The Nightingale Girls - By Donna Douglas Page 0,166
suddenly felt very dry. She would have appreciated a cup of tea, but Mrs Tremayne didn’t look as if she was about to offer her one. ‘I’ve come about Helen. You’re not really thinking of sending her to Scotland, are you?’
‘Not thinking about it, Miss Hanley. I’m going to do it. As soon as it can be arranged, in fact.’ Mrs Tremayne advanced into the room. She looked neat as ever in her sage green twinset and tweed skirt, her hair immaculately knotted at the nape of her neck. She was such a tiny, delicate creature, Veronica felt like a clodhopper next to her.
Constance Tremayne bestowed a smile on her. ‘Actually, Miss Hanley, I’ve been meaning to thank you. If you hadn’t alerted me to what was going on, I might never have found out what my daughter was up to. And then, heaven knows what would have happened.’ Her shoulders shuddered delicately. ‘Thanks to you, I have managed to step in and stop Helen from making a grave mistake, one which could have blighted her whole future.’
‘That’s just it,’ Veronica said. ‘I think you are the one making the mistake. You shouldn’t take Helen away from the Nightingale.’ She noticed Constance Tremayne’s darkening expression, but blundered on, ‘She’s an excellent student, and an asset to the hospital. And what’s more I believe she is happy and settled there. It would be so unfair to uproot her and move her all the way to Scotland. And who knows what effect it will have on her studies.’
‘Miss Hanley, please.’ Constance held up one hand to silence her. ‘I have no wish to offend you, but as I explained to Matron, neither you nor she has any idea what it’s like to bring up a daughter. Helen is young and naïve. She doesn’t know her own mind. She must be protected from her own base desires . . .’
Veronica Hanley stared at her in frustration. She wished she understood delicacy and tact, because she needed them for what she had to say next. For a moment she almost wished she had Matron’s facility with words. She might not approve of Kathleen Fox’s methods, or indeed anything much about her, but she had to admit Matron had a way of talking that seemed to get through to people. Unlike Veronica, who just seemed to blunder about, trampling over everything like the big, clumsy thing she was.
A bull in a china shop, her mother had always called her. That was exactly what she felt like now.
‘Well, Miss Hanley,’ Constance was already dismissing her. ‘Thank you for coming all this way, but I do have another appointment . . .’
‘Wait.’ Veronica rummaged in her ancient handbag. It had been her mother’s and had lain unused at the back of her wardrobe for such a long time the leather was cracked and dry. ‘I have a photograph I would like to show you. I think it’s in here somewhere . . .’
Constance tutted. ‘Can’t it wait, Miss Hanley? Only I am in rather a hurry.’
‘Please, it won’t take a moment . . . ah, here it is.’ She pulled the photograph out of her bag. The sepia image had yellowed with age. ‘I think you might find it interesting.’
Constance Tremayne took the photograph with a heavy sigh. ‘Really, Miss Hanley, I don’t have time to . . .’ She stopped dead as her gaze fixed on the figures in the photograph.
Veronica had seen the colour drain from people’s faces when they were given bad news about a loved one. And here it was, happening to Constance Tremayne. Her skin turned the colour of putty.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said faintly. ‘How did you get this?’
‘Before I began my training at the Nightingale, I was a cadet nurse at a hospital on the south coast. St Anthony’s in Whitstable. That’s a photograph of all the staff, taken one Christmas.’ She pointed over Mrs Tremayne’s shoulder at the chubby girl standing head and shoulders above her neighours in the middle of a row. ‘That’s me. I was a big galumphing thing even then.’ She moved her finger up to the back row of the photograph. ‘Those are the sisters, and those,’ she traced some more of the faces, ‘are the staff nurses. I can still remember their names, all these years later. Porter, Casey . . . and there’s Nurse Brown. She was on the TB ward. Very efficient. I must confess, I always wanted to be like her.’