To Have and to Hold (34 page)

Carmel, however, wasn’t happy at all. One evening she talked it over with Lois, and Jeff, who was round to see her. ‘He makes all the right responses and that is it,’ she said. ‘There is no real communication. It’s just as if he has pulled down the blind and effectively shut himself off. He reminds me of a hurt or damaged animal that has dragged himself away to lick his wounds in pri
vate. I’m sure inside Terry Martin is curled a tight knot of heartache.’

‘Maybe this is his way of coping,’ Lois said. ‘Anyway, aren’t we warned not to get personally involved?’

‘That’s what we’re told, all right,’ Carmel conceded. ‘It is sometimes quite hard to put into practice. It is tough dealing with Terry physically, knowing that I can only do so much. Even when he recovers, he will still be carrying around emotional scars that will probably drag him down again.’

‘Does he have visitors?’

‘No,’ Carmel answered. ‘I spoke to the nurse who was on duty when he was admitted and those in the post-operative unit. They told me that no one had even been to enquire whether he was going to live or die, never mind visit.’

‘Ah, that’s sad,’ Lois said. ‘But I would still keep right out of it as far as you possibly can.’

Knowing Lois had a very valid point, Carmel said nothing, and things continued in the same vein day after day. When, after three weeks, the matron asked Carmel what she had found out about Mr Martin’s background she had to say, ‘Virtually nothing, Matron.’

‘Nothing? You are with him day after day,’ the matron said incredulously. ‘Don’t you talk together?’

‘Not really,’ Carmel said. ‘I ask him questions if I have to and he answers, in monosyllables if he can.’

‘I can scarcely believe this.’

‘I think there is something in his past bothering him that I would hesitate to disturb because I think his mental state is very precarious,’ Carmel said. ‘When Terry, Mr Martin, first began to talk, Dr Stevens made
some comment about Paul and when he had gone Mr Martin asked me what had happened to Paul and I told him. Then he asked me if I had any family and it was when I told him about Beth that he changed. He said he didn’t want to answer any more questions. If anything, he has gone backwards since then.’

‘Dear, dear, this will never do,’ Matron said. ‘Till Mr Martin spoke to you he hadn’t opened his mouth and all we knew about him was the things the neighbours knew, and that too was precious little. No one has been in to see him or even enquire about him and my guess is no one knows where he is. Of course, it is quite possible that the man is alone in the world but we need to be sure. What would he do if you asked him direct questions again?’

‘I don’t know, Matron, but I have the feeling that he would become very distressed.’

‘Would you try it?’

‘Shouldn’t the doctor ask him these things?’

‘Maybe, because you have tasted tragedy yourself and he knows that and because Mr Martin spoke to you first, you would possibly have a better reaction,’ Matron said. ‘Anyway, isn’t it worth a try?’

Matron’s suggestions were really directives, as Carmel knew only too well. She very apprehensive as she returned to the room a few minutes later. Cassie went on her break and after she left, Carmel first busied herself in the room, tidying up and putting things in order and throwing the odd comment to Terry, which he chose to ignore. In the end, she decided she had dallied long enough and had to get started and so, feeling none too
confident, she sat on the bed facing him and said, ‘D’you remember the day I told you about my husband, Paul?’

Terry didn’t answer but his eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Undaunted, Carmel soldiered on. ‘Well, I’d just like you to know that that isn’t information I share with patients generally. But you asked and I told you, but you didn’t tell me whether you were married or not.’

Terry glared at her, but made no effort to speak and Carmel suppressed a sigh. ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘Answer something else instead. Why did you ask me why I should be bothered with you, almost as if you didn’t deserve to be helped?’

‘Maybe that’s what I think,’ Terry growled.

‘But why would anyone think like that?’ Carmel said. ‘If nothing else, people with your skills are badly needed. This is everyone’s fight, every man’s, every woman’s and even every child’s because we are fighting to make a safer world for them to grow up in.’

