‘Pipe down, Smithy! Stop being so dramatic!’
Dramatic? Phooey! If the fact that a young woman on a chance visit to her brother and his family had just been blown to pieces tonight wasn’t dramatic ‒ what was it? If the prospect of being blinded, or having your face sliced off ‒ or both ‒ wasn’t sufficient reason for terror, specifically after you had seen and nursed women so injured more times than you could bear to remember ‒ how much more did you have to fear before you were allowed to show you were afraid without risk of being accused of posing? Death itself? What the hell did death matter so long as it was quick and painless? And after death ‒ nothing. Nothing to fear in nothing.
A carefully buried memory suddenly surfaced from her subconscious and she remembered saying that to Nurse Carter one night in the country hospital when for a week Nurse Carter had been her temporary night junior. She had been secretly half-contemptuous, half-envious of Nurse Carter’s private running commentary with her personal God, until the night her junior had forced her to drink a pot of strong, salted black coffee. ‘How can you be so sure, Carter? You’ve been a VAD in air-raids, you’re not a fool, but you are sure. How?’
‘I dunno. I just am. Have some more coffee …’
The memory dispersed her anger. She sat forward, pulled off her cap, took a powder compact and comb from her dress skirt pocket and, with the calm of the eye of a hurricane, reflected on her reflection in the little mirror. A rag, but a tidy rag. Useful things, mirrors. But no mirrors in Rachel last summer. No mirrors in the patients’ lockers, the bathrooms, the day duty-room, the small alcove outside the basement ward where the nurses left their cloaks and spare clean aprons. Even the pocket mirror the wardmaid propped on the kitchen dresser behind the jugs had to go. Nurse Smith, the ARP think this batch of handbags probably belongs to some of our latest admissions. Once you’ve managed to identify the owners, label all compacts and handbag mirrors as usual and lock them with the others in my bottom right desk drawer.
‘Oh, there you are!’ Nurse Carter stopped breathlessly in the doorway, her eyes wide with fear, the DD keys clasped in one hand. ‘Dean wants you to scrub stat. for Jarvis ‒ yes, another ‒ she and Mack are with him and I’m getting the morph. ‒’ she ducked aside as Nurse Smith raced out, then ran on to the duty-room and a few seconds later back to Jarvis’s bedside. It was the first occasion in her nursing life that she had run on duty with official permission.
Nurse Dean held out a steady hand for the keys and morphine ampule. ‘Wait, Carter.’ She checked the ampule label in her torchlight. ‘Right. Now ring Night Sister,’ she added placidly.
MacDonald, his stethoscope in his ears, bent over Jarvis. Nurse Carter glanced fearfully at the white back but didn’t dare look again at Jarvis. She sped for the telephone as Nurse Smith appeared by Nurse Dean and shook the drips from her wet hands.
‘Switchboard ‒ Emergency. Night Sister for Wally’s please.’ Nurse Carter watched fearfully the shadows on the ceiling over 11 whilst she waited. Thank God, Dean had just come back to her before it started. It had been far worse for him than anything she had imagined, but Dean had known what to do and done it. Thank God for Dean.
‘Night Sister speaking. Yes, nurse?’ queried the hushed, unemotional voice.
‘Please, Sister, Nurse Carter speaking for Nurse Dean from Wal ‒ from Walter Walters Ward. Please, Sister, Jarvis in Bed 11 has just had a second coronary thrombosis diagnosed by the SSO who was in the ward at the time and Jarvis has just been given an injection of ⅓ of a grain of morphia by Nurse Smith witnessed by Nurse Dean that was left in hand by the SMO ‒’
‘By the Senior Medical Officer, nurse. The coronary thrombosis was diagnosed by the Senior Surgical Officer. Will you please not use abbreviations. Abbreviations are unprofessional, easily misunderstood and the hallmark of a slipshod nurse. St Martha’s nurses must not be slipshod. Now repeat your message again correctly, Nurse Carter …’
Chapter Nine
MacDonald strolled out to the flat as Nurse Dean replaced the receiver, ‘Sullivan gone back to sleep and needed a second shout?’
