After a tortured lunch, when people had talked round and across her and just looked through her when she asked for bread, Daniel found her crying in the summer-house. He sat down beside her and patted her shoulder awkwardly.
“I hate this place,” she sobbed. “I don’t want to belong to it, but, oh Daniel, isn’t it awful when everyone’s against you!”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’ve got a fellow feeling. I was a misfit, too, at school. I was slung out of Eton, you know.”
Interest checked a sob. She looked up. “Lucky you,” she said through the only handkerchief that Kathryn had not pinched. “You couldn’t be slung out of here.”
“You could for what I did, I bet.”
“What did you do?”
“Something like you, only mine was real arson. I set fire to a housemaster’s car.”
“Daniel, you didn’t!”
“I did. I dropped a match in the petrol tank. It burned like all-get-out.”
“Why did you?”
“Because I hated him—and life in general. I was half crazy that term for want of someone to talk to. I wasn’t any good at anything and, being me, couldn’t bear being a nonentity. The masters, I believe, had been told to go easy on me because I was bereaved, so I didn’t even have the distinction of being cursed. I was passed over, forgotten at the back of the class, stuck in the deep field in the third cricket game which no one bothered to umpire, lost at the end of a stone corridor in one of the little cold cells which opened off it like the snuggeries in a family vault. I had to call attention to myself. I thought they’d send me to prison, but they didn’t. Just sacked me. First time a Brett’s ever been sacked from Eton, don’t you know. Still, it got me to Italy. That saved my life, though the family thought it was my downfall.”
“Why?”
“Oh—I went properly wrong after that, and ended up as you see me now. But anyway, I enjoyed seeing that car burn to serap metal in Founder’s Yard more than anything else at Eton. I’d like to burn another some time.”
“Let me help,” said Pamela eagerly. “Let’s burn Humphrey’s motor-bike. They might sack us both.”
“I’m going anyway,” he said, “as soon as I’ve got my money. Back to Italy. I’m going to get me a room above a café and live on aubergines and figs and Orvieto Secco and not ever do a stroke of work.”
“Let me come, too. I like figs. It’s the only part of the food I like here.”
“What would you live on? I couldn’t support you.” He stretched out his legs and leaned against the wall with his hands behind his head. “You haven’t got any money, have you?”
“Estelle has. She’s got a diamond bracelet worth two thousand pounds. I could steal that.”
“I say,” he said, “you are getting progressive. Quite the Rosemount spirit.”
“Don’t say that,” Pamela said fiercely, “even in fun. If I thought I was getting like them here I’d die.”
“Poor old soul.” He smiled at her. “You do hate it, don’t you?”
“I loathe it,” she said solemnly, “with my heart and soul, I swear.” She licked her finger and drew it across her throat from ear to ear. “That’s what we used to do at the High School. I wish I was back there. Daniel,” she said suddenly, and the simplicity of the idea stunned her, “let’s run away I”
“Oh, we can’t,” he said lazily.
“Why not? They always do in school books, why not in real life?”
“Where to, though?” he asked, leaning forward.
“Well, you’d be all right. You’re grown up. I could go home. To Estelle and Eric, I mean. They couldn’t send me back if once I’d run away. Peter wouldn’t have me.”
“He would. He’d call it an extravasation of the freedom syndrome and love you all the better for it.”
“I’d tell them what he did. Then they wouldn’t send me back.”
“What did he do?”
“Here, it was.” She told him about it.
“God!” he said. “You poor kid! Of course you can’t stay here. Why didn’t you tell me before? I’d have damaged more than his book for him.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. It made me feel awful. I didn’t think I’d ever tell anyone. I’d hate to tell Estelle, because she’d analyse it, but you could tell them for me. You would, wouldn’t you? Make them send me back to the High School?”
“Oh don’t, Pam,” he said. “Don’t get me involved. You’ve got me wrong. I don’t go round being a benefactor.”