Terry’s eyes suddenly filled with tears at Carmel’s words. They poured from his eyes in a torrent and he sobbed and sobbed as if he never intended to stop, the weeping punctuated with gasps of sheer anguish that seemed to be tearing him apart. Eventually Carmel, alarmed by Terry’s condition, could stand it no more and leaned right over him in the bed and held him tight.

She was heartily relieved when Cassie put her head around the door at that moment. ‘Fetch Dr Stevens,’ she said to the girl, who was staring almost transfixed at the man sobbing on the bed and Nurse Connolly nearly lying on top of him. Carmel, however, was too worried about
Terry to consider her incongruous position. ‘Hurry,’ she urged, and the girl almost ran from the room.

‘Was that virtual collapse brought about by trying to talk to Martin about his past?’ Dr Stevens asked Carmel after he had sedated Terry. He added, ‘Matron said that you were going to try.’

Carmel nodded, feeling incredibly guilty that she had brought about such a paroxysm of grief, however inadvertently. She tried to remember the conversation before Terry had broken down completely and recounted it to the doctor as well as she could.

‘D’you think that Mr Martin might have lost a child in one of the raids?’

‘I think that is quite possible,’ the doctor said. ‘And if the man has been holding that inside himself all this time, when he comes around, he might well need help to deal with it. I will alert the Psychiatry Department.’

The next day, Carmel was summoned to Matron’s office and was surprised to see Dr Stevens already there. ‘Mr Martin was admitted to the psychiatric wing of the hospital last night,’ Dr Stevens said.

Carmel was shocked. ‘Was that necessary?’ she asked and then blushed at her temerity. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to tell you your job. It’s just…’

‘I know how you feel,’ Dr Stevens said. ‘This wasn’t a decision I made lightly, I assure you, and I trust it will not be permanent, but I was too worried for his mental state. When he is more stable they will run some tests on him and maybe have some idea of the root of his problems.’

For three days Carmel and Cassie worked on the main
ward. Carmel worried and fretted over Terry, but no one seemed able to tell her anything. Visits to the psychiatric unit were discouraged and she felt helpless.

Matron was waiting for Carmel when she arrived at the hospital the following morning. ‘Mr Martin wishes to talk to you. In fact what he said was you are the only person he will talk to. Though he is still in the psychiatric unit, he is in a private room so you won’t be disturbed.’

After her last experience with Terry, Carmel was nervous of seeing him again on her own and she opened the door of his room tentatively, noticing straight away that his neck brace had been removed.

She sat on the bed so that she could see him. His face was white with exhaustion and there were black smudges under his eyes. She felt sympathy well up inside her and she felt bound to say, ‘I am so sorry, Terry, that I upset you so much when I spoke to you a few days ago.’

‘That wasn’t your fault and I know you were trying to help,’ Terry said. ‘I had a few sessions with this psychiatrist chap and he said I had to talk to someone. “Release the demons,” was the way he put it, before they destroy me. I knew he was right because the memories are ripping me apart and all this time I really thought I was coping.’

‘Some things are just too hard to cope with alone,’ Carmel said gently.

Terry nodded. ‘I know that now and I wanted to talk to you first because you really seemed to care. You asked me if I was married. Well, yes, I was, to a girl called Brenda and we had two children, a son, Andrew, who
was only six months old and a daughter called Belinda. She was as pretty as a picture and two and a half years old. God, when you told me your little girl was the same age, it was like a knife had twisted in my heart and I resented you for having a living child when mine was dead. I’m really ashamed now that I felt that way.

‘We lived in a back-to-back house in Bell Barn Road down the Horse Fair way only a few doors from Brenda’s parents. And since the raids started, we’d all had a bad time of it, living so close to the town.

’Anyway on this evening, 19 November, the sirens wailed out just as we’d finished our tea, like, and we got the kids ready to take them to the public shelter in Bristol Street like we’d done many times before. Brenda’s parents and younger sister were waiting for us, and we all walked down together.’

