It's the book she notices first.
Mavis is in Nurse Miller's room – or what was Nurse Miller's room, before she became Sister Mary Cynthia, and before it was given over to Nurse Mount's young Welsh friend – giving the upstairs rooms their weekly once-over with the duster. It looks nice, the room, now. Mrs B had come to her, last Tuesday, with a face like thunder. 'As if we've not got enough to do as it is! You'll have to stay late one day this week.'
And so she had done. It had been a hell of a job: after doing her normal morning jobs, Mavis'd had long afternoon of getting the dust up out of the carpet; of getting rid, as best she could, of the smell of damp that crept into the convent rooms as soon as people left them; of sorting out bed linen; of requisitioning the furniture that had somehow become dispersed throughout the building; and of supervising Fred in moving chests of drawers and wardrobes from there to here (and actually doing a lot of the carrying herself). She'd got it spruce, spick and span, but now, a few days after Nurse Busby's moved in, it's somehow better than that. There are pictures on the wall, the furniture has been subtly rearranged, there's a pretty vase with flowers in it on the table, a wireless on the chest of drawers, and a bookshelf crammed with books.
Homely, it feels.
She's picking up a little stack of books from the bedside table so she can give it a quick wipe, when she fumbles, and they fall from her grasp. The top two books – recent crime thrillers, the library sticker on their cover proclaiming their origin - land, face up, with a thud. The third, however, hits the floor with a softer whump, absorbing the impact in its awkwardly splaying pages, its dustjacket hanging off it at an odd angle.
Mavis curses softly, and picks it up. As she does, she's careful to catch the bookmark and fix it in place – there's nothing worse than losing your page, she knows. (Mavis is a big reader – she's got six tickets with Poplar district library and goes every Saturday to take her books back and pick up new ones. Mrs B marvels at her for doing so, and doesn't know where she finds the time to read so much. But then Mrs B has a husband, two daughters, a son, and half a dozen grandchildren and Mavis – well, Mavis doesn't have that.)
Mavis tries to settle the book back into its jacket but she can't get it to sit right. And then she realizes why. The dust jacket this book is wearing isn't its own; the paper cover overhangs at top and bottom, its spine much wider than the book inside. The book she's holding isn't, as it purports to be, The Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti; as she fiddles with it, pulling it loose from the cover to set it aright, she realizes that it's something very different. It's a book she's only heard of, mentioned to her once by a woman she knew with a recommendation that she'd like it if only she could track it down, but that she'd be unlikely to find it in the public library.
Well.
The Price of Salt.
Well.
She's long had her suspicions about Nurse Mount. Hard not to, really, with those pictures on her wall, pictures that signify a certain something to those in the know. She'd been taken aback the first time she'd seen them there above the girl's bed, a wall bare for so long suddenly coming brightly to life, and developing an unmistakeable personality of its own. (The picture of Dietrich had thrown her back twenty years, to before the war, to the first (but not last) time she'd seen Morocco.)
And now The Price of Salt.
Well. Nurse Busby too?
It brings a smile to Mavis's face. It can be a lonely life, Mavis knows that well enough, but that it can be made bearable by those who understand is something she also knows. She's pleased for Nurse Mount to have a friend in the same boat. Or perhaps they're more than friends?
In one last attempt to fit the jacket to the book, she flips open the cover. Nurse Busby is clearly trying to be discreet about her reading matter, and Mavis respects that, and wants to make sure she puts it back as neatly as she can. But there, written on the fly leaf, clear for anyone to see, she reads – she can't help it –an inscription: 'All my love, P xxx.'
She recognizes the writing from the chalk board downstairs.
Well, that settles it. More than friends.
Just then Mrs B's voice echoes up through the halls, calling her for elevenses. She snaps the book shut, picks up the other two from the floor, and returns the pile to the bedside table. The Price of Salt, in its masquerade as something else entirely, she places carefully, innocuously, back in its place as the bottom-most of the three.
If changing bed linen is part of your job, you get to be pretty good at telling when beds are being slept in, and when they are not, and when there are, in fact, two people regularly sleeping in a bed made for one. It doesn't matter that those beds belong to nurses who have been well-schooled in hospital corners: however neatly the bed is made, there's still a certain something that gives the game away.
Mavis strips the beds every fortnight, before bagging up the sheets and sending Fred with them to the commercial laundry on Chrisp Street. They send most of the laundry out now, ever since the great laundry skirmish (as Mavis likes to think of it) back in the old Nonnatus house – when was it? 57? 56? it was the year Nurse Franklin arrived, anyway – when Mrs B had threatened to resign if Sister Julienne didn't agree to let her send the worst of it – the nuns' habits, the uniforms, the aprons, the overalls, the bed linen – out to a commercial laundrette. Now it's just the nurses' every day clothes that Mavis has to see to, and it's not a bad job (or it's not as bad as it once was) but with Peggy gone and never replaced, she's grateful for the new twin tub that Sister Julienne had finally agreed they could get when they moved into the new house. It's Nurse Franklin's things that take the longest: she has some lovely, pretty things, undoubtedly, but they take so much care and time. Because of that, Mavis has worked out a system where she does Nurse Franklin and Nurse Mount's things one week, and the more robust, durable things of the other three nurses the next.
So now Mavis's only job with the bed linen is to strip the beds and make them afresh.
And that's how she knows that Nurse Mount is spending more time in Nurse Busby's bed than she is in her own.
It's not just that the scent of Nurse Mount's perfume lingers in Nurse Busby's room: it's that it's on Nurse Busby's sheets too. And it's also that there are strands of her red hair on Nurse Busby's pillow.
She thinks it's sweet, really.
