‘Nah ‒ he’s not a proper doctor ‒ the proper doctors wear long white coats! He’s just a houseman.’
Adult patients often had difficulty over the different uniforms and grades, but the children had us all taped. I knew several of them from my own period in Christian. There, very obviously, I had been nicknamed.
To the shame of their mammas my old patients greeted me with shrieks of ‘Hi-ya, Snow White! Ain’t you got no dwarfs yet?’
My lack of attendant dwarfs had been a constant and unflagging joke. They screamed with joy now, as they had done in Christian when they lost their tonsils, adenoids, or mastoid processes.
I had been too busy this morning to be miserable, now I was too busy to think of this evening, but I beamed happily round the children and the noise worried me not at all. Occasionally I wondered how much was penetrating the glass walls of the office; but John seemed impervious to it, so I did not give it any serious thought.
Once, inadvertently, I found myself beaming at him, then realised what I was doing, and caught the eye of the serious little girl whose throat he was examining.
‘Wider please, Marion,’ he said, ‘that’s it. Now a big Ah.’
‘Ah!’ she bellowed obediently, her round eyes on my face. ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’
‘Hey!’ he smiled at her, ‘that’s plenty. You’ll do. You’re cured, young woman.’ He turned in his chair to talk to her mother, and as he did so he glanced momentarily at me.
‘You needn’t bring Marion up again, Mrs Forbes ‒ unless you have any more trouble. But I doubt if you will.’
‘There now,’ said Mrs Forbes contentedly. ‘Hear what the doctor says, lovey? You don’t have to come up to the hospital no more.’
Marion’s small face was scarlet. She was one of my old patients, and, like her mother, I knew what that colour foretold.
We spoke together, ‘There, there,’ pleaded Mrs Forbes.
I said quickly, ‘You must come back to our Christmas party.’
We were too late. Marion’s face appeared to disintegrate. ‘But I don’t want not to come up to the hospital no more,’ she wailed, ‘I like hospital!’
John said, ‘I’m glad of that, Marion. Because you can do something for me.’
She was so interested that she stopped crying immediately, and the forgotten tears dripped off her cheeks and on to the small velvet collar of her blue coat.
‘Go on,’ she said, ‘I can?’
‘Yes. You. You’re quite a big girl, aren’t you ‒ six? And you understand all about hospitals, don’t you?’
She nodded so violently that her hair slide flew off.
‘Now, see here,’ he said, ‘there’s a girl out there’ ‒ he jerked his head towards the waiting-room ‒ ‘who’s not as lucky as you. She doesn’t know about hospitals, and she’s got to come in ‒ same as you ‒ and have the same thing as you did.’ He spoke very seriously, as if he was talking to the Professor or the Dean. ‘Will you go and have a chat with her? Tell her what it’s like. She’ll like to know ‒ and she’s around your age, I should say.’
Marion scrubbed her face absently with the handkerchief her mother had pushed into her hand.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Joan Devon,’ he said. ‘Nurse Snow will show you which she is. So will you do that for me as you go out?’
Marion said, ‘Is she a big six? Like me?’
He looked her up and down. ‘No. I should say she’s rather a middle-sized six.’
Marion sighed with pleasure. ‘All right,’ she said and made for the door.
I took her over to Joan Devon, wondering if he was clairvoyant. I could find no other explanation to account for his knowing how a child he had not yet seen felt about hospitalisation. When I went back to the office he explained.
‘I heard what you were saying to her when I came in, and saw that hers was the only new name on the list. But what’s she doing here? She shouldn’t be at a follow-up.’
‘Nurse Blakelock said that Mr Dulain arranged for her to come up this afternoon. Her doctor is a friend of his.’
‘Has she got a letter?’
‘Yes.’ I took her notes off the file and gave them to him.
He glanced through them. ‘Right.’ He handed them back. ‘Thanks, Nurse.’ He told me Mr Dulain was away on holiday. ‘Fishing. Which is a pity. I’m quite happy to see his private patients for him, but they aren’t always so happy to see me.’
I said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise she was a private patient.’
