Children's Ward

by Claire Rayner

  And as she made her way up to her own ward, Harriet thought bleakly, I wish I were as uncomplicated as Sally. But I’m not. And the possibility that Tod is Gregory’s child makes me care even more about what happens. I love Gregory enough to love his child – even another woman’s child – But she pushed the thought away, sickened suddenly by the vision that came unsought to her mind, a vision of a happy, Gregory, loving another woman, loving her more than Harriet, loving her enough to –

  The ward was buzzing with activity as she came through the door, children bumbling about in their usual way, nurses feeding toddlers with plates of porridge and scrambled eggs, the ward maid lackadaisically pushing cots about as she started the day’s cleaning. Harriet took the report from the tired night nurses, before sending them off to their breakfast and well earned sleep, and started her morning’s round of her patients. The gassed children were lively this morning, showing little evidence of the state they had been in the night before, and the oldest asked her eagerly if she could see her Mummy. Harriet ’phoned the women’s medical ward, and asked if the children could see their mother, and was told that the woman was much better this morning, and would be better still for the sight of her family. So the three children were wrapped in blankets, piled into one big wheelchair, and sent with a nurse to see their mother, bouncing joyously as they went, in imminent danger of tipping the chair and themselves down into a pile of kicking arms and legs.

  Harriet smiled as she saw them on their way, relieved for them that they had survived their experience so well, and turned back to the ward to see the rest of the children. The child who had had his operation the day before was doing well, though feeling a little weepy and irritable, and Harriet promised him that his parents would be coming to see him very soon. As she tucked the miserable little creature more comfortably into his blankets, she could see Tod across the ward, sitting as usual in the corner of his bed, watching the children in the ward with his usual disinterested stare. Almost furtively, almost against her will, she watched him, trying to see some resemblance to Gregory in him. Was that how Gregory held his head? How his eyes were set in his face? But even with her now firm belief that this child was Gregory’s son, she could see nothing of him in the small fair head, the wide blue eyes, and narrow face with its pointed chin.

  There was a squeal from some of the older children as old Nickie, the hospital’s elderly postman, came padding into the ward, his hands full of envelopes and parcels. The children clung to his knees, chattering excitedly, trying to pull the things from his gnarled old hands, and with his usual friendly grumbles, Nickie began to distribute his mail. Those children who could read grabbed their envelopes, and hurried off into corners to open their letters, and those who couldn’t tore open theirs as nurses came to read the contents to them. When all the children had at last accepted that there were no more for them, and those without letters at all had been comforted by the sweets the old man always carried for the disappointed ones, he came over to Harriet, where she was rearranging a bandage on the ear of a child who was doing his best to remove it, a large parcel still under his arm.

  ‘There’s one here I’m not sure about, Sister,’ he said, wheezing a little. ‘Delivered by hand and addressed to this ward clear enough, but it just says “Tod” on it. No last name. Who would that be, now?’

  Harriet, puzzled, put her hand out for the parcel, and Nickie gave it to her. It was neatly wrapped, and the label bore the sign of a big shop Harriet knew well, a shop in the main road near the hospital. It read ‘Tod, c/o Sister, Children’s Ward, Royal Hospital.’ And Harriet took it over to Tod’s bed, to sit with it beside him.

  ‘This is for you, Tod,’ she said gently. ‘Would you like to open it?’ but Tod just looked at it, and made no move.

  With a sigh, Harriet opened the parcel, and slowly began to pull out the contents.

  There was a pair of brown corduroy trousers, a neat red sweater, a woollen vest and underpants, and a pair of long brown socks. Under this, there was a brown duffel coat, and a yellow woollen cap with matching mittens, and a pair of red slippers, with cowboy hats embroidered all over them. A pair of red wellington boots completed the clothes, and tucked into one of them was a small blue toy car.

  There was nothing else. No letter, no card, nothing. Just the things, and the label on the wrapping. Harriet slowly began to dress Tod in the clothes, pulling the straps of the trousers up with a pin, for they were too long for the frail child, sending a nurse to get a needle and thread to make a more permanent alteration. Tod seemed uninterested, making no effort to stop her, but also not helping her to put them on. The slippers fitted well, and when she had dressed him, putting the coat, cap, mittens and boots in his empty locker, Harriet carried him to the pile of toys in the middle of the floor, sitting him down with the other children in the hope he would start playing with them. But he just sat, his legs thrust out in front of him, his face watchful.