‘I remember that raid,’ Carmel said with a shiver as she recalled the hospital packed with the injured, the maimed or those desperately searching for news of their loved ones. ‘It was a dreadful night, that.’

‘And it went on for hours and hours,’ Terry said. ‘And then about midnight a warden came in and asked for some men to help. A pub had collapsed, trapping people in the cellar, and they were being gassed to death. Naturally, I went and so did Brenda’s dad. Some time later, after we got the people out and I had disconnected the gas pipe to prevent any explosion and we were on our way back to the shelter, we heard the planes coming closer. We both ducked into this entry. I was at the end of it, looking out into the street, and there were that many fires burning it was like bloody daylight. Brenda’s dad had gone further in. Next thing I knew, I was blown
to the other side of the street in the blast from the bomb that had landed on the entry and Brenda’s dad had been killed. I was wondering how I was going to tell Brenda and her mother, sort of rehearsing it as I walked back, you know…’

Carmel wondered if he was aware of the tears that he was brushing impatiently away and she suddenly knew what he was going to say, but that didn’t minimise any of the horror. With a grim and humourless laugh he went on, ‘Huh, I needn’t have worried. When I got to the shelter it was just a mound of rubble, sandbags seeping everywhere and people uncovering bodies and bits of bodies that were buried in the debris.’

Terry’s eyes, which sought Carmel’s, were bleak as he said, ‘I never found any of them. The two babies, Brenda, her mom and sister were probably all cuddled together and were blown to pieces. I asked myself over and over, why them and not me? Why was I the only one in the whole family to be alive and everything I cared about taken from me?

‘I knew I couldn’t have stood seeing them in bits. I ran away from it and so now I don’t even know where they are buried, nor Brenda’s dad either. What sort of a useless person does that make me? I feel so bloody bad about that now, like I have let them all down.’

‘Don’t torture yourself,’ Carmel said. ‘You weren’t thinking straight. God, you must have been in shock.’

Terry nodded. ‘It was the house that was the last straw. Funny that, my family wiped out and when I found the house gone too, something snapped. Suddenly everything went black and I just fell in a heap across the rubble. I came to in a hospital bed the following day and after a
couple of days, there was a pastor came round to talk to me and he sorted me out with a new ration and identity card because Brenda had them in her shelter-bag, and as far as I know that was never recovered. He got me some clothes too, and found the place that I am living in, and even contacted my boss at the Gas Board, who thought I had been killed.’

‘They probably think that again this time,’ Carmel said.

‘This time I wanted it to be true,’ Terry said.

‘Don’t talk like that,’

‘It’s true,’ Terry said. ‘Or it was. I just thought, what have I got to bloody live for? I was sort of holding part of this bombed house up so the people trapped in the cellar could get out and then I just let go and let the lot fall on me. I wanted to die. I had had enough, but there were people everywhere pulling at the rubble, trying to save the life I didn’t want saved and I wanted to tell them that, but I found suddenly that I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move either and that terrified the life out of me. I wanted to be dead, not paralysed.’

Carmel felt her stomach turn over for this poor tortured and very lonely man, and she had the urge to put her arms as tight around him as she was able to and hold him tight. She knew, though, she couldn’t do that.

Instead she said, ‘That is one of the most tragic tales I have ever heard and I feel touched that you have shared this with me. And now I am off to see if I can have you moved back to the surgical ward, because you certainly don’t belong here.’

‘Are you sure that you are thinking of Terry as just a patient?’ Lois asked Carmel one day.

‘Of course.’

‘Matron will have your guts for garters if there is the slightest hint of impropriety.’

‘There isn’t and, anyway, I know that, Lois. I’m not stupid and I do know how to behave as a nurse, thank you very much.’

