Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [125]
This second pregnancy was, if anything, less stressful than the first and Irene actually found herself rather bored by it. That was until she saw a notice in the local health centre advertising special birth and mothercraft classes at a hall in St Stephen Street. Had Irene been more fully occupied she would not have bothered with these, but in her current state she thought that it might be interesting to see what these classes entailed – not that she had anything to learn, of course, about bringing up children. Indeed, it was she who should be imparting knowledge in this area, not receiving it. But the barricades in this life are never in the right place, and so she duly enrolled in a class that was scheduled to run for six weeks, with meetings on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and on the evenings of the same days for those mothers-to-be who were still at work.
The classes were to be run by somebody called Nurse Forbes, and there was a picture of Nurse Forbes on the poster. Irene peered at her. She had a rather bovine face, Irene decided; the sort of face that one used to see in advertisements for butter. In fact, thought Irene, she looked a bit Dutch. The Dutch, she felt, had that rather milky look about them, as if they had eaten too many dairy products. And they probably had, she reflected.
Irene smiled. Poor Nurse Forbes! She probably had not the slightest idea who Melanie Klein was; for her, babies were a matter of bottles of milk and injections and nappy rash and all the rest. Hers would be a life filled with unguent creams and immunisations and breast-milk issues. Poor woman. And then, shortly after she had seen the poster and studied the picture of Nurse Forbes, Irene had the chance to meet her. It happened after a routine check-up that Irene had with her doctor. This doctor for some reason did not appear to like Irene
– a feeling which Irene decided was based on his fundamental 262 No More Nonsense, Nurse Knows Best
insecurity and his inability to engage in a non-paternalistic way with an informed patient.
“I’d like you to have a chat with Nurse Forbes,” said the doctor. “If you don’t mind, that is. She runs a class, you know. Not that you would need a class, of course. Not in your case.”
“On the contrary,” said Irene coldly. “I have already decided to sign up for it.”
“In that case,” said the doctor, “you can see Nurse Forbes straightaway. She’s in the building. Speak to the receptionists first. I’m sure that the two of you will get on very well.”
Irene had not bothered about the receptionists. She had left the consulting room and walked down the corridor to the door marked Nurse Forbes. She had knocked on the door and, a moment later, a voice had called out: “Come in!”
It was a milky-sounding voice, Irene thought. 84. No More Nonsense, Nurse Knows Best
Nurse Forbes was a woman in her early forties. She had been brought up in Haddington, the youngest of three girls, all of whom became nurses. Her mother had been a nurse, as had her grandmother.
That she should become a nurse too had been accepted from the very beginning, and when the time came for her to leave Knox Academy, she had enrolled on a nursing course at Queen Margaret College in Clermiston. In due course she had graduated with distinction, as her two sisters had done. She completed her training in the Royal Infirmary and in that classic of Caledonian-Stalinist architecture, the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion. Marriage came next – to a man who worked as an accountant in a brewery – and then there had been public service: she had served for a short time on the Newington Community Council, and had been appointed by the Secretary of State to the Departmental Committee on Maternity Services and the Healthy No More Nonsense, Nurse Knows Best 263
Eating in Pregnancy Initiative. She was very good at her job. Irene, of course, knew nothing of this distinguished career when she knocked on the door marked Nurse Forbes. There were so many people who seemed to work in the health centre