by Muriel Spark
“Perhaps you might obey it,” said Miss Taylor.
“What’s that you say?”
“You might, perhaps, try to remember you must die.”
She is wandering again, thought Lettie. “Taylor,” she said, “I do not wish to be advised how to think. What I hoped you could suggest is some way of apprehending the criminal, for I see that I must take matters into my own hands. Do you understand telephone wires? Can you follow the system of calls made from private telephone boxes?”
“It’s difficult,” said Miss Taylor, “for people of advanced years to start remembering they must die. It is best to form the habit while young. I shall think of some plan, Dame Lettie, for tracing the man. I did once know something about the telephone system, I will try to recall what I knew.”
“I must go.” Lettie rose, and added, “I expect you are keeping pretty well, Taylor?”
“We have a new ward sister, here,” said Miss Taylor. “She is not so pleasant as the last. I have no complaint personally, but some of my companions are inclined to be touchy, to imagine things.”
Lettie cast her eye along the sunny verandah of the Maud Long Ward where a row of old women sat out in their chairs.
“They are fortunate,” said Dame Lettie and uttered a sigh.
“I know it,” said Miss Taylor. “But they are discontented and afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“The sister in charge,” said Miss Taylor.
“But what’s wrong with her?”
“Nothing,” said Miss Taylor, “except that she is afraid of these old people.”
“She is afraid? I thought you said the patients were afraid of her.”
“It comes to the same thing,” said Miss Taylor.
She is wandering, thought Lettie, and she said, “In the Balkan countries, the peasants turn their aged parents out of doors every summer to beg their keep for the winter.”
“Indeed?” said Miss Taylor. “That is an interesting system.” Her hand, when Dame Lettie lifted it to say goodbye, was painful at the distorted joints.
“I hope,” said Miss Taylor, “you will think no more of employing Mrs. Pettigrew.”
Dame Lettie thought, She is jealous of anyone else’s having to do with Charmian.
Perhaps I am, thought Miss Taylor who could read Dame Lettie’s idea.
And as usual after Dame Lettie had left, she pondered and understood more and more why Lettie came so frequently to visit her and seemed to find it pleasant, and at the same time seldom spoke or behaved pleasantly. It was the old enmity about Miss Taylor’s love affair in 1907 which in fact Dame Lettie had forgotten—had dangerously forgotten; so that she retained in her mind a vague fascinating enmity for Jean Taylor without any salutary definition. Whereas Miss Taylor herself, until quite recently, had remembered the details of her love affair, and Dame Lettie’s subsequent engagement to marry the man, which came to nothing after all. But recently, thought Miss Taylor, I am beginning to feel as she does. Enmity is catching. Miss Taylor closed her eyes and laid her hands loosely on the rug which covered her knees. Soon the nurses would come in to put the grannies to bed. Meanwhile she thought with a sleepy pleasure, I enjoy Dame Lettie’s visits, I look forward to them, in spite of which I treat her with my asperity. Perhaps it is because I have now so little to lose. Perhaps it is because these encounters have an exhilarating quality. I might sink into a torpor were it not for fat old Lettie. And perhaps, into the bargain, I might use her in the matter of the ward sister, although that is unlikely.
“Granny Taylor—Gemini. ‘Evening festivities may give you all the excitement you want. A brisk day for business enterprises,’” Granny Valvona read out for the second time that day.
“There,” said Miss Taylor.
The Maud Long Ward had been put to bed and was now awaiting supper.
“It comes near the mark,” said Miss Valvona. “You can always know by your horoscope when your visitors are coming to see you, Granny Taylor. Either your Dame or that gentleman that comes; you can always tell by the stars.”
Granny Trotsky lifted her wizened head with low brow and pug nose, and said something. Her health had been degenerating for some weeks. It was no longer possible to hear exactly what she said. Miss Taylor was the quickest in the ward at guessing what Granny Trotsky’s remarks might be, but Miss Barnacle was the most inventive.
Granny Trotsky repeated her words, whatever they were.
Miss Taylor replied, “All right, Granny.”
