But what motivation did I have to become an accomplished nurse? There would be no additional money or glory, only martyrdom. I could work and hope to take on more responsibility in my future years, receive better accommodation, become more senior but the gains would be immaterial. A nurse could work herself to death, and often did being so close to infection and disease, and she could still die poor. I would have to trust that I would reap my rewards in the next life, but I had trouble believing I would be invited upstairs. It was different for surgeons. They could become rich, be admired, and they were respected, which was a reward in itself. Rare women like Matron Luckes and Florence Nightingale were already upper-middle class when they chose their professions, so they would never have to worry about affording food for the table or coal for the fireplace if their career failed them; they could simply retreat to their family estates.
Thomas was fun, brash, playful and confident – all useful antidotes to the state of gloomy self-punishment that was then consuming me. The old Susannah would have spurned his cocky advances; she would have squealed and run, forever destined to be the prig, and Thomas would have moved on to the next nurse, but I wanted to keep him, like a pet. He adored me. Even when I was his shameful little secret and he’d tug at my clothes with what seemed like so many hands and beg me to let them wander, I didn’t give in, much though I wanted to. I never got to meet Mrs Wiggs at that point, though she would pester us by knocking at the door, and I would giggle and wince as he shouted at her to go away.
‘What can she think of you, hiding nurses in your bedroom?’ I asked him once.
‘Nothing! She worships me – I can do no wrong. It will be you who is cast as the temptress,’ he replied, laughing. ‘You must be a very wicked woman indeed, to seduce a young man so unused to the big city.’ He used to say that sort of thing in between trying to get his tongue past the boundaries of my clothes. It was like being attacked by an eel.
Then he would put me in a cab and I’d ride back to the hospital still squirming from the state he’d put me in, desperate to let him in, my blood thick like oil, my veins swollen, my skin hot. Was this the badness my grandmother had claimed to see inside me? Why was it a bad thing to feel pleasure? Why should I be obliged to remain lonely and miserable?
I did worry he would lose patience, but Thomas was from a class of men so unused to rejection that the effect this had was to drive him insane. Even on the wards he would sniff round me like a dog, desperate to crawl up my legs.
The gossip spread like wildfire and I was on borrowed time before it finally got to Matron. The other nurses whispered and I caught sly looks, but I didn’t care. I had become a terrible nurse: distracted, indifferent and uncaring, never doing more than the absolute minimum, for what was the point?
Thomas talked a lot about himself, his favourite subject, but I never had much to say, so it worked rather well. I thought him sweet and myself clever. I believed I was letting him do all the talking, which meant I rarely had to disclose anything about myself. He asked about my family, and I told him the old scarlet fever story, that my grandparents had raised me and now everyone was dead. I had no one. Poor, vulnerable little me. I never lied and he didn’t ask again.
He told me all about growing up in a house called Abbingdale Hall, a large Georgian mansion in the village of Wraxham, a few miles outside Bristol. To me he may as well have been describing a palace. It had a small farm, an orangery and an aviary. He mentioned once that there were twenty servants and my head almost snapped off. Twenty! I struggled to imagine what on earth these people could be doing all day. There were arable fields where crops were grown, pastures on which cattle grazed, and tenants that maintained hedgerows, so they had to employ a farmer and his family to look after the land. He talked of formal gardens, terraces, rose gardens, ornamental flowerbeds, and there was even an arboretum. I worried he would sense my newfound lust was more than a little influenced by his wealth.
‘My father called it paradise,’ he said. ‘Wild garlic grows under the trees. It’s quite beautiful.’
It certainly sounded like paradise to me. Thomas’s childhood was a world away from mine.
One evening in his bedroom, he said, ‘When we are married and I have established myself as England’s greatest surgeon, we can retire and live there. You know, I will inherit the lot once my mother dies. There is Helen, my twin sister, and she’ll have to be well looked after, of course. I consider myself a forward-thinking man. I’ll give her enough to keep her happy – she does like to order and organise. Little Helen! She has always been such a busy little hen and she’s really rather good at it. However, I am the male heir, and nothing can change that.’
He was saying everything I wanted to
