Children's Ward

by Claire Rayner

  Paul, much to her relief, had seemed to accept her loss – if that was how he regarded it – with equanimity. Although he had made no regular attachment with another girl, he was as socially active as ever, appearing at the doctors’ mess parties with a different nurse or sister each time, racketing around the hospital in his old insouciant way, greeting Harriet when they met with a casual friendliness that deceived everyone, including Harriet. Only Sally and Stephen knew that his hurt was still there, still very real, though Sally, with unusual taciturnity, said nothing to Harriet about this; she felt, wisely, that it would do no good for Harriet to know of the occasions when Paul burst out bitterly against Gregory to Sally and Stephen, that Harriet had enough to cope with without having to worry about Paul.

  Harriet spent a fortnight’s holiday in Devonshire, early in April, with her sister and brother-in-law and their delightful children, grateful for the respite in one way, impatient to return to the hospital and Gregory in another.

  Sybil, at thirty-three already very matronly, was a little worried at the change in Harriet, perturbed by the way she had seemed to fine down, the way her skin had developed the translucence of thinness, even though the change suited her. Harriet, as Sybil told her husband privately one night, must be in love – really in love. She had become more than just the pretty girl she had always been, had developed a remote beauty that was startling in its delicacy.

  But in spite of the closeness of the sisters, a closeness that had developed since the death of their parents many years earlier, Sybil couldn’t discover with whom Harriet might be in love, and she had the good sense not to probe.

  On the last day of Harriet’s holiday, however, as they packed her bags in the middle of the hubbub five children under six can raise when they really try, she did tell Harriet to remember that the Vicarage was her home, and would be as long as she wanted it to be.

  ‘We’ll always be here, Hattie,’ Sybil said, using the childish nickname. ‘If ever you need us, or you’ve got any problems, remember that, won’t you? And it isn’t only me – Edward is as attached to you as I am. So if you need us, or if you’ve got any – difficulties – give a shout. We’ll be listening for it.’

  Harriet hugged Sybil’s plump figure, and clung to her for a moment before thanking her, and promising to remember.

  ‘I don’t know myself how things are going to be with me, Sybil, but as soon as I do know, I’ll tell you. Bless you for being so understanding. Not one question – and I know you’ve got lots!’ and they laughed together, and Harriet went back to London and the Royal with a warm feeling inside that whatever else happened, Sybil and Edward and their fat babies would always be around to be loved and to love in return.

  Gregory met her at the station, his eyes kindling with pleasure at the sight of her head thrust out of the carriage window as the train ground into the huge terminus. And she, in her turn, felt the familiar lurch inside at the first sight of his lean body and grizzled head, a feeling complicated a little by a sudden rush of tenderness. He looked so lonely, standing there against the garish colours of an advertisement hoarding, his rather shabby overcoat hunched round his thin shoulders.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said, as he picked up her two cases, and walked beside her to the barrier.

  ‘And I you,’ she replied, looking up at him, smiling, love in her eyes as naked as a child’s. And that was all they did say on a personal level, talking desultorily of hospital doings as they drove back to the hospital, though beneath their casual chatter both were almost painfully aware of the other’s physical proximity.

  She went on duty next morning with real pleasure, looking forward to the rush of work that was the only thing that really kept her going. It had been the lack of mental preoccupation that had been the hardest thing to bear about her holiday, though she had benefited in a physical way from it, looking more rested than she had for months. Her uniform felt stiff and strange, even after only two weeks out of it, and she stretched her neck against the grip of her starched collar with a sort of masochistic pleasure in the stiffness of it.

  Later, at ten o’clock, she was tube feeding a baby in the far isolation cubicle, a two week old scrap of a creature whose hold on life was pathetically precarious. As she manipulated the fine red tube, watched the milk formula drip through the glass connection, all that made her a children’s ward sister came bubbling up in her. Nothing she felt, could ever be as rewarding as this, this struggle to care for these children. If they survived – and she was grimly determined that this one certainly would – they would grow up never knowing anything about the woman who had helped to make their lives possible, and for Harriet, this was one of the joys of nursing children. She had always found the gratitude of adult patients she had nursed somehow distasteful. She did her job because she loved it, and to be treated by a patient as though she were a sort of angel of mercy, as many adults did, embarrassed her, took some of the bloom from her pleasure in her job.

