The Loud Halo by Lillian Beckwith

Author:Lillian Beckwith [Beckwith, Lillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

See The Sea for Breakfast.

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The Nurse

The nurse was extremely irate.

‘What I don’t do for these people here,’ she complained loudly in a voice that sounded to me to be permanently pitched to a tone of grievance. ‘And what thanks do I get for it? The way they treat me sometimes anybody would think I was trying to make them worse instead of better,’ she elucidated with unwitting accuracy.

Our nurse was a fussy prudish little woman with an occupational flush on her face and a halo of springy white curls that were only partly repressed by the severity of her dark blue felt hat. She must, when she was young, have been extremely pretty. She was still, if you took her feature by feature, a pretty woman but at fifty she had already achieved an appearance of senility by her splayed-foot walk, her habit of peering over the tops of her spectacles and by the looseness of her pouting mouth.

I tipped the pail of shingle I had just carried up from the shore on to the path I was making and invited her inside for a ‘strupak’, the resentment I felt at having to leave off just when I was full of energy for my work being somewhat mitigated by the prospect of a couple of hours of indiscreet but very revealing gossip about my neighbours.

Though a Scot, the nurse was, like myself, a ‘foreigner’ in Bruach and despite the fact that she had been residing among them for over twelve years she was not perceptibly nearer dispelling the prejudice of the crofters than she had been during her first twelve weeks. Undoubtedly for a stranger the task of nursing Bruachites was a difficult one—they could be testy enough on occasion—but so far as the crofters were concerned the nurse’s chief disadvantage was that she did not speak their language: she ‘hadn’t the Gaelic’. If they became ill it might be too much of an effort to translate their needs into English, a complaint I felt was justified as it was obvious that however good their English they still thought in Gaelic and then effected the translation. Had the language difficulty been the only obstacle there is little doubt that time would have established a sufficiently cordial relationship, but time had elicited the fact that the nurse’s shortcomings included an insatiable curiosity and an incorrigible tendency to gossip, so that despite her assiduous attentions when she was called in many of the Bruachites preferred to keep quiet about their ailments and to recover or die without her aid in either direction.

‘Did you hear what Alistair Beag had the cheek to say to me yesterday?’ Nurse challenged me shrilly when she was seated.

I had heard, and like everyone else had been secretly delighted at its aptness but, turning my back to her while I filled the kettle, I professed ignorance.

‘He told me I’d been here too long,’ she declared, her voice brimming with outrage, ‘in fact he shouted after me as I was leaving the house so that everybody could hear.

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