“What did she say?” demanded Granny Valvona.
“I am not sure,” said Miss Taylor.
Mrs. Reewes-Duncan who claimed to have lived in a bungalow in former days, addressed Miss Valvona. “Are you aware that the horoscope you have just read out to us specifies evening festivities, whereas Granny Taylor’s visitor came at three-fifteen this afternoon?”
Granny Trotsky again raised her curiously shaped head and spoke, emphasising her statement with vehement nods of this head which was so fearfully and wonderfully made. Whereupon Granny Barnacle ventured, “She says festivities my backside. What’s the use of the stars foretell with that murderous bitch of a sister outside there, she says, waiting to finish off the whole ward in the winter when the lot goes down with pneumonia. You’ll be reading your stars, she says all right when they need the beds for the next lot. That’s what she says—don’t you, Granny Trotsky?”
Granny Trotsky, raising her head, made one more, and very voluble effort, then drooped exhausted on her pillow, closing her eyes.
“That’s what she said,” said Granny Barnacle. “And right she is, too. Come the winter them that’s made nuisances of theirselves don’t last long under that sort.”
A ripple of murmurs ran up the rows of beds. It ceased as a nurse walked through the ward, and started again when she had gone.
Miss Valvona’s strong eyes stared through her spectacles into the past, as they frequently did in the autumn, and she saw the shop door open on a Sunday afternoon, and the perfect ices her father manufactured, and heard the beautiful bellow of his accordion after night had fallen, on and on till closing time. “Oh, the parlour and the sundaes and white ladies we used to serve,” she said, “and my father with the Box. The white ladies stiff on your plate, they were hard, and made from the best-quality products. And the fellows who would say to me, ‘How do, Doreen,’ even if they had another girl with them after the pictures. And my father got down the Box and played like a champion. It cost him fifty pounds, in those days, mind you it was a lot.”
Granny Duncan addressed Miss Taylor, “Did you ask that Dame to do something for us, at all?”
“Not exactly,” said Miss Taylor, “but I mentioned that we were not so comfortable now as we have been previously.”
“She goin’ to do something for us?” demanded Granny Barnacle.
“She is not herself on the management committee,” Miss Taylor explained. “It is a friend of hers who is on the committee. Now, it will take time. I can’t, you know, press her. She is very easily put off. And then, you know, in the meantime, we must try to make the best of this.” The nurse walked back through the ward among the grannies, all sullen and silent but for Granny Trotsky who had now fallen noisily asleep with her mouth open.
It was true, thought Miss Taylor, that the young nurses were less jolly since Sister Burstead had taken over the ward. Of course it was but two seconds before she had become “Sister Bastard” on the lips of Granny Barnacle. The associations of her name, perhaps, in addition to her age—Sister Burstead was well over fifty—had affected Granny Barnacle with immediate hostile feelings. “Over fifty they got the workhouse mind. You can’t never trust a ward sister over fifty. They don’t study that there’s new ways of goin’ on since the war, by law.” These sentiments in turn had affected the other occupants of the ward. But the ground had been prepared the week before by their knowledge of the departure of the younger sister: “A change, hear that?—there’s to be a change. What’s the s
tars say, Granny Valvona?” Then, on the morning that Sister Burstead took over, she being wiry, bespectacled and middle-aged with a bad-tempered twitch at one side of her face between lip and jaw, Granny Barnacle declared she had absolutely placed her. “The workhouse mind. You see what’ll happen now. Anyone that’s a nuisance or can’t contain themselves like me with Bright’s disease, they won’t last long in this ward. You get pneumonia in the winter, can’t help but do, and that’s her chance.”
“What you think she’ll do, Granny Barnacle?”
“Do? It’s what she won’t do. You wait to the winter, you’ll be lyin’ there and nothin’ done for you. Specially if you got no relations or that to raise enquiries.”
“The other nurses is all right, Granny, though.”
“You’ll see a difference in them.”
