by Sheila Burns
‘Simple appendix,’ she said briskly in answer to my inquiry, ‘she’ll be as right as rain in a fortnight,’ and she stepped out towards the room which was ready.
I saw the doctor standing there. I don’t believe that he saw either of us, but only his wife’s face, and he knew also that she was doing well. Instantly his eyes lit up, the anxiety fell from him like a cloak, and he stood there watching us lift her on to the bed without a hint of dread which had been so obvious in him a few minutes before.
They had done the op in record time.
‘She’s grand,’ said the theatre Sister.
‘She looks fine.’
She came round beautifully. When she had come to, she made a most terrible fuss, but then I had rather anticipated that she might. Her husband stood on one side of her, trying to stop her tears, but she insisted on crying her heart out from sheer self-pity. He was dreadfully distressed, and it worried me seeing him helpless to do anything for her, yet sitting there looking so anxious.
‘She’ll be better with strangers,’ I told him, ‘leave her to me, I’ll manage her.’
‘It seems like deserting her.’
‘It is better for her. You’d say that in any other patient. She will pull herself together and be a different woman.’
He saw the logic of that, and in the doorway he put out a hand and wrung mine.
‘You’re a brick,’ he said; ‘if ever a woman was cut out to be a nurse, you are the one.’; and I knew then that he looked upon me purely as a piece of machinery and had never thought of me as being a woman at all.
Very soon after he had gone, she quietened down, and lay there, no longer crying and complaining, but watching me in a dazed, dozy sort of way. She wanted to know if I had posted the letter. She wanted the golden basket of mimosa brought much closer, so that she could see it better, and the beautiful lilies that her husband had sent her moved right away.
Then she fell into a deep sleep, and I left her in the hands of the night nurse when she was like that.
‘HIS wife?’ said the night nurse.
‘Yes. I don’t see why it seems so queer that he should be married.’
‘It seems extraordinary to me. Nobody knew. How long has it been going on?’
It wasn’t any business of ours, and I said so. I took a last look at her and left her for the night. In the morning she would be much better.
An appendix takes forty-eight hours of hard nursing; then you are generally through the wood. During those forty-eight hours, if I were away from her side, Mrs. Harper rang the bell. She wanted every moment of me, she wanted every ounce of my strength. There was something about her which seemed to sap my vitality, something which sucked the life from me.
‘She’ll make you quite ill,’ Tenny said. ‘I’d let her get on with her old appendix, and stew in her own juice. There is nothing much the matter with her, and what there is, is mostly put on.’
Which I had to admit was true.
As a nurse you see the inside life of patients, and I had known from the first that Iris Harper was spoilt. There came lovely gifts for her, a tiny dressing-jacket made entirely of swansdown, a little make-up outfit to slip under her pillow; all the newest books, boxes of chocolates of a size and shape that I had never seen before. Enormous chocolates, and she too frightened for her figure to be tempted by any one of them.
Appearance meant everything to her; appearance and Bill.
She got a little better and then she told me all manner of things about her husband. I didn’t want to listen. But what could I do? I could not tell her that I respected and cared for him myself, perhaps too deeply, and that he meant everything to me. I had to sit there and listen, and these revelations were torture to me.
She told me about their marriage.
She had been touring with a seaside company during the summer, and Ray had sat in the stalls and had been attracted by her. They had got to know one another, and she, seeing that he was fascinated by her, had faked an illness and had been left behind when the company toured on.
It is extraordinary how even the trained brain can become blind when a man falls in love. He had never realized that her illness was a fake; he had fallen head over heels in love, and had not known that all the while she had gone out of her way to discover that he was rich.
‘I dare say you think it is awful to marry a man for his money,’ she said, ‘but it is far more awful to be poor. I know, because I’ve had some. But Ray is so deadly serious. He has such idiotic ideas of living life seriously ‒ and soberly. He sticks to that rotten old profession of his, and he does not like me doing things, and being happy. I always say that he ought to have been a Scotch Minister, and not a doctor at all. Oh, I’ve been through Hell with him.’
I was quite sure that this was not true, and thought it highly probable that he might have been through Hell with her. Yet he had never complained.
I said, ‘Marriage means give and take, of course.’
And she turned from me impatiently.
She said, ‘I believe you are a prude,’ and once, ‘You ought to have married Ray yourself, then you’d know what he is like. Smug! That’s what he is!’
‘Spoiling’ was what I thought sounded to be much more like it.
On the fourth day she wanted new nighties. She had come into the home with the loveliest trousseau that I had ever seen, but there were not enough for her. Satin beaute with fine lace, patterned chiffon, georgette. Ray did not grumble. He sent in a dozen that afternoon, and I felt that they ought to have been tea-gowns, not nightdresses at all, but even they did not satisfy her.
‘They’re dowdy,’ she said, and made a grimace, ‘they are the sort of things that he would buy. You have some of them,’ and she flung me across half a dozen ungraciously.
