'No no, my dear Bingham! After all, I'm a septic case, so, you should come first.'
'Well, that's terribly d. of you, old chap, but really-I know,' he announced, his eyes lighting up at the gentlemanly solution to this impasse, 'you shall have our centrifuge all tomorrow afternoon.'
'Really, I couldn't-'
'Yes, old chap. Absolutely insist.'
'That's awfully kind of you, Bingham.'
'Don't mench, old chap.'
A month passed like a fine April day. Then a strange feeling of depression began to creep over me. At first it puzzled me; my career was progressing splendidly, but I had the vague feeling of something missing from my life. I wondered if I were developing some dark psychological complaint, and mentioned this to Grimsdyke one evening over a pint of beer in the King George pub opposite.
'I don't know what it is exactly,' I told him. 'It's a sort of-well, unsatisfied feeling. Lord knows why. I love the work, I really feel I'm learning a bit of surgery at last, it's fun living in the hospital with the boys, and I haven't seen Bingham for two days. What more could I want? Do you think I ought to take an interest in art or music or something?'
Grimsdyke laughed. 'You don't want music, old lad, you want women. Or one woman at least.'
I was surprised. 'Do you really think so?'
'Absolutely certain. Can't miss the diagnosis. We're not run-around students any more, however much we try and pretend we are on Saturday nights. We're worthy citizens, God help us. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Jane Austen.'
'A wife!' I cried in horror.
'Well, I wouldn't go as far as that,' he added, finishing his beer. 'But you get the idea.'
I thought carefully about Grimsdyke's diagnosis, and decided that he was right. Fortunately, the treatment would be simple. Since returning to St Swithin's as a doctor, I had sensed a different relationship between myself and the hundreds of young women that the place was obliged to employ. Apart from the nurses, there were the buxom dieticians, the cheerful girls in X-ray, the neat secretaries, the occupational therapists in sandals and folk-weave belts, the laboratory assistants, the speech therapists, the child-guidance workers, and the statuesque physiotherapists in the massage department who were known as the 'slap-and-tickle honeys'. As students, these ladies had treated us like well-brought-up Wrens dealing with fresh ratings; but now that we were qualified and therefore pressingly marriageable the iron hand was eased a little from the velvet glove.
The sister of Mr Cambridge's female ward had resigned shortly before I arrived, leaving the patients in charge of the staff nurse until the matron could make another promotion. This was Nurse Plumtree, a pale, thin, dark, snub-nosed girl, passably pretty except for her hair, which appeared to be attended by a gardener in a spare second while occupied with the hedge-clippers. From my first entrance to the ward Nurse Plumtree clearly looked upon me as her own property. This was correct hospital etiquette, for the staff nurse was always allowed first bite at the new houseman; but Nurse Plumtree, perhaps because she was in supreme authority over the others, took pains to make this obvious. I preferred her second-in-command, a bright, red-headed, freckled Scots girl, to whom I chatted if Nurse Plumtree was out of the ward; when she returned she would cross directly to us with an extra briskness in her step, look her professional sister squarely in the eye, and order her to check the laundry. One afternoon, Nurse Plumtree came back from lunch to find the pair of us giggling over a joke in the sluice-room, and afterwards rarely took any time off at all. She insisted that this was through her devotion to duty; but it was clear to everyone else that it was through her devotion to me.
'Have you any socks that need mending?' she asked one morning. 'If you'll bring them up I'll darn them for you. I've nothing else to do in the evenings. I never go out.'.
We were sitting alone in the Sister's private sitting-room, a small apartment fierce with yellow chintz and brassware next to the ward. Every day I was invited there for a cup of milky coffee served timidly by the junior probationer, while Nurse Plumtree took a tin of her own chocolate biscuits from the bureau, put her feet up on the rushwork stool, and lit a cigarette. 'In fact,' she went on, 'I've got an evening off tomorrow. From five o'clock. I don't know what on earth to do with it.'
'Really? Well, er-perhaps something may turn up,' I said warily. 'Who knows?'
She sipped her coffee sorrowfully.