“You could start now,” she said happily. She believed that he would do it. It was going to be the biggest adventure of her life, and when it was over she would write a book about it. She bounced on the plank seat, thumping his knee with her fists. “Oh, come on, Danny! Let’s make plans. It’s going to be terrific.”
“Danny …” he said. “I haven’t been called that for years.” He looked at her with his eyes half shut, as if he were trying to blur her into someone else. “When I was married,” he said, “my wife wanted us to have a son, because she thought that was what I wanted. But really I wanted a daughter. You can’t talk to boys, because they’re as tied up as you are. And they get to despise you. Girls will put up with you when you’re senile because you bring out their maternal instincts. But whoever heard of a son feeling paternal about his father?”
Pamela wished that he would hurry and not talk about irrelevant things. There was so much to do, for they must go today, now, while the idea was still hot in their brains.
He opened his eyes again, yawned and stretched himself, looking at his watch. “Oh well,” he said, “if we’re going, we’d better step on it. There’s a train in an hour.”
They were both so tired when they got to London that they could not decide what to do. Pamela wanted Daniel to take her with him to an hotel. She was too tired to face Estelle and Eric tonight.
“They’ll know,” she said. “Peter will have rung up and told them. He may even have followed us.” She had had this prickling in her spine ever since they stole out of the coal-house door at Rosemount. She looked over her shoulder and up into the black vaults of the station roof, shivering, dizzy with fatigue, seeing things that were not there.
“Don’t be an ass,” Daniel said. “How could he?”
“In a plane or something. He’ll pounce.” She could feel his cold fingers on her arm.
“Rot,” said Daniel. “Home for you, and bed. It isn’t an hotel, anyway, where I’m going, just a lousy kind of boarding house. I couldn’t take you there.”
She was afraid he wanted to be rid of her. Often on the journey down he had said: “I need a drink.” It must be wonderful to be a grown-up and be able to have a drink and suddenly feel much better about life.
“Not home, Danny,” she begged, standing looking up at him, while people pushed and jostled round them. “There’ll be so much talk.” Oh how Estelle loved to talk about things! “Not tonight. Tomorrow.”
“Tonight,” he said, picking up her bag. “Let’s get a taxi.”
“No, a bus. It’s slower.” She trotted by him as in a dream. She had a horrible feeling, like being drawn powerless towards some suffocating terror in a nightmare, that when she got home Peter would be there, grinning like a werewolf on the brocade sofa.
Half-way across the main road outside the station they had to wait on an island for a gap in the buses and cars. Under the flat green light their faces looked as though they were dead. Still with that prickling in her spine, Pamela looked back and saw, stepping towards her off the pavement they had left, a man in a mackintosh, with grinning teeth.
“Danny!” she cried. “He’s after us!” She reeled forward into noise. A scream, a great grinning radiator on top of her, Daniel in her ear, “You bloody little——” and she was knocked forward, stumbling to the pavement among the screams, and turned to see Danny’s suitcase scattered open on the road and the crowd beginning to gather.
Chapter Ten
The Nurses
Sister Fe
rguson liked to see her fractured femurs all together on one side of the ward, with their Balkan beams exactly parallel and the foot of their beds raised at the same slope. She would really have liked them all to have identical fractures, so that their legs could be slung at the same angle and the tin cans with the extension weights in them all hanging at the same level.
She would be glad when this new patient had had his operation and was settled down for at least a month with his beam and pulleys. He was at the top of the ward now, by the desk, where she could keep an eye on him, but as soon as possible she would move him half-way down and line him up with the other femurs.
Sister Harvey had her Balkan-beam women scattered about all over the ward, which was not only insulting to Mr. Penny-feather and inconvenient for the nurses, but spoiled the look of the ward as much as bed wheels akimbo and counterpanes awry. But Sister Harvey thought more of her wireless and her artistic flower arrangements than of tidy lockers and undeviating beds, and there were nurses on her ward with hairstyles that—well, that was the way things were in the profession nowadays.
