A Surgical Affair

by Shirley Summerskill

  At last she stood up. “It’s late. I must be going.”

  “Not yet,” he pleaded.

  Mark came toward her, and Diana did not move. Then his hands were on her arms.

  “You’re beautifully brown,” he said softly.

  And he kissed her, a tender kiss of love, quite different from the hard passionate embrace when they first held each other.

  As he released her, Diana told him breathlessly, “I’ve missed you—so much.”

  “I miss having you to tease in the theater,” he said, smiling. Then Mark put on another record, and the soft notes of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture filled the room.

  They sat on the sofa; he was kissing her face, her neck, and she was quite still, her eyes closed. As the music became louder, more urgent, their desire for each other increased. The sound acted like a drug. It was compelling them on, throwing them together, its strength and beauty keeping away all that was separating them.

  There was only that little room, crashing cymbals, strings in flight, melancholy oboes, tempestuous brass; and their bodies clinging together, with one desire, one consuming feeling.

  And when the music was soft again, he sat back beside her, and they listened. The could not hear the rain now; there was only the music and their love.

  Then he looked around at her. “Your nose is peeling.”

  She giggled. “Do you remember, when we were sewing up after taking out Mrs. Hastings’ appendix—”

  “And I said, ‘Your peel is dropping in the wound, Dr. Field.”

  “But it wasn’t!” she protested, “and I couldn’t argue with you, in front of everybody.”

  “I know. I was only teasing, and you took it so seriously.” Mark ran his fingers through her hair. “I like the way you laugh.”

  “I must be going,” Diana said, for the second time that evening, but she was to tired, bewildered and happy to move.

  “I want to kiss you again.”

  But she pushed him away, because this was not what she really wanted. It was no use pretending any more.

  “What about your friend, what would she say?” Diana asked him, coldly, unable to keep the resentment out of her voice.

  “Denise? She’s just a friend.”

  “Don’t you—love anyone?” she persisted quietly.

  Diana felt as if they were caught in one of those revolving giant wheels you see at fairs, always going back to the same point, never escaping.

  “I try not to let myself fall in love,” he told her, frowning. “If I did, it would lead to marriage—and I’m not sure that would work.”

  “Still blaming yourself for what happened to Mary? And with Denise, there are no ties, no obligations.”

  “She doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “Well, I do, Mark.”

  The music had stopped. There was only the rain beating on the window now.

  “This is the moment,” she thought. “It had to come. I was a fool to think we could go on putting it off. He has to tell me where we go from here. I can’t go on any longer not knowing.”

  Mark sighed and gazed up at the ceiling, as if he could not bear to see the hurt, unhappy look in her eyes. Then he said quietly, “When are you supposed to be marrying Richard?”

  “So that’s his answer,” Diana thought. “A moment ago he had his chance to start a new life, to begin again, but he didn’t take it. Well, at least we know where we stand.”

  “I don’t know, it’s up to me,” she replied calmly. “There are problems. How to combine surgery with marriage.”

  Then Mark turned and gazed at her, a pained expression on his face. “I’d be jealous, miserably jealous, to see you married to him, although he’s probably a nice guy. I couldn’t offer you anything better.”

  Diana bit her lip, to stop herself from telling Mark that she couldn’t imagine anything better—than to be his wife.

  “I’m not like you,” he went on. “You said so yourself, at Tony Spring’s party, remember? We’re from different worlds, Diana. Sister once said that I was dragged up, and you were properly brought up. First you had a nanny; then you were carefully protected by a boarding school until you went to Oxford and met Richard.”

  “I suppose I’ve always known my parents were in the background, to help me,” she agreed.

  “Compared with yours, my whole life has been a tough climb. After my father died, I worked in cafes and hotels in Sydney, in the evenings, washing-up mostly, to get through medical school. And my sister was still at school, so there were three of us to feed. I couldn’t have qualified without scholarships all the way along. My whole background is different, don’t you see?”

  Diana sighed and decided to change the subject, because she knew he was right. They had been living in different worlds from the moment they were born. How could they ever live together? “Do you think I’ll ever become a surgeon?” she asked him.

  “It’s too early to say. I guess if you really want to be one you can, and nothing will stop you. It gets hold of you, once you start. There’s always more to learn, a better way to operate.”

  Diana stood up. The talk of surgery had brought her back to reality.

  “I must get some sleep,” she said.

  “And I’m going to the library,” Mark announced, leaping up.

  “The library?” she repeated incredulously.

  “To bury myself in the latest surgical advances. To forget about you, Diana,” he told her quietly. “It’s the only thing to do in the circumstances.”

  “I mustn’t come here again.” She sighed. “It’s a pity, because I love listening to your records.”

  “You know you can always play them—when I’m out. The reason I haven’t asked you here before is that it would complicate everything. And it has. You must see that.”

  There was nothing more to be said.

  “You’d better run along,” Mark told her quietly, his hand gently on her arm.

  And she left the room.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Autumn arrived. The trees in the hospital garden turned to brown, the radiators were switched on and Diana packed away her summer dresses. She and Mark were no longer happy and carefree. A strain, a different tension had grown up between them; so that meeting in the corridor they no longer smiled at each other, and sitting together at breakfast they hardly spoke.

