Rosie (34 page)

‘If I let you go, I shall expect you to work your next two days off on your return. That’s the only way I can adjust the rota,’ she said in a cool crisp voice, already picking up some papers dismissively.

Rosie knew there would be some price to pay, but that one seemed remarkably low. She nodded her agreement. ‘So I can go then?’ She wanted it confirmed now so she could write to Miss Pemberton.

‘Yes, you may.’ Matron gave her a disparaging look. ‘But in future you will have time off only when I allocate it.’

Rosie didn’t care about that, she didn’t intend to be working here much longer. ‘Thank you so much, Matron,’ she said breathlessly, and left before the woman had a chance to change her mind or offer some spiteful criticism.

Once back on the first floor Rosie let out a whoop of delight before she let herself back into the day room. Since having her hair cut her life seemed to be charmed. Two boys had asked her for a date at a dance she went to with Linda and Mary, she’d had a pay rise of two shillings a week and her bust seemed to have grown another inch. She didn’t like either boy enough to see them again, but it was nice to be asked. The bust and the rise in pay had satisfied her more.

‘You look pleased with yourself!’ Maureen said spitefully as Rosie came rushing into the room with a wide grin on her face.

Rosie paused at Maureen’s tone, all at once aware of a tense atmosphere. Maureen was mopping the floor; obviously someone had had an accident. The patients were all down at the far end of the room huddled together looking cowed. Rosie wondered if Maureen had been shouting at them as she sometimes did, frightening the life out of them. There was no sign of Mary.

‘I’ve got a week’s holiday at Easter to see my aunt,’ Rosie said reluctantly. As Maureen didn’t go anywhere on her days off, and never mentioned holidays, she didn’t want to rub in her own good fortune. ‘Who had the accident?’ She assumed Mary must be with whoever it was.

‘Patty. That’s the fifth time she’s done it this week. She doesn’t seem to even know she’s doing it.’ Maureen frowned in irritation. ‘She ought to be upstairs.’

Rosie was just about to say she didn’t think being incontinent was reason enough to incarcerate someone with severely disturbed people, when an ear-piercing scream ripped out from the floor above. She stopped short, looking up, and unusually so did all the patients.

Normally such loud screams were short-lived, but not this one. It went on and on, too fierce and strong for it to be someone just disapproving of having their hair brushed. George and Alice put their hands over their ears and started rocking in their chairs. Donald looked very alarmed.

‘Hell’s bells,’ Rosie exclaimed. As everyone predicted, she had grown used to disturbing noises from upstairs, mostly she didn’t even notice them. But this one was exceptional; it made her blood run cold. To her mind it could only be someone in terrible pain. ‘What on earth’s going on up there?’

‘As if I’d know,’ Maureen snapped.

Rosie looked at Maureen in surprise. For all this girl’s faults, she did normally seem to care about the patients. ‘Well, do you think I ought to go up there and see? It might be an emergency!’

‘It’s none of your business,’ Maureen replied sharply and she moved towards the door, almost as if she intended to stop Rosie from rushing out. ‘Aylwood won’t thank you for sticking your nose in.’

Such an odd reaction disturbed Rosie even more. Maureen looked frightened; her grey eyes were blinking furiously behind her glasses and her usually pale face was flushed. The screaming grew louder still. Aggie began to wail in fright, and when Rosie looked round at her she saw all the patients were huddling closer still to one another like a flock of frightened sheep.

‘I’m going up there,’ Rosie said, so alarmed now that she felt she had to do something.

Maureen blocked her way. ‘Oh no you don’t. You’ll get us all into trouble,’ she said, gripping Rosie’s arm to restrain her. ‘You’re the nosiest person I ever met.’

The screaming stopped abruptly, just like a gramophone record being snatched off. Aggie stopped wailing. Maureen let go of Rosie’s arm.

For a second or two the day room was totally silent, not a sniff, grunt or even the sound of breathing. Rosie glanced behind her and seeing the patients like statues, too terrified to move, she saw their need to be reassured was of far greater importance than tackling Maureen, or concerning herself with something happening elsewhere.

She wheeled round, walking down the room towards them. ‘All better now,’ she said soothingly.