‘No.’ She tucked the endpiece of the stethoscope round her neck more firmly into her white starched belt, to provide an alibi for her downcast eyes. ‘That was Night Sister. She asked me to apologize to you for the slight delay, but as Jarvis has settled she hasn’t liked to get up another physician and Sullivan’s had to go straight to Luke. A patient with an aortic aneurysm has just had an haemoptysis. Only a little one, of course, or she’d have got up the SMO. I’m sorry about this.’
‘That’s all right. I’m in no hurry.’ He saw from her downcast face that she now knew precisely why, but was not ready to discuss it yet. ‘I must hang on for Sullivan. If not, knowing my opposite number’s ethical mind, I’ll have to deal with his coronary at breakfast. If you want to get on writing your night report in the log, don’t mind me.’
‘Thanks. I should get on with it.’ She sat down and tried to discard her personal thoughts. ‘Thanks for your help with Jarvis. I’m sorry I had to involve you, but it was an emergency.’
‘No trouble. Not that you needed me. You had the crisis over before it got off the ground. I hope,’ he went on in a pleasantly detached tone, ‘you’re around when I have my coronary. If so, like old Jarvis, I may well live to have another.’
She ignored the compliment. ‘Of course we needed you. You had to make the diagnosis. Nurses don’t diagnose.’
‘Nor they do.’ She missed his quick, ironic smile as she was staring at the open log book. He looked from her face to Jarvis. The screens had again been folded back. ‘He’s right under. God be thanked for the white poppy ‒ and God alone knows what we’d all do without it.’ He watched Nurse Carter hitch a stethoscope into her ears and reinflate the rubber blood-pressure bandage round Jarvis’ inert left arm. ‘His coronary shook that kid Carter rigid.’
‘The first she’s seen happening. Always a bit alarming the first time.’ She had to look up at him. ‘Night Sister’s just told me you’re swapping with Mr Davis.’
He faced her, but his expression gave nothing away. ‘It was only settled when I was doing tomorrow’s transfers with her before I came up here just now. Haven’t had much time to tell you yet. Initially, the idea was to pitch up Davis just for tomorrow, then the top brass got blethering to each other on the ’phone. Prof. Surgery very decently decided to come in and give me the verdict and ‒ er ‒ so on ‒ in person. I was with Night Sister when he arrived. They’ve decided I must have one week’s compassionate leave, then take over Davis’s SSO-ship in the country. I can’t say I like any part of the idea, but in this I’ve no say. Still, Davis is a sound chap. If I must hand over, I’d sooner it was to him than anyone else.’
‘He’s a good surgeon and ‒ and you do need a rest. How long do you think you’ll be in the country?’
‘For good, I imagine, as far as Martha’s, London, is concerned. My contract ends in ten weeks. Even if I can wangle it back on the Staff ‒ and that’s an open question if there ever was one ‒ I’m now on my last night’s rounds in Martha’s, proper.’
She said softly, shakily, ‘I can’t actually take that in, Mack.’
‘Strikes me as quite a thought after so many years ‒ but not one for this moment. I want another look at the chaps and then I want a word with you about that girl Smith.’ He strode back into the ward before she could answer.
She watched him go, but the strain of it all blurred her vision. She blinked impatiently and then had a new anxiety as she saw MacDonald had gone first to Jarvis. She glanced anxiously towards the stairs. If Night Sister had had to get up the SMO for that man in Luke, the SMO would come to see Jarvis. A breach of medical ethics was permissible in an emergency, but that was over now. Mack should’ve remembered Jarvis was medical and the fact that he hadn’t showed he was still in shock. He didn’t sound or look it, but neither had he looked or sounded himself since she reopened the ward doors. Why that stupid girl had chos
en that moment to play up ‒ but that was a stupid question as Smith always had played people up at the wrong moment and that was one reason why she had been so unpopular in their set when they were junior pros. They had kept this to themselves as she was one of the set and as time went by had on the whole been more amused than annoyed by her tantrums ‒ and that’s all they were ‒ since with seniority she had previously had enough sense not to have them on-duty. She wouldn’t have another tonight. Nurse Dean’s firm jaw set beneath the youthful roundness. She would explain this tactfully to Mack; she should be able to smooth it over. She would remind him how well Smith had risen to Jarvis’s coronary and how quickly she had soothed Briggs once she got back to him.
