Patsy of Paradise Place, page 25
She was shaking with nerves by the time they arrived at the hospital.
‘Come on, let’s visit Liam first and then we’ll deal with the other matter afterwards,’ Billy told her.
Liam was in a long narrow ward with ground-to-ceiling glass doors that opened on to a stretch of green grass. Although there was quite a keen breeze the doors were wide open.
‘He’ll catch his death of cold in this place,’ Billy commented as he turned up his jacket collar.
‘Fresh air is all part of the treatment,’ Patsy assured him.
‘What, even in winter?’
‘So I understand. We’ll have to bring him in a woolly hat and some gloves when it gets colder.’
Billy shot her a sideways glance to see if she was smiling and then frowned heavily when he saw she was quite serious.
Liam was so pleased to see them that it brought a lump into Patsy’s throat. She made a pretence of putting some of the things she had brought for him into the locker by his bedside so that he wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes.
Patsy’s heart sank as she looked at his thin little legs and arms. He had always been on the skinny side, but now they were like matchsticks. She found herself wondering why she had never suspected that something was wrong with him when he didn’t fill out. He’d been a very small baby, but with all the food Elaine gave him he should have been quite tubby when he reached the toddler stage.
Patsy sighed. She’d always told herself that he was going to be tall and lean like her dad, but she should have known that those characteristics wouldn’t have developed until he was entering manhood.
It was no good dwelling on the past, she thought, swallowing back her tears. If she’d made mistakes then she must try and rectify them.
It made her all the more determined to work at the hospital he was in. As a nurse, even if it wasn’t on his ward, she would be able to find a way to monitor his progress first hand and to be there to comfort and reassure him while he was undergoing treatment.
Chapter Thirty-One
PATSY FOUND IT much easier to transfer from one hospital to the other than she had thought possible.
Not everyone liked the idea of nursing TB patients because of the fear of catching the disease, or infecting someone in their own family, so the isolation hospital was always ready to consider suitable applicants.
A further point that made the transition easy was the fact that the matron at Liverpool General Hospital was not very pleased with the way Nurse Callaghan had been acting over the last few months and was quite relieved to see her go. First of all there had been the summons for Nurse Callaghan to go home in the middle of the day because of a family crisis, followed almost immediately by the necessity of taking her leave early.
According to Sister Pringle, when eventually Nurse Callaghan did return to duty she seemed to have her mind on other things and her work on the ward had suffered because of this. It was only the inconvenience of being short-staffed that had stopped Matron dismissing her right away.
Patsy settled in quickly at the new hospital. She was not working on the children’s ward, but hoped that perhaps she would be transferred in the near future. But she managed to see Liam most days, even though sometimes it was from a distance.
She had told no one in the hospital that she was his mother, but being under the same roof as him was comforting even when she wasn’t able to sit with him or even speak to him.
Patsy tried to be as discreet as possible, but she suspected that the nurses on the children’s ward wondered why she was always pausing by the door. On the first two or three occasions she had explained that she was new to the hospital and had lost her way, but she knew she couldn’t go on making such an excuse for ever.
The truth emerged the night after Liam underwent his first major treatment. She had slipped along to his ward late in the evening, at a time when she knew the night staff would have completed their rounds and would be in the staff room, to check if he was all right.
Her heart ached as she saw him lying there awake, and in obvious distress. Before she could help herself she was kneeling at his bedside, stroking his damp hair back from his brow and murmuring words of comfort.
When she tried to leave he clung on to her, sobbing so loudly that the duty nurse came hurrying in to see what was wrong. When she found Patsy at Liam’s bedside she demanded to know what was going on. She listened in obvious disbelief as Patsy explained she was Liam’s mother. She then insisted that Patsy must leave the ward and said she would have to report the incident to Sister.
Patsy didn’t sleep a wink that night. She knew she had broken hospital rules and that there would be trouble the next day. It was no surprise at all when around mid-morning the staff nurse on the ward where she was working told her to report immediately to Matron.
Outside the door to Matron’s office, Patsy smoothed down her starched white apron, straightened her white cap and took a deep breath to steady her nerves before she knocked. As she waited nervously for the summons to enter, Patsy braced herself for an onslaught.
She had gone over and over in her mind what she should say and had decided that the truth would carry more weight than any excuses. She was sure that once Matron knew that Liam was her child she would understand her fears and anxiety and why she was constantly hovering near his bedside.
She was quite wrong. Matron was completely unsympathetic.
‘You have been trained to look after people who are sick, Nurse Callaghan, not your relations,’ she said icily. ‘What you have been doing not only transgresses the trust I have placed in you, but is highly unprofessional.’
‘Liam is my son, I am terribly concerned about him,’ Patsy responded heatedly. ‘He is not yet five years old and this is the first time he has been away from his home. I’m not interfering in his treatment in any way.’
‘That will do, Nurse Callaghan! I do not consider these to be mitigating circumstances and I will not enter into any further discussion of the matter. Do you understand?’ she added sternly.
Patsy tried to bite back the angry retort that rose to her lips but the words gushed out like a jet of scalding hot water.
