Three for a Wedding. Betty Neels

girl, and when she smiled she was quite dazzling. Before he had met her, he had always scoffed at descriptions of girls with sapphires in their eyes and corn-coloured hair, but he had been forced to admit that he was wrong, because Phoebe had both, with the added bonus of a small straight nose and a mouth which curved sweetly, and although she wasn’t above middle height, her figure was good if a little on the plump side. She was, he had to own, quite perfect; the one small fact that she was twenty-seven, three years older than himself, he did his best to ignore; he would have preferred it otherwise, but one couldn’t have everything … As soon as he had taken a couple more exams he would ask her to marry him. He hadn’t intended to marry before he was thirty at least, with a fellowship and well up the ladder of success, but if he waited until then she would be thirty herself—a little old, although she would make a splendid wife for an ambitious young doctor, and looking at her now, she didn’t look a day over twenty.

      ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’ he wanted to know.

      She didn’t bother to tell him that she had missed her own midnight meal; that she would get a sketchy tea into the bargain. ‘Yes—but you must be very quiet, I’ve only just got them all quiet again.’ She got up. ‘Keep an eye on the ward,’ she begged, and slipped away to the kitchen.

      She came back presently with two mugs, a thick slice of bread and butter atop each of them, and handed him his with a murmured: ‘I haven’t had my meal.’

      ‘Poor old girl—I’ll take you out for a good nosh on your nights off.’

      ‘I can’t, Jack, I’m going home. Sybil’s got a week’s holiday, and I haven’t seen her for ages.’

      Sybil was her younger sister, twenty-three and so like her that people who didn’t know them well occasionally confused their identities, which was partly why Sybil, when she decided to be a nurse too, had gone to another training school—a London hospital and not very far away from St Gideon’s—but what with studying for her finals and Phoebe being on night duty, they saw very little of each other. Soon it would be easier, Phoebe thought, taking a great bite out of her bread and butter, for Sybil had sat her hospital finals and the last of the State exams had been that morning. When she had qualified, as she would, for she was a clever girl, they would put their heads together and decide what they would do. The world, as the Principal Nursing Officer had told Phoebe when she had offered her the post of Night Sister, was her oyster. That had been three years ago and she still hadn’t opened her particular oyster —there were jobs enough, but she had wanted to stay near Sybil until she was qualified. Now perhaps they would go abroad together.

      Her train of thought was interrupted by her companion, who put down his mug, squeezed her hand and went out of the ward. Phoebe watched him go, the smile she had given him replaced by a tiny frown. He was going to ask her to marry him—she was aware of that and she didn’t know what to do about it. She liked him very much, they got on well together —too well, she thought shrewdly —they had similar tastes and ideals, but surely, she asked herself for the hundredth time, there was more to it than that? And shouldn’t she know if she loved him? Was this all that love was, a mild pleasure in someone’s company, a sharing of tastes, a gentle acceptance of being a doctor’s wife for the rest of her days—for Jack, she felt sure, would expect her to be just that and nothing more, she would never be allowed to steal the scene. Would her heart break if she never saw him again, or if, for that matter, he were to start taking some other girl out for a change? She was older than he; she had pointed this out to him on several occasions, and more than that, being a softhearted girl she had never allowed the thought that she found him very young upon occasion take root in her mind.

      The hour ticked away. She solved the bed state, puzzled out the off duty for another two weeks, and was dealing with old Mrs Grey, who was a diabetic and showing all the signs and symptoms of a hyperglycaemic coma, when Nurse Small came back. They dealt with it together, then Phoebe, gathering up her papers and whispering instructions as to where she would be if she was wanted again, went silently from the ward, down the long corridor, chilly now in the small hours of an April morning, and into the office which was hers during the night when she had the time to sit in it. She had barely sat down when her bleep started up—Children’s this time, and could she go at once because Baby Crocker had started a nasty laryngeal stridor. She had to get Jack up after a while; he came to the ward in slacks and a sweater over his pyjamas, and they worked on the child together, and when he finally went, half an hour later, she walked down the corridor with him, starting on her overdue rounds once more. At the end of the corridor, where he went through the door leading to the resident’s quarters, he gave her a quick kiss, said ‘See you’ and disappeared, leaving her to make her way to Men’s Medical on the ground floor, musing, as she went, on the fact that although his kiss had been pleasant, it hadn’t thrilled her at all, and surely it should?

      The early morning scurry gave her little time to think about herself. Fortified by a pot of strong tea, she did her morning rounds, giving a hand where it was wanted and then retiring to her office to write the report and presently to take it along to her daytime colleague before paying her final visit to the Night Super. A night like any other, she thought, yawning her way to breakfast, where Sadie Thorne, Night Sister on the Surgical side, was already waiting for her. Night Super was there too, a kindly, middle-aged woman, whose nights were filled with paper work and an occasional sortie into which ward was in difficulties. She was good at her job and well liked, for she never failed to find help for a ward when it was needed and had been known to roll up her own sleeves and make beds when there was no one else available. But normally, unless there was dire emergency in some part of the hospital, or a ‘flu epidemic among the nurses, she did her work unseen, supported by Phoebe and Sadie and Joan Dawson, the Night Theatre Sister. She looked up from her post now as Phoebe sat down, wished her good morning just as though they hadn’t seen each other less than an hour since, and went back to her letters, while Phoebe made inroads on her breakfast, thinking contentedly that in another twenty-four hours’ time she would be going home. She caught Sadie’s eye now and grinned at her.

      ‘One more night,’ she declared.

      ‘Lucky you. Going home?’

      Phoebe nodded. ‘With Sybil —she’s got a week off and goes back to night duty.’

      Night Super looked up briefly. ‘I hear she did very well in her hospitals.’

      ‘Yes, Miss Dean. I don’t know how well, but I hope she’s in the running for one of the prizes.’

      ‘Like her sister,’ murmured the Night Super, and Phoebe, who had gained the gold medal of her year, went a becoming pink.

      She packed her overnight bag before she went to bed, because on the following morning there would be barely time for her to tear into her clothes and catch the train. Then she washed her hair, and overcome by sleep, got into bed with it hanging like a damp golden curtain round her shoulders.

      The night was fairly easy—the usual mild scares, the usual emergency admission, and hubbub on the children’s ward, because one of its small inmates was discovered to be covered in spots. Phoebe, called on the telephone by an urgent voice, made her way there as quickly as she could, sighing. It was early in the night, she still had her rounds to make.

      The child was a new patient, admitted just as the day staff were handing over thankfully to their night colleagues, and not particularly ill. She was popped into a cot while the more urgent cases were attended to, presently she would be bathed, her hair washed, and tucked up for the night.

      Phoebe, looking quite breathtakingly beautiful in her dark blue uniform, trod quietly down the ward with a nod to the nurses to get on with what they were doing and not mind her. The child was sitting on a blanket in its cot, eating a biscuit. It looked pale and undernourished and was, like so many of the children who were admitted, too small, too thin and lacklustre as to eye—not through lack of money, Phoebe knew, but through the parents’ neglect; good-natured and unthinking, but still neglect. She smiled at the elderly little face, said brightly, ‘Hullo, chick, what’s your name?’ and at the same time peered with an expert eye at the spots.

      There were a great many of them, and when she peeped beneath the