  They suit him, she thought, these clothes. And they’re good ones. That’s an expensive shop – but who? –

  With a sudden thought, she left Tod, and tearing the label from the wrappings of the parcel, hurried to her office. With crisp movements, she dialled the number of the shop, and when they answered, asked for the manageress.

  Lying with a smooth facility that surprised her, she said glibly, ‘I’m so sorry to bother you – but there seems to have been some sort of mistake. A parcel arrived here this morning –’ she described the contents, and said then, ‘And this little boy doesn’t know who sent them! He’s the only one we have called Tod, but we wondered if there had been a mistake. May I ask if you can remember who bought them? The little boy’s family would like to know if they were meant for him so that they can say thank you –’

  The manageress seemed to be unsurprised, and went off to find the saleswoman who had arranged the sale, leaving Harriet clutching the ’phone with a cold hand. Maybe it was a relative, she thought with wild hope. Maybe someone does know he’s here, and just doesn’t want to claim him – but still wants to see he’s properly equipped –

  The voice of the saleswoman came clacking tinnily through the ’phone.

  ‘Hello, Madam? You were asking about some clothes that I sold?’

  Again Harriet described them, told the same lie about the child’s parents, and the saleswoman seemed to accept her lies.

  ‘Yes, I remember the sale quite well. Yesterday it was, just before we closed – it was a man bought them. He didn’t seem to know the size – said the boy was about five or thereabouts. I hope the things fit all right?’

  ‘They fit,’ Harriet said quickly. ‘Look, could you describe this man – then I can tell the child’s parents –’ And with a great deal of careful attention to detail, the voice described Gregory, faithfully, even remembering his voice.

  ‘A very nice man, he was,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Money no object, you know – wanted the best. Nice of him, wasn’t it? I hope the parents like the things –’

  ‘Yes – thank you,’ Harriet said mechanically, and put the ’phone down as the saleswoman burbled on. She had known, really, she told herself dully. It had been mad to hope that it had been otherwise. Gregory had bought these clothes for Tod, had gone out at the end of a long day’s work expressly to equip a child he swore he had never seen before in his life –

  ‘Dr Bennett’s here, Sister,’ a nurse’s voice brought her up sharply and Harriet hurried out of her office, pulling her cuffs straight on her sleeves as she went.

  Dr Bennett was standing beside the group of children in the middle of the floor, a tall man beside him, both of them looking down at Tod’s still little body, an oasis of silence in the middle of the noisy group of children.

  ‘Good morning, Sister.’ He greeted her with a cheerful smile. ‘This is Dr Jeffcoate, Psychiatrist, you know. He’s come from the University to see our little mystery. I thought perhaps he’d succeed where we failed –’

  The tall man nodded at Harriet, and said, �
��I’d like to examine this child –’ and Harriet picked the unresisting Tod up, and led the way back to her office. She sat Tod on her desk, and the two men stood and looked at him, while Tod looked silently back.

  Crisply, Dr Jeffcoate began to ask questions of Harriet, about Tod’s behaviour, the way he ate, moved, slept, and with equal crispness, Harriet answered him. She described the one occasion when Tod had seemed to respond to her, when he had slept on her lap after she had sung to him, described it in some detail. But she said nothing of what had happened the previous day.

  ‘And he has never spoken,’ Dr Jeffcoate said, watching Tod.

  ‘No,’ Harriet said in a low voice, almost sickened by her own lie. But she couldn’t do it – couldn’t possibly tell them of Gregory and Tod’s recognition of him. That was something she would still have to work out for herself.

  Swiftly, Dr Jeffcoate began to make a detailed neurological examination of Tod, pushing the things on Harriet’s desk out of the way, and pillowing the child’s head on the cushion from her chair, brusquely refusing her offer of the dressing cubicle.

  ‘I can manage here,’ he said, and put out an imperious hand for an ophthalmoscope, bending to peer intently through it at Tod’s blue eyes, while Tod just lay on the desk, unresponsive as ever.

