Annette was confident that she could return to her old job as staff nurse at the Royal Hospital and face her ex-fiancé David without a qualm. But how would she really feel when they came face to face? Was there really ‘nothing so dead as a dead love’?
GRADE: C
BEST QUOTES:
“Since when was human behavior consistent?”
“Any person’s the richer for having loved. Nothing—either time or distance—can take away the effect of love. It builds something into a person, into their character. Something permanent.”
“It’s only too easy to make all the virtues—trust, kindness, simplicity, meekness—appear like foolishness, instead of sterling qualities.”
“There’s far more to people than proteins, fats, carbohydrates and so on.”
“Time and love are strangers to each other.”
REVIEW:
A year and a half before this book opens, Annette Cochrane
and her fiancé, resident anesthesiologist David Hadley, had argued over her
wish to complete her training before getting married. “I don’t want my wife
working. I’m earning enough for both of us,” he’d trotted out. But she’d gone anyway:
“I want to feel I’ve achieved something before giving up,” she replies, already
having given up “the secret ambition she had once had to specialize” as a scrub
nurse. So off she goes to a hospital a hundred miles off for six months more
training while he waits around for her to come home. Or not, as it turns out
when she comes back that he’d been taking out chief nurse Janet Hughes in her
absence. But he’d suggested they end their engagement, so she’d slipped off her
ring and gone off for a year of surgery training.
Now back at the hospital, she’s doing her best not “to fall in love with David all over again, suffer the same heartbreak.” He’s being very helpful with that, acting all cold and snippy, yet still always seems to be around for one reason or another. She starts dating the new surgeon, Andrew Knight, who seems to have fallen for her in a big way, but every time she takes him to her apartment, David is there visiting her roommate. Meanwhile there are the usual troubles with her colleagues: the chief nurse is cool and unfriendly, and one of her subordinates is deliberately sabotaging her, but Annette is ultimately able to negotiate her work difficulties. After many dates with Andrew, he eventually proposes, but she is still waffling about whether or not she still loves David, and goes “all sentimental every time he came into her mind,” deciding it’s “habit for her heart to gyrate every time he came near her or touched her.” Sure it is! So we spend a great deal of time watching Annette and David slowly drift into the painfully obvious ending we saw from the first chapter.
It’s curious that this book presents working as one of two choices: one either marries and gives up her career or becomes “a hard-bitten, career-driven woman who thinks of nothing but work and expects everyone under her to do the same.” Annette decides out of the blue, halfway through the book and after having gone to considerable trouble to maximize her nurse training, that “there were more important things in life than achieving an ambition,” thinking that “marriage can be more important for a woman than a career.” It’s an odd position for someone who was hell-bent on finishing her training at the expense of her relationship. The most irritating part of this is that in the end—spoiler alert—when she’s ready to chuck her career David replies, “My darling, you don’t have to. It’s entirely up to you. But the fact that you were willing to—” He doesn’t say what that does for him, but it made me want to throw up, and was an irritating way to end a book that had been largely only dull up to that point.