He smiled slightly. ‘Officially she isn’t. But her father is an old Joe’s man and her mother an ex-Joe’s nurse ‒ that’s in the letter. What else does that make her?’ He went back to his seat and the desk. ‘Well, Nurse, can I have the next, please?’
The last infant was in the office by four-thirty. A pro came to relieve me and I went to tea. Lisa had already eaten and gone, so I sat alone and thought about Peter and wondered if I was being a fool, and what was wrong with folly?
When I got back to O.P.s the waiting-room was empty and the pro busy tidying the chairs and benches.
‘I’ll take over,’ I said, ‘if there is anything to take over?’
She glanced at the closed office door, through which we could see John at the desk.
‘The S.S.O. is just writing a letter about that boy with a chronic sinus, so I’m afraid I’ve not been able to tidy in there.’
‘I’ll do that when he goes. Thanks.’
She looked at the office again, then came nearer to me. ‘Mr Kier was in a few minutes ago. He asked for you, Nurse. I said you were at tea but off at six. Was that all right?’
I smiled. ‘Fine. Thanks again.’
She smiled back and I saw my own reflection in her eyes. My cap was a white halo on my head. By her expression it was obvious that she had mistaken it for that. She was very junior and very young, and the hospital to her was a terrifying place and not just the place where she worked, and where healthy people tried to make less healthy people more comfortable.
I could remember treading that same harassed, Sister-ridden path, where nothing made much sense and the only thing that mattered was the time. And where even the race against the clock hands was unreal, because of the nightmare quality of the eternal, ‘Hurry, Nurse!’
‘Get on, Nurse!’
‘Haven’t you finished that sluice ‒ or laundry ‒ or kitchen yet?’
‘Come along, Nurse ‒ you must learn to be quick as well as thorough!’
I guessed that temporarily I had broken into her private nightmare and turned it into a dream.
The senior nurses had all been sympathetic to me over this affair, because they felt ‘There but for the Grace of God go I.’ The pros reacted kindly or indifferently, for other reasons. As they were far from the stage of being left in charge of wards, they could not visualise themselves in my position or guess at the snags that come with responsibility. And to some of them, this child among them, I was mystery, romance, and a pathetic heroine rolled into one. I could see by the way she was gaping at me that she had decided that one day she too would mislay a shot of morphia, and have attractive house-surgeons asking for her, beautiful sisters making unkind remarks, and the most senior surgeon in the place intervening for her for some inexplicable reason.
Only his reason would not be inexplicable. He would naturally be pining with unrequited love, and unconcerned with such mundane details as the shortage of trained nurses in Out-Patients.
I said, ‘You’d better go to tea, Nurse. Sister Dining-room creates if you girls are late.’
She blinked, smiled dreamily, and drifted out to the changing-room. I thought I must have looked very much like that all this afternoon.
I carried the last two chairs to their places against the wall, and picked a yellow hair-ribbon off the floor behind the radiator. John came out of the office.
‘Sister back yet, Nurse Snow?’
I said she was off until five.
‘Oh
.’ He juggled the notes he was holding like giant playing cards, then found what he was looking for. ‘Would you give this to Sister?’ He handed me an envelope. ‘It’s about that Devon child.’
I tucked the letter in my apron bib. ‘Yes, Mr Dexter.’
He looked round the empty room. ‘What was going on in here this afternoon? A riot?’
I said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Dexter. I’m afraid they were a bit noisy.’
He said it had not bothered him much. ‘I don’t have to use my ears when I look down a throat. But’ ‒ he looked at his feet ‒ ‘you know you ought to keep ’em quieter. I don’t know how you can do it, but you should.’ He told the floor that it was possibly a good thing Sister was off-duty.
I said, ‘Yes, Mr Dexter,’ and longed to ask if he had heard whether the Out-Patient nurses at St Martha’s hospital used gags or open ether in the Children’s Room.
He asked what kind of a day I had had.
‘Busy, thank you, Mr Dexter.’
He looked up. ‘I was aware of that.’
I was full of charity to all my fellow men at that moment, and since that necessarily included him I thought I might as well take the opportunity to thank him for suggesting to Matron that I should be sent to work here. I said it was very kind of him.
