MacDonald looked as if unexpectedly confronted by an aggressive stranger whose views he objected to but felt impelled to hear. ‘I’m a surgeon not a psychiatrist. Nevertheless, after fourteen years I’ve acquired some insight into the effect of surgery on the human psyche. On the basis of that experience,’ he continued drily, ‘I would say (a), that a man who threw himself under a tram could be considered to have a genuine wish to end his life, and (b), that a forequarter amputation could prove less than ideal therapy for boosting his will to live again.’
She smiled quietly, ‘I’m afraid Major Browne’s going to wreck your statistics, Mr MacDonald. I think your forequarter has already begun boosting his will.’
‘Why?’
‘No one can make a one-legged man in a wheelchair fight another war.’
‘Christ,’ he said, ‘Christ. You’ve not only decided I’ve done him a good turn, you’ve got him up in a chair. What’s up with you tonight, nurse? You’re not usually given to spurious optimism over your special patients. Nor am I.’ His expression hardened. ‘Leaving aside his mental state, I know a dangerously ill and probably dying man when I see one and that’s how Browne looked when I last saw him.’
‘Yes. He did. When you last saw him. But you haven’t been with him more or less nonstop all night and I have. That’s why I think he’s going to do.’
‘Intuition?’ he snapped.
‘Facts,’ she snapped back. ‘To start with, he’s a tough and a very old hand at being tough. Don’t tell me he can’t be much of a soldier to be still only a Major in his second war as a Regular ‒ maybe he’s not much good at red tape but if he wasn’t a pretty good soldier he wouldn’t be still alive. He must have the most tremendous physical and mental resilience to have survived both wars and these last few hours. When you last saw him he was only just round. Now he’s not just holding his own, he’s picking up steadily at the right pace. No,’ she went on more gently, ‘I’m not usually very optimistic about my specials, but that’s mainly because most I get are moribunds like poor Briggs. But whatever the prognosis, when you special a patient you get to know him or her very well in a very few hours. The more you special, the less time that takes. I’ve done so much it now takes me roughly fifteen minutes to know the type of patient I’m nursing. They all split into two main groups; the fighters and the resigned. The latter seldom want to die but as they’ve given up, they always do. Some of the fighters die, of course, but they keep up the fight to their last breath ‒ and that’s no flight of my imagination. Take Briggs now. God only knows why he still wants to live, but he does, and he’s still fighting though his heart can’t take much more.
‘All my three in here tonight are fighters. Jarvis ‒ not one of yours ‒ has a rocky heart and his weight’s against him ‒ but I think there’s a fair chance he leaves us on his two feet. Browne’s got a good heart and a good build. And, I repeat, he’s a fighter; fighters with his allies don’t give up or die easily.’
‘Och, nurse! If chucking himself under a tram wasn’t giving up, what the devil was it?’
‘Remember his age, Mr MacDonald. Remember ‒’ she insisted, ‘he’d just come off after a forty-eight that included last night which everyone’s told me was sheer murder.’ He nodded, reluctantly. ‘Have you heard his only son was killed in June?’
‘From Night Sister. Go on.’
Somewhere in the depths of her mind she heard the first small trumpet sounding. She didn’t slacken her attack. ‘From the little his wife told me, he’s still crushed with grief ‒ and so is she, under the hatches.’ Again MacDonald nodded. ‘I’m sure what happened was this; he came off exhausted, sad, walked out into the cold, pelting blackout, and just kept on walking without knowing where or why then suddenly saw the outline of the tram and thought ‒ I’ve had it. I can’t go on. On crutches ‒ in a chair ‒ he won’t have to. And pushing the chair will give his wife a reason for going on. I think she can use one.’
He rested his elbows on the table and locked his hands under his chin. ‘Nevertheless he had that manic turn. That doesn’t sound to me like second thoughts.’