Mack, she thought, leaving. For a few seconds she felt as if one of her limbs had dropped off. She reminded herself how much he needed a week’s rest, how very little time they had been able to have together recently, how much more certain would be his off-duty once he was back in the country, and that she only had another three nights to work before her next nights-off. Perhaps by then ‒ and she cut short the thought and blushed at the indelicacy of taking into consideration Mrs MacDonald’s funeral. She took up her pen and went on with her report.
Nurse Carter glanced up as MacDonald’s shadow fell over Jarvis’s bed and automatically handed him the charts and joined him at the foot. He studied the triple graphs of pulse, respirations and blood-pressure, then moved to lay a hand on the still clammy forehead and time the temporal pulse for himself. He stepped back to Nurse Carter, and murmured, ‘Slightly more than well as can be expected. Let’s hope he keeps it up. Probably a wee one.’
She winced. ‘Wee? All that pain?’
He hesitated, then beckoned her to the stock cupboard down the middle. He took an old envelope from one trouser pocket, laid it address-side down on the top chart and with his pen sketched a diagrammatic heart. ‘Look. Here’s the coronary artery. A big one usually does this ‒’ he shaded an area, ‘or this ‒’ more shading. ‘That shuts the supply to the heart right off and so ‒’ he added more lines, ‘the supply to the brain. When it’s a wee one, this is what often happens so ‒ see here ‒ brain stays conscious throughout. Like just now. Didn’t knock him out. Only the morph. did that.’
She looked up at him and the rose-coloured sweat glistened on her upper lip. ‘He stared and sweated and couldn’t move, like Briggs sometimes.’
‘That’s how real pain always looks, nurse. With Briggs it’s caused by an inoperable secondary pressing on a major nerve.’
‘I sort of thought it was that.’ She looked at Jarvis. ‘Mr MacDonald, can he get over this one?’
He said kindly, ‘You shouldn’t ask me that, Nurse Carter, and I shouldn’t answer. I’m a surgeon. He’s one of the SMO’s medical patients. Strictly off the record, I’ll be a wee bit but not too surprised if the old boy once again potters out of Martha’s on his two feet. He’ll be back, of course. But with luck not for a year or two.’
‘Oh, goody! Goody!’ she breathed, and her head swung round at Murphy’s plaintive whisper. She waved to show she had heard and stood on her toes to confide in MacDonald’s ear, ‘I expect his nappy’s off again.’
His eyebrows shot up. ‘Nappy?’
‘I’ve tied him up in a sling to stop the dressings on his buttocks falling off. He doesn’t need to untie himself every time he uses a bottle, he just will, then he can’t tie himself up again. Will you excuse me if I see to him?’
‘Go ahead, nurse, only ‒’ he lowered his head to her ear, ‘for God’s sake don’t use a safety-pin or sure as hell he’ll shove it through his abdominal wall.’
She smiled quickly, compassionately, and with unusual maturity. She had suddenly remembered clearly when shock had jolted her into a new awareness of human suffering and human grief, when she had found herself with one skin too few and had only been able to tolerate existence by making the kind of cracks that those with one skin too many regarded as symptoms of callousness or indifference. ‘I won’t, Mr MacDonald. Thanks.’ He glanced curiously after her, then incuriously at the address on the old envelope. It was in his wife’s handwriting. It contained a letter but he couldn’t remember when it had come or what was in it. He put it away quickly, replaced the charts on Jarvis’s footrail and noticed George Mercer’s good right hand groping for the water glass on his locker. He crossed the ward silently.
George Mercer felt the hand supporting his head, the hand steadying the glass at his lips. ‘Ta, Nobby ‒’ he blinked, ‘oh ‒ you, sir. Thought meself back at the camp hospital.’
‘Nobby your mate there?’
‘That’s right.’ Beneath the flush of sleep the fair Viking face hardened. ‘They got him in Germany now. Near the Polish border, the mate I was with yesterday says ‒ if he’s not packed it in. Just don’t do to brood, do it, sir?’