‘It was not at all kind of me,’ he said calmly; ‘I only suggested this because I dislike waste. I knew how busy this place is now ‒ remember, since the new regime last year they are working with only one staff nurse ‒ and the staff here have far too much to do. I could not see that you were necessary in the dining-room, but I could see that a spare trained nurse was essential here. I merely pointed that out to Matron and she agreed.’
‘I see.’ I did indeed. All this song and dance about wasting nurses in domestic sinecures was merely a rationalisation of his desire to help Sister O.P.s. I wondered if he had explained this to her. Life would be very much more pleasant for us all if he did, but I doubted if he would. He was not given to explaining his actions, and was only telling me this to prevent my having any ideas that it might have been for my personal benefit. I was quite pleased. It stopped me having to feel grateful.
He tucked the sheaf of notes under his arm. ‘I won’t,’ he said pointedly, ‘keep you any longer, Nurse. I’m sure you are anxious to get on.’
All nurses are always anxious to get on, and that hour of the afternoon, off. I said correctly, ‘Yes, Mr Dexter, thank you, Mr Dexter,’ as Sister Tutor had long taught us always to answer and thank any senior, for anything.
At six I went off duty by way of Matron’s office, in case there was a note or dictated telephone message waiting in my pigeon hole. There was none, so I walked slowly back to the nurses’ home. I did not meet Peter in the hospital corridor or the grounds. It began to rain when I was half-way across the park that separated our home from the main building. The doctors’ house overlooked that corner of the park; I strolled past their house, pretending to be lost in thought and ignoring the rain. I hoped he might see me from a window and come down. I achieved nothing but a ruined cap and wet feet.
There was no message waiting in the Home either. I wondered if he had forgotten. I was back in the Day Nurses’ Home and walked across to the Night Nurses’ house to look in the ‘S’s’ pigeon hole there. It was empty.
I went back to my new room and decided to have a bath while I was waiting. I left the door ajar while the water was running, and only turned the taps half on, so that I should hear the telephone if it rang. It did not ring.
I reminded myself that he had warned me it was only in the air, that this silence merely meant he was held up and unable to contact me. I was fairly content with my explanations; only fairly, since all nurses are well aware that any doctor at any time can get a message to anyone, if he really wants to do so.
Next morning he smiled at me as he rushed past the Children’s Room on his way to Casualty, then stopped and came back to the doorway. ‘Sorry I couldn’t make last night,’ he whispered, and vanished again.
He went on smiling at me for the next couple of weeks but we never met for more than a few minutes in the corridors or did more than glimpse each other across the canteen. He made no more attempts to speak to me or contact me in any way, and I began to wonder if I had met him outside the dining-room at all, or simply imagined it.
‘But why,’ I asked Lisa, who now seemed to know most of my affairs, ‘why did he have to say anything about taking me out? He didn’t have to take me out. Why pretend?’
Lisa hesitated, ‘Perhaps,’ she said slowly, ‘he couldn’t really help himself.’
‘I don’t follow you.’
She looked at me. ‘I see you don’t, dear girl.’ She smiled, not unkindly, ‘For all that you’re an S.R.N. you are a little green about the facts of life, aren’t you?’
I smiled back. ‘I could be at that. Tell me, Grandmama.’
‘Right.’ Her eyes danced. ‘Listen hard. You have a thing for Peter, and Peter has a thing for you. I know ‒ I know ‒ he handed you the frozen mitt in the canteen, and I know he’s been avoiding you like the plague recently because he does not want any of the mud of this affair to rub off on him, but ‒’ she drew a deep breath, ‘he’s still got a thing for you. When you are around, he can’t take his eyes off you, and I suspect he has a hard time keeping his hands off you. I don’t think it’s true love, alas, but I do think that physically, where he’s concerned, you hit the spot. Only since he isn’t a purely physical type, his head rules his heart, to coin a corny phrase, and not the other way about.’
‘He certainly had things under control that morning in the canteen,’ I said dryly.