The morning after my talk with Grimsdyke she threw into her conversation, 'I've got a half-day on Wednesday. Starting at twelve o'clock. And I'm due for a late pass till midnight. But I don't expect I shall take them. There just doesn't seem anything to do.'
I already knew this, having sneaked a glance at the nurses' off-duty book kept with the insurance certificates on her desk. I had made up my mind. Nurse Plumtree was presentable and pleasant; besides, there was not the faintest chance of being snubbed.
I coughed.
'If you're really without plans, perhaps you'd like to come to the pictures, or something?'
For an instant her eyes widened. 'I'm not sure if I can really leave the ward. Nurse Macpherson isn't very experienced.'
'Of course not.'
'As well as being a lot too familiar with the patients-'
'So I've noticed.'
'And anyway, she's far too interested in one of the students for the good of her work.'
'Really? Do try and come. I'll see you at six,' I said, rising. 'Outside the dental department.'
15
My romance with Nurse Plumtree caused no more surprise in the hospital than the annual blooming of the geraniums outside the Secretary's office in summer. My colleagues grinned more widely the more I asked them to stand-in for me during the evenings, and Nurse Macpherson once winked at me over a ward screen; but to most people at St Swithin's we were simply another staff nurse and houseman obeying the local laws of biology.
Like many other young couples with no money in London, we sat at the back in the Festival Hall and the Empress Hall, we dined at Lyons, and we drank in the cosy saloon bars of tucked-away pubs, of which my medical education had left me with a more precise knowledge than of human anatomy. Often Nurse Plumtree paid for herself and sometimes she paid for us both. She was an easy girl to entertain, because she was fond of long silences during which she would stare at the opposite wall as if recalling the faces of friends long dead; and her conversation, when it came, was almost wholly about the hospital. As my few former girl friends had all been nurses this failure to throw off the cap and apron did not discourage me, and I consoled myself that another companion might have talked only about ponies or Proust; but after a few weeks I found myself irresistibly wishing that she would stop telling me exactly what was happening to number twenty-two's blood chlorides, and the bright retort she had made to Nurse Macpherson when informed that the ward's allocation of liquid paraffin had been used up in a week.
There was another more disheartening impediment in my relationship with Nurse Plumtree. I confessed this late one evening to Grimsdyke, when he came into my room to scrounge cigarettes.
'How's the sex life?' he asked cheerfully. 'Feeling more contented?'
'Well-yes and no.'
'What? You mean the course of true love hasn't run smooth?'
'Too smoothly, if anything,' I told him. 'You know how it is with nurses-we go to a flick or a concert or something, then I rush her back to the hospital before her late pass expires, we have a quick neck among half the medical school outside the mortuary gate, then I push her into the Nurses' Home on the stroke of eleven. If I kept her out another minute her good name would be ruined for ever, so it seems.'
'Frustrating.'
'You don't have to read Freud and Kinsey to know it doesn't do a chap much good. But what's the alternative? Apart from holding hands in Hyde Park?'
'How about a little intramural love life?'
'In St Swithin's, where they separate t
he sexes like a Victorian swimming-bath?'
'There's always the fire-escape.'
'Ah, the fire-escape!' This ugly zigzag up the wall of the Residents' Quarters was a monument to the victory of the insurance company's prudence over that of the matron. By climbing the darkened floors of the empty out-patients' block at night, crossing the roof of the physiotherapy department, and dodging past the night porter's mess-room, we could smuggle a nurse into our forbidden corridors. This risky adventure was rarely suggested, for the nurse, if discovered, was regarded by the Matron to be fit for nothing more but the Chamber of Horrors.
'There's nothing to it, old lad,' Grimsdyke went on, as I looked at him dubiously. 'Wait for a dark night, lay in a bottle of courting sherry, have a decent shave, and you're all set for a cosy evening. So much warmer than Hyde Park, too.'
At our next meeting I mentioned the fire-escape to Nurse Plumtree. As I expected, she looked sad, sniffed, and said, 'Oh, Richard!'
Feeling I should provide some excuse, I went on quickly, 'But I mean, I thought we could just have a cup of coffee, and I could show you my microscope slides of gastric ulcers that I've been telling you about. I mean, it would be quite-well, you know, all right-'
'Oh, Richard! It would spoil everything.'
