In Storm and In Calm

by Lucilla Andrews

  Sometimes. Sometimes they screamed with fear. More often, just whimpers ‒ please help me ‒ please stop it hurting ‒ please, please, can’t you stop it hurting ‒ please?

  Always, they seemed to say, please, in reality. Perhaps it was that that exploded the comforting illusion of living a movie. I remembered one youngish consultant exploding. Christ! What this country needs is another war to bring it to its senses! An older consultant who had been a surgical registrar during the London blitzes and then gone into the Army said only those without first-hand experience of war thought it solved anything. I’ve seen tonight’s scene repeated in our old Cas. Hall, night after, night, week after week for months and on and off for years. Since when has total insanity led to anywhere but a bed in a psychiatric ward?

  The road had led me to the harbour and I walked slowly round the waterfront, at first looking without seeing, and then gradually breathing in with the salty, fishy, much colder air, the calm in the fishermen’s faces, and the neat order of their boats. The harbour water was charcoal, the Sound beyond, gun-metal grey and choppy. A tied-up row of black and blue fishing boats bobbed languidly. The gulls investigated the empty fishing baskets stacked one inside the other on the open decks, the neat coils of rope up aft, and lined the great blue metal winches in the stern and perched on the radar and radio masts. A little way out a Dane, a Norwegian and a Russian were anchored together and a fighting cloud of gulls was swooping for scraps being thrown from the Dane. Nina Khristina had gone and I could only read half the Norwegian’s name. Lilly ‒, Oslo. I looked for quite a while at the Norwegian flag, and then at the scarlet hammer and sickle on the Russian’s black funnel. The quay was fairly crowded, and very peaceful. There was little traffic on the road, and none of the ambling, chatting, fishermen raised their voices. I heard snatches of Russian, Norwegian, what I took to be Danish, broad Scots, and most of all, the Shetland dialect that was still totally incomprehensible to me. The Shetlanders wore patterned sweaters and woolly caps that would have cost a bomb in London. I thought of their waiting, knitting womenfolk and then of Magnus’s comment on the higher status of Thessa women.

  There was a handful of other young women pottering round the harbour as I was, and, as obviously, strangers interested in a new scene. The fishermen watched us go by, some incuriously, some with eagerness, but there was not one cat-call, one wolf-whistle. Occasionally, one of the older men wished me a good afternoon, then went on his way or with his conversation. The good manners after last night, were soothing to the soul, But remembering last night, for a few moments I wondered uneasily how long those fishermen would be able to retain their civilized acceptance that a woman had a perfect right to walk alone and admire a view if she so chose, without automatically being on the make. Then again I thought over Magnus’s words on that hillside. I took another look around at the fishermen’s faces and stopped worrying. Polite and quiet now, yes, but beneath the calm the faces were uniformly tough as hell. I wanted to stand on that quay and give three loud cheers for Thessa. I was wildly glad the oil was bringing the world to their doorstep. They had so much to teach the world, and it was their doorstep and if the world made the mistake of forgetting that, it would be something else the world would have to learn from Thessa.

  I went to the movies with Alan again that night and after we had fish and chips in a cafe near the harbour. He asked about the party. ‘Any good?’

  ‘No. Too boozy.’

  ‘No use denying we Scots can be gey lads for the drink.’

  ‘Not only Scots. Anglos and Yanks. How’s Mrs Laurensen today?’

  ‘Wee bit better.’ We talked ‘shop’ till he drove me home in the white estate. ‘Between my boss and myself, you’ll be getting used to this car.’

  ‘Home from home.’

  ‘Always make with the wee sister act back home?’

  I thought of the expression I had only once seen on Magnus’s face. ‘Makes for a quiet life.’

  ‘If that’s what you want from life. Is it?’ He drew up at the Home, switched off and faced me. ‘Who are you running away from? Or is it yourself?’

  I smiled. ‘Sorry, Alan, but I’m too full of fish and chips for the psychiatric couch. Thanks for a nice evening.’