‘Don’t go all mardy on me,’ Lois protested. ‘It’s only you I am thinking of, and if you only knew how much you talk about him, how his name creeps into every other sentence…’

‘I am with the man day in and day out—what do you expect?’ Carmel asked testily. ‘I realised only the other day that I know more about him than any man alive, including Paul, and that came as a bit of a shock. I also know every inch of his body, even the most intimate areas, because for some weeks the confines of the cage meant he was able to do little for himself. That is bound to make you closer to a person than the average nurse/patient relationship, but that doesn’t
mean I would forget myself entirely and leap on him in a fit of rampant lust.’

‘All right, all right. Point taken,’ Lois said with a grin. ‘But, seriously, how does he feel? You know, even on the General Ward, many male patients fancy themselves in love with the nurses. I mean, does he—;’

‘Terry’s fine,’ Carmel said shortly. ‘He knows the score.’

Lois wasn’t convinced, but she knew that there was nothing to be gained by keeping on about it and she said nothing more.

Carmel was glad she had dropped the subject because she had been less than honest. Each day she longed to see Terry again, and when he smiled at her when she went into the room, she felt her heart turn somersaults. He brightened her day and her life. She felt like a young girl again. She had been brought up sharp the first time she had recognised that feeling. She had thought all emotion like that died with Paul, and she had never felt even mildly sexually attracted to anyone before, but she had been careful not to allow any glimpse of this to creep into the way she had cared for Terry.

Each day she would buy a paper on the way to work and either she or Cassie would read bits out to him. It was Cassie’s idea because she said that time must hang heavy for him. He didn’t even have visitors to break up the day and tell him what was happening outside the walls of the hospital.

Carmel thought it a very good idea and though she did most of the reading and discussing afterwards, Cassie was the best one to help him with the crossword. This was because at least a couple of the clues usually
centred around the stars of the silver screen, or the title of the film they had starred in, and Cassie was never away long from the cinema.

Her favourite films were romances, so Carmel and Terry would hear about the elegance of Joan Crawford in
Mademoiselle France
, the glamour of Margaret Lockwood in
The Lady Vanishes
, the beautiful and sexy Veronica Lake and Marlene Dietrich in anything at all, and, of course, Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in
Gone With the Wind
, which Cassie had seen three times.

Carmel, knowing of the penny-pinching of her student days, asked her one day where she got the money from.

‘Oh, we don’t pay,’ Cassie said. ‘One of my roommates’s sister is an usherette at the Gaumont and she gives us free tickets, so I can go when I like usually.’

‘No wonder you have all the answers,’ Terry commented wryly from the bed. ‘So come and help me with fourteen across.’

Soon, however, these sessions had to be severely curtailed, for Terry was on the road to recovery. Carmel went with him when they removed his supportive cage. When they started the intensive physiotherapy the treatment was explained to her, and she and Cassie worked together with him on the ward each day to strengthen his muscles.

It was Carmel who often had to bully him in the early days, despite feeling sympathy for the pain he usually endured afterwards. She would watch him as he lay back in the bed, knowing he would be aching all over, but she never let a hint of pity enter her voice or manner as she tended him, well aware that if he wanted to return to full health he had to suffer this.

Then came the day he was lifted to his feet where, supported by Carmel and a physiotherapist, Terry shuffled between two wooden bars. His excitement to be on his feet again brought tears to Carmel’s eyes but she never let them fall. It would not help Terry to have people crying all over him, and she helped him progress first to crutches to get around and then eventually to sticks.

And now even the sticks had been thrown aside. He was completely recovered and fitter, he claimed, than he had ever been. Carmel knew that, happy as she was to see him so much better, there would be a big hole in her life when he left the hospital, which he was due to do the first week in November.

The morning that he was due to leave, he suddenly caught hold of Carmel’s hand and said, ‘I am really going to miss you. You have given me back my reason for living and I can’t thank you enough for that.’

