Hospital Circles by Andrews Lucilla

Author:Andrews, Lucilla [Andrews, Lucilla]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Maggie Hope, Jean Fullerton, district nurse, nurses, medical romance, Nadine Dorries, 1960s, Donna Douglas, hea, happy ending, doctors, hospital romance, Nightingales series, happy ever after, casualty, nursing
Publisher: Wyndham Books (Medical Romance)
Published: 2018-12-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

MARGARET COMES BACK TO BENEDICT’S

I kicked off my shoes, stretched out on my bed, and watched Margaret light a cigarette. ‘Did I ever know this other man?’

She walked over to my window to get rid of her match. ‘I doubt it. It was all over years ago.’ She leant on the sill. ‘How this place has grown! And altered! Cas seems the only place that’s still where it was. Subway open yet?’

‘Royalty’s been invited to do that on the 14th of next month. New caps, aprons, white gloves, and toothy smiles will be issued to one and all.’ I watched her back. ‘What was his name? Or don’t you want to talk about him?’

She turned, smiling. ‘Darling, I haven’t your passion for P.M.s. Anyway, isn’t one P.M. enough for one afternoon?’

We had been holding a post-mortem on my dead fixation for Bill Francis, and I had been hoping we could now resurrect her old affair with the man she had mentioned in that letter. I said, ‘Don’t slap me down ‒ but did Old Red ever know about him and you?’

‘Oh, yes.’

So that hunch was right. ‘Margaret, there’s something else I’ve been meaning to ask you. When was the last time you saw Old Red before you two met up in the car park? When you left Benedict’s?’

‘No. It was ‒ when? Six or seven years ago, I think. It could be less. I do remember he was then a senior registrar here.’

‘You came up to Benedict’s?’

‘No. I met him outside a few times when I came up to the bank.’

‘Did you meet before that?’

‘Sometimes. When he was an h.s. he used to visit the flat Simon and I had in Fulham. He came to Simon’s funeral.’

‘You never told me that!’

‘Jo, you were then eight years old.’

‘I don’t mean then, I mean now.’

She looked at me reflectively before answering. She looked older that afternoon than she had when I last saw her at the cottage. Her face was pale and unusually tense. ‘I know what you mean, but as this is probably the first time I’ve mentioned Simon’s funeral to you, are you really surprised?’

‘No. Sorry. We’re so alike in so many ways that I keep forgetting you’re not an extrovert nut like me.’

‘Is that what you are?’ She sat on my bed. ‘And how does an extrovert nut get on in Cas?’

‘Not so hot. I’m now the most senior Hall junior. At this rate my Cas time’ll be through before I’m inside the A.R.R.U.’

‘That the Accident Team? Richard explained it to me when he was down at the cottage this Sunday. It’s news to me. Cas, as I remember it, was a free-for-all, with everyone sooner or later doing every job.’

‘But in those days there weren’t millions of cars on the roads, we hadn’t a spandy new clearway two miles off, and weren’t the largest general hospital to the London end of a not so new motorway.’

‘So Richard said.’ Before I could ask her more about that particular visit she asked what was really wrong about Casualty.

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