‘It probably would, had you seen it. It came on when he woke up and thought he was in the road. He thought he was lying on his back, he could feel his phantom and he wanted to get up and run away. The moment we got through to him where he was, that his leg was off ‒’ she snapped her fingers, ‘he came out of it like so. He subsided into sad little requests to speak to his wife ‒ he was very sad, very ashamed,’ her face saddened at the memory, ‘but from that moment he stopped fighting us and began fighting for himself. He sounded very distressed when he confessed to his wife, but once he got it off his chest, he sounded quite different. Relieved.’
‘The guilt will continue to haunt him. That won’t aid recovery.’
‘But the relief will. He was so relieved he went back to sleep in the middle of his wife’s pep-talk. She had gone when he next woke briefly and his first words were, “Nurse, it wasn’t just a dream that you told me my right leg’s gone and I can only feel my right toes itching because of the ‒ what did you call it ‒ the ghost leg?” I explained it all again and warned him he’d feel the phantom for some time and that it would hurt but not tonight as we wouldn’t let it. He said, “Thank you so much, m’dear,” and went back to sleep smiling. I looked under his mask before I came out. Still smiling. He’s relieved plus and that’ll take the edge off his guilt.’
MacDonald stared at his locked hands. ‘Personally, I don’t consider relief the antidote to guilt, but I’ll admit it has certain analgesic properties.’
‘Analgesics wear off. His relief won’t. No leg, no more soldiering.’
‘I can’t see much comfort in that for his wife.’
‘Not for her tonight. But later I don’t think that’ll upset her as much as she thinks tonight ‒ providing he’s not disgraced.’ He looked straight at her and she met his gaze. ‘Yes,’ she said, as if he had spoken, ‘yes, I know. Tonight she knows he’s worked his ticket under a tram and to her that’s like deserting in the face of the enemy. Tonight ‒ when she’s still in shock. How much of tonight will she remember later ‒ unless she’s forced to remember his disgrace for the rest of her life?’ She paused and held her mental breath, but he stayed silent. ‘If she’s allowed to forget, Mr MacDonald, then I don’t think it’ll be too long before she does, before she starts remembering only what she’ll want to remember and that’ll be his battles. Alamein, Dunkirk ‒ you name it ‒ he was there. She told me. And you? Yes. That’s why I’m sure it won’t be too long before she’s able to persuade herself he’s a genuine war casualty and my God ‒’ her voice vibrated with an unpredictable force, ‘that’s how I see him.’
‘And you see that poor woman enjoying caring for a crippled husband?’
‘Not enjoying, though I think she’ll do it gladly. Having him to look after will mean she’s still doing her bit. And I think that’ll matter like hell to her!’
He looked at his hands very thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That aspect will matter greatly to Mrs Browne.’ He didn’t say another word for a good five minutes and Nurse Smith waited in silence for his decision.
The peace of the mid-small hours shrouded the hospital, but MacDonald alone recognized it as akin to the peace of peacetime nights. Nurse Smith had only nursed in war. MacDonald remembered years of nights in the great undamaged hospital where no ward filled with sleeping patients had ever been wholly silent. It took an act of war to cause the absolute silence that fell over an entire ward when every patient was too petrified by fear to breathe audibly, or when every patient was dead.
Wally’s snored peacefully, slept peacefully, and the anaesthetic fumes wafting from Nigel Gill’s bed doused the sweat and hot rubber, but not the ether, iodiform and stale tobacco hanging in the air. Someone had woken. Somewhere, far up the ward, bedsprings creaked more loudly, enamel was clattered against wood, and then an urgent, apologetic stage whisper echoed into the flat, ‘Sure
to God, Nurse Carter and haven’t I spilt the b ‒ and haven’t I spilt it on me drawsheet again and it’s sorry I am ‒’
‘Don’t panic, Murphy ‒ coming ‒’ Nurse Carter’s floating whisper was instantly echoed by Nurse Dean’s soporific, ‘Ssssh, please, ssssh ‒ ssssh.’
The flick of scurrying, starched skirts faded up the ward; more creaking bedsprings, then the swish of one drawsheet being removed and another replaced, and the bedsprings were silent. Then the soft click of the lock on the balcony door.