The ward clock was out of order. Sister had rung down to the electrician three times about it, but he did not seem to think it as important as she did. A voice called from a bed behind her: “Half-past ten by my watch, Sister. Time you went for your coffee.”
“Thank you, Sonny.” Sonny Burgess had been in her ward for two years with his spine in a plaster cast. They were part of each other’s lives. On her way out of the ward she stopped by the new patient’s bed. He was asleep, and he still looked very shocked, as far as you could see for the dirt and grazes on his face.
“Nurse Saunders!” she called. “I’m going to coffee. Keep an eye on this femur man, and if he wakes you can start cleaning him up. I can’t think what the night nurse was about to leave him like this. She had plenty of time.”
She would have to speak to her about it this evening, and the night nurse would be furious and do no mending, or mark all the new pillow-cases in hideous letters an inch high, as she had done last time Sister had scolded her. She always said she had no time, but Sister believed she spent half the night reading, and didn’t wake people up for their fomentations. In her day, night duty had been duty, with three night sisters prowling round to keep you on your toes, but you couldn’t say a thing to these girls nowadays. All this extra money and heated bedrooms and dances every Saturday had gone to their heads. It might recruit more nurses, but what kind? “When I did my training at the Northants General,” she was fond of saying, “we were there for work, not for sport.”
The nurses at St. Patrick’s quoted that, she knew. “When I did my training at the Northants General-” she could hear them giggling, when they thought she was not near. They thought her an antiquated martinet. Ferocious Fanny Fossilson, they called her, but it could not be helped. Whatever the younger ones like Sister Harvey thought, she believed it was impossible to run a ward properly without rigid discipline. A man had died once, twenty years ago, because she had not done what she was told. She had never forgotten that.
In the sisters’ room they were reading the papers and talking excitedly. “You’re in the news, Fergie,” they greeted her. “At least your new femur is. Look, he’s got quite a write-up.”
“I suppose that will mean those reporters trying to get into my ward at all hours,” she complained, but she could not help being quite thrilled at what she read in the paper. “Fractured humerus!” she scoffed. “They always get it wrong. I daresay the whole thing is a tissue of lies.”
“Oh no. The policeman told Nurse Jones about it in Casualty. He’s quite a hero.”
“Well, he’d better not try any heroics in my ward,” Sister Ferguson said, pouring herself some coffee.
“I don’t suppose he’s as brave as all that, Fergie dear. He only argues the toss with lorries, not with you.” They laughed. They always laughed at everything Sister Morris said. When she was in training she had won the gold medal three years running and was the youngest staff nurse ever to be made a sister, but she was going to throw it all away to marry Dr. Methuen next month. Already she had cast off all sense of responsibility, and Sister Ferguson was sorry for whoever got Out-Patients after her, for the linen cupboard down there was a shambles.
She started to tell them about her osteotomy case, which had taken a really interesting turn; but with their thirst for sensation, they only wanted to hear about Mr. Brett, who after all was only just another fractured neck of femur with slight concussion, and everything going according to plan.
“I see old Penny has got the reduction down for his list this afternoon,” Theatre Sister said. “You coming with him?”
“I suppose I shall have to,” Sister Ferguson said, although she always deliberately fixed her staff nurse’s day off for Mr. Pennyfeather’s bone days, so that she could go to Theatre. Mr. Pennyfeather was one of the few people who had been at St. Patrick’s as long as she had.
“The old Thomas’ splint and Balkan beam, I suppose?” said Sister Harvey. “Penny hasn’t altered his technique since the first war.”
“And what’s wrong with that? His femurs knit. That’s more than Sir Isaac’s elbows do, with all his new-fangled gadgets. The old ways are often best. I hope I may live to see steam kettles come into fashion again.” She took some pins out of the front of her dress and plunged them here and there in her cap, which would not settle this morning, because she had washed her hair last night. She did this regularly once a week, although it did not show, since she wore her cap covering practically all her hair, which was what she had been brought up to believe a cap was for.