I wanted to say no, because they were quite unsuitable for me, and quite the loveliest that I had ever seen, but then I remembered that he had bought them. I suppose it ought not to have made any difference, and I must have been mad to think of such a thing, but human nature is queer, and it acts queerly and on impulses. I thanked her profusely, and she said in a disgruntled manner:
‘Nonsense, you’ve done me a kindness. If I had sent them all back, Ray would have been angry with me. As long as somebody keeps them he doesn’t care. Take them and forget about it.’
That night I slept in chiffon, and I was ashamed that I dreamed of him, and in the morning told myself that I was acting like a little fool, and was old enough to know better.
But logic does not help when you fall in love. I had found that out.
It was hurting me far too much.
The part that was most difficult was that I was a jealous little idiot. I hated seeing him hanging over her bed, stroking her soft fair hair, and hearing him say sweet and endearing things.
‘Thank God,’ I told myself, ‘that an appendix is a short illness, and I shall soon be rid of them both.’
Them both! It had come to that.
The other nurses were naturally all eyes and ears, because each of them had suffered a passion for Ray in her time, and they had been tremendously intrigued discovering that he was married. Off-time was harassed. We trooped down to the meals whereat Miss Vaughan presided. In the sitting-room, a prim, austere little room, where no sunshine ever penetrated and which although it was called ‘Nurses’ relaxation room’ was anything but an invitation to relax, everybody chatted about it.
I had not realized that Ray Harper was such a pet in the home, nor that they thought so highly of him, and that every nurse cared for him.
‘He is one of those men,’ said Tenny in a confidential mood, ‘haven’t you noticed it, there are men like that? Valentino sort of men. You see them and you fall for them. They are forbidding rather than fascinating, and give you the idea of always holding something back.’
That was perhaps the truest thing she ever said. Ray Harper was one of those men born to fascinate women.
Only Miss Vaughan held her peace about
it. I think she had summed Iris up in her own mind, and knew the sort of girl that she was. I had kept quiet about Bill, who had sent in the basket of mimosa, and about the letter I had had to post, but I knew that Iris was wondering how she could get him to see her while she was in the home without setting other people talking.
I said that she couldn’t. It would be madness. Every nurse was out to see what she could, and nobody can chatter more than they can. I was so afraid that the news might eventually reach her husband and hurt him.
‘Oh, bother him,’ said Iris, ‘he must learn to fight his own battles.’
It was then that I thought of the man who had fought for his patients’ lives on the operating table with such a relentless determination, and who would not let them go. I thought of him, hopelessly incapable of fighting this shadowy figure of Bill, and the extravagances and spoilt whims of his wife.
‘It is so wrong,’ I told myself.
But all the time I was telling myself that it would end. A fortnight would see her back in her own home and then I should not be distressed by her, and worried. Another patient would fill this bed, and we should be able to forget Iris Harper.
Only it didn’t end like that!
On the eighth day I found Dr. Harper in the sterilizing room. I was off duty and had gone down, sent by one of the other nurses, to have a look as to how the swabs were sterilizing. I found him there.
‘I’m trespassing, I know,’ he said laughing, ‘but I have been looking for you, Nurse, and I want to have a chat with you.’
Nurse. It sounds such an impersonal word, and I hate to hear it. Nurse is so remote. Nobody has ever called me Katy for years.
‘It’s about Iris. I dare say you have realized that she has taken an immense fancy to you. It really rests with you that she has made such a quick recovery and I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you for it.’
He held out his hand and took mine. I felt a lump in my throat as though I wanted to cry, which was quite silly of me, for nothing was more natural than that he should be grateful and want to say so. I had done nothing but what was my duty for his wife, and I wanted to tell him that, but the words would not come.
Then suddenly he said something which startled me. ‘I know your name is Day,’ he announced, ‘what else is it?’
I was so surprised that I told him.
‘It is Katy. Katy Day.’
Only a few minutes before I had been thinking what ages it was since anybody had called me Katy. I was tired of being just Nurse. It is everybody’s name, and I wanted to have my own name for a change.
‘I am going to ask you a favour,’ he said.
‘I shall be pleased to do anything that I can for you.’
‘You understand Iris, and at times she is a bit of a handful. I dare say you have found that out already?’
I had.
‘After this she is to go away for a change, which it is imperative that she should have. I dare not go with her because, after all, I have other people who have greater need of me, yet I don’t want her to go alone.’
I thought instantly of Bill, the man I had never seen, knowing quite well that Ray had no idea about Bill. I did not know what was coming next.
‘I’ve seen Miss Vaughan,’ he said, ‘and she is agreeable, and I am wondering if you would take Iris away for me?’
I shan’t forget that moment.
All along I had been telling myself that the tension could not last, and that when she had gone I should be rid of them both and have time to re-establish my own feelings and to forget that I had ever thought foolishly of Ray Harper. Because it was foolish. Anyway, just as a specialist and myself as an ordinary little nurse it had been too ridiculous, but when I knew that he was a married man then of course it was madness.
We stood there in the sterilizing room, burningly hot, for the sterilizer was going (they were operating within the hour), and Ray was standing there staring at me with beseeching eyes.
Charge of Iris!