  He shrugged. ‘O-kay, o-kay! Get back behind your wall if you wish. No skin off my nose as, unlike my boss, my girl’s come out from behind hers. But seeing we get along fine without fancying each other, I thought maybe I could help.’

  ‘You think I need help?’

  ‘I think you need a man. Perhaps I’m daft as you’re probably shacking up with one in London ‒ but that’s what I think. Going to clout me?’

  ‘Just have another cold bath.’ I got out. ‘Thanks for the free analysis. See you.’

  He called after me, ‘Charlotte, you’re not upset?’

  ‘God, no!’ I lied.

  Cathy yelled down the corridor as I stormed out of the lift. ‘Some Englishman wants to talk to you ‒ hanging on now.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Hasn’t said. One of last night’s?’

  ‘God knows. Just say I’m dead.’

  She came into my room grinning a few minutes later. ‘He heard us. He asked me to tell you he’ll drop a wreath, manly tears, and a prayer into the Sound tomorrow, and that his name’s Rod.’

  I had forgotten his existence, but as he had apparently done the same until tonight, I doubted my reaction would bother him any more than it did me. I was glad I had not spoken to him and I was too peeved and in that mood I generally did something stupid. Not only me, I reflected in the bath. No two better ways of ending new and beautiful friendships than to make an ill-timed truthful remark, or ill-timed sincere pass. Old friendships could survive both, but the new had to be handled with much greater care and hypocrisy. That morning I had been sorry my time on Thessa was over the half-way and running out. I went to bed that night rather relieved by the fact.

  I spent all next morning in the theatre watching Mr Norris’s operation. ‘You’ve not been through with one of ours yet,’ said Sister Olaf. ‘Time you took a proper look and the old lad’ll be glad of your company. Has he told you you put him in mind of his Bella?’

  ‘Yes.’ I looked up from his notes. ‘He’s going to be under a long time.’

  ‘Afraid he’ll go on the table?’

  I hesitated. ‘Well, he could, couldn’t he?’

  ‘Aye. And he knows it. He’d it straight from Mr Moray last night, then signed the consent form. He may be a very old man, but there’s nowt senile about his brain. He knows what’s what.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you?’ She demanded. ‘I’d not say you did! I’d say you’ve forgotten your training and experience and are having a right wallow in slush over a dear little old man best left to die in peace. Brace up, lass! Face facts! There’ll be no peace in the death that awaits him if he’s let be, and a limit to how much he can be given to keep pain under. If you’ve not yet learnt there’s worse things in this life than a quick death, it’s high time you did! Aye, it’s a risk. A calculated risk that takes guts to accept and guts to perform! We both know it’s not every surgeon that’ll put the patient’s choice ‒ aye, and welfare ‒ above his own operating statistics. Mr Fraser’d do as Mr Moray, but in my time I’ve worked with more consultant surgeons than I can count who’d not touch that old man this morning. If there was no handy registrar to be dumped with the dodgy job and left to carry the can, it’d be transfer to medical geriatric ward ‒ with great regret, of course! Get your feet back on ground and get his prep, ready. I’ll witness.’

  I stayed with Mr Norris behind his drawn curtains until the theatre trolley arrived, and then in the anaesthetic room. The injection left him a little drowsy without impairing his coherence. We talked first about the harbour yesterday. He knew the names of the three foreign ships from Wally Ferguson. ‘Wally came to see me again last evening. He’s a good boy. Minds me of my elder boy.’

  ‘The Captain
of the liner, Mr Norris?’