‘No. Just a minute, laddie. Your pillows are a mess.’ MacDonald supported George Mercer’s shoulders with an encircling arm, and plumped and turned the pillows. ‘Just go back gently.’
Good as old Nobby. Good as nurses the pair of ’em. ‘Ta, sir. That’s nice.’
‘How are your new lot feeling?’
‘Chest and arm’s all right. Hand’s a bit sore. Pins and needles. That be the circulation starting up proper?’
‘Yes. Good sign, but will it stop you getting off again?’
George Mercer smiled slowly, ‘Not after that Nurse Dean’s tablets. Have me kipping the week I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘You do that.’
‘How about you, sir? Don’t you never get to bed?’
‘Eventually. Sleep well.’
MacDonald backed to the foot of the bed and heard behind him, ‘It’s tied up I am and it’s tied up I’ll stay till morn, Nurse Carter, and the Holy Angels’ll be blessing you for the grand comfort to me backside … is it too loud I’m talking? … Herself will be … and himself no less? … Sure to God there’s not one more word I’ll be saying this night for would I be getting yourself on the mat with herself and himself …’
MacDonald’s eyes creased with amusement and his gaze rested in turn on the snoring Bert Harper, the soundless boy’s sleep of Joe Panetti, and every other sleeping figure in every other unscreened bed on both sides of the ward. Then he turned and looked over one of Briggs’s screens.
Briggs’s sunken eyes were closed and the green rubber bag flapped shallowly but rhythmically, but he lay too still and tense to be asleep. Nurse Smith knew MacDonald was watching, but didn’t look round until she finished aspirating. She held up the filled syringe for MacDonald to see the colour of its contents. He nodded sombrely, for a moment their eyes met and she made no attempt to hide the appeal in hers. She glanced at Briggs, then back at MacDonald and her glance said plainly, ‘He’s dying. He may last out tonight but he won’t see another. He’s got used to me.’ MacDonald made no response, but went on watching Briggs for about three minutes, and then moved away. Nurse Smith sat quietly on Briggs’s locker-seat, reached for one of his hands and felt the claw-like fingers weakly grip her own. She was sure she had won again and was too relieved for fear or triumph, but not to wonder whether, certainly on the second count, she owed it mainly to Mrs MacDonald’s death. And then she wondered if it was the shock that had humanized MacDonald, or freedom from an unhappy marriage. She had no time to give to the answer as the grip on her fingers had tightened convulsively.
MacDonald was beside the Major. He held the mask a little above the face that in sleep looked younger than fifty-four. Sleep youthened all faces but those of the very old. Death didn’t discriminate. Death youthened all faces. There was now more strength in the dreamer’s face, more strength in his pulse, more pink than blue in the colour of his skin. The blood fell more slowly through the glass drip-connection, and as could happen once the benefits of a transfusion became apparent, every drop seemed to add a drop more life to the sleeper. Blood, oxygen, morphia and the human will working together were formidable allies, but without the la
st the other three were often just temporary crutches.
He had replaced the mask and was looking down at the mass of white over the mutilated hip when he heard Briggs’s, ‘Oh, dear, nurse … coming on again … not hurting you, am I, nurse? … Oh dear … oh dear, dear, dear …’
Nurse Dean was eating a sandwich whilst she wrote, when MacDonald reappeared with Briggs’s notes in his hands. Nurse Carter had taken advantage of his solitary round to rush out to the kitchen, deposit a meal tray beside Nurse Dean and insist, ‘If you don’t eat now, nurse, you’ll never have time. Hope you don’t mind milk but I thought it would be quicker than tea and the fridge is afloat with the transfers’ rations.’
MacDonald said, ‘I’ve just been talking to Smith about ‒’
Nurse Dean broke in, impatiently, ‘She’s not playing up again?’
He frowned. ‘No. This was about Briggs. But did you know she’d got this doodle phobia? If so, why the devil didn’t you tell me earlier?’
One Night in London: a hospital in wartime (The Jason Trilogy Book 1) Page 14