by Mary Renault
She thought that he was dozing, till he said, slowly, “You set an almost mystical value on life here, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. It’s just our job.”
“Almost as if it were an end, instead of a means.”
“Well, it’s the only thing we’ve expert knowledge of, and that not much. Probably it’s better we shouldn’t meddle outside.”
“Mic Freeborn has ideas about life too—you know him?”
“A little.”
“My own are different, I think.”
Colonna missed the last sentence. She had been listening to a step approaching along the flagged passage between the wards.
“I think,” she said, “this is Vivian coming to see you.”
“Yes, I promised I’d see Vivian.”
“I’m afraid she mustn’t stay very long, tonight.”
“No. She’s on duty, isn’t she?”
“Well, yes, and—”
“Besides, she’s not very fit. People find these interviews upsetting.”
“How can you”—Colonna’s mental uniform suddenly fell from her—“talk like this, as if you were discussing someone else?”
“I am. This mess under the sheet, I can’t even feel it, you know.”
The outer door of the ward swung to, and closed again. Colonna slipped out, and met Vivian in the passage. She only said, “Will he know me?”
“Oh, yes. The transfusion made a lot of difference.”
She said, in a perfectly level voice, “Rosenbaum shouldn’t have done that to him.”
Colonna moved back towards the door, and stopped. “I’m supposed not to leave him,” she said. “I’m going into the other side-ward. Just see that he keeps still. I shall hear if you want me.”
“Thank you, Colonna.” She went in.
The man in the other side-ward was asleep. A convalescent, he needed no lamp at night, and would probably wake if she switched it on. She sat there in the dark, near the open door, where she could hear if Pratt or the Night Sister were coming.
The door of the next side-ward was ajar too, so she could hear, through it, the desultory murmur of their voices, broken with silences. The man in the bed beside her snored a little; the rhythmic sound wove itself into the pauses, becoming less and less audible as her accustomed ears ignored it. After five minutes or so he turned over on his side, and the noise stopped. The place was very quiet, so that once, when they raised their voices above a whisper, she heard what they said.
“Don’t, Jan. You know it was all through me, from the beginning.”
“You? No. We just lived it.”
“But if I hadn’t—”
“This didn’t happen; it was, always. Mic knows. Or he will, when he has time.”
“Time? Mic will never … I’ve taken everything from Mic now. Everything he ever had.”
“Oh, no. He isn’t a person to whom that can be done.”
I ought to turn her out, Colonna thought mechanically. Talking to an ill patient like that. She got to her feet without noticing, stood for a moment, and sat down again. Their voices sank lower, and she did not hear any more.
The half-hour was nearly over when she heard Pratt coming down the main ward. There was no sound from the other room. She slipped from her place and knocked softly. It was Jan who said “Come in.”
“I’m sorry. But nurse is doing a round.”
“She’ll tell me to go,” Vivian said. Colonna could tell from her voice that she had been weeping. There was a pressed-down place on the sheet where her face had been.
“Go by yourself,” he said. “It feels better. You’ll be all right when you start working again.”
It had taken a great deal out of him. Colonna wondered what Pratt would say.
Vivian got up. “Yes,” she said dully; then, recalling something, “Jan, Mic’s down in Casualty. Someone said he wanted to come and see you, but they wouldn’t let him.”
“Why on earth not?”
“He’s not a relative, you see.”
“But—” he was speaking with much more effort now,” no one told me. Wouldn’t they have—asked me if I wanted him?”
“You see,” Colonna explained, “it’s only relatives when—as a rule. But perhaps if I said you’d asked for him—”
“Would they?” His face altered for a moment, then, was quiet again. “No. Mic’s had enough. There’s no point, we’ve done all that. Tell them to—give him something to make him sleep.”
They heard Pratt’s footsteps passing from the ward into the passage.
“You’d better be going,” he said.
She stood, her will helpless, her hand on the black iron foot of the bed.
“Jan, I wish I could have”
“I’m glad you came. It was good to speak the truth for a minute. Everything’s all right, Vivian. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.” She turned away quickly and went out.
“That’s right, Nurse,” said Pratt in the corridor. “Better not stay too long tonight. You’ll be able to look in again tomorrow when you come off duty.”
Colonna took her patient’s pulse—she had a good deal of difficulty in counting it—and marked up the chart.
“Well,” said Jan, “I think that’s everything.” He shut his eyes. She thought his consciousness was slipping; but realised, after a time, that he was asleep.
Colonna sat with her hands folded over the notebook in front of her, absorbed in the newness of her own thoughts.
At four o’clock the probationer brought her in a tray of tea. She managed the crockery without noise, but suddenly, his voice quite wakeful, he said, “Wouldn’t you rather be having it with the others? This is very dull for you. Have you been sitting here all this time?”
“Yes, but it’s all right. Just routine.”
“I don’t like to think I’m wasting your time like this. Can you sleep if you want to?”
“Well, no, hardly. Would you like a cup of tea? I’ve lots here.”