Mavis has lived removed from the watchful, curious eye of anyone else for ten or more years (ever since she and her father had concluded that their relationship would function better if, rather than living with him, she simply looked in on him a couple of times a week instead), but she remembers, before that, living in close quarters like these, when she was in the WAAF. She remembers it as if it were yesterday (remembers it more vividly than yesterday's drab routines) and she remembers the close shaves and the near misses, and what happened to those who weren't as fortunate as she had been in that regard.
She can't help but worry for them, Nurse Mount and Nurse Busby. It's such a big risk they're taking. But she's an old romantic at heart too, so she's also glad for them: from what she's seen of her, it does seem that Nurse Mount has been happier in the last few months than she's been in a long time.
So when Mavis finds Nurse Mount's cardigan mixed in with Nurse Busby's washing she smiles to herself, and thinks about the recklessness of young lovers, and – because it's not her week for doing Nurse Mount's laundry – when it's washed and ironed, instead of leaving it out on the nurse's bed for her to put away as she normally does, she simply places it, quietly and without fuss, where it belongs in Nurse Mount's drawer.
But when, a few weeks later, Mavis finds underwear marked PM in Nurse Busby's laundry basket, she is rather less amused. A cardigan or a jumper could be explained away, a shirt, just about, but a pair of knickers? They really are getting careless, and it could blow up terribly for both of them.
She wonders if she ought to say something.
In the end, she decides against it. But she also decides against repeating what she did with the cardigan. She won't put the knickers back in Nurse Mount's drawer: she'll leave them with Nurse Busby's things, let her discover them and hope that she gets the message that they're not being as discreet as they need to be.
The next day, then, with the washing dried, and ironed, and sorted into piles according to the initials marked on it, the knickers labelled PM go back on Nurse Busby's pile, discreetly but prominently on top, so she'll see, so she'll get the message that they're being too reckless in the clues that they're leaving.
She carries the clean clothes upstairs, stopping first in Nurse Crane and Nurse Gilbert's room to deposit their piles on their beds, then continuing along the corridor to Nurse Busby's room.
Pushing open the door, she's surprised to find Nurse Busby lying on her bed, reading.
She must have a day off. Mavis hadn't realized.
'Your laundry,' she says, after apologising for barging in without knocking.
Nurse Busby stands with a smile, and thanking her, takes the pile from her. As Mavis is turning to leave, she sees her freeze.
She's seen the knickers, and there's real fear in her eyes.
In all her thinking about how Nurse Busby might make this discovery, Mavis hadn't actually considered being there to witness Nurse Busby's consternation. But now, with the look of abject horror on Nurse Busby's face, she wishes she'd done it differently, that she'd found another way. That she'd fixed the mistake silently, and let them carry on regardless.
Nurse Busby is looking at her now, perhaps trying to gauge what she knows.
'You two need to be more careful,' Mavis says, gently.
'I don't know what you mean.' The fear in Nurse Busby's eyes is joined by a glister of tears, even as there's defiance in her voice.
'You do.'
And then, as the silence stretches between them, Mavis decides she needs to even the score: to expose herself as much as these two young women are exposed. 'I know how it is. I know,' she says, meaningfully, and the fear in Nurse Busby's face suddenly shifts into understanding. She asks a silent question with her eyes, which Mavis answers with a nod, and as a momentary afterthought, a wink.
'Oh,' seems to be all Nurse Busby can manage to say.
Later, Mavis is in the chapel, on her hands and knees, polishing the floor. It's hard work, but it's soothing in its own way, and it allows her to get lost in her thoughts, which is where she is when she suddenly realizes she's not alone.
She turns. It's Nurse Busby, holding a tray.
'I thought you might like some tea,' she says shyly.
If Mrs B were still here, Mavis wouldn't risk it, but Mrs B is long gone - she always leaves at 2, if not before, so she can get home to look after her oldest daughter's kids when they get home from school. So she eases herself to her feet, and then into a chair, and she gladly takes the cup that's offered her.
Well, it's awkward at first, but then they have a good old chat. She can see what Nurse Mount likes about this girl: of course it's that she's pretty, but she's also wickedly funny and bold, and they talk and talk and share confidences in voices that are hushed and conspiratorial. Mavis tells her things, and the younger woman's eyes open wide with amazement, with glee, with camaraderie. The afternoon slips away from them and an hour or more is gone before Mavis remembers that she's supposed to be at work. Reluctantly, she goes back to her polish and her cloth, reluctantly, she shoos Nurse Busby away. In the end, the chapel floor's not done half as thoroughly as it usually is. If Mrs B comes to inspect it tomorrow Mavis'll get an earful. But she won't mind, because when she leaves work that afternoon, Mavis goes away with a book tucked under her arm. 'It was a present, so I'd like it back,' Nurse Busby – Delia, as Nurse Busby has told her to call her- had said, 'but you're very welcome to borrow it.'
And in exchange, she'd left Delia with something perhaps more valuable: a scrap of paper with an address of an establishment off the King's Road in Chelsea written on it.
Mavis only makes it up west occasionally these days. She can't afford it much, for one thing, and if the noise and the smoke and the crush were tolerable when she was younger they are harder for her to take now. But it's the birthday of an old friend and an opportunity to see which faces are still there, and which are not, so she goes to the club with relish.
There are two new faces there this evening: new to here, at least, if not new to her. Mavis catches sight of the pair of them, dancing, as close together as can be, as she's waiting at the bar. She thinks for a moment about going to say hello, but then she sees Nurse Mount cup Nurse Busby's face in her hands and kiss her gently, and she thinks better of it.
She decides to leave them to it.
She turns back to the bar, and orders herself another drink.
A/N: if you've ever read Goblin Market you'll know (as, I suspect Delia does) that some of the poems of Rossetti aren't quite as innocuous as Mavis assumes they are….