'What, you mean just looking at my slides? They're most interesting, and of course I have to borrow a microscope from one of the other residents, so I can't very well show them to you elsewhere. But of course, if you don't want to-'
She sighed deeply, and looked away. I felt that Grimsdyke would have managed the invitation much better! I had tempted her only with the pathological equivalent of etchings. There was another of her silences, then we talked about the best way of treating post-operative thrombosis.
Our affair jogged along for several weeks. There was no alternative, for she now simply told me when she was next off duty and assumed that I would be waiting to take her out. It was a relationship with many concrete advantages, for Nurse Plumtree was a tender-hearted girl whose motherly instincts were not wholly absorbed by her profession. From our first outing she had mended my shirts, lent me books, and provided currant cake with the morning coffee; now she bought me ties and bars of chocolate, pressed on me handfuls of vitamins from the medicine cupboard, knitted me a muffler, and made me wear braces instead of an old rugger club tie for keeping up my trousers, which she pressed proudly every Sunday with her iron in the Nurses' Home. My friends thought I had not looked so tidy or so well fed for a long, time.
Two events disturbed the placid current of this romance. The first was Nurse Macpherson's transference to night duty.
In the printed charge handed to him by the hospital Secretary on his appointment, each senior house surgeon at St Swithin's was enjoined 'to visit your wards at least once nightly before retiring, to take the report from the senior night nurse and attend to the needs of the patients, at whatever hour that might be'. This night round was the most conscientiously performed of all the house surgeons' duties, for night nurses, who have to sleep all day and work alone all night, are lonely souls who suffer from a deficiency of masculine companionship. For this reason the most untidy and unromantic houseman is confident of a welcome in the darkened ward, even if he has just been thrown out of the King George and arrives, like my predecessor, wearing the head porter's hat and riding a bicycle. Besides, all nurses are good cooks and without the ward sister counting the rations over their shoulders gladly provide peckish housemen with bacon and eggs at midnight.
My night rounds had so far been dull, because the nurse on Fortitude was a newly-promoted girl who breathlessly read me the ward report with one timid eye on the door for the visit of the surgical night sister; on Constancy, the night nurse was a thin, spectacled woman with a faint moustache, who in the half-light reminded me of Groucho Marx. One night I came up the empty corridor after seeing Nurse Plumtree into the Nurses' Home as usual, and found Nurse Macpherson frying bacon and eggs and smoking a cigarette in the small kitchen next to the ward.
'What on earth are you doing here?' I asked in surprise.
'Why, hello, there! For three months I'm to be Queen of the Night, tra-la! Didn't Plumtree tell you?'
I shook my head.
'How about some eggs and bacon? Or would you prefer'-she opened a box on the diet trolley-'some egg custard and pureed spinach?'
'As a matter of fact I could do with a bite. As usual, they gave us a rotten supper in the Residency. You know, that brawn stuff the patients won't eat.'
She nodded. 'How well I do! It would pass unnoticed in a pathology exam with "Draw, Label, and Identify this Tissue" stuck on it. There's a bottle of beer in the comforts cupboard,' she went on, breaking a couple more eggs. 'Help yourself and pour me a glass.'
'Aren't you worried about the night sister?' I asked, hesitating.
'What, old Muggsy Munson? She's got her feet up in the Sister's room with a nice cup of tea reading the _Washerwoman's Weekly,_ I'll bet. She comes round as regularly as the hands of a clock.'
I sat down at the ward table, wondering why a nurse smoking in uniform always presented such a curiously abandoned appearance. Then I remembered that I had just kissed my girl-friend good night. 'How are the patients, Nurse?' I asked, trying to re-establish our professional relationship.
'Please, please, don't talk about them out of the ward, I beg.' She forked bacon from the pan. 'I cannot talk shop with my meals. The Nurses' Home is ghastly-it's mastoids with the mince, mumps with the macaroni, membranes with the mash. That's one of the things I've got against Plumtree-' She bit her lip. 'I shouldn't have said that, I suppose?'