  Diana often spent her free evenings playing records, alone in Mark’s room. Looking through his window at the Great Bar, bright and defiant in the clear, cold sky, or sitting in his armchair in the glow of the firelight, music filling the room, she felt near to him, she could almost hear his voice.

  Tired of the sight of sickness and suffering, Diana would escape into this other world, Mark’s world. She felt she belonged in that room, which was his home, so far from the land where he grew up. Her love for him gave her a right to be there; the right to look at his books, or to touch his sweater, thrown carelessly onto a chair.

  She was content for the moment to know and love Mark, to remember their jokes, their embraces, the hours of working together. Diana was not thinking of the future; the present was enough.

  It was after one of these evening ‘record orgies,’ as she thought of them, that Diana went down to the common-room.

  “We’re starting to think about the Christmas show,” Mike Simons told her. “Do you sing, swallow swords or do acrobatics?”

  “Juggle, cut women in half or produce white mice out of a tram driver’s sock?” asked Dr. David Slater. He was a pathologist; a small, thin man, with a ginger moustache, who produced the show every year. Before starting as a medical student, he was a professional actor for years.

  “Well, as a matter of fact,” said Diana, smiling as she dropped into the nearest armchair, “I play the double bass.”

  “Really? Rather unfeminine.”

  “Where on earth do you keep it?”

  When the general consternation had died down, Diana went on, “I started playing at school, in the
orchestra and did a bit at Oxford afterward.”

  “Oh dear, only classical stuff,” said David Slater, disappointed.

  “I can play swing, too. At least, I did for the revue at school.”

  And so Diana was eagerly enlisted for at least three items in the hospital show. She managed to hire a double bass from the local music shop, and during the next few weeks practised for hours in the store room above the pathology laboratory, where the hospital piano was kept.

  A few of the doctors and nurses were rehearsing there after lunch one day; noisily, argumentatively, but as enthusiastically as any professional group.

  “Sister Baker has a good contralto voice,” Mark reminded them. “I hear she sings in the show ever year.”

  “Let’s have her singing Jerusalem or Land of Hope and Glory, draped in a Union Jack!” Tony Spring suggested, grinning.

  “What about some Ivor Novello tunes, with the rest of us providing the chorus?” said Diana, and they all agreed.

  Mark, wearing a cloth cap, gave his monologue about the man who was taken up to the operating theater by mistake, having just dropped off to sleep for five minutes on one of the trolleys in Charity Ward.

  The hospital chaplain did a sketch about a short-sighted gardener and sang some Gilbert and Sullivan. Both acts were well received by the audience, because normally Father O’Shanahan was such a serious, dignified figure.

  David Slater, who was to emcee the show, tried out a few of his jokes on them all.

  Those weeks were happier ones for Diana. She threw herself into the life of the hospital and was too busy to worry about her own troubles.

  At one of the evening rehearsals Mark told Diana he was not seeing Denise any more.

  “I met her at the airport when she returned from France. We drove to her apartment and I told her it was all over,” he said quietly.

  They were sitting on the floor in a corner of the room, while a group of nurses practised their “Scene in Matron’s Office.”

  “That must have given her a shock,” said Diana, because although she had never met Denise, she felt a sympathy and understanding for her. Diana had imagined the same thing happening to herself so often; the complete despair she would feel if Mark told her they would never meet again.

  He shrugged. “At first she cried, said how cruel and ungrateful I was, but she knew it would happen one day. I’d always warned her not to get too used to me being around, that I didn’t love her, and never would. After a while the tears stopped, and she was her usual bright self. Don’t worry. I bet you, in a few months she’ll have another man firmly in tow.”

  “Did she ask why it was all so sudden? Why didn’t you tell her in France?”

  “No, but she probably guessed. Anyway, in France I didn’t know I was in love with you, at least I didn’t admit it to myself.”

  Slowly, Diana repeated to herself the words Mark had just said. In France I didn’t know I was in love with, you. She realized that, at last, in that simple, unexpected phrase, he had told her he loved her.

  No great announcement, no passionate speech; just a casual remark, which she had waited to hear for so long. How Like Mark!

  “I think I knew for sure that I loved you,” he went on, gazing straight ahead, “when we were up on the roof, that hot afternoon, do you remember? It was such a glorious feeling of contentment, of peace. I didn’t tell you that evening, though. I was so bewildered by it all.”

  Diana smiled. “I knew I loved you long before that. It was after the car accident. You looked so pale and helpless. I wanted so much to help you, to make you strong and active again.”

  She sat in contented, happy silence for a moment, then Mark grinned at her. “This is a fine setting for a love scene—a draughty room above the path lab, surrounded by worn-out mattresses and packing cases.”

  “Mmm. We should be on a moonlit balcony—in evening dress, or by a fountain in Rome.”

  He shook his head. “This is better.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Sister Baker knows I’m here, if she wants me in her ward urgently,” and they laughed.

  “You can’t use the Cadillac any more,” said Diana, looking at him.