There had been a difference. The nurses were terrified of their new superior, that was all. But as they became more brisk and efficient so did the majority of the grannies behold them with hostile thoughts and deadly suspicions. When the night staff came on duty the ward relaxed, and this took the form of much shouting throughout the night. The grannies shouted in their sleep and half-waking restlessness. They accepted their sedative pills fearfully, and in the morning would ask each other, “Was I all right last night?” not quite remembering whether they or another had made the noise.
“It all goes down in the book,” said Granny Barnacle. “Nothing happens during the night but what it goes into the book. And Sister Bastard sees it in the morning. You know what that’ll mean, don’t you, when the winter comes?”
At first, Miss Taylor took a frivolous view of these sayings. It was true the new sister was jittery and strict, and over fifty years of age, and frightened. It will all blow over, thought Miss Taylor, when both sides get used to the change. She was sorry for Sister Burstead and her fifty-odd years. Thirty years ago, thought Miss Taylor, I was into my fifties, and getting old. How nerve-racking it is to be getting old, how much better to be old! It had been touch and go, in those days, whether she would leave the Colstons and settle down with her brother in Coventry while she had the chance. It was such a temptation to leave them, she having been cultivated by twenty-five years’ association with Charmian. By the time she was fifty it really seemed absurd for her to continue her service with Charmian, her habits and tastes were so superior to those of the maids she met on her travels with Charmian, she was so much more intelligent. She had been all on edge for the first two years of her fifties, not knowing whether to go to look after the widowed brother in Coventry and enjoy some status or whether to continue waking Charmian up every morning, and observing in silence Godfrey’s infidelities. For two years while she made up her mind she had given Charmian hell, threatening to leave every month, folding Charmian’s dresses in the trunk so that they were horribly creased, going off to art galleries while Charmian rang for her in vain.
“You’re far worse now,” Charmian would tell her, “than when you were going through the menopause.”
Charmian plied her with bottles of tonic medicine which she had poured down the lavatory with a weird joy. At last, after a month’s holiday with her brother in Coventry, she found she could never stand life with him and his ways, the getting him off to his office in the morning, the keeping him in clean shirts, and the avaricious whist parties in the evening. At the Colstons’ there was always some exotic company, and Charmian’s sitting-room had been done out in black and orange. All the time she was at Coventry Miss Taylor had missed the exciting scraps of conversation which she had been used to hearing on Charmian’s afternoons.
“Charmian darling, don’t you think, honestly, I should have Boris bumped off?”
“No, I rather like Boris.”
And those telephone messages far into the nights.
“Is that you, Taylor darling? Get Charmian to the phone, will you? Tell her I’m in a state. Tell her I want to read her my new poem.” That was thirty years ago.
Ten years before that, the telephone messages had been different again, “Taylor, tell Mrs. Colston I’m in London. Guy Leet. Not a word, Taylor to Mr. Colston.” These were messages which Miss Taylor sometimes did not deliver. Charmian herself was going through her difficult age at that time, and was apt to fly like a cat at any man who made approaches to her, even Guy who had previously been her lover.
At the age of fifty-three Miss Taylor had settled down. She could even meet Alec Warner without any of the old feelings. She went everywhere with Charmian, sat for hours while Charmian read aloud her books, while still in manuscript, gave judgment. As gradually the other servants became difficult and left, so Jean Taylor took charge. When Charmian had her hair bobbed, so did Miss Taylor. When Charmian entered the Catholic Church Miss Taylor was received, really just to please Charmian.
She rarely saw her brother from Coventry, and when she did, counted herself lucky to have escaped him. On one occasion she told Godfrey Colston to watch his step. The disappointed twitch at the side of her mouth which had appeared during her forties, now gradually disappeared.
So it will be, thought Miss Taylor, in the case of Sister Burstead, once she settles down. The twitch will go.
Presently, however, Miss Taylor began to feel there was very little chance of the new sister’s twitch disappearing. The grannies were so worked up about her, it would not be surprising if she did indeed let them die of pneumonia should she ever get the chance.
“You must speak to the doctor, Granny Barnacle,” said Miss Taylor, “it you really feel you aren’t getting the right treatment.”