To go away with her, reminded all the time that she was his wife. I felt then that nothing in the whole world could be more hateful. I wanted to scream: ‘No, no, I CAN’T,’ but then at the very moment when I was just going to tell him that it was quite impossible, another thought struck me.
If she left the home without me, then although I might have time to make myself sensible, I should so seldom see him. If I went away with her, I should meet him in his home-life, I should be seeing him for week-ends. It would be bad for me; it would hurt me, but it meant so much to me that I couldn’t say no.
‘You will do this for me, Katy?’ he asked.
For a moment I stood there quite still.
He did not know that I would do anything in the world for him. When he looked at me like that, compellingly and possessively, he must have known that I could not say no to him.
‘You will do this for me?’ he persisted.
All my future seemed to hang on that moment, and the dreadful part was that I knew it. There was the gurgle of the sterilizer, all the sounds of the home going on around us. I suppose that I wanted to see more of him, even then. I suppose that I loved him badly, a great deal more badly than I dared to admit even to myself.
You cannot stop that kind of love.
‘I’ll go with her,’ I said, and I was keenly aware that my voice sounded unreal. I wondered if he noticed it, and only hoped that he didn’t.
‘Thank you, very much.’
I wondered if he knew how I was feeling, and what an effort it had been to accept, and then I told myself that he must not know, and whatever happened I must never let him guess about it. I had laid myself open to be very deeply hurt. I heard Sister on the stairs.
‘Nurse,’ she called.
That was the signal to return to duty.
Under a starched white apron no heart must be allowed to beat. There must be no sentiment, and there can be no time for love. Yet for all that, we nurses are women just as others, we feel as they do, we care as they do, and we suffer as they do.
Sister called me aside.
She said: ‘It is your patient. She seems to be rather distressed; you see, I took her in a telegram and I think you ought to go in and see her.’
I went to Mrs. Harper at once. The room was a bower of flowers, all of them the more expensive kind; really, she must have had a host of generous friends. It was like entering some lovely springtime garden. She herself lay back among the pillows, and I was horrified to hear her sobbing. I went to her at once.
‘You mustn’t cry like that, you’ll only hurt yourself,’ I told her; ‘there are the stitches to be remembered. Come now, Mrs. Harper, try to control yourself, you can’t cry like that. What is the matter?’
But she went on.
After a frightful battle, I wheedled the trouble out of her, and it was of course all about Bill. I might have guessed that already! It seemed from what I could gather, but she was weeping so violently and making such a fuss that it was difficult to decipher what she said, that he had wired to her, and there was a very urgent message she must get back to him. And, whatever happens, Ray must never know.
‘He just hates Bill,’ she told me, ‘he is the most unreasonable man; oh, he is cruel to me, so cruel.’
I didn’t believe that, because cruelty was something outside Ray Harper’s mentality. I had seen him when he had come to the home to carry out bad dressings, and had always been struck by his sympathy and tenderness and his care for his patient. A man who could behave like that, with such pity and kindness, was not the man who would be cruel to his wife.
I quite understood that he did not like the idea of Bill, whoever Bill might be, and yet I could not help remembering the perfect lilies which Ray had sent her and which she had thrust aside for Bill’s basket of mimosa.
‘Ray thinks that I have given Bill up,’ she told me, and clung to me, ‘he thinks the whole affair is over, and it will never be over. Never. Never. Never. Ray is so cold and reserved, and so desperately
doctory, we ought never to have married.’
And only a few moments before I had looked into the eyes that were accused of being cold and reserved and had seen in them infinite care and compassion. They had held suffering too, and now I wondered if Iris was the person causing a great deal of that suffering. Then I pulled myself together, it doesn’t do when a nurse starts wondering about her patient’s private life. I was just the girl who was doing the nursing, and I told myself, pretty sharply, that I had better not forget it.
‘I’ll help you,’ I promised, ‘but you mustn’t cry now. Just lie down and rest.’
It was imperative that she should not fling herself about. The stitches were still in, and she might have done herself irreparable damage. It is a nurse’s duty to help her patient to get well, and to soothe and comfort her if she becomes distressed. In hospital we are taught from the beginning that our first duty is always to the patient. Even if she is married to the man you love. Even if you are out of sympathy with her at heart. If necessary I would have to help Iris against Ray, and I knew it.
When I had got her calm again it was only to find that her temperature had gone up. Her pulse was erratic. I filled in the chart with some qualms because I was not too happy about her; I made my report to Sister.
‘What has been happening?’ asked Sister, and she read the report, and nibbled the end of the pencil, her brow knit, which meant that she was anxious, I knew.
‘She received that telegram and it seemed to distress her very much.’
‘Have you calmed her now?’
I nodded. I did not dare confess that the only way to calm her had been to consent to what she had wanted. The urgent message had got to be delivered personally, and she begged me to take a note round to a block of flats when I went off duty. I had not wanted to do it, at first I said flatly that I would do no such thing, but she had become so much more distressed and had been so hysterical, that in desperation I had agreed. I told her that George the porter would deliver it for her, but that did not satisfy her.