She filled the feeding-up and helped him to drink. When she had finished her own meal he said, more diffidently than he had spoken before, “I wonder if you’d mind doing something for me?”
Mistaking the reason for his hesitation, she said, “Of course not. That’s what I’m here for.”
“You’ve been awfully good. But I feel, now, that I’d rather like to be by myself for a little while. Do you mind?”
“But I—” As she spoke he turned his face a little to look at her. She could see that he was wondering whether she would think him discourteous, not whether she would refuse. That had not occurred to him. She was suddenly unable to finish what she had begun to say.
He added, as an afterthought, “You can tell the Sister that I said it would be all right.”
She rose to her feet, still silent. She could have found an answer to most things, but not to this native unnoticed arrogance. It unnerved her to see the security of a lifetime poised so carelessly within reach of her overturning hand. “Well,” she said, slowly, “you see—”
“It isn’t for that. That wouldn’t be fair to you.”
She had no idea what he meant, but could not say so. There was a silence.
“There’s something I want to remember. So would you—as there isn’t much time? You’ve been so sweet about everything.” He smiled deliberately, into her eyes.
Suddenly she thought, with unbearable certainty, this is the first time he has needed to coax a woman. “Yes,” she said; “of course, that’s perfectly …” Unable to finish, she went outside and hid herself in the darkness of the next ward. It was a good many years, it occurred to her, since she had cried about anything except her own disappointments and desires.
She had ceased for a little while to listen to the sounds that went on round her, even the instinctive watchfulness of her work suspended. The arrival of Pratt, on her next round, took her entirely by surprise. The first thing she was aware of was the dazzle of a torch across her eyes. She jumped up from the
stool she had been sitting on, out of its range.
“Nurse Kimball!” The convalescent was still asleep; Pratt’s sense of outrage could only vent itself in a hiss, like compressed steam. “Whatever are you doing here? Why aren’t you with your patient?”
“I know perfectly well what I’m doing, thank you, Pratt. I specialled cases long before you.” Attack was the only form of defence in which Colonna was practised. She was wondering if her face showed, and if Pratt had noticed it. “I went out because he asked me to. I can hear him quite well from here.”
“Hear him!” It took Pratt a moment or two to recover even such voice as the situation allowed. “You can hear if he haemorrhages, I suppose! Are you absolutely out of your senses, Kimball? To leave a patient because he asks you to—a patient in that condition!”
“He knows his condition. That’s why he asked to be left alone.”
“What did you say to him?” The increased pressure behind Pratt’s whisper raised it nearly an octave.
“Nothing, you fool!” The blindness of mounting anger was, on the whole, a relief. Against the dim light of the doorway Pratt’s cap, shoulders and elbows stuck out at rigid angles. Colonna added, viciously, “If you’re incapable of following adult mental processes I’m sorry; but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
The outline of Pratt’s cap quivered. “Next time Sister comes round,” she said, “I shall tell her I can’t be responsible for running this ward unless she sends me someone more competent.”
Colonna drew a long breath. The tears were drying quickly on her flushed face. “You’ve got a bloody nerve, Pratt, to think you can speak to me like that.” Her voice rose from a whisper to an undertone. The sleeping man grunted and turned over noisily in bed. She moved out towards the doorway, pouring a shrill sibilance as she went. “Competent my foot. You’re as much use on a ward yourself as a hen with its head cut off, and you know damned well it’s only a fluke you’re not doing second to me.”
They stopped, a little shaken. A preceding fortnight of underground hostilities made the surface explosion more, rather than less, devastating. They had said these things to one another by hints and implications a dozen times; so that open directness became shocking, like the sudden use of a prohibited weapon in war. The mattress behind creaked as the patient rolled over in search of the more comfortable position he had left. Pratt edged out after Colonna. Her starched apron-bib creaked audibly with the spasmodic rise and fall of her chest.
“Everyone knows Matron wouldn’t give you a ward because she thought you weren’t fit to look after one. And I’m not surprised.”
“Anyhow”—Colonna’s half-controlled voice slipped on and off the vocal tones—“I’d sooner have you as first than second. I have to run everything in any case, and at least the cleaning gets done.”
“How—how dare you speak to me like that when I’m in charge?” Pratt had reached the verge of hysteria, but the darkness supported her. “I shall go to Matron first thing in the morning. I shall give in my notice if you’re not moved. I’ve never been spoken to like it in my life and I—”
“Oh, shut it, you’s,” murmured the patient, imperfectly awake. The noise had made him dream of his domestic troubles. Still muttering, he lifted the top pillow and bumped it down over his ears.
Pratt backed out into the passage. “You’ll have the whole ward awake in a minute,” she whispered, very softly.
“You were talking,” breathed Colonna. They found they had neither of them, at the moment, anything else to say, and tried to conceal from one another their feelings of foolishness and dejection.
“Well,” said Pratt, by way of a rearguard action, “you’d better get back to your patient, Nurse. His father can’t be here till nearly midday tomorrow. And you know what Sister said.”