‘You can’t do this, you can’t stop me seeing him!’ she raged. ‘He needs me at his bedside, he needs my reassurance.’
‘Nurse Callaghan!’ Matron’s face was red with anger. ‘How dare you dispute my judgement!’
‘Liam is a desperately sick little boy and he needs to know that his mother is there near him,’ Patsy repeated stubbornly.
‘Why should one child receive different treatment from all the others? Have you stopped and considered what it is doing to the other patients to see one small boy getting preferential treatment?’
Too choked to answer, Patsy looked down at her shoes.
‘I’m waiting for your answer, Nurse Callaghan,’ Matron snapped.
Patsy knew she was defeated. ‘I’m sorry, Matron. I won’t do it again,’ she said meekly.
‘You most certainly won’t, Nurse Callaghan,’ Matron said frostily. ‘You are dismissed. I want you off the hospital premises within the hour. Do you understand?’
The colour drained from Patsy’s face. ‘You can’t mean that,’ she gasped.
Matron gave her a withering look. ‘You should have thought about the consequences before you behaved in such an unprofessional way. Kindly close the door as you leave.’
Patsy went straight from Matron’s office to the ward where Liam was. Without asking anyone’s permission she walked over to his bed and gave him a big hug.
‘Look, luv, I won’t be able to see you again until visiting day,’ she told him.
He looked crestfallen. ‘You said you’d come and kiss me good-night every night while I was in here,’ he reminded her.
‘I know, pet, but things have changed. I’m not working at this hospital any more. I’ll be in to see you on Wednesday though. Who shall I bring with me?’
‘Nana said she’d come, and Billy was going to come as well,’ he pouted.
‘Well so they can.’
‘If they come then you won’t come.’
‘We’ll all come,’ she promised. ‘Billy can pop in for a few minutes and then he’ll wait outside while Nana comes in to see you and I’ll be here the whole time. How about that?’
Liam’s pallid face brightened. ‘And will you all bring me something?’
‘You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you,’ Patsy smiled, as she hugged and kissed him again.
‘Nurse Callaghan, what are you doing here? Matron said you were not to be allowed on this ward except at normal visiting times so will you please leave immediately.’
‘I’ve got to go now, Liam,’ Patsy told him, tears trickling down her cheeks. ‘I’ll see you on Wednesday, I promise.’
When she left the isolation hospital she couldn’t bring herself to go back to Paradise Place. How was she to explain to Elaine and Billy what a mess she had made of things?
She walked slowly up Mill Lane to Liscard Road and walked round for almost half an hour staring unseeingly into the shop windows. What was she going to do now? She was out of work at a time when they needed as much money as possible for Liam. When he came out of hospital he would need plenty of nourishing food to build up his strength and she could hardly ask to go back to Liverpool General.
Her feeling of gloom deepened. Perhaps Liam never would come out of hospital. So few children recovered, because they hadn’t the stamina to fight the disease or stand up to the long, arduous treatment.
The thought that he might die filled her with even deeper fear. He’d never even met his father! Bruno didn’t even know he existed.
She had to do something about that and there was no better time than the present, she decided. She was in Wallasey so she was only a bus ride away from New Brighton. She’d go to the fairground again and this time she would definitely find out what had happened to Bruno. Someone there must know.
The fairground was thronged with people and everything seemed to have changed from when she had last been there. There were far more swings and roundabouts and a great many new sideshows, but there was still no circus.
‘Bruno Alvarez? Yes, I remember him,’ one of the stall holders told her. ‘Tall, dark-haired chap, came from Spain or one of those Mediterranean places. He used to train the lions and big cats. Is that the fellow?’
‘Yes,’ Patsy agreed eagerly. ‘That sounds like Bruno. Can you tell me where I can find him?’
The man pushed his hat back and scratched his head. ‘No, not really. He left a few years back, took his animals with him and hasn’t been back since.’
‘You must know where he went?’
The man scratched his head again. ‘Can’t say I do, really. There were rumours that he’d gone to Blackpool and then someone said Rhyl and someone else said Morecambe. There’s any number of seaside places up and down the coast so he could be at any of them.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Hold on,’ the man said as Patsy turned away. ‘There was something that happened the day before he left that might interest you.’
‘Go on.’
‘Some woman, quite a bit older than him, came here looking for him. She was quite a looker and she had lovely hair. Reddish blonde it was. Bruno seemed a bit surprised to see her, but she grabbed hold of him and began hugging and kissing him and a couple of minutes later he had his arm round her waist and they went off towards his van.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Well yes. Except that next morning Bruno packed up all his belongings and he and the woman and the animals took off. Like I said, no one’s seen or heard of them since.’
‘Thanks!’ It wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear. From the man’s description there was very little doubt in her mind who the woman had been.
Patsy felt numb as she left the fairground, wandered out on to the promenade and made her way across to the pier. Leaning on the railings she stared out unseeingly across the choppy waters of the Mersey.
The disappearance of her mother from their house in Paradise Place, and of Bruno from the fairground, had happened about the same time. Linked to what she had just been told the pieces fitted together like a jigsaw. I should have known from the way mam carried on with Bruno when she met him on my sixteenth birthday that she was involved, Patsy thought bitterly.