‘It’s my job,’ Carmel said, trying to keep a lighter note in the conversation, because Terry’s words were causing her stomach to turn over most alarmingly, and his holding her hand was sending a tingle running all through her arm.

‘No,’ Terry said. ‘Nursing is your job. You have done far more for me than mere nursing. I don’t know how you feel about me and have no right to say these things to you, but I think—no, I am sure—that I love you dearly.’

Carmel willed her voice not to shake as she said, ‘It’s a well-known fact that many male patients fall in love with their nurses.’

‘This goes deeper than that,’ Terry said earnestly.
‘Can I—can I see you sometimes, when I am out of here?’

Carmel knew what he was asking, but she wasn’t ready yet for any sort of relationship, so she said, ‘Why? You’re better now, you don’t need the services of a nurse.’

‘No, and it isn’t the nurse I want,’ Terry said. ‘But I do want Carmel Connolly the woman.’

‘No, Terry,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t be wise. I’ll see you at Christmas anyway, won’t I? By then you will feel differently. Trust me.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘I am still making no promises, Terry.’

She had worried how Terry would spend Christmas and with whom. She knew it was an intense and emotive time for many people anyway, and she didn’t want Terry to slip back into depression again. Ruby fully understood her concern and said she should invite Terry to spend Christmas at her house.

When Carmel issued the invitation to Terry, just before he was due to leave, she knew by the look on his face that he was pleased beyond measure and that he had been worried himself.

‘You’re quite sure about this?’

‘Absolutely,’ Carmel said. ‘There won’t only be me and Lois—you know, my friend that I told you I share the house with. We always spend the day with next door neighbours, the ones who look after Beth in the day. It helps to pool the rations and then, of course, Jeff has all manner of contacts and we don’t enquire too closely where he gets some of the stuff he brings.’

‘Isn’t Jeff your father-in-law?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Won’t he mind me muscling in?’

‘No. Why should he?’

‘Well, you know…’

‘No, I don’t know,’ Carmel said. ‘They know all about you anyway.’

That, of course, had been before he had made the declaration to her, but she had given him her answer. She had to be content with that and so had he.

Carmel couldn’t seem to shake off the despondency that surrounded her after Terry left the hospital. It was almost tangible. Lois watched her pick at her food, her face become pasty white and her eyes develop blue smudges beneath them.

‘What’s up with you?’ Lois demanded one night after Carmel snapped at Beth over nothing.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know full well what I mean. You have been going around like Lady Misery for a couple of weeks and now you have started to take your bad humour out on Beth.’

‘I’m just out of sorts,’ Carmel said.

‘What about?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, do I?’ Carmel said impatiently. ‘Why is anyone out of sorts?’

‘Has the way you are feeling got anything to do with your Terry being discharged?’ Lois persisted.

‘No, of course not,’ Carmel retorted quickly, almost too quickly. ‘And stop calling him
my
Terry.’ She was silent for a second or two and then
said, ‘I do miss seeing him at the hospital. I expected to and I expected to get over it as well, which I will do.’ She hesitated and then went on, ‘If you want to know, Terry did say he cared for me, but as you once pointed out, many male patients fall in love with their nurses. Cassie has always said that he was sweet on me, but you have to take what Cassie says in that vein with a pinch of salt. As well as the numerous films she sees, she also reads these trashy romances and they fill her head with rubbish. She sees intrigue and passion around every corner.’

‘Can’t be bad,’ Lois said, and was pleased to see the ghost of a smile playing around Carmel’s mouth. ‘Maybe, as she has done such a study of it, she is the very one to ask.’

‘No, the very opposite,’ Carmel said, laughing. ‘She reminds me of Aileen in a way. Not that she falls in love herself every five minutes, but I think that she would like to arrange it that everyone else did.’

