A Match for Sister Maggy Read Online Free

Maggy remembered it, she decided she must have imagined the woman’s fear and anger.
    She was due off duty at six o’clock. She gave the report to Staff Nurse and then waited for the visitors to arrive. She had two days off, and she wanted to see Monsieur Riveau, and get the question of his wife’s teeth settled. She felt the usual thrill of distaste as she approached the bed. The two men were seated on either side of it; neither got up as she approached, but watched her with thinly veiled hostility. She wasted no time, but explained her errand and stood waiting for a reply. The men looked at her without speaking, their faces expressionless, and yet she had a prickle of fear so real that she put her hand up to the back of her neck to brush it away. Atlength the elder man said, ‘No X-ray, no dentist for my wife. She refuses.’
    â€˜There’s no pain involved,’ Maggy replied doggedly. ‘Her jaws are swollen; her teeth may be infected and it may make the ulcer worse.’ He said ‘No’ in an ugly voice, and she damped down her temper and persevered in a reasonable way, struggling with her French.
    â€˜The teeth are probably decayed; she will be better without them.’ She managed to smile at the unfriendly faces. ‘It’s very likely that in time they will make her condition worse.’
    Their silence was worse than speech—chilling and unfriendly and completely uncooperative. She could feel their dislike of her pressing against her like a tangible thing. She gave herself a mental shake, asked them to reconsider their decision, and said goodnight. Her words fell into silence like stones, and as she walked away, she could feel their eyes on her back; it was a most unpleasant sensation.
    Maggy spent her two days off with a former nurse who had trained with her and then left to get married. She came back to St Ethelburga’s refreshed in mind if not in body, and with a strong desire to get married and have a husband and children of her own. She thought this unlikely. She had never met a man she wished to marry; but as if to give the lie to these thoughts, a picture of Dr Doelsma, very clear and accurate down to the last detail, came into her mind’s eye. She shook her head, reducing his image to fragments and said something in the Gaelic tongue with such force that Sister Beecham, sitting opposite her in the sitting room, put down her knitting and looked at her.
    â€˜I don’t know what it meant, Maggy MacFergus, but it sounded as though it was a good thing I didn’t, and if you are going to make the tea—I’ll not have milk; I’m dieting.’
    Maggy got up obediently. Sister Beecham had been at St Ethelburga’s for so long that her word was law to any Sister under forty, and Maggy was only twenty-four.
    As she crossed the landing the next morning, she sensed an air of suppressed excitement, although there was no one to be seen. Staff was waiting for her in her office, standing by the well-polished desk, adorned by a vase of flowers. Funeral flowers, delivered at regular intervals to the wards and hailed as a mixed blessing by the unfortunate junior nurse whose lot it was to disentangle them from their wire supports and turn the anchors and wreaths into vases of normal-looking flowers. Maggy noted with relief that Nurse had achieved a very normal-looking bunch. She detested them, but had never had the heart to say so; she guessed that some nurse had taken a lot of trouble to please her. She exchanged good mornings with Staff Nurse Williams, and thought for the hundredth time what a pretty creature she was—small and blonde and blue-eyed—everything Maggy was not and wished to be. She had discovered long ago that there were few advantages in being six feet tall. It was, for a start, impossible to be fragile or clinging; it was taken for granted that she would undertake tasks that smaller women could be helpless about, and there was