Merryn Allingham - The Nurse's War

He trod up the stairs as delicately as he could. The ground floor of the house was occupied by an old woman, ninety if she were a day, half mad he was sure. He glimpsed her sometimes through her open door crooning quietly to a cat or slumped in a fireside chair, staring blankly at the bare wall in front of her. Sometimes she would stir herself to fling random curses at whoever was unlucky enough to catch her glance but she rarely noticed his comings and goings, being so deaf that a bomb could have fallen outside her window and she’d not have flinched. It was when he approached the first floor that he steeled himself to tread more softly still. He tried to shut his mind to the ill will he imagined lay beyond that door.

His years in the army had given him a nose for danger and he was sure the men who lived there were up to no good. It wasn’t just that they’d ended their conversation the minute they realised he understood Hindi, nor the sheer absurdity of finding two Indians living in the middle of the East End in the middle of a war. It was the nagging matter of why they were there. The Indian might be a soldier as he claimed, and the man’s cap badge seemed to prove it, but why wasn’t he with his regiment or returned to India? And what was the Anglo doing here? You couldn’t trust Anglo-Indians, they were neither one thing nor the other, neither British nor Indian. Some of them had chips on their shoulders for that reason. Did this one? Did the man mean to expose him as a deserter, imagining perhaps that he’d be paid for the information?

He was sure it was this man who’d pushed the white feather beneath his door and that was a warning if ever there was. The sooner he was out of Ellen Street, the better. If Daisy did as she promised and tackled Grayson Harte in the next few days, he might have the papers he needed within the fortnight. Harte could do it if he wished, and he would wish. The man had liked Daisy just a little too much. And his wife had liked him back, despite the doubts her husband had tried to sow in her mind all those months ago when Harte had played at being a district officer. Gerald had no compunction in throwing them together again. ‘Wife’ was just a word now, not that it had ever been much else. For a moment he felt remorse at what he’d done to the young girl he’d met at Bridges. But not for long. There was no point in looking back. And he had no qualms in using Grayson’s feelings for Daisy. Not if it would get him what he wanted.

He put one foot on the stairway leading to his attic. It creaked badly and he froze where he stood on the landing. He tried to breathe very quietly. Were the men on the other side of the door listening? He edged closer so that his ear was almost touching the blistered wood. Inside angry footsteps paced the bare boards. And there were two voices. Both men were at home. He was sure that at least one of them had been following him recently. Several times he’d half sensed a figure at the periphery of his vision and wondered if it was his neighbour. When you said that aloud, it sounded ridiculous, yet … The men were talking loudly, animatedly. Their voices came to him in blurts of noise. He’d heard them argue before, but today there was a new harshness, a new agitation. They were speaking Hindi for certain and the heat of their disagreement was leaving them careless. He caught words here and there, ‘car’, ‘hotel’, ‘Chandan’—was that a name?—disconnected words that made no sense. But he dared not linger and very carefully he placed his shoe on the first step, bracing himself for another agonising creak. Thankfully, the wood remained silent and, on the balls of his feet, he tiptoed up the remaining stairs.

The two small rooms he rented were airless, worse than airless, for the smell of thick dirt was overwhelming and so intense it seemed alive. He could hardly breathe the atmosphere and had to force himself to swallow it in great slabs. The two small windows were glued shut and muslin curtains drooped undisturbed against grimy panes, their colour an elephant grey. Several more flies had buzzed their last since he’d left that morning and now lay shrivelled on the uncovered floor. The room was as dark as it was airless, and through the gloom only the dim outlines of a few pieces of broken furniture were visible.

He flung himself down on to the iron bedstead, pushing aside a tousled heap of clothes. For a long time he lay there, sprawled across the questionable mattress, and trying not to think. His eyes travelled around the brown-papered walls, blotchy and peeling from the damp, and upwards to the pitted ceiling, tracing, as he had done so many times these past few weeks, the cracks that disfigured it. He no longer saw its ugliness but instead had created a map of his own devising. This was him, here on the left, in the centre of that large, brown stain. The mass of small, thin lines stretching westwards were the waves of the ocean he would soon be crossing, and there on the other side of the ceiling, a solid splurge of colour—old paint, he thought, working its way to the surface—was surely the New World beckoning him to its shore. He lay there, looking upwards, for as long as his eyes would stay open.

‘Are you going then?’

Connie punctuated each of her words with a particularly vicious scrub. The urine testing had been done for the day and now they were in the sluice room, grinding their way through the cleaning of bedpans. It was a messy undertaking, mops and Lysol everywhere.

‘I have to. I promised.’ Daisy’s voice trailed miserably beneath the thunder of water. She didn’t want to seek out Grayson, didn’t want to see him again, to see his slow smile and lose herself in those deep blue eyes.

She felt Willa Jenkins looking at them from the opposite line of sinks. ‘Take care, Willa,’ she called across at the girl, ‘there’s another heap of pans just behind you.’

It had amazed them when Willa had managed against all the odds to pass her probation on the third attempt. She was slow at her work, constantly getting things wrong, and very clumsy.

Broken china, smashed thermometers, bent syringes, followed her wherever she went. Daisy had often come to her rescue, helping to hide the wreckage before Sister caught a glimpse. Their fellow nurses had gradually lost patience with such an awkward colleague and were not above joining in a communal teasing that at times verged on unkindness. The girl was an outsider like herself, Daisy thought, but, unlike her, she hadn’t learned to blend in, to stay unobtrusive. She’d done what she could to protect Willa, remembering her own isolation as a servant and the scourging meted out by the shop girls at Bridges. But it wasn’t always easy to intervene and she was aware of how very unhappy the girl must be. And lately she’d become even more withdrawn, ever since the news had circulated that her brother had been killed on his last training flight. Willa’s interest in their conversation today was the first she’d shown for weeks and, at any other time, Daisy would have tried hard to include her. But this was such a very personal matter.

Connie was still speaking, her voice lowered. ‘Cheer up, Daisy. It’s a good thing, surely. Get the papers Gerald wants and you’re a free woman. Once he’s in America, he won’t come back. You can file for a divorce or an annulment or whatever it is.’

Her mind stuttered at the thought. ‘There’s a host of things to sort out before I get there. That’s the stuff you deal with at the very end of a marriage.’

Or when you’ve come to terms with the end, she thought. The truth was that she had no real idea how she felt about Gerald. When he’d accosted her outside the Nurses’ Home, he’d simply been a figure in the dark. He’d sounded like Gerald and, in the brief flare of the match, he’d even looked like Gerald. But somehow his resurgence had seemed fantasy, as though he were a mythical phoenix, risen from the ashes. Today though, in the sunlight of a London park, she’d had to accept that he really had come back to life and was not going away.