By Pauline Ash, ©1967
Nurse Leila possessed
a rare quality—the ability to draw people out. Wherever she went, within the
hospital or outside it, people found themselves falling in love with her. All
except the one person she really cared about. Was there anything she could do
to change the way he felt?
GRADE: B
BEST QUOTES:
“I think you’d be wretched without something of your very
own to keep you occupied, but I can’t help feeling, sometimes, that you ought
to have a family to raise, instead of just a job.”
“I wish you nurses would just nurse, and not talk to the
patients at all!”
“This young man was going to kick against the pricks, every
inch of the way.”
“If he could have shrugged, he would have, but he couldn’t
because of his injuries.”
REVIEW:
Poor Nurse Leila Richmond. She really likes taking care of
patients, which in this case means running errands for them, giving advice
about their personal lives, carrying secret messages to the secret people in
their lives—and unfortunately, as she’s on the men’s ward, all these patients
soon come to feel they’re in love with her. And why wouldn’t they? “She was a
golden girl. Golden of skin, golden of hair—and her eyes—they caught the
sunlight, and they danced, and it was the happiest, the most beautiful face he
had seen for a long time.”
A number of patients are yearning for her tragically: Dudley
Marchmont, a wealthy young painter, whose hands were burned in an unsuccessful
attempt to rescue a child from the fire that burned his apartment building to
the ground (an especially gruesome backstory that is barely commented upon);
Jeffrey Philbey, a mountaineer with an unhappy marriage who had forced his
reluctant wife to come on a climb with him, and in the accident that ensued
he’d become a “spinal case”—though it seems likely that he will regain some use
of his legs—and his wife was killed, leaving his 7-year-old ward, herself the
orphan of his brother, in his disinterested custody; and Marwood Tappender, a
travelling businessman with a habit of taking typists to dinner (but nothing
more!) when he’s on the road, but he has not told his wife of his hobby, and is
being blackmailed by one of the typists. Phew! And did I mention that Marwood’s
wife Arabella is the sister of surgeon Kearney Holdstock, “a big man, with
massive shoulders and a fine head which he held rather high,” with whom Leila
is actually in love?
It’s not hard to see that nothing but serious trouble and
hospital gossip is going to come of Leila’s heartfelt desire to help her
patients struggling with despair—“You’ve only got to say you need something,
and she’ll come galloping to do it for you!” exclaims one patient. Kearney’s
feelings for Leila cause him to be sucked in to Leila’s efforts to help her
patients, and it isn’t long before he’s in love with her too, but as the hot
water rises around Leila’s neck, she’s convinced that the only way out—once
she’s solved everyone else’s problems, naturally—is to quit her job and go work
at another hospital. The women’s ward, apparently, where she would cause much
less collateral damage, has no need for a dedicated nurse.
As she’s running away from the hospital with Kearney in
enamored pursuit, her train crashes, which of course leads to the rapprochement
of the heroine and her man. This involves her promise to marry him and quit
working, even after earlier consideration of quitting her post at the hospital was
described as quite a burden to bear: “With the end in sight, St. Mary’s assumed
a new atmosphere, an atmosphere she didn’t want to lose. She had been a part of this great family for long
enough to be a little scared and very sad at losing it.” But with a man to be
gained, she’ll chuck it all! “No more trying to arrange other people’s lives,
my sweet,” says her surgeon, drastically arranging her life for her without a
flicker of irony. “You’ll have quite enough on your hands managing your own,”
he tells her, implying her life will revolve around him and their future
children. She hesitates—and he says, “Leila, if you want to go on carrying the
burdens of your patients, you have to make a choice. It’s them or me.” Well,
the choice seemed obvious enough to me! While it is true that Leila gets
herself excessively involved with her patients and needs to be redirected,
she’s clearly a great nurse who turns hopeless patients around, and it does not
stand to reason that she shouldn’t be a nurse at all. I felt the loss to the
hospital, the patients, and to Leila herself—will she really be happy puttering
at home with little to do (until the babies start cranking out) waiting for her
surgeon husband, who will be working 60-plus hours a week, to show up?
It turns out I had read this book before but had failed
somehow to write the review, and now, remembering nothing of it, I was forced
to wade through it again. I can’t really say it was worth a second go-through.
There’s a lot of drama in the plot, and as each patient tumbles for Leila she
is completely incapable of telling them that she does not love them and that
they need to pull themselves together, only compounding her problems. We’re
told that Kearney is a good guy—he loves his sister very much, and he agrees to
play along with several of Leila’s escapades—but she largely thinks he does not
care for her and just enjoys yelling at her, not completely without reason. In
the end we have a fiancé 13 years older than our 20-year-old heroine and who
has few outward charms to put the reader on his side. The story is entertaining
enough, but there’s not enough in this book to love as much as the fellas who
all love this nurse.