“I suppose,” said Sister Morris, “if your hero goes septic he won’t get penicillin?”
“Ah, now you’re laughing at me,” said Sister Ferguson, and went back to her ward.
She made the nurses go round tidying all the beds again before Matron’s round, although Matron, who was fifteen years younger than Sister Ferguson, always said that she didn’t want her hospital to be all mitred corners and no fun. She was one of the new sort. Matrons had been matrons in Sister Ferguson’s day, without all this talk of democracy and taking the nurses to the theatre. Oh well, her own kind was dying out. She would retire soon and leave the field to nurses without stockings and taps that stayed polished without daily rubbing. Where would she retire to? She never thought of that, for her life beyond the hospital was a blank. She could not imagine existence without it.
When Matron came into the ward, willowy in her high-necked navy dress, one of the probationers, who was scrubbing out a locker, scrambled to her feet and scuttled away in search of her cuffs, but Matron told her to go on with her work and not bother. Sister bit her lip. It might be her hospital, but it was not her ward, and she had no right to come in undermining the discipline that Sister took so much trouble to establish.
Mr. Brett was awake, and Matron asked him what he would like her to do about his family.
“Family?” he said thickly, for one side of his mouth was bruised and swollen. “I haven’t got any.”
“I’ve had enquiries from people who’ve seen it in the papers,” Matron said. “A Mrs. Brett, who said she was your aunt-”
“Keep’em all out,” he said. “I don’t want anyone. There was a girl called Pam though. Can’t remember her other name.” He put his hand up to his head and seemed surprised to find the hand in bandages.
Sister thought it sounded like some girl he had picked up somewhere, but Matron said: “Oh yes, the child whose life you saved.”
When Sister came back to him after Matron had gone Mr. Brett said: ’ What was she talking about? / saved Pam’s life?”
“Yes,” she said. “You’re quite a national hero. I’ll bring you the papers when you’re well enough to read.”
Nurse Saunders was in trouble with Hodgen’s splint, so Sister, who believed in helping with the practical work in her ward, rolled up her sleeves and cleaned up Mr. Brett and prepared his leg for the theatre herself
, as it was Mr. Penny-feather’s case. She never took any off duty on her staff nurse’s day off, although Nurse Saunders in her impulsive way was quite good; better than Staff Nurse Fitt in many ways.
“Why don’t you go out and get some sun, Sister?” Nurse Saunders sometimes said. “I’ll be all right on my own.”
“But you’re not State-registered.”
“That makes no odds. The men aren’t going to die because I’m wearing the wrong colour belt.”
“It’s not ethical, Nurse, to leave you in charge.”
“But all the other sisters do it-”
“Nurse. I am not all the other sisters.”
Mr. Brett seemed a pleasant young man. He swore a little, but she was used to that. She thought he was going to be quite an amenable patient, although when she came to give him his injection he made a fuss and jerked his arm so that the needle jabbed him and he said: “There, I told you it would hurt.”
She was tired when she came back from Theatre. Mr. Pennyfeather was very slow and it was no joke to stand on the alert for an hour when you were fifty-five. She went into her office to change her shoes and Winnie the ward maid brought her a cup of tea and told her that she’d missed a bit of fun.
“There was two reporters come up while you was in the theatre, wanting to talk to our ‘ero. So I tell them ‘e’s gone and show them the empty bed. Laugh! they thought he’d kicked the bucket and dashed away like lunatics so as to get their story in first.”
“Winnie, you didn’t tell them that? It’ll be in the paper.”
“What’s it matter? Brighten it up a bit. I didn’t tell them, anyway. I just said, ‘He’s gone,’ I said. They can’t sue me for purgatory.”
Winnie, like the other ward maids, did and said more or less what she liked, for she knew she was as gold. She looked like nothing on earth, wore her stockings spiralled round her legs and her cap hanging by one pin from hair that Sister itched to get at with the Sassafrass bottle, but she did her own work adequately and anyone else’s with enthusiasm.
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