Doctor Fane (hiatus)

The New Nurse I.

The letter had said that someone would be waiting for Celia at the station, but when her train arrived, she was the only person who got off and the platform was empty. She walked down the platform to look for the waiting room and found only the gates to the road. The station, it seemed, was too small and unimportant to have one. Nor was there such a useful creature as a porter to make enquiries to, or to help her carry the over-stuffed carpet bag which held all her worldly belongings and bumped against her knees with every step. She hooked it over her elbow and went through the gates and out into the street beyond. There was nobody waiting here either. The street was empty but for a taxi cab standing on the corner, the horse idly flicking its tail, the driver eating a sandwich with grubby fingers. Surely he could not be the man they had sent to meet her?

He swallowed the last three mouthfuls of his sandwich in one, licked the crumbs from his fingers, and doffed his cap at Celia. "You need to get somewhere, Miss?"

Celia shook her head hurriedly. She did not have the money for a taxi. She hadn't even ha'pence in her pocket for a bun during the wait at Holbeck Station. Besides, they had said that they would send someone to meet her.

"I don't suppose," Celia said in a voice unnaturally high and tight from tiredness and nerves, "that anybody has been waiting in the street? My train... My train I think was a little late."

The driver shook his head. "Been no 'ne but me the past hour gone. But I can take you, Miss, wherever it is you need."

"I don't have any money."

"Ah well," the driver said pragmatically, "you'd best walk then."

Celia was not prepared to walk. She looked around her. The station stood at the edge of a small, quiet village, and the street was nothing more than a row of shabby houses that soon faded into farmland. A sign above the door of one house proclaimed beer, tea, and refreshments. Celia crossed the road, letting her carpet bag slip back down to her hand and bang once more against her knees. Perhaps they were waiting for her in there. When she opened the door, a bell jangled but no urgent movements came from within. It was some time before her eyes adjusted to the dim light and she could make out the shape and form of a woman leaning against the counter of a bar, reading a book.

"Excuse me," Celia said.

The woman glanced up. "Pint?"

"No, no." Celia looked around. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the light, she could see that every crooked chair was vacant, every ale-stained table bare. "I... I don't suppose somebody was waiting here? For, um, for me?"

"Maybe. Who are you?" the woman asked.

"The new nurse for the cottage hospital over at Fernleigh Dean."

"That so? No, no one was waiting for you." The woman looked pointedly at a tray of bilious looking rock cakes sitting beside her on the bar. "Want a bun? Tea?"

Celia shook her head. Even if she had money, nothing could have tempted her to the rock cakes. "I need to find the person who was sent to pick me up."

"Good luck, love," the woman said absently, returning her attention to her book.

Celia went back out into the street. It seemed even sleepier than before. Dead leaves rustled in the gutters. A crow cawed from a tree. She wandered down the street until the row of houses stopped abruptly at a field with two sleeping horses, and then returned to the station. Nobody. Not even the taxi driver, who had disappeared, perhaps in search of a livelier thoroughfare.

Celia's inner child — that spoiled beast, which she had carried around inside her for twenty years now — welled up with tears and fear. No one was coming to pick her up. She had come to the wrong place. The cottage hospital at Fernleigh Dean did not want her after all.