Betty Neels - The Silver Thaw

She whispered, “I’m not, I’m not, and soon I won’t be young anymore. Oh, Tom, what about children and making a home together and having a dog and a cat and going out for picnics on Sundays…?” He was silent.

She tried just once more. “Tom, won’t you look for a job in England? For my sake?”

He smiled kindly. “Amelia, you know how important my work is to me.”

“More important than I am?”

He considered that carefully. “That’s hard to answer, but if I must be honest—yes, it is.”

Romance readers around the world were sad to note the passing of Betty Neels in June 2001. Her career spanned thirty years, and she continued to write into her ninetieth year. To her millions of fans, Betty epitomized the romance writer, and yet she began writing almost by accident. She had retired from nursing, but her inquiring mind still sought stimulation. Her new career was born when she heard a lady in her local library bemoaning the lack of good romance novels. Betty’s first book, Sister Peters in Amsterdam, was published in 1969, and she eventually completed 134 books. Her novels offer a reassuring warmth that was very much a part of her own personality. She was a wonderful writer, and she will be greatly missed. Her spirit and genuine talent will live on in all her stories.

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CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

THE OPERATING THEATRE was quiet; not a peaceful quiet, though. Mr Thomley-Jones was in a bad temper and although he was working with his usual meticulous care and skill, he was making life hard for those in attendance upon him, snapping and snarling his way through a cholescystectomy, two nasty appendices—both pushed in between the other cases because they could have perforated at any moment—and now with a still nastier splenectomy almost completed, he was venting his wrath on the hapless house surgeon who was assisting himself and his registrar. The unfortunate young man, clumsy in any case, became even more so, dropping things, tightening retractors when they should have been loosened, using the wrong scissors and generally making a fine muddle. His chief waited in mounting impatience and a silence which spoke for itself while his assistant cut the ends of gut with which Mr Thomley-Jones was reassembling his patient’s inside and then let out a great roar as the unfortunate young man cut too close so that the stitch was no longer a stitch. The registrar sighed soundlessly and took over, the thunder of his chief’s rage leaving him unmoved.

Just as unmoved was Mr Thomley-Jones’ theatre Sister, who in one swift movement removed the scissors from the hapless surgeon’s hand, gave him a swab to hold, handed more gut to Mr Thomley-Jones, threaded another needle ready for the mattress stitches and swept her gaze round the theatre. The theatre mechanic was standing stolidly by the anaesthetist, her staff nurse was checking swabs, the more senior of the student nurses was looking frightened but doing just as she should, and her companion, fresh in the theatre that very morning, was in tears.

She put the needle and gut into Mr Thomley-Jones’ impatient hand and said in a quelling voice: ‘Sir, you’ve made one of my nurses cry.’

‘Bah!’ exclaimed Mr Thomley-Jones, ‘she shouldn’t be in theatre if she’s got no guts for it.’

Theatre Sister looked at him from a pair of fine dark eyes, heavily lashed. ‘Unlike many of the people who come here, she has got guts, but when you get annoyed you’re rather awesome, sir.’

He glanced at her and although she couldn’t see his face she knew that he was pleased at being called awesome—it sounded godlike.

‘Impertinent young woman, aren’t you, Sister?’

‘I’m sorry if you think so, sir, but I try to look after my nurses.’

He held out a hand for more gut and she inserted it into the needle-holder with great neatness.

‘Oh, you do that all right, teach ’em well, too. You’re a good one at your job, Amelia.’

When he called her by her name she knew that she had been forgiven. They had worked together now for four years and had a proper respect for each other’s job; as the operation drew to its close he mellowed visibly so that the houseman was emboldened to take up the scissors again and the registrar winked at Amelia.

The surgeons went away presently to drink their coffee in her little office down the corridor, and, the patient safely despatched to his ward, the anaesthetist wandered away to join his colleagues, leaving the mechanic to tidy up after him while Amelia collected her nurses and set about the task of clearing away and setting up for the afternoon list. But presently she left Sybil, her staff nurse, and the student nurse and guided her new member of the team into the anaesthetic room where she was at pains to explain to the still tearful girl that Mr Thomley-Jones’ bark was a great deal worse than his bite, that in time she would find that she could continue with her tasks in theatre whatever happened and that she had done very well for her first morning. ‘And just you remember,’ said Amelia soothingly, jumping down from the trolley where she had perched herself, ‘one day you’ll probably be a theatre Sister yourself. It’s a splendid job, you know.’

With which heartening words she took herself off to join the gentlemen; they liked her to be there while they relaxed after a list, to pour their coffee and hand them biscuits and make an attentive audience of one while they chewed over their work. It was a nice job, she mused, going down the corridor, but after four years she was beginning to wonder if she wanted it for much longer; she was twenty-seven now, almost twenty-eight and although she had been engaged for a year to Tom Crouch, the Medical Registrar, he had made it evident that he expected her to go on working for some years after they were married, and as his reasons were sound and sensible she had stifled her disappointment and agreed to stay at St Ansell’s. Tom was clever and doing well and he wanted to do better. He was anxious to make a success of his life and give her the things he considered that she should have; he was quite stubborn about this, and it was a pity, for she was the only daughter of a very comfortably placed village squire, able to provide all the comforts and luxuries Tom wanted her to have as well as helping him up the ladder. It seemed a waste of time to go on working while he saved enough to buy himself into a practice when she could have married him at once and enjoyed all the pleasure of running her own home. She saw his point of view, of course, but sometimes when she was tired at the end of a long day, she wondered if he weren’t being selfish—well, not selfish, just a bit thoughtless…