Donald moved first, getting out of his chair and lumbering towards her. His eyes were wide with fright and as he reached Rosie he slid his hand into hers. The door opened and Mary came back with Patty in tow. Archie shuffled his chair along the floor making the feet squeak on the lino.

The almost palpable tension in the room vanished as the usual noises began again. Alice got up to go over to Patty. George began to creep across the room, Maud started to talk to herself again. But Donald, who was usually quicker than anyone else to adjust to sudden changes, was still clinging to Rosie’s hand. Rosie guessed whatever was troubling him had happened before the screaming started.

‘What’s up, Donald?’ Rosie asked quietly. He was hanging his head as if afraid to speak out. Normally he confided in her about everything that happened in her absence. ‘Did something happen while I was out of the room?’

‘Jackson s-s-smacked Patty,’ he whispered. ‘She sh-sh-shouted at us all too and told us to sit d-d-d-down or we’d be s-s-sorry.’

Rosie was still smarting at Maureen’s remark about her nosiness. Hearing she’d hit an old lady just for wetting herself added to it, but as she soothed Donald she noticed Tabby.

All the other patients were moving again, yet she was still sitting in a chair just staring blankly into space, her knitting lying on her lap.

Tabby was never motionless. She either knitted frantically or paced about, and Rosie felt a pang of disquiet. Leaving Donald for a moment, she went over to sit beside the woman. When she asked what was wrong, Tabby didn’t reply but caught hold of Rosie’s hand and held it tightly.

This was entirely out of character. Most of the patients liked to be touched. They responded eagerly to having their heads stroked, their hands held or a hug, but Tabby always shied away from any physical contact.

‘What’s wrong, Tabby?’ Rosie asked again.

Tabby pointed to the ceiling.

‘It’s okay, it’s all quiet again now,’ Rosie said. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of.’

‘I don’t want to go up there,’ Tabby spat out, her tawny eyes flashing the way they often did just before she lashed out at someone.

Tabby was one of the patients with whom Rosie had made almost no headway. Although she was articulate and capable of holding a proper conversation when she chose, most of the time she merely grunted at people, Rosie included. Her nature was as fiery as her hair, one minute quiet and docile, the next flaring up for no apparent reason and clawing whoever happened to be closest. All the staff treated her with caution.

‘No one’s going to send you there,’ Rosie said evenly, wondering if Maureen might have threatened this.

Tabby turned conspiratorially towards Rosie, still holding her hand. ‘There’s a bad man there,’ she said in a low voice. ‘He hurt me.’

Rosie thought she was just confused and after a few soothing words encouraged her to pick up her knitting again. Maureen had left the day room now, perhaps to have a cigarette, so seeing Mary was sitting alone reading a magazine, Rosie went over to her.

‘Was Tabby ever upstairs?’ she asked.

Mary nodded. ‘Yes, just before I came here. Why?’

‘Just wondered,’ Rosie replied and walked over to the window to save the necessity of explaining herself, or being accused again of being nosy.

There were daffodils out in the front garden and a forsythia bush was a mass of bright yellow flowers, but for once Rosie wasn’t heartened by these clear signs of spring. She was all too aware of something ugly lurking unseen in this building.

She thought that the combination of Maureen shouting at the patients, Patty being smacked, and then hearing that screaming from upstairs, must have triggered off an old memory for Tabby. Could the male chargehand called Saunders who worked up there be the bad man she spoke of? Or had there been a different man working there before?

In the entire seven months Rosie had been here she hadn’t had any contact with the male chargehand at all. He lived out and came in minutes before seven, going straight to the ward. His dinner break never coincided with hers, the most she’d seen of him was the odd crossing on the stairs. Even at Christmas he hadn’t put in an appearance in the staff room.

Considering that men were the main topic of conversation amongst the chargehands, it was odd that they didn’t speak about the only male one. Rosie had always assumed that the lack of information about him – whether he was married, where he lived and suchlike – was just because he was so unattractive. He was a big, heavily built man with short cropped sandy hair and pockmarked skin. She certainly hadn’t been interested enough herself to ask anyone about him.