She said, ‘Dear girl, Peter’s had things ‒ and, forgive my saying it, you ‒ under control for the past couple of years. He’s managed it all very neatly. That invite the other evening was one of his rare slip-ups. But once he got away and thought it over, he decided the only thing to do was to give you the air, from his own angle, quite as much as your own. Mind you,’ she added, ‘this is only guess work. Your guess is as good as mine.’
I shook my head. ‘My guesses are out. Haven’t got any about anyone. So you are probably right.’
She said gently, ‘I hope I’m not, Gill ‒ but I’ve a nasty feeling I am. I can see no future for you ‒ or any other working girl ‒ with that young man.’ She was silent for a short while, then, ‘Has he got any money?’
‘Peter? Only what he earns.’
She grimaced. ‘I thought so. In view of which, it’s just as well, dear girl, that Carol Ash is your greatest friend.’
‘Carol? What’s she got to do with it?’
Lisa said, ‘Well ‒ you did fix up about the rugger dance, didn’t you? If that isn’t throwing them together, I don’t know what is. And Carol is the one girl at Joe’s who would be more than an asset to a rising young doctor. A rich wife,’ she reminded me, ‘is a splendid thing if you want to hang around waiting for the good jobs. The waiting takes years.’
‘I suppose it does.’ I felt very bleak.
‘Don’t let it get you down too much,’ she said. ‘Heaven knows I could be all wrong. It’ll probably all blow over in a month or so when this missing-dope business blows over. After all, no one seems to have taken it, and no harm been done, so it may have been a dispenser’s mistake, regardless of what they say.’
‘I wish I could believe you. I can’t say I do. I find it hard to credit that Peter ever liked me at all.’
‘Phooey! This I’m certain ‒ as long as you are around Joe’s, Peter will have to be around you. He may not like it, but he can’t help his hormones. They act for him.’ She turned to me, ‘Gill, I hope I haven’t hurt you with this girlish frankness? I feel I’ve been opening my big mouth too wide.’
She looked really worried, and since I had grown very fond of Lisa lately, and disliked having to upset her, I said, ‘No. I haven’t enjoyed it, but you haven’t hurt me. Subconsciously I’ve known that was the set-up. I pretended to myself th
at I didn’t, but I did.’ I sighed. ‘Of course, I should have had more pride and what-have-you than to stick around with him, but where Peter is concerned, my pride goes out of the window.’
I thought she would laugh, but all she said was, ‘Dear girl, how well I know that sensation.’
‘You do?’ I was surprised. Lisa was on dining-out terms with half the resident staff. I had never heard or suspected that she took any of her many young men seriously.
‘I do.’ She coloured slightly. ‘Just another Lonely Heart am I.’ Then she laughed. ‘Lonely Hearts are legion in this hospital ‒ and boring! In my particular case, he doesn’t know I’m around ‒ rather like you and John Dexter, with the difference that while you couldn’t care less if John sees you or not, I, alas’ ‒ she smiled self-deprecatingly ‒ ‘care no end. I’m only unburdening now, dear girl, to show you that you aren’t the only mug at Joe’s.’
I was curious to know who he was, but she did not say, and I did not want to force her confidence.
‘You shake me, Lisa. I hadn’t a notion.’
‘I know that. Nor has he. Which gives me a good laugh, in a bitter way, from time to time. I’ll tell you all one of these fine days. But thanks for not asking leading questions.’
I thought over Lisa’s words during the next few days. She had been very shrewd about Peter and the more, or rather the less, I saw of him, the more I realised how right she was. I knew I was not good at judging people’s reactions or behaviour, but I tried to discover whom it was that Lisa had been discussing.
It was something to do, and something else to think about in place of Peter and what Matron was ultimately going to do with me after this spell in O.P.s. I was not successful, although I turned into the perfect little watch-bird watching the young men watching Lisa. I was no better with Lisa’s affairs than I had been with my own. The only thing I discovered from my watching was that John Dexter appeared to spend far more time walking through Out-Patients than he had done when I was last here, and that when he walked through Out-Patients he always found it necessary to talk to Sister.
The Quiet Wards Page 9