She shook her head and went on, ‘To tell you the truth, I think Terry is still mourning the family he lost. And the feelings he said he had for me, well, they were more infatuation, mixed up with gratitude. He has no room in his head for further tangled emotions. I know that in my rational head. I’m sorry I have been such a grouch. I know it is my problem and no one else’s and I intend to take a grip on myself. Don’t worry, I’ll have got myself sorted well before Christmas when I will see Terry again.’

Terry was also trying to work out his own feelings for the little nurse who had wormed her way into his heart. The love that he had once felt for his wife, his children and even Brenda’s parents and sister had seemed to disappear totally when they died. He’d felt barren, emotionless, and
it was a young nurse who had made him feel again and taught him that his life had some meaning. She also taught him that though the memories of his loved ones would never leave him and would always hold a special place in his heart, he had to go back into the stream of life again because that is what they would have wanted him to do.

He had felt love for another human being stir in him again, as if it was being roused from a long sleep, and he knew he loved the little Irish nurse with the lilting voice who had pulled him back from the pit of despair.

After he left the hospital he felt cast adrift. He had got his old job back after the hospital had contacted the Gas Board, but his landlady had had to let someone else rent the rooms he’d had and had his belongings packed up ready for him to collect.

His boss was letting him sleep on his settee for the time being, but it was not suitable in the long term and Terry knew he would have to trail the streets once more, looking for someone with a spare room. In the meantime there was an ache in his heart every time he thought of Carmel. In the end the longing to see Carmel again got so great he knew he had to find her and tell her how he felt about her, and he set off after work one evening towards the end of November.

He had Carmel’s address in advance of Christmas. Just forty minutes later, he was standing outside number 17 York Road, and before his courage could fail him he raised the knocker.

Carmel was just mounting the stairs to take Beth to bed when the knock came on the front door and so she opened it with the child in her arms.

‘Terry!’ she cried, but Terry didn’t speak. He was startled by the sight of the child, though he could barely see either of them in the beam of his torch for Carmel had turned the light off before she could open the door. ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘We’re letting in all the cold air.’ And then, as he stepped into the hall and Carmel was able to shut the door and turn the light on, he saw Beth clearly for the first time. She was gorgeous and as unlike his Belinda as it was possible to be, with her vivid blue eyes, her blonde curls and her little rosebud mouth. He smiled even though he felt a tug in his heart as he did so.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You must be Beth?’

‘Yes,’ the child said and then, because she liked to get things straight, she said, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Terry.’

‘What are you doing here, Terry?’ Carmel said. Then, with an impatient gesture, she said, ‘Oh, don’t bother telling me now. Wait until I get madam here to bed. Come through and meet Lois first, though, and have a hot drink at least. It is turning into a bleak old night outside, judging by the wind gusting around the house.’

It took Lois only a few minutes to realise that she liked Terry Martin very much and for her to note the love light shining in his eyes when Carmel came back into the room after tucking Beth up for the night. She also saw that Carmel was agitated and confused.

‘Why are you here, Terry?’ she said, sitting at the other side of the table opposite him. ‘I thought we agreed.’

Lois looked from the lovelorn face of Terry to the flushed one of Carmel and thought to herself that Cassie
might have got it right after all. She knew too her presence wasn’t needed.

‘If you will excuse me I have to write a letter to Chris.’

Terry threw her a look of gratitude, but Carmel didn’t want her to leave. Couldn’t she see she wasn’t ready for this sort of thing yet? So she said almost accusingly, ‘But you wrote to him two days ago.’

‘Well, I am writing again,’ Lois said firmly. ‘There were things I missed telling him in the other letter,’ and she slipped out of the room and left them to it.

Terry cleared his throat and, knowing it was no good beating about the bush, said, ‘I came to see you, Carmel, because since I left that hospital, all I have done is think about you. You weren’t able to express how you felt about me in the hospital, I know that now, and the last thing in the world I would do would be to make life difficult for you, but I need to know. If you cannot return my feelings then I will move out of your life and harass you no further.’