  ‘So he is. Master. My Bella’d be proud, though she never wanted the boy to go to sea. When he was a bairn, she said to me, for years as a lass I’d to wait for my dad to come home from the sea. Now I’ve to go on waiting for you to come home. I’m not waiting for my son to come home from the sea. He’s got to do better. But when he was old enough for work, there was none other but the sea and not much to be made from her. My brother had a Master’s Certificate and he wasn’t the only Master from the islands sailing as an Able Seaman. Couldn’t get a better berth. But the boy was set on the Merchant Navy, so he went for an apprentice and not long after my Bella was gone. Pneumonia.’ He sighed, quietly. ‘Forty years back, so it was. I still mind her well.’ He gazed at and through my face. ‘Slip of a lass, she was, same as yourself, and with a smile I’ve seen you smile. I’d tell her that smile would warm an empty hearth and an empty heart ‒’ the slow smile lit up his ancient, yellow and sunken because now toothless face, ‘and she’d slap back, sharp, “That’s enough of your nonsense, boy!” Times she’d a tongue to give an edge to a gutting-knife, but aye a gentle hand. I’m glad I kent her, so I am.’

  The G.P. anaesthetist was back. ‘Just another wee prick in your arm and you’ll be away to sleep before you can count to five. Ready?’

  ‘So I am, Doc ‒’ and he was under.

  Once he was in the theatre, as the ward nurse ‘going through’ my only job was to stand out of the way and watch. It was a job I had loathed since my first appendicectomy in my first student year. Seniority made this worse, not better, since it involved knowing the patients, their conditions, and the risks better. The sense of detachment I had tried to acquire in my private life, always had collapsed directly I walked into a ward. My intelligence could accept the fact that surgery could be a life-saver, but neither before, nor that morning, could it force me to watch the initial incision. I had even had to avoid that during my theatre training. My theatre report was the only bad one I had in my general training. ‘Not your scene, Nurse,’ said our then C.N.O.

  ‘No, Miss Evans.’

  ‘Nor mine, my dear. I too lacked the necessary academic approach. A not uncommon failing, in my experience, amongst female nurses and in my personal opinion probably far more responsible than male medical prejudice for the shortage of female surgeons ‒ only for goodness sake don’t quote me on that or I shall have every girl medic student at my throat! It is so much easier and more comfortable to blame male chauvinism rather than one’s own hormones.’

  Experience at least provided some physical if not mental relief. I knew how to ease my feet by occasionally balancing on their outer edges, how to stave off giddiness by every now and then stooping from the waist to fiddle with the hem of my gown, how to place myself against a wall and lean back when no one was looking, and most important of all, not to touch or pick up anything, even if the operating team dropped every instrument on the instrument trolley. In my first year someone had dropped some artery forceps and before I could be stopped I had picked them up and thoughtlessly placed them on the patient’s sterile-towel draped feet. The operation had had to stop while everything and everyone changed. The Senior Surgical Registrar was not too angry. Sister Theatre took me apart. My ward sister said theatre sisters seldom liked ward nurses and frankly could one blame them?

  ‘How’s he up your end, Doctor?’ Magnus asked for the fourth time, during the second hour.

  ‘Feeling the strain but I’ve known many a younger heart tolerate it the worse.’ The anaesthetist adjusted a dial on his machine, then peered forward. ‘Can you get it all away without eviscerating him?’

  ‘On present showing.’

  ‘How much longer’ll you need?’

  ‘I’d like an hour.’

  ‘I’d prefer less. Can you manage?’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  His best was so good he made it look easy. From his qualifications and the conditions of his post-operative patients in Olaf, I had expected Magnus to be a very competent surgeon, but his economical and decisive speed did surprise me. The hot, brilliant shadowless lights above the table seemed to have stripped away his protective colouring of languid vagueness as cleanly as his knife was stripping the diseased from the healthy tissue. He looked and sounded a different man. A man who knew exactly what had to be done and how to do it, not with over-confidence, but merely with that absolute confidence anyone really good at any job exhibits when on the job. That the same applied to Jenny surprised me much less as I had always found it easier to understand my own sex, and particularly those who shared roughly my own age-group and training. I did notice with a particular interest to which I knew I would return later, how very well she and Magnus worked together. They worked as great friends as well as colleagues and their total accord infected the rest of the ‒ to my Martha’s eyes ‒ minute operating team. Alan gave me another surprise. He was the only surgical assistant, but as good as many a registrar I had watched. Watching him I thought how often I had mentally labelled him ‘a nice little man’. From that morning I never thought of him as ‘little’ again, nor did I ever again wonder why Jenny was so popular with the theatre nurses. The theatre atmosphere ‒ and that was always set in ward or department by the senior sister ‒ was smooth, efficient, silently friendly, and totally lacking in inter-staff tensions. The very little conversation was only between Magnus and the anaesthetist. The two staff nurses and one male theatre technician who made up the rest of the team, communicated amongst themselves and Jenny with them all, with eyebrows, occasional smiles over masks, and winks. Not once throughout did the surgeons have to ask for an instrument, thread, clip, gut, or needle. They stretched out their hands without looking round and Jenny either put what was required into the mute gloved palms, or handed over the small kidney dish containing it. Her staff worked in the same mechanical but not inhuman silence. When it was over and Magnus voiced the leading surgeon’s traditional ‘Many thanks, everybody’, the trio exchanged relieved smiles with Jenny. Chums all round, I thought, and stored that one to work on later.

