A Nurse's Duty: A 1930s Medical Romance by Sheila Burns

Author:Sheila Burns [Burns, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Maggie Hope, Jean Fullerton, medical romance, Nadine Dorries, nurse stories, nurse romance, doctors and nurses, 1930s, Donna Douglas, hospital stories, hospital romance, Nightingales series, nursing
Publisher: Wyndham Books (Medical Romance)
Published: 2019-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

After that we had to meet as strangers, normally and naturally, just as though neither of us knew that the other one cared.

I cannot begin to explain how hard all that was, or what a strain. It was dreadful to be constantly seeing him whom you adored, with other people always round you. To be constantly talking of unimportant general subjects when in your heart was the burning vital subject that hurt so badly.

I wanted to ask him what was happening to Iris. Had he settled the affair with Captain Dawson, or was that wretched man still hanging round their home? I wanted to ask all sorts of questions, but of course I never got the chance to put one to him.

He cared for me, I knew that, but whether it was the feeling that I had for him I could not tell, and, anyway, I had no right to that feeling, because he and I were in two different types of life, and he was a married man.

I lay awake in bed at night trying to reason this thing out. What was the end of it? There were, of course, the papers which I had got from the Crown Agent people, and which I kept in a little pile. Tenny was all for going on with it. She wanted to get away from the monotony and the routine, but I knew that when it came to the actual break I should be sure to fail her. I had not got the courage to go right away and never to meet him again or see him again. It was absurd, because I knew that I was resenting the fact that we had to meet and speak, because it made me feel so dreadful, but I could not end that dreadfulness.

‘You’re growing thin, Nurse,’ Miss Vaughan announced to me one day in the middle of our cold mutton meal.

‘I was too fat before,’ I told her.

I think she guessed a little, for she is a very discerning woman. But she said nothing. She just smiled.

Birdie announced her engagement with a half-hoop of sapphires, and Tenny went on with her work. Routine had got us all again and there was no escape from it.

People think that a nurse’s life is full of change and enchantment and thrill, but that isn’t so. You change one patient for another, one disease for another, but it is no more than that. You do not meet exciting people, for when they come to us they are generally weary, and sick, and crotchety. They are never at their best. When they become at their best again, then they go away.

Occasionally through that dark patch I would see Ray operating, see that masterful being standing over the table, compelling his patients to live. Or I would meet him across somebody’s bed, when I was only the nurse. That hurt. I hate being just Nurse and never Katy.

‘This will go on for ever and ever,’ I told myself frantically, ‘and I can’t face it.

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