  As she finished the task, and checked the incubator for temperature and oxygen flow, one of the nurses tapped on the glass partition, and nodded. Harriet came out, leaving the baby to digest its feed and go on with the slow process of healing. She hung her gown outside and as she washed her hands in the basin on the barrier nursing table, the nurse told her of a new admission on his way up.

  ‘It’s a bit of an oddity, Sister,’ the nurse said. ‘Casualty sister said the police brought him in. He’s about five or so, she thinks, but he won’t talk – so they don’t even know his name. She says the police have no idea who he is – found him wandering around somewhere, and brought him here.’

  Harriet dried her hands, and sighed a little. ‘These police really are a bit much,’ she said crossly. ‘They treat this hospital as a clearing house for all their problems –’

  The nurse grinned. ‘It’s a true bill this time, Sister. I mean, there is something wrong with the child,’ she peered at the scrap of paper in her hand on which she had made a few notes as she had spoken to Casualty sister on the telephone. ‘He’s got some injuries – a few abrasions, a huge bruise on one hip, and query a fracture of a bone in his foot – they’re waiting for an X-ray report on that. Sister says she thinks he might have been hurt in a road accident or something –’

  ‘Hmm,’ Harriet made her way through the ward. ‘All right, nurse. Put him in bed seven, will you? At five, he’s a bit big for a cot, I imagine. I’ve got to take Casey’s stitches out, and then I’ll come and see our little mystery. Not that he’ll be a mystery for long. They never are. There’ll be an agitated parent rushing in any minute, I daresay.’

  When she brought the little Jamaican boy back from the dressing cubicle, his appendix wound now minus its stitches, and tucked him back into his cot, a piece of chocolate in his hand because he had ‘been such a good boy and hadn’t made a fuss,’ Harriet turned to bed seven.

  At the sight of the child who sat on it, pressed against the white painted iron bars at the head, his knees drawn up, his head down in a classically defensive pose, Harriet’s heart twisted with pity. He looked so bereft, so lost, so utterly bewildered in this strange huge room full of oddly dressed people and rows of beds and cots. She picked up a toy from the bottom of Casey’s cot, which didn’t disturb that small brown child in the least, so plentifully did his adoring parents supply him with toys, and went to sit at the edge of bed seven.

  He was small, with fine bones only lightly covered with flesh, and the delicate blueish skin of the very fair. His hair was the colour of spun barley sugar, and lay on his head in a smooth cap that was grimy now with dust and a patch of oil. He had huge blue eyes, the pale china blue that so often goes with very fair hair, and startlingly dark brown lashes, lashes that curled at the edge to a fringe of gold, glinting in the morning sunlight. His face was pointed, the chin held rigid now in an effort to keep his soft mouth firmly closed, and he stared at Harriet with suspicious eyes, trying to shrink into an even smaller ball, pulling back against the bars
at the head of the bed as though he would have gone right through them if he could.

  ‘Hello,’ Harriet said softly.

  He sat quite still, never taking his unwinking eyes from her face, making no sign that he had heard her at all.

  Gently, Harriet put the little toy engine she was holding in front of him, and for a moment, he looked down at it. Then, seeming to dismiss it as an irrelevance, he raised his eyes to her face again and ignored the engine.

  ‘What’s your name, lovey?’ Harriet asked softly. Still no response, just that unwinking stare. He might be deaf, Harriet thought. I’ve seen just this look on the face of a deaf child before now. Surreptitiously, she dropped her hand below the level of the side of the bed, and watching him carefully, snapped her fingers with a sharp crack. The child’s eyes shifted briefly towards the sound, then returned to her face. Not deaf then.

