As they battle to rebuild their own and others' lives & livelihoods in a country irrevocably changed by war, VAD Nurse Mary Crawley & convalescing Captain Matthew Crawley are swept into a web of scandal & corruption that threatens to rip the Crawley...
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The move to Downton Abbey convalescent home did not go well. Mary and Sybil had planned to cover the afternoon and evening shifts that Matthew was first there, making sure he settled in. The unexpected arrival of two truckloads of injured men to the hospital put paid to their plans, with Major Clarkson telephoning the Abbey and seeking that they both return immediately, barely an hour after Matthew had arrived.
Mary could see that Matthew was clearly overwhelmed, firstly by the trip on the stretcher in the bumpy ambulance, and then by being placed in the wheelchair for the first time and taken to his room. And she worried that him being in a room alone might not be the best – there had been some comfort in the busyness and comings and going of the ward at the hospital.
"Matthew, I am so sorry I have to go, I'll be back as soon as I can, all right?"
He'd said tightly "I'll be fine," but she knew he was not. She tried, without success to find Edith to keep an eye on him, but she was nowhere to be seen. She looked for one of the duty nurses, ignoring the toot from the car waiting outside. She couldn't find anyone, and when there was a second toot from the waiting car, she left reluctantly, and let Branson hand her in beside Sybil.
"I'm not sure Matthew is going to cope," she said worriedly to Sybil as Branson drove them to the hospital. "He didn't seem himself, and I couldn't find anyone to be with him before I left."
Sybil frowned. "When we get to the hospital, see if you can phone home and get someone to check on him. I don't feel very comfortable with him left alone like that either."
Later, Matthew wasn't sure what set him off. Something had banged. Shortly afterwards, the duty nurse found him on the floor of his room in a highly distressed state in the middle of a flashback. He had managed to badly bruise his shoulder falling from the bed. He could not be calmed, and in the end, they had to sedate him. He slept until the next morning, and when he awoke, he was not himself.
The world was without colour. There was no taste to the food he was coaxed to consume, and he felt disembodied. As though he was observing his life from somewhere else.
Talking to anyone was an effort, so for the most part, he didn't bother. Day and night seemed little different, meaningless.
He let them wheel him to the physical therapy sessions and did the painful, humiliating exercises imposed on him with little effort. There was no point. He really would be better off dead.
Even Sybil couldn't get a smile out of him, try as she might with some new jokes, courtesy of Branson and the lads he spent time with at the Grantham Arms. At night, when he did finally fall asleep, the nightmares returned, and he would wake up shouting, and drenched in sweat.
"He is depressed," Major Clarkson told Isobel, without ceremony, when there had been no improvement for more than a week. "I have been expecting that this would happen, at some point. It is extremely common in the soldiers with permanent injuries, and especially when they start to realise the implications, which for some reason, has happened for him now with this move to the Abbey."