“Oh, anything,” said Colonna sullenly. There was a heaviness in her like a dull pain. She did not realise, till she turned to go in, how near they had both been, at the end, to the open door. He was looking at her as she closed it.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, “to have got you into trouble.” Afterwards the humour of this seemed to strike him, for he turned his head away and she saw him smile.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “for everything. I’m going to sit very quietly in that corner and soon you’ll forget I’m there.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She perceived, now, a flat gentleness in his voice that hurt her more than her own sensations. Something had gone out of it. “Nothing would come, anyway. I ought not to have expected it.”
“Perhaps if you were to sleep again.”
“There’ll be time for that.”
She took his pulse—more even, but weaker than before—entered it, and went over to her chair.
“There’s something else,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I shouldn’t have overheard. But was anything said about my father coming here?”
“Yes. He’s coming to see you tomorrow morning.”
“Vivian didn’t tell me she’d asked him to come.”
“It was the hospital. They—often do, you know. They’d have his address on her records, I expect.”
“Why haven’t I been told?”
“Well …” Her voice trailed away. She had become so used to his quiet that she took it for granted, thinking, if she thought at all, that his weakness enforced it. This clipped hardness seemed to belong to someone else; though, in fact, Jan in his travels had not always been able to rely on charm to get what he required.
“Tell them at once, please, that I don’t want the message sent.”
“I think it’s gone.” She knew that it had; but so effectively had he imposed his illusion of authority that it was fear, not kindness or caution, that kept her from saying so.
“Gone? Do you suppose these people realise that I’m of age?”
“You were too ill to be worried. They just assumed you’d want to see him, I suppose.”
“Why the hell should they assume anything of the kind?”
“Keep him quiet,” said Colonna’s two years of training. Not that he had spoken loudly; she knew that it would have used less effort if he had. Her voice, in habit-formed reaction, grew mild and maternal.
“Sister will be talking to him, you know, before he comes in here. Perhaps, if you’ve quarrelled, she could say something first that would help.”
“Quarrelled?” He said it with a kind of dubious astonishment, like someone savouring a new joke in very bad taste; and fell silent, either in weariness or in a hopelessness of getting himself understood. But in a few minutes he went on, forcing his voice a little, “We simply have nothing to say to each other. We never have had. How long is he going to be here?”
“It depends, I suppose, on—on how you get on.”
“You mean he’s going to wait?”
“He’ll want to stay for the present, I expect.”
“But this is quite fantastic. You’ve sent for my father, without consulting me, in order to let him sit here on the edge of a chair waiting indefinitely for me to die?”
“It doesn’t mean that. People often come and—”
“You know perfectly well that’s what it means. Surely someone could have asked me whether I wanted to spend my last hours making conversation to an almost total stranger?” This left him a little out of breath. He added, when he had recovered it, “And they wouldn’t let Mic come in.”
“I’m sorry. You see most people—it’s just always done.”
“Presently I shan’t even be able to talk to him. What will he do all that time? Read the Tatler?”
“If you really don’t want to see him,” said Colonna at last,” perhaps Sister could send him away. But wouldn’t he feel rather—?”
“No. One can’t do that sort of thing.”
“He won’t be in here all the time.”
“What will they do if he isn’t at home? Broadcast, I—suppose?”
“He was at home. He’s on his way, I b
elieve.”
“What, on the milk train? They got him up in the night? Really, this—this is too bad.”
“He would probably prefer it,” she suggested.
“Poor soul. I can see him sitting among the milk cans, wondering how long it will last and what he’d better talk about. You say they always do this?”
“In a place like this … a great many people, you know, aren’t equal to being alone.”
“I see. I hadn’t thought of that. … I’m sorry, I’ve been unreasonable.”
“No. Too reasonable, perhaps. But you ought to be resting now.”
“Why?”
“You’ll use yourself up.”
“That’s my own affair.”
“Not altogether, here.”
“I keep forgetting.” His mouth was dry, and she helped him to another drink. He thanked her and said, “I used to think sickness only meant pain, dirt—things that one knows about.”
“Most people seem to find those quite unexpected. What more can it be?”
“It’s not belonging to yourself.”
As if a light had been flashed in them, Colonna’s eyes contracted, and she turned them away.
“Is that such a bad thing?”
“Yes.” She heard the remnants of passion in his voice. “It’s—” He paused. She saw a look cross his face that might at first have been fear, but was changed to something more like wonder.
“It’s death, I suppose,” he said.
She wandered away to the uncurtained window and stared out, unseeing, at the few lights left burning in the town below. After an interval she did not measure, she looked at her watch and found that it was time to take his pulse again. If he was sleeping, she thought, she would let it go. It was a long time since he had stirred. But she found him awake, though he did not immediately notice her. She felt a longing to recall him, a craving for some contact, however slight, with his mind; not the hope of establishing a personal relationship, but the need to recapture an experience, as one longs for the repetition of music, or to climb a remembered hill again.