  She tried another ploy. From her top pocket she pulled a small chocolate bar – for she always carried some, knowing how few children could resist sweet things. She held it out to him, but after a brief glance at it, he ignored it. She took the silver paper off, holding it out again, invitingly, but though he looked longer at the rich brown of the chocolate, he refused to be tempted. So Harriet dropped it onto the bed, and with a smile, stood up. She crossed the ward to stand at the table in the centre, ostensibly busying herself with an injection tray, but watching him covertly from under her lashes. After a while the child stirred a little, looked sharply at her bent and apparently absorbed head, and then picked up the chocolate. For a moment he peered around with the cunning suspicion of a marauding cat, and when he was sure no one was looking at him wolfed the chocolate with a voracious hunger that wrung Harriet’s heart with pity. He’s starving, poor little devil, she thought. Who on earth could let a child get as hungry as that?

  With apparent casualness, she returned to him, sitting again on the edge of the bed, saddened by his immediate shrinking into his corner again.

  ‘Let’s play a game, shall we?’ she said. ‘I’ll try to guess your name, and if I get it right, you shall have lots and lots of chocolate – piles and piles of it, all you can eat. Shall we?’

  Still he made no response, but Harriet persisted.

  ‘Andrew? Adam? Barry? Billy? Charles? Craig? –’ Working through the alphabet, she said name after name, trying desperately to remember the sort of names that had been fashionable to give little boys about five years ago, the sort of name he might be expected to have. But it was useless. He showed no sign of recognition at any name, not for a moment giving that faint flicker that Harriet was watching for so closely, that slight movement of muscle that she knew would show his recognition of familiar syllables.

  From behind her, a voice said, ‘Hello, Sister. Trying to solve our little mystery, are you?’

  She got to her feet. ‘Good morning, Dr Bennett,’ she said formally, and the senior paediatrician smiled down at her from his considerable height, and said, ‘Glad to see you back. Had a good holiday?’

  ‘Very pleasant, thank you sir,’ she said, and they moved away to the centre of the ward, where Dr Bennett perched himself against the table, and swung a long leg idly as he looked across at the child in bed seven. ‘Casualty told me about this child. Very odd altogether.’

  ‘The police brought him in?’

  ‘Mmm. But not before they had tried very hard to find his people. I don’t know the details – apparently there’s a policewoman on her way up from Casualty to see me about him. I told them I’d be here in a few minutes, so they said –’

  The double doors swung, and a fair girl in the neat blue uniform of a woman police constable came down the ward, her heavy shoes clacking noisily on the wooden floor.

  Dr Bennett stood up, and nodded at her, and the policewoman smiled back, pulling her notebook from her pocket.

  ‘They told me you were the best person to talk to about this child, sir,’ she said. ‘We picked him up at six o’clock last night, down at the market –’

  ‘The market?’ Dr Bennett interrupted.

  ‘Street market, sir, at the corner of High Road and Jefferson Street.’

  ‘Not far from the underground station,’ Harriet said. ‘I know it. Mostly fruit and vegetables, and a couple of gimcrack stalls and old clothes stalls –’

  That’s it, Sister. Well, we got a call. This child had taken some fruit from one of the stalls, and the stall-holder had caught him. And when he couldn’t get any sense out of him, he called us – it’s as well he did. Well, we couldn’t find out who he was, and the station sergeant said seeing no one had reported a missing child, and he looked a bit small just to be wandering on his own, we’d better put out a search for his people. We tried all evening, put him in a bed at the station, and waited for someone to claim him. Well, sir, no one did – and that’s really odd. We’ve never had a child of this age so long without someone reporting him missing.’

  ‘Quite.’ Dr Bennett frowned. ‘Six o’clock last night, you say? Hasn’t he said anything at all since then?’