  “Nope. I’ve had to get used to walking again. But I couldn’t go on seeing Denise, when all the time it’s you I want to be with. Rather like taking tablets, instead of eating proper meals.”

  “What else did you tell her?”

  “I said I’d be going back to Australia soon, and it’s best we should end it calmly now, no scene at the dockside, cables sent out to the ship, that sort of thing.”

  His words sent a chill through Diana. She had always known the day would come when he would leave the hospital, and she would be alone, but she preferred not to think about it. But now Australia seemed very far away; a huge, empty country, across miles of ocean.

  “It’s definite, then?” she asked, in a choked voice. “You’re going home?”

  “I’ve been offered a good job at the hospital where I was a student, working under the Professor of Surgery. Just the sort of thing I want to do.”

  “I’m glad,” Diana managed to say, softly but sincerely.

  “What will you do when your job ends in January? Decided yet?” Mark asked casually.

  “I might apply for a casualty job here, but I haven’t really thought. I feel I belong to Mansion House Hospital, I can’t imagine working anywhere else. Anyway, the first thing I’ll do is sleep for a week.”

  David Salter called over to them. “Come on, you two! We’re going to run through the final chorus.”

  A few weeks before Christmas, for three evenings, the show was performed; one end of the casualty department being converted into a stage. Hospital staff with their friends, and all patients fit enough to walk or to be wheeled in a chair, came along to see it. The show was one of the important social events of the hospital year, awaited with excitement for weeks beforehand and discussed for months afterward.

  As usual it received tremendous applause, because the audience always enjoyed recognizing the performers, however lacking in theatrical talent. Sister Baker received repeated encores for her songs, and Father O’Shanahan was the star of the evening.

  Diana stood between Sister Baker and Mark as they all joined in the final chorus on the last night of the show. It was a sad, sentimental tune about the hospital, written by David Slater and sung at every show.

  Sister Baker knew the song by heart and had told Diana once that she could never stop her eyes watering as she sang it. She loved the hospital, despite the hard work, but Diana wondered if that show would be Sister’s last. Perhaps next Christmas she would be working in another hospital. It was good to have a change, to gain new experience. But in her heart Diana knew she would still be there, leading the singing; and after all, Mansion House had just saved her life. How could she leave and go somewhere else?

  And Mark stood close to Diana; she knew that he too felt the sadness of the song. What would he be doing when Mansion House Hospital held its next Christmas show?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “She’s bleeding from a stomach ulcer,” Diana explained quietly, as they left one of the cubicles in Casualty. “You can see she looks as white as paper, she’s sweating, her hands are cold. Those are all signs of haemorrhage.”

  “How much blood do you think she’s lost?” asked the junior nurse.

  “I’ve no idea. When the daughter came home from the movies her mother was vomiting it up. Goodness knows how long it had been going on. The patient’s too confused and weak to tell us.”

  They walked quickly over to Sister’s desk. As they passed the rows of empty benches their footsteps echoed on the tiled floor. Casualty at night was the loneliest place in the hospital, but during the day it was the nerve center. It was nearly midnight. The only other sound was the bubbling of the sterilizing machine in the minor ops. room.

  Diana picked up the phone and dialed her ward number. “Dr. Field here. We’ll have to adm
it a woman of 67, Mrs. Elizabeth Hardy, perforated gastric ulcer ... One bed left? Good. She’s been in here twice in the last ten years for medical treatment of the ulcer. But this time it may be too late for that. We’ll take her first and hand her over to the surgeons if the worst comes to the worst. Will you arrange for a porter to collect her?”

  Diana told the nurse, “I’ll take some of her blood now, so we can get it cross-matched, and drip more into her as soon as she’s in the ward. We must get the blood pressure up.”

  “This is my first time on night duty, Dr. Field. It’s funny—I always thought it would be boring, with nothing to do.”

  Diana nodded. “We all think that at first. But when you’ve been on nights, you find that the really exciting things happen then. It seems like that anyway. Perhaps it’s because it’s so quiet everywhere. It adds to the drama.”

  The nurse hurried back to the cubicle, and Diana asked the switchboard for the resident pathologist. She hoped David Slater was on that night. He didn’t seem to mind getting out of his warm bed to go to the path lab, and he worked quickly.

  It was two hours later when Diana had a chance to go along to Night Sister’s sitting room for a cup of coffee. Diana relaxed in the armchair by the fire.

  Sister Raines was a large, kind woman with twinkling blue eyes. “Will you have to call the surgeons in, Dr. Field?” she asked. “It’s Dr. Royston on tonight, isn’t it?”

  “It’s touch and go at the moment. If she can hold her own during the next hour, she should be all right.”

  “But you mustn’t leave it too late, I suppose, or she’ll be too weak to stand the surgery.”

  Diana rested her head back on the chair.

  “I remember something Mr. Cole once said,” she mused. “A good surgeon isn’t always the person who cuts well with the scalpel and scissors. He must treat the patients properly after the operation so they recover quickly and aren’t left with any disability. But Mr. Cole said that maybe even more important than either of those things is the knowledge and judgment needed to decide—Is an operation necessary? And if so, when should it be done?”