Read Online Call Nurse Jenny by Maggie Ford - Free Book Online Page B

paused to regard her closely. ‘But what about you? I bet you do enough of it. A nurse, eh? Always thought you were cut out to be something like that. I think that’s why I admired you so much, Jenny. Got anyone in tow yet? Some handsome young doctor?’ There was a look in his eye that made a spark of hope leap inside her.
    ‘No one at the moment,’ she said, smiling, then she said something utterly stupid before she could stop herself. ‘I don’t have the time.’
    ‘Me too.’ He gave a low chuckle. Had she disappointed him? ‘Having too good a war to get roped in. Women tell you too much what and what not to do. I’m free for the time being. But you never know, do you?’
    He broke off and on a sudden thought crooked his arm and tugged back the sleeve of his overcoat to glance down at his wristwatch, the gold one which he had told her last year had been given him by his father’s sister for his twenty-first. ‘Ye gods! Got to go, Jenny. If I miss my connection I’ll get put on a charge for being late. Cheerio then. And take care of yourself.’
    ‘You too.’ Dismally, she was aware she had blown the one chance she might have had of his asking her for a date, or even if he could write to her. On sheer impulse born out of desperation she leaned forward and laid a kiss full on his lips. Expecting him to pull away she was surprised by his arm coming around her, the kiss being held, and it was she who broke away in a fluster, taken off guard by the strength of his lips on hers, there in the street.
    ‘Like you said,’ she burst out idiotically, ‘you’ll be late.’
    He nodded, seeming to gather his wits. ‘Yes, I will. I’ll write to you, Jenny.’
    He seemed so tremendously happy as he went on his way. Rosy from his promise, the pressure of his lips still felt on hers while her own foolish confusion mocked her, she watched him go, shouldering his small pack, his step jaunty. War hadn’t touched him at all. The terrible events of Dunkirk, of desperate men with their backs to the sea until the armada of small boats had come to their rescue, had passed him by. If anything, she had seen more of conflict than he.
    A fleeting vision of her part in it passed through her mind, days and weeks compressed into seconds as she watched Matthew’s departing figure. A once-quiet, smoothly running hospital suddenly filled with a consignment of casualties from those beaches. A first-year student nurse thrown into the deep end trying to cope with a picture of defeat, the exhausted, the filthy, the torn bodies, her first-ever experience of war at its most vicious, all the worse because her life as a student nurse only the previous day had been so sedate.
    Surrounded by that upheaval, she had cooked porridge, cut mounds of bread and butter, helped undress those who passed out into sleep the moment they were left alone, sometimes just where they stood. She had washed the wounded, tried not to weep over the dying or turn away as gangrenous or maggot-infested wounds were uncovered, and had wished to God she had been qualified to do more than just assist and cut bread while those skilled medical teams operated on the suffering. And the June sun had shone on.
    She saw Matthew turn, throw her a careless wave. She waved back, smiled. No ghosts of dead and dying comrades, no splattered bodies and shattered limbs haunted his vision. He had continued, as he’d said, to play at soldiers in the safe environs of a Yorkshire moor. Pray God, Jenny thought as she waved, heartened by his promise to write to her, there would never be need for it to be otherwise.
    For a week as he took orders, drilled, cleaned his equipment and uniform free of moorland mud and grass knowing that next day they’d need cleaning all over again, Matthew thought of Jenny Ross and the kiss she had given him. No mere friendly one. He’d always had a sneaking suspicion that underneath that touch-me-not exterior she’d always presented, she had been in love with