  ‘Ach, well, a couthy forenoon’s work!’ The anaesthetist switched off another knob. ‘There’s no doubt that when you get one of these tough old Victorian hearts you’ve the nearest thing to human indestructibility in this world. But I’ll not deny for a wee moment or two you’d me sweating, Mr Moray.’

  Magnus slowly peeled off his gloves watching the limp figure on the table. ‘I’d not say you were alone in that, Doctor. Many thanks for a fine anaesthetic. Is his bed here, Sister? Right. Let’s have it in.’

  After Mr Norris was back in Olaf with Maggie sitting by him until he came round, I gave Sister the operation report in her office.

  ‘Text book, eh? H’mm. No surprise to me, Staff. I’ve yet to know Mr Moray mistaken over a calculated risk, but as the man’s human and there can always be a first time, I wasn’t trailing my coat earlier. Right. Get off to your lunch. It’s been kept hot. And don’t come back till six.’

  I was due on at five. ‘Sister, I’m not doing anything ‒’

  ‘Nor are you running this ward, lass! Out from under my feet ‒ and get some air. You’re looking peaky after all that standing about doing nowt!’

  I took her advice as I wanted to think and walking generally helped the process. I didn’t bother to change and hid my uniform dress beneath a mac and scarf as I didn’t intend going near the town. I walked up the road running south towards the first of the many green-brown hills as it was so much easier to hear oneself think in isolation. Not that I was all that sure I wanted to hear my thoughts. I was afraid I would find them a little too pleasant for comfort. But I couldn’t get the morning out of my mind for a reason that had nothing to do with my great relief for Mr Norris, but was very much connected with surgery in general.

  I thought first of the senior theatre sister who had given me that bad report. She had been about twenty years older than Jenny, very experienced, and good enough to have every Martha’s c
onsultant general surgeon ready to accept a pay cut to keep her. She would have approved of the way Jenny had turned her team into chums. She often said she considered it so essential for her theatre staff to like each other, that if she ever spotted a hint of inter-staff friction, out one or both parties had to go. She said operations provided enough tension, and to allow any personal element to increase the pressure was to ask for mistakes on the table. ‘The biggest mistake of all, of course, is to ignore a love affair between two members of the operating team. All right, all right, Nurses! You may call it sex but I’ll call it love as that’s what we called it when I was your age! And I’ll tell you this ‒ let love into a theatre and as sure as night follows day, sponges will be left in wounds and stitches left out! Consequently I have always flatly refused to have married or engaged couples working simultaneously in my theatre no matter how excellent the individual qualifications. And I’ve yet to meet the good theatre sister or surgeon who doesn’t share my view. We all work best with those we like, but in my opinion, no surgeon in his right mind will willingly pick up a knife handed him by the woman he loves, or vice versa. Detachment at the table is vital, but neither surgeons nor theatre nurses are machines. So love ‒ all right ‒ sex ‒ is as forbidden to enter my theatre as the musca domestica!’ She had always referred to the common house fly by its Latin name. I never discovered why.