She had tried to forget about finding them in bed together the next morning. Or the way Bruno had seemed to change towards her immediately afterwards.
She knew now why her mam had given up the house.
Yet, when Mam found out that I was pregnant I told her that it was Bruno’s baby, she thought angrily. Even though she knew that she still went away with him. She abandoned me and pinched my boyfriend, knowing I was going to need help from both of them. If it hadn’t been for Billy and his family looking after me I would have had no one.
Patsy thought of the countless times he had taken her in his arms and comforted her, and the look in his eyes whenever he’d done so. Above all she remembered his tenderness on the one and only occasion when they’d made love. The more she thought about the way Billy had behaved, his kindness, his steadfastness throughout all her troubles, the more incredible it seemed that he still felt the same way about her.
Billy really must love me a great deal, she thought with astonishment. His feelings for her had withstood the countless difficulties they’d gone through together.
She’d taken him so much for granted. She hadn’t treated him anywhere near as well as she should have done. It was something she would always regret, but it wasn’t too late to do something about it.
The time had come to admit to him and to herself just how much she cared for him, to openly acknowledge that she loved him.
Filled with a mixture of relief, joy and hope for the future she headed for the nearest bus that would take her back to Seacombe ferry. It would make her journey longer, but she didn’t want to catch a boat from New Brighton: the crossing would bring back too many sad memories.
Anyway, there was no immediate hurry. As far as Billy and Elaine knew, she was at work so they wouldn’t be expecting her. The longer the journey took, the more time she had to decide what she was going to tell them about losing her job.
The only good thing that she could see coming out of all this was that she would be able to visit Liam regularly every Wednesday and Sunday.
Chapter Thirty-Two
PATSY WAS SO immersed in her misery as she stood leaning on the rail of the ferryboat as it pulled alongside at Liverpool that she didn’t notice the young man in grey flannels, brown tweed jacket and brown cap patiently waiting on the slipway.
The gangplank was lowered and she was making her way on to the floating roadway when she was startled by him limping towards her. He grasped her by the arm.
‘Where the hell have you been, Patsy? I’ve met every boat from New Brighton and Seacombe for the past two hours. I thought I must have missed you. I even rushed back to Paradise Place and left messages with everyone I could find to tell you to get back to the hospital as quickly as you could. Then I came back here to the Pier Head to check if you were on any of the boats as they arrived.’
‘Billy! What are you doing here? How did you know I was on the way home?’
‘We had a policeman call at the house to say they’d had a phone message from the Wallasey Hospital, that’s why I’m here. We’ve been at our wits’ end trying to find you.’
Patsy turned a brick red, her green eyes flaming. ‘They had no right to do that! My quarrel with the matron was nothing at all to do with you. Why send the police, anyway? What I did wasn’t criminal!’
‘I don’t know what the devil you’re on about,’ Billy frowned. ‘The police came with a message about Liam. They said we ought to go over there right away. When me mam and me got there we couldn’t find you and we were told that you had left the hospital.’
‘What’s happened to him?’ she asked anxiously.
‘He’s much worse. They want us to be with him. Come on.’ He turned her round and hurried her back on to the boat she’d just arrived on, which was already preparing to cast off again for a return journey to Seacombe.
Patsy felt numb and then guilty as she listened to Billy’s account of what he and Elaine had been told when they reached the hospital.
‘They said there had been some sort of disturbance on the ward this morning and that as a result Liam was very upset. It seems he cried so much that it brought on a severe bout of coughing that wouldn’t stop. In the end he was coughing up so much blood that they had to take emergency measures.’
‘Oh my God!’ The colour drained from Patsy’s face.
Bill looked puzzled. ‘Mam thought you were there at the hospital with him and that you’d been the one to send for us.’ He frowned. ‘You should have been there. Where were you?’
Patsy ignored his question. ‘Liam is going to be all right, isn’t he?’ she asked anxiously.
‘I’m sure he is.’ Billy put an arm round her shoulder and hugged her close to him. ‘Don’t worry, they’re doing everything they can for him,’ he said confidently, planting a reassuring kiss on the top of her red curls.
Patsy flinched and pulled away. ‘I should have been there. He needs me.’ She sniffed and dabbed at her eyes. ‘Oh, Billy, why does everything always go wrong for me?’
‘Don’t worry, me mam’s there with him,’ he reminded her. ‘She’ll do all she can to comfort him.’
‘That’s not the point. I’m the one who should be there, I’m his mother,’ Patsy insisted angrily. ‘What if they told him I was coming to see him and he’s been expecting me? He won’t understand why I’m not there and he’ll be breaking his little heart.’
‘Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now, Patsy. Neither of us can turn the clock back. What on earth made you leave the hospital in the middle of the morning, anyway? You still haven’t told me.’
‘I was ordered to leave. I broke the rules. I was caught cuddling Liam when I shouldn’t have been anywhere near the ward he’s in. I was sent to Matron and when I tried to explain that Liam was my child she dismissed me on the spot and told me to be off the premises within an hour. She said I’d been trained to nurse the sick, not my own family,’ she added bitterly.
