Free The Breaking Point by Daphne du Maurier

sometimes down the corridor outside, answered, ‘Yes, I’ll give you your first shock.’
    It was a strange thought how memories of coming into the nursing-home were now blunted. The staff who had received her were dim shadows, the room assigned to her, where she still lay, like a wooden box built only to entrap. Even the surgeon, brisk and efficient during those two rapid consultations when he had recommended an immediate operation, was a voice rather than a presence. He gave his orders and the orders were carried out, and it was difficult to reconcile this bird-of-passage with the person who, those several weeks ago, had asked her to surrender herself to him, who had in fact worked this miracle upon the membranes and the tissues which were her living eyes.
    ‘Aren’t you feeling excited?’ This was the low, soft voice of her night-nurse, who, more than the rest of them, understood what she had endured. Nurse Brand, by day, exuded a daytime brightness; she was a person of sunlight, of bearing in fresh flowers, of admitting visitors. The weather she described in the world outside appeared to be her own creation. ‘A real scorcher,’ she would say, flinging open windows, and her patient would sense the cool uniform, the starched cap, which somehow toned down the penetrating heat. Or else she might hear the steady fall of rain and feel the slight chill accompanying it. ‘This is going to please the gardeners, but it’ll put paid to Matron’s day on the river.’
    Meals, too, even the dullest of lunches, were made to appear delicacies through her method of introduction. ‘A morsel of brill au beurre ?’ she would suggest happily, whetting reluctant appetite, and the boiled fish that followed must be eaten, for all its tastelessness, because otherwise it would seem to let down Nurse Brand, who had recommended it. ‘Apple fritters - you can manage two, I’m sure,’ and the tongue began to roll the imaginary fritter, crisp as a flake and sugared, which in reality had a languid, leathery substance. And so her cheerful optimism brooked no discontent - it would be offensive to complain, lacking in backbone to admit, ‘Let me just lie. I don’t want anything.’
    The night brought consolation and Nurse Ansel. She did not expect courage. At first, during pain, it had been Nurse Ansel who had administered the drugs. It was she who had smoothed the pillows and held the glass to the parched lips. Then, with the passing weeks, there had been the gentle voice and the quiet encouragement. ‘It will soon pass. This waiting is the worst.’ At night the patient had only to touch the bell, and in a moment Nurse Ansel was by the bed. ‘Can’t sleep? I know, it’s wretched for you. I’ll give you just two and a half grains, and the night won’t seem so long.’
    How compassionate, that smooth and silken voice. The imagination, making fantasies through enforced rest and idleness, pictured some reality with Nurse Ansel that was not hospital - a holiday abroad, perhaps, for the three of them, and Jim playing golf with an unspecified male companion, leaving her, Marda, to wander with Nurse Ansel. All she did was faultless. She never annoyed. The small shared intimacies of night-time brought a bond between nurse and patient that vanished with the day, and when she went off duty, at five minutes to eight in the morning, she would whisper, ‘Until this evening,’ the very whisper stimulating anticipation, as though eight o’clock that night would not be clocking-in but an assignation.
    Nurse Ansel understood complaint. When Marda West said wearily, ‘It’s been such a long day,’ her answering ‘Has it?’ implied that for her too the day had dragged, that in some hostel she had tried to sleep and failed, that now only did she hope to come alive.
    It was with a special secret sympathy that she would announce the evening visitor. ‘Here is someone you want to see, a little earlier than usual,’ the tone suggesting that Jim