  ‘Not a word, sir. Wouldn’t eat, either, though we tried all we could to make him – anyway, he slept all right, and this morning we put out an all stations call to check on missing kids. He’s not been reported anywhere, it seems, and we’ve covered the area very carefully. They’re checking outside London now. Well, sir, this morning, I thought the kid ought to –’ she blushed suddenly. ‘Well, sir, he hadn’t been to the lavatory since we got him to the station, sir, and we haven’t any kids’ clothes if there’s any accident, so I took him. He fought like a mad thing –’ and she held out a scratched hand ruefully. ‘But I managed to get his pants off, sir, and sit him on the lav – the toilet. And then I saw the bruise. So we thought we’d better bring him here.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Dr Bennett nodded. ‘As well you did, constable. He’s got several abrasions, and a badly bruised foot. They had some trouble trying to X-ray him, I gather, so I don’t suppose the films’ll show much – but it seems possible he’s fractured a metatarsal. We’ll get the orthopods to have a look at that. In the meantime, we’ll keep him in, and try our best to get him to talk to us. If you hear from his people, you’ll notify us, of course –’

  The policewoman, clearly relieved at being rid of her burden, took herself off, and Harriet and Dr Bennett returned to the child’s bedside.

  He had made no move at all, still sitting crouched against the head of the bed, his eyes staring around him with a lack lustre look that was pathetic in its emptiness. Dr Bennett tried to persuade the child to talk, but after ten minutes of gentle urging, he sighed and stood up.

  ‘Completely withdrawn, Sister,’ he said. ‘No contact at all, is there? Look, treat those abrasions in the usual way, watch him for any signs of other disease – it’s possible he was in an accident and those abrasions certainly look as though they were the result of a bad tumble which might have inflicted some internal injury, and I’ll get the orthopods to see his foot. He’s all yours, Sister. Perhaps when he’s been here a while you’ll be able to make some contact with him. Offer him some loving – you know the sort of thing I mean – and try to get him to talk. And see the night staff observe him carefully. Children who refuse to talk while they’re awake sometimes talk in their sleep. Right?’

  Harriet nodded, then suddenly she said, ‘We’ll have to call him something, sir. We can’t just say “you” all the time, can we? Not very loving –’

  Dr Bennett looked down at the silent child, and sighed sharply. ‘Yes –’ then he smiled a little grimly. ‘He’s come to us out of the blue, Sister – a gift from the gods, if you like. Call him Theodore, hmm? The gift of God.’

  Harriet smiled too. ‘A shade – stiff, sir?’ she ventured. ‘Could we shorten that perhaps? Tod, say?’

  Dr Bennett laughed, and nodded. ‘You are quite right, my dear. Tod it is. Nice and simple. It’ll do till we find out what it really should be. I hope it won’t be long before we do –’

  And after he had gone,
Harriet stood at the door, looking down the ward at the slight little boy in bed seven, and silently agreed with him. No one should be as unhappy, as lost, as abandoned, as this pale fair scrap of a child. Tod, she thought. An anonymous sounding syllable for an anonymous child. I hope someone claims him, soon.

  Chapter Seven

  But no one did. The police checked with every station in the country, but Tod fitted none of the descriptions of such children as were missing. The aid of newspapers and television was sought and Tod’s thin little face stared out from front pages, from television screens, and still no one came to say they knew him, let alone claim him.

  A special court was convened in the hospital, and Tod was solemnly described as an infant in need of care and protection, and put under the impersonal guardianship of the State.

  ‘It’s all we can do, Sister.’ Dr Bennett told Harriet, afterwards. ‘This way, we can at least treat him properly – if he needs surgery for example – which he doesn’t as it happens – we’ll be able to perform an operation with the Court’s consent. But it’s an odd business. I’d have thought someone somewhere would have recognised his photograph –’

  ‘What will happen to him?’ Harriet asked practically.

  Dr Bennett shrugged. ‘We’ll get him physically fit, first, of course. Then I suppose we’ll have to get the trick-cyclist on to his mental condition.’ Dr Bennett had all the old fashioned physician’s fine scorn of psychiatrists. ‘This refusal to speak could be the result of a traumatic experience – the accident, whatever it was, that gave him those injuries – or it could be a form of juvenile amnesia. I’m not much up on this sort of thing, quite honestly.’

  ‘Then we’ll keep him here?.’ Harriet persisted.

  ‘Not for long, Sister. I suppose they’ll find a vacancy in some institution for him – one for the mentally handicapped perhaps –’