‘I agree with your mother.’ Patience was speaking the truth. She’d observed her friend dealing with the patients a couple of times over the last days, and the big northern lass had a way with her that calmed the most agitated soul. ‘You’ll do just fine – I won’t let you fail, I promise. We’ll help each other through, all right? Bargain?’ She held out her hand.
‘I think you’ve got the worst of this bargain, lass, but aye, all right.’ Olive shook her hand and they grinned at each other.
The bell sounded for lights out within moments and once the girls had settled down, Patience, in spite of being exhausted, lay staring into the blackness as Olive began to snore in her bed across the room. The nurses’ rooms were small but clean, each holding two beds, one wardrobe and two tiny tables which served as desks with a hardbacked chair tucked under each. A series of shelves had been fixed to one wall on which books and papers and personal items could be stored, but the bare floorboards, walls painted a dingy green and paper blind at the window made the accommodation utilitarian at best. At least to Patience. For Olive, used to sharing a bed with her sisters, with a curtain separating their space from the boys’ bed, it was the height of luxury. Likewise the Infirmary’s flock mattress was as comfortable as the softest feather bed to Olive, who had been used to a sparse straw mattress all her life, but for Patience it felt as lumpy as lying on pebbles.
Patience tried to relax and let sleep take over her mind and body, but her thoughts went back over the day and especially to one of the patients on her ward. Gideon was a young man about Matthew’s age, married with two small children, and after his leg had become tuberculous as the result of an accident four years previously and had to be removed, his wife had gone to pieces. She had sat with the woman for some time that afternoon, trying to instil into her that this wasn’t the end of the world and the important thing was that Gideon’s life had been saved, but the young wife had expressed revulsion at the thought of even seeing her husband, and had told Patience she intended to take the children and go back to her mother’s house. She’d had a hard job not to shake the silly woman and had ended up being quite sharp with her, which unfortunately Sister had overheard, resulting in a lecture on the standards of propriety when dealing with patients’ family.
She’d only been at the hospital a matter of days and had a black mark against her. Patience wrinkled her nose. And she suspected she’d already found what was going to be her Achilles heel to getting on in her career, because she couldn’t in all honesty say she would do any differently if the same circumstances presented themselves. Well, apart from making sure Sister wasn’t in earshot. She smiled wryly to herself. She had all the time in the world for those family members who were bereft or anxious about their loved ones, but that silly, selfish woman needed a good slap.
Sister had tried to excuse Gideon’s wife by saying the woman had been gently brought up, being a landowner’s daughter with a privileged background, but that didn’t cut the mustard with her either, Patience told herself. Florence Nightingale had been a gentlewoman of the upper classes – and look what she had accomplished, working in the worst of conditions in military hospitals in the Crimean War and transforming the most appalling state of affairs. Women weren’t the empty-headed, weak creatures society – or perhaps she should say men – made them out to be, with lesser intelligence and fortitude than the male sex.
Patience nodded in the darkness, the thoughts she had been having more and more over the last months gathering steam. And marriage wasn’t the be-all and end-all for a woman either. When she thought back now to how she had behaved with Mr Travis, who was her superior neither in intellect nor breeding, it made her hot with fury that she could have been so stupid.
She would never marry. Tiredness was overcoming her at last. Looking like she did, who would fall in love with her? And only love would do. And so nursing would be her husband, and the patients the children she’d never have. And she would be content with that. Given time.
Chapter 13