  Dr Bennett and Harriet watched in silence, and at last, the psychiatrist straightened, and stood looking down at Tod.

  ‘This may be a long job,’ he said at length. ‘What-ever has happened to this child has been clearly catastrophic as far as he is concerned. It will take considerable testing and observation before I could hazard a guess at his condition or prognosis.’

  Dr Bennett said quickly, ‘We can’t keep him here for much longer, Jeffcoate. Quite apart from anything else, this is a general hospital – we haven’t the facilities –’

  ‘I realise that,’ Dr Jeffcoate said. ‘I could perhaps get him a place at one of the homes I visit. And as he’s a ward of court, there’ll be no problems about parental consent, of course –’

  ‘Sir,’ Harriet’s voice sounded a little cracked as she moved forwards to stand protectively beside Tod. ‘Sir – may I make a suggestion?’

  Dr Jeffcoate peered sharply at her under bushy eyebrows, and Dr Bennett, one eyebrow raised interrogatively, looked at her with a trace of irritation in his face.

  ‘Well, Sister? I’ve told you already we can’t keep him here, however attached you may have become to him –’

  Beseechingly, Harriet said. ‘But – look, sir. The police found him near this hospital. He’s too small to have wandered all that far from wherever he lived. Couldn’t – couldn’t I try to find his home? Just give me a little time, sir, before you move him to somewhere else. Please?’

  ‘How do you propose to find his home?’ Dr Jeffcoate asked dryly. ‘I gather the police have failed – how do you think you can succeed if they can’t? Or have you some information we and they haven’t?’

  Harriet pushed her guilty memory of Tod’s behaviour yesterday away, and said eagerly, ‘But even so, sir, no one’s tried to use Tod to find out. Suppose – suppose he actually saw his home? Wouldn’t he recognise it?’ Of course he will, her mind said. He recognised Gregory –

  ‘It’s possible,’ Dr Jeffcoate said. ‘Remotely possible –’

  ‘Let me try, sir,’ Harriet said. ‘Let me take him out – let me just walk him around the district and watch what happens. I know the area very well sir – I’ve made a point of getting to know it – and perhaps, if I’m lucky enough, I’ll find a place he knows. Then – then perhaps we’ll be able to discover who he belongs to –’

  There was a long silence, Dr Bennett standing still, his face showing nothing, Dr Jeffcoate thinking carefully.

  Then, Dr Jeffcoate said, ‘It will be a couple of weeks before I can arrange a vacancy in a home anyway. If you’re happy about the idea, Bennett, I see no harm in it. It’ll get the child out of the ward and that won’t do him any harm, and there’s always the possibility that Sister here is right. He could perhaps be made to respond in an environment he remembers. And once he does, of course, the problem is solved. These acute conditions rarely require intensive psychiatric treatment once the initial block is broken down.’

  Harriet turned and looked at Dr Bennett, her eyes pleading with him. ‘Please?’ she breathed. ‘Please, sir?’

  Dr Bennett cleared his throat harshly, and said, ‘Oh, all right, Sister. If you can find the time, and Jeffcoate is sure it will do no harm, what can I say? We can block a bed for a couple of weeks, I suppose. As it’s summer, and we don’t get quite so many emergency demands for beds this time of the year. But just two weeks, mind.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Bennett,’ Harriet smiled brilliantly at him, and picking Tod up, held the small body close, looking at the two men over the narrow shoulders. ‘If I can just try –’

  Dr Jeffcoate smiled suddenly, his face lifting out of its grim lines. ‘He’s a lucky child, Sister. At least he’s got someone to care for him. And he needs that.’

  And Harriet held Tod close, and said, ‘Yes. I care for him.’ She rubbed her cheeks against his smooth fair head. ‘I care for him.’

  Chapter Ten

  Harriet spread the map on her bedroom floor, and fixed the corners firmly with books. Then she sat back on her heels, and looked at it.

  ‘See, Sally? If I use the hospital as a central point, and draw circles out from it, then I can map out exactly which areas to cover each time we go out. And if I really study it, then there’ll be no danger of missing a single street.’