“The doctor my backside. They’re hand-in-glove. What’s a old woman to them? I ask you.”
The only good that could be discerned in the arrival of the new sister was the fact that the ward was now more alert. Everyone’s wits had improved, as if the sister were a sort of shock treatment. The grannies had forgotten their will-making, and no longer threatened to disinherit each other or the nurses.
Mrs. Reewes-Duncan, however, made the great mistake of threatening the sister with her solicitor one dinner-time when the meat was tough or off, Miss Taylor could not recall which. “Fetch the ward sister to me,” Mrs. Reewes-Duncan demanded. “Fetch her here to me.”
The sister marched in purposefully when thus summoned.
“Well, Granny Duncan, what’s the matter? Hurry up now, I’m busy. What’s the matter?”
“This meat, my good woman…” The ward felt at once that Granny Duncan was making a great mistake. “My niece will be informed…. My solicitor—”
For some reason, the word “solicitor” set fire to Sister Burstead. That one word did the trick. You could evidently threaten the doctor, the matron, or your relations, and she would merely stand there glaring angrily with her twitch, she would say no more than, “You people don’t know you’re born,” and, “Fire ahead, tell your niece, my dear.” But the word solicitor fairly turned her, as Granny Barnacle recounted next day, arse over tit. She gripped the bedrail and yelled at Granny Duncan for a long time, it might have been ten minutes. Words, in isolation and grouped in phrases, detached themselves like sparks from the fiery scream proceeding from Sister Burstead’s mouth. “Old beast…dirty old beast…food…grumble and grouse…I’ve been on since eight o’clock this morning…I’ve been on and on…work, work, work, day after day, for a lot of useless old, filthy old…”
Sister Burstead went off duty immediately assisted by a nurse. If only, thought Miss Taylor, we could try to be sweet old ladies, she would be all right. It’s because we aren’t sweet old things….
“Scorpio,” Granny Valvona had declared four hours later, although like everyone else in the ward she was shaken-up. “Granny Duncan—Scorpio. ‘You can sail ahead with confidence. The success of another person could affect you closely.’” Granny Valvona put down the paper. “You see what I mean?” she said. “The stars never let you down. ‘The success of another person…’ A remarkable forecast.”
The incident was rep
orted to the matron and the doctor. The former made enquiries next morning of a kind which clearly indicated she was hoping against hope Sister Burstead could be exonerated, for she would be difficult to replace.
The matron bent over Miss Taylor and spoke quietly and exclusively. “Sister Burstead is having a rest for a few days. She has been overworking.”
“Evidently,” said Miss Taylor, whose head ached horribly.
“Tell me what you know of the affair. Sister Burstead was provoked, I believe?”
“Evidently,” said Miss Taylor, eyeing the bland face above her and desiring it to withdraw.
“Sister Burstead was cross with Granny Duncan?” said the matron.
“She was nothing,” said Miss Taylor, “if not cross. I suggest the sister might be transferred to another ward where there are younger people and the work is lighter.”
“All the work in this hospital,” said the matron, “is heavy.”
Most of the grannies felt too upset to enjoy the few days’ absence from duty of Sister Burstead, for whenever the general hysteria showed signs of waning, Granny Barnacle applied the bellows: “Wait till the winter. When you get pneumonia…”
During those days it happened that Granny Trotsky had her second stroke. An aged male cousin was summoned to her bedside, and a screen was put round her bed. He emerged after an hour still wearing the greenish-black hat in which he had arrived, shaking his head and hat, and crying all over his blotchy foreign face.
Granny Barnacle, who was up in her chair that day, called to him, “Pssst!”
Obediently he came to her side.
Granny Barnacle flicked her head towards the screened-in bed.
“She gone?”
“Nah. She breathe, but not speak.”
“D’you know who done it?” said Granny Barnacle. “It was the sister that brought it on.”
“She have no sister. I am next of kin.”
A nurse came and hurried him away.
Granny Barnacle declared once more to the ward, “Sister Bastard done for Granny Trotsky.”