Nurse Carter left the balcony door propped open on the latch. Murphy was lying on his left side, had watched her go out, and she knew without asking him that he would hiss for her if Dean or one of the patients wanted her in the next couple of minutes. She needed the invigorating cold clean night air to wake her up as she had felt herself reaching the point where her eyelids kept closing even when she was moving. She knew if she now stopped and leant against a ward wall, she’d fall asleep on her feet. She dumped the wet drawsheet in the linen bin, put down her bucket and leant on the cold flat stone top of the balustrade. She inhaled deeply, thankfully, and as her mind began to clear, thought of Mrs MacDonald ‒ and then of Mark Jason.
The night was quiet and darker as all the red lights had gone out. The clouds that overcast the sky were moving quite quickly, but no wind ruffled the black silk surface of the river. The line of empty, tarpaulin-covered barges that for the past few months had been moored directly in front of the hospital, bobbed lazily and the water lapping their sides made the sound of silk being softly torn. According to rumour popular with patients and staff, they were surplus invasion barges Ike had forgotten. ‘Well, I mean,’ said the patients, ‘can’t expect old Ike to remember everything, can you? Got a bit on his mind D-Day, hadn’t he, what with the weather playing up shocking.’
The black frieze of the buildings across the river slowly lightened to dark charcoal as the moving clouds split to let through the low, three-quarter moon. The pale light gathered strength and transformed London into a medieval city of jumbled houses leaning companionably against each other; of spires and towers and castles with strange, uneven turrets encircled by wide, black moats. The castles were the solitary ruins standing amidst flattened bombsites.
The dark quiet pavements in the dark quiet caverns of the streets looked empty and inhabited only by shadows, but in that predawn silence Nurse Carter heard the echoes of the footsteps of the shadows in the shadows. London was asleep behind blind bedroom windows, inside the steel cages of the Morrison shelters on ground floors, and deep beneath the ground in the steel-meshed bunks and on the cold, dirty, crowded floors of the Tube platforms. ‘If you can get a squeeze in,’ said the patients, ‘you can’t do better than make for the Piccadilly or Green Park. Real nice and deep the pair of ’em.’ London slept on, but not the police on the beat, the ARP wardens and workers coming and going from Wardens’ Posts, the fire-watchers on their rounds, the drivers of the sparse traffic. Occasionally, a car or lorry crept furtively along the opposite embankment behind blackened headlights, with thin slits left to allow the weak rays to stab the road surface a few yards ahead. And each time one turned to crawl over the bridge nearest the hospital, it turned into the shadow of a snail with the eyes of a glow-worm.
From a habit engrained since her first night in Wally’s, Nurse Carter took a firmer grasp on the balustrade and leant well over to look up at the City on her far right. The piebald light was too weak to expose the acres of burnt-out buildings, the miniature mountains of rubble, the great gaping holes, and the greater empty spaces, but the shadow of St Paul’s was just discernible against the sky. Still there, she thought, as London had thought from the end of the first week in September 1940. And she smiled instinctively at the outline of Wren’s dome.
Directly above her the moonlight was stronger and laid silver streaks on the black river, silver swathes across the delicate shadow of the nearest bridge, and filtered through the gaping windows of the roofless, ruined ward blocks still standing on either side of Wally’s block. The moving light reminded her of a night nurse’s torch moving between sleeping patients and she was relieved she no longer feared ghosts. In the shadows in the empty ruined wards it was so easy to imagine she could see the moving figure of the ghost night nurse, and the ghost patients in their ghost beds.
There were more ghosts in the sky now. Great oblong floating ghosts, some silvered, some grey shadows, and where the moonlight caught them, the cables of the barrage balloons flickered like silver tinsel magically suspended in mid-air.
‘Nurse Carter ‒ Nurse Carter ‒ herself is wanting you ‒’ hissed Murphy.
She backed quickly, gulping clean air and just before she closed the door glanced back across the river. Thank God all the lights are out, she thought, forgetting London had ever had any other lights but those of the ARP rescue squads and the search-lights of the ack-ack crews.
MacDonald stirred at last and Nurse Smith lay back in her chair. She had been watching his face. He said, ‘That leg’s been on my mind.’
‘It would’ve been on mine.’