  Sally, lying on her front on Harriet’s bed, her fair hair flopping over her face as she twisted her head to see the map the right way up, sighed, and said, ‘I still think it’s crazy. This hospital’s in the middle of one of the most tightly packed areas of London, and you think you can cover on foot every possible place this kid could have come from. And anyway, you’ve no proof he even lived anywhere near here.’

  Patiently, Harriet went over her reasoning, point by point. ‘He’s too small to have travelled far on foot. It is more than unlikely that any bus conductor would have let him ride on a bus by himself – even if he’d had the fare, which is equally unlikely. If he even managed to travel on the underground, why should he have chosen to come to this particular area? I know he was found near the underground station, but that was just a coincidence –’

  ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that it’s a pretty wild coincidence that he should have turned up here in the first place? I mean, if Gregory is related to him –’

  ‘I know,’ Harriet said brusquely. ‘But maybe it isn’t such a coincidence after all. I mean, if Gregory – knows – the child’s mother, there’d be every reason for – for her to live near where he works –’

  ‘Poor old Harriet,’ Sally said softly. ‘This is cutting you to ribbons, isn’t it?’

  ‘Can’t be helped,’ Harriet said, and bent her head to her map again.

  And indeed, every way she turned, the situation seemed loaded with pain for her. Convinced as she was that Tod was Gregory’s son, she had been forced to face the fact that somewhere there was a girl who belonged to Gregory, belonged to him in a way she longed to belong herself. Bleakly she felt that whatever happened, even if by some miracle she and Gregory ever did build together the life she wanted, it would always be shadowed for her by the memory of this other girl. Not that it looked as though there would ever be a future now.

  ‘He’s leaving, you know,’ Harriet said suddenly.

  Sally raised her head sharply. ‘Leaving? Gregory?’

  ‘So he said,’ Harriet still didn’t look up.

  ‘But – he can’t be,’ Sally said. ‘He’s been offered the junior consultancy in urology –’

  ‘What?’ Harriet did look up now, her face blank with surprise.

  ‘They were talking in theatre this morning,’ Sally explained. ‘Old Peter Leeman is retiring this autumn – and Sir David told him that Gregory had been accepted by t
he Board to replace him. He didn’t tell you?’

  Harriet shook her head. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Yesterday, as far as I know. Look, it’s quite possible Gregory doesn’t know himself yet. The Board only met last week, and you know how long it takes them to publish their mighty ponderings. I shouldn’t have heard it myself – but I always eavesdrop on the surgeons’ room. I can hear every word from my office, and I make sure I always do! It could be that they won’t announce their decision till Founder’s Day, next month – old Sir David likes to bring a bit of pomp and circumstance into things, and it’d be just like him to announce the new appointment then.’

  ‘Maybe he won’t leave, then,’ Harriet said slowly. ‘It’s quite a thing to get an appointment like that – not even Gregory could turn it down – just because of me.’

  ‘Who knows? If he’s as mixed up with his private life as he seems to be, maybe he’ll be forced to give the job a miss. Face it, Harriet, for God’s sake! He’s supposed to be in love with you, yet it seems he’s got a family of some sort already – in a mess like that, the only thing to do is cut and run. Quite honestly, love, it’d be best for you if he did leave. Give you a chance to get over him, hmm?’ but Sally didn’t sound too hopeful, and was forced to reply with a grin to Harriet s own rueful grimace.

  ‘Sure,’ Harriet said wryly. ‘Gregory goes away and whoosh! All gone nasty miseries! Harriet’s the same old Harriet again! I wish it were as easy as that.’

  Sally wisely left it there. There was little point in trying again to change Harriet’s point of view. And as Sally herself had realised, the day she had found Harriet weeping so bitterly over the little porcelain girl, somehow this love affair was meant to be. For all her practicality, Sally was aware of the inevitableness of it, the very real mutual attraction that pulled these two people together so powerfully.

  So she made a pot of coffee, and sat quietly drinking hers while Harriet made a rough drawing of the area she meant to cover with Tod the next day, the first half day she had been able to arrange since Dr Bennett had given her permission to take Tod looking for a place he might remember.