But then, now she came to think about it, Staff Nurse Aylwood who worked alongside him was equally mysterious. A tall, gaunt-looking woman in her forties with slate grey hair, she had her breakfast before anyone else, had dinner sent up to the wards, and often took her tea up to her room. In the evenings she always shut her door firmly with a bang, then switched on her wireless as if to drown out the noise of the younger members of staff’s chatter. Rosie hadn’t even discovered her Christian name.

In the light of what Maureen had said just now about Aylwood not being likely to thank her for sticking her nose in, it now seemed more probable that these two members of staff kept their distance because any familiarity with other staff might expose the way they ran that ward.

Rosie frowned; that didn’t really make sense. After all, Gladys Thorpe, Linda and Mary all spent several hours up there each week too. Yet as she mulled it over in her mind she realized that floor must be seriously understaffed for most of the day, because the other girls only went up there at meal times.

A horrifying image of people locked in cages like animals, shot into her mind. She tried to shake it out, sure her imagination was getting the better of her, and she vowed then silently to herself that after Easter she would find a new job.

It was a bright, sunny but chilly afternoon when Rosie got off the train at Bridgwater two weeks later. Miss Pemberton was waiting on the platform wearing a tweed coat and a brown felt hat. Like many people she had a black band sewn on her coat as a sign of mourning for Queen Mary, who had died just a few days before.

Rosie’s emotions had swung like a pendulum between joy and apprehension on the long train journey. She was excited at having a holiday, and at seeing Miss Pemberton and possibly Alan, but coming back to an area which held such a wealth of memories was frightening. After Bristol she had her nose pressed up against the window, anxiously awaiting the first glimpse of the Levels. As the train chugged across the familiar flat landscape, her mouth had become dry with nerves, yet her eyes prickled with tears as she saw again the place she loved.

The sun glinted on the rhynes and patches of floodwater that were still lying in the fields. She saw new lambs gambolling around their mothers, herons standing like statues on the banks of the rivers. There was blossom on fruit trees and clumps of primroses were growing on banks, all so beautiful and serene. Yet everything she saw was a reminder of her father and brothers. She knew too that down here people had long memories: they wouldn’t have forgotten the brutal murders as had the people in London.

‘You look marvellous,’ Miss Pemberton exclaimed, taking Rosie’s small case from her hand and putting it down on the platform for a moment. Then taking both Rosie’s hands in hers, she smiled warmly. ‘Let me get a really good look at you!’

Violet hadn’t actually recognized the chic young girl with an urchin haircut and an apple-green costume getting out of the train. Not until Rosie waved and she saw the familiar cheeky grin. This new Rosie looked like a fashion plate.

Rosie giggled with embarrassment as Miss Pemberton studied her. ‘You look like a real city girl,’ she said. ‘I’m proud of you, Rosie.’

A lump came up in Rosie’s throat, not so much at the praise but at the warmth in the older woman’s eyes and voice. It made her feel as if this really was her auntie, welcoming her home after a long absence.

Rosie didn’t speak as they drove out through the town because she was so engrossed in looking at everything. Bridgwater had seemed a magical place to her as a child, bustling with people, cars and buses and dozens of exciting shops. There was the barber’s shop she took Alan to, the gunsmith’s where Dad bought his shot, the greengrocer’s who sold home-made toffee apples and the little flower stall where she used to stop to sniff the flowers and ask the names of ones she didn’t recognize.

She remembered standing on the bridge watching the river and the boats, wishing she could live here. It was less than a year ago that she’d last seen it, on leaving the hospital, but it wasn’t as she remembered.

‘I expect you think everything’s shrunk. As I’ve found, some places improve by leaving them and then going back. Others are best left in memory,’ Miss Pemberton said drily. ‘I felt just as you must now when I came back here in 1947. I had a wonderful memory of a sweetshop with rows of gleaming glass jars filled with every kind of sweet you could imagine. The old lady who owned it wore a big white apron, and when I was a young girl she used to tell me to close my eyes and open my mouth, and she’d pop something delicious into it.

‘I couldn’t wait to find it again. During the war I’d dreamed of her toffees and coconut ice. I planned to go in and buy pounds and pounds of different sweets –’ She broke off to laugh.

‘Did you find it?’

‘I did, but what a disappointment! It was dark and dingy, hardly any stock what with sweet-rationing. There was another old lady in there, in a rather dirty overall. All I bought was two ounces of bull’s eyes.’