effect. It was no good—she remained, at least to the casual eye, uninteresting. In her dressing gown presently, she trailed along the corridor and joined her friends over tea and a gossip, while at the back of her mind the idea of leaving—going right away—was already forming. She could give a month’s notice and start again at another hospital. It would be a wrench, because she had been happy during the last year; she was never going to be brilliant in the nursing world, but she was good with patients and kind and gentle. Besides, she was young enough to start again. The idea had solidified into certainty by the time she was in bed; a fresh start, and she would forget the hurt Basil had inflicted.
She slept soundly because she was tired, but when she woke she knew that her mind was made up. She would go that very morning and see the Principal Nursing Officer, something she hardly looked forward to, as that lady was known among the lesser fry at the hospital as the Tartar—a quite unsuitable name, as it happened, for she was by no means fiery in character, although her wooden expression, and the fact that she smiled only at Christmas and the Annual Ball, made her intimidating. But Phoebe, having decided, wasn’t going to be put off by that. When the breakfasts had been served and Sister had come on duty, she knocked on the office door, ready with her request to go to the office at nine o’clock.
But the speech was unnecessary. Sister looked up as she went in. ‘They’ve just rung through, Nurse—you’re to go down to the office at once. Run along.’
Phoebe didn’t run, mindful of Sister Tutor’s remarks about fire and haemorrhage, but she walked very fast, wondering what on earth she’d done.
She put an anxious hand to her cap, knocked on the door and was bidden to go in. The Tartar’s wooden features wore an expression which Phoebe could only imagine to be sympathy, although she spoke briskly enough.
‘Nurse Creswell, your aunt, Miss Kate Mason, is ill. She has asked her doctor to send for you—apparently you are her only relative.’ She gave Phoebe an accusing look as though that was her fault. ‘She feels most strongly that your place is by her side so she may be nursed back to health. I should add, Nurse, that your aunt is suffering from chronic bronchitis and crippling arthritis and is unlikely to regain a state of health when she will be unable to do without your care. It means, of course, that you will have to give up your training for at least the immediate future.’
Phoebe stared at the Tartar’s cold eyes while she digested this information. Here was help not quite what she would have wished for, but a loophole of escape. Aunt Kate was a holy terror; dictatorial and on the mean side, she had ignored her family for years and Phoebe, the last member of it left, hadn’t seen her for some time. So like Aunt Kate, she mused, to turn a cold shoulder on the family and then demand help as though it was her right. But it was an escape…
‘Am I to go at once, Miss Ratcliffe?’
‘Naturally. I consider this an emergency and the doctor who is attending her stresses the need for nursing help as soon as possible. You will be given compassionate leave until your leaving date and you will, of course, receive payment until that day. You may go today, Nurse Creswell, and I trust that your year with us as a student nurse has given you a good grounding for whatever tasks you will need to undertake.’
Phoebe sorted this out. ‘Yes, Miss Ratcliffe, I’ll do my best.’ She added rather shyly: ‘I’ve been very happy here.’
The Tartar inclined her head graciously. ‘I trust that your future will be as happy, Nurse. Goodbye.’
Very doubtful, thought Phoebe, speeding back to the ward to tell Sister. Aunt Kate lived in Suffolk, in a village which she remembered only vaguely—but even if it had been a large town, she doubted very much whether she would get a great deal of time to spare. All the same, she liked the country; she would use some of her savings to buy a bike, so that when she had an hour or so… She was already making the best of a bad job when she knocked once more on Sister’s door.
Sister was surprised and flatteringly reluctant to let her go. ‘Not that I can do much about it,’ she grumbled. ‘I quite see that if your aunt has no one else to look after her, there’s nothing else to be done.’
Phoebe refrained from saying that Aunt Kate had sufficient money to employ a private nurse if she so wished.
‘Well, you’d better go,’ sighed Sister, ‘and you were turning into quite a good nurse too.’
Phoebe bade her goodbye, announced her departure to the nurses on the ward, explained to the patients, and took herself off to her room, where she started to pack. She was about halfway through this when two of her friends came over to change their aprons. They listened to her with astonishment, heedless of returning to their wards, begged her to write, and promised to say goodbye on her behalf to her other friends.
‘What about Basil?’ one of them asked.
Phoebe bent over her case, ramming things in with some force. ‘I’ve had no time to see him or let him know,’ she said casually. ‘I daresay we’ll meet up some time.’
Her companions exchanged glances. ‘Well, have fun, Phoebe—we shall miss you.’
She would miss them too, she thought, sitting in the train, gazing out at the flat Essex countryside, but perhaps she would make new friends in the village. It was quite a long journey, and by the time the train reached Stowmarket, she was famished. She put her two cases in the left luggage at the station, then went into a nearby café and had a meal of sorts before collecting her luggage once more and crossing the square to board the bus for Woolpit. It was a five-mile ride and Phoebe sat in the almost empty bus, watching the first signs of spring with delight. London’s parks were all very well, but they couldn’t compete with primroses and the bread-and-cheese in the hedges under a thin sunshine from a pale blue sky. The bus turned off the by pass, rattled down the narrow road to the village and stopped at one side of the village green. Aunt Kate’s house was on the other side, beyond the village pump, a nice old house with sash windows and tall Tudor chimneys. Phoebe said goodbye to the driver and carried her cases across the green, put them down in the porch which sheltered the white wood door, and thumped the knocker. The Tartar had told her that she would telephone the doctor to say that Phoebe was coming at once, but she doubted if she was expected quite as soon.
The door opened cautiously and a girl of sixteen peered round it.
‘Hullo,’ said Phoebe, ‘I’ve come to look after Miss Mason. May I come in? I’m expected.’
The girl smiled then. She opened the door wide, took one of Phoebe’s cases from her and said breathlessly: ‘Oh, miss, come in, do. I said I’d stay until you got ’ere, ’e said I was to, but now I can go ’ome.’
‘Do you come each day?’ asked Phoebe quickly. ‘And what’s your name?’
‘Susan, and I come mornings, to clean and that—there’s been a nurse, but she won’t come no more—couldn’t manage with Miss Mason’s ways. Went this morning, early she did.’
Hence the urgency, thought Phoebe. The doctor, whoever he might be, must think of her as a gift from heaven. She could imagine his relief; being a niece of his troublesome patient, she could hardly pack her bags and leave.
‘Well, I’m here now,’ said Phoebe hearteningly. ‘Just show me where my room is and where you keep everything. Is my aunt in bed? Asleep?’
Susan nodded. ‘She usually has a nap till tea.’ She added anxiously. ‘We could be quiet like.’
Phoebe nodded in wholehearted agreement. Let her just have time to look around her and make a cup of tea, she prayed hopefully, and followed Susan down the hall.
She remembered the house well enough. The kitchen was at the right of the passage at the back, a roomy old-fashioned place, its only concession to modern times being the gas stove. Aunt Kate had never seen the sense in spending money on washing machines and the like when she could get a young local girl to do the chores for a small wage. All the same, it was a pleasant place as well as old-fashioned, and it was clean. Phoebe nodded understanding at Susan’s pointing finger; the larder, the