‘So I’ve gathered.’ They exchanged brief, conspiratorial smiles. ‘Of course,’ he added offhandedly, ‘we’re only a civvy hospital.’
‘That seems to have narked the War Office tonight.’
‘Indeed. Most regrettable. One would have liked to feel their minds were wholly concentrated on winning the war. I trust I’ll set their minds at rest with the letter I’ve just written them in Night Sister’s Office, but I rather doubt it. However, I’ve made it very clear that I refuse to give my permission for his transfer to any military hospital until he’s safely over the fourteenth night. I have then suggested that if he survives to that point, he should be transferred straight to our EMS Orthopaedic Unit in Surrey. I doubt they’ll argue that one since all three Services send so many of their major orthopod problems there.’
‘Especially soldiers. I worked there last Christmas. We were swamped out by the 8th Army and repatriated Italian POWs. Not one civvy in my three months as night senior.’ She hesitated, puzzled. ‘Why’ve you written already? Particularly as you were rather afraid he’d had it?’
‘It was a letter that had to be written sooner or later and ‒ and as the hospital’s settled and I hate writing letters I thought I’d better get on with it.’ He glanced at her tray. ‘You aren’t eating. Have a sandwich.’
She felt sick with relief. ‘Not hungry.’
‘Force yourself. Night’s not over yet.’
‘No.’ She avoided his eyes. ‘I can’t eat four. Would you like one?’
He seemed about to accept, then shook his head. ‘Thanks, but I mustn’t eat your food. If I want anything before I turn in, the kitchen will have left something in our pantry.’
‘If it’s the same as we’ve got tonight, congealed horse and weary Yellow Peril.’
‘God forbid.’ The transforming grin flickered over his face and she thought, that’s how he must’ve looked when he was young.
She offered the plate without rising, ‘Do have one.’
‘If you’re sure? Thanks.’ He walked round, helped himself and sat on the edge of the table to eat. ‘Very nice.’
She watched him with concealed interest as she recognized he had now gone into the slow-motion syndrome that frequently overtook residents still up at that hour when they reached what was officially the last ward of a twenty-plus hour day. She had never before seen MacDonald in the syndrome; obviously, he was far more exhausted than he appeared or realized. She offered to make him tea.
‘No, thanks, nurse. I can still feel the three cups I scrounged from Night Sister washing round my back teeth.’
‘So that’s what’s woken you up?’
‘No,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Tea only stimulates me when I’m whacked. I went over my high peak of fatigue about an hour ago and once over, and the closer it is to dawn, the more I wake up and yet, conversely, the better I sleep.’
‘Like the pa
tients. Come dawn and even the most restless settle into a good sleep. And night nurses start telling each other ghastly jokes that sound exquisitely hilarious. Strange,’ she reflected, ‘how everyone seems to get a second wind at dawn. Even the DILs. If you’ve got them through to dawn, almost invariably you’ve got them through the whole night.’
‘Not strange at all. It’s a straight primitive hangover from our primitive ancestors. The sun was their lifeline and every sunrise a triumph of unreasoned hope after a night spent huddling in the caves from unreasoned terrors. Triumph’s a stimulating emotion and every dawn provided the first safe moment for enjoying its re-birth and ‒ so on ‒’ his voice stopped, silenced by his thoughts and he frowned at his feet.
She was too preoccupied by her own thoughts to notice. ‘Our primitive ancestors were dead lucky. They only had to huddle in the caves by night.’
‘We modern troglodytes have the full benefits of twentieth century civilization, nurse.’ The sudden, arctic bleakness in his voice made her glance up and she saw it mirrored in his face until he became aware of her glance. His face closed exactly as if he had shut a door between them. In his former conversational manner, he asked, ‘Why did you decide to train after graduating?’
‘It was 1940 so I thought I’d better get into the war, before I was hauled in. I forget precisely when they started calling up all single women in the 19-to-23 age group, but I was in it and only beat the call-up by a few months. By then, everyone I knew was either in, or climbing into uniform. I decided I needed one.’
One Night in London: a hospital in wartime (The Jason Trilogy Book 1) Page 12