'Not said it?' I tried to sound as indifferent as possible.
'Why?,
'Well-everyone knows that you and Plumtree-I mean, she's a very good sort at heart.'
'She certainly strikes me as being a decent sort of girl, I must say.'
'Oh, yes, very nice. Such a pity about her acne.'
'Acne?' I recalled that Nurse Plumtree's face was occasionally marred by a small square of sticking-plaster.
'Yes, all over her back. But of course-' She giggled. 'You wouldn't know about that, would you? But she's a nice placid person.'
'I happen to dislike chattering women,' I said, a little stiffly.
'She's no chatterbox. Why, sometimes she sits for hours and hours without saying anything, just looking into the middle distance.'
'I find her quite an interesting companion, anyway,' I insisted.
'So do we in the Home, these days. The things she tells us about you! My, my! I want to blush sometimes. Did you really go as far as that on the Inner Circle the other night?'
'Good God, did she tell you that?'_
'That's only half of it. How many eggs?'
I ate my bacon and eggs in silence. I was disillusioned. I had thought Nurse Plumtree above the common feminine habit of describing an evening out in the spirit of a boastful Grenadier in a pub after Waterloo.
When I met her the following evening I was more careful in my conversation and behaviour. This did not seem to disturb her, but as we came home I had to admit that her silences seemed longer and longer, and now extended from Piccadilly Circus to Russell Square on the Tube; and as she turned to allow me to kiss her good night I was sure I saw incipient acne all over her cheeks.
'I suppose you know Macpherson's on nights?' she said.
I murmured that I had noticed her while dashing through the ward on my night round.
'I'm asking the office to get her moved,' Nurse Plumtree went on. 'She's incompetent. Do you know that this morning she gave the high-protein diets to the low-proteins? And she mixed up the extra vitamins with the salt-deficients?'
'Oh, really? It doesn't seem to have done them much harm, anyway?'
She twisted the top button of my overcoat: 'Richard, I've got an evening tomorrow. Will you come to dinner at home?'
'Home?' I was startled. I had never thought of Nurse Plumtree having any home except the one provided by S
t Swithin's.
'It's only down in Mitcham. Mummy and Daddy would love to see you.' I hesitated. 'Please, Richard.'
I thought quickly. Dining with the parents would certainly be a trial. I could see it-gruff father, who I believed was a retired colonel, and sharp-eyed mother, both suspicious of my intentions towards their daughter. Still, Nurse Plumtree had been a kind companion to me, and I owed her some repayment-besides, I was running short of money, and it would mean a free meal.
'All right, ' I said. 'I'll meet you at the usual place at six, if I can get away.'
The clock struck then, and she disappeared through the closing doors of the Nurses' Home.
'How's Plumtree?' Nurse Macpherson asked cheerfully, as I arrived in the ward kitchen two minutes later.
'Oh, all right.' I sat on the edge of the table, lit a cigarette, and swung my legs.
'You don't sound very enthusiastic about it, I must say.'
'Oh, don't I?'
She put down a bowl of eggs she was beating and went on, 'Be a darling and lend me a cigarette. I left mine in the Home.'
She came across to me as I pulled a packet from my jacket pocket. When I lit her cigarette with the end of mine she gripped my hand tightly and said, 'You know what's wrong with Plumtree, don't you? She's undersexed.'
For a moment I looked at her. Nurse Plumtree was pale and dark, Nurse Macpherson red-headed and freckled. Nurse Plumtree always looked faintly ill, and Nurse Macpherson always buoyantly healthy, with a stride recalling a moor on a frosty morning and arms suggesting the tennis racket and the hockey stick. Nurse Plumtree was introverted and Nurse Macpherson extroverted, and if one was undersexed then the other was certainly oversexed. Before I realized what I was doing, I had kissed her.
'Ummm,' she said, nestling into my arms. 'Not quite the Nightingale spirit, but give me more.'
'What about the ward?' I gasped.
'The pro's looking after it.'
I kissed her again.
'But the night sister?'
'Not due for hours. Besides, I've got my cap on. That's the important thing. If they found a nurse stark naked with her cap on, it would still be respectable.'
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