Ted worked for a long time over his letter. He’d had to buy a special pad to do it on, for a start; he had some writing paper somewhere around the flat but to tell the truth it was so long since he’d had to write to anyone that he couldn’t for the life of him remember where it might be. So, early on Sunday, when he’d walked down to the corner shop to get his People just as he had every Sunday for the last thirty-odd years, he’d bought writing paper and a new ballpoint pen and a packet of envelopes. The stamp he’d have to get tomorrow when the post office opened, but never mind; he’d need time to get the thing done properly, and it would give him something to do in the morning. So, he’d made his lunch as usual — a couple of rashers of bacon and an egg as it was Sunday — and then settled down at the kitchen table to do it.
But it was a lot harder than he’d expected. Knowing how to start was the first problem. He had vague memories of the right way to do it: ‘in response to yours of the ult —’ or something of the sort, but that didn’t seem right. And it had to be clear and properly done. He didn’t want people thinking he was just an old fool whingeing on. He had a good case and it mustn’t be spoiled by telling it wrong. And sheet after sheet of the new pad was torn up as he struggled on to get it right.
But he managed it at last and read it carefully, several times, and then set it neatly in its envelope and propped it up on the mantelpiece ready to be taken tomorrow to be stamped and posted. And then sat down to watch the telly for the rest of the evening.
But there was nothing on; just a lot of talking on one channel and shouting on the others and he was restless and bored by it, and something more too. He was angry. He’d felt bad enough over losing his bed and his operation, and pretty cheesed off at the pub when he’d heard those nurses talking; but now he felt even worse. It was writing it all down that had done it, that was the thing. The words he’d used went round and round in his head as he sat and stared at the stupid images on the screen; and suddenly he decided he knew what he’d do.
He wouldn’t wait till tomorrow and the post office. Why should he? He’d do something about it now, right now, and he got up and went round his flat with his usual methodical neatness, getting it ready to leave, locking windows, dealing with the cat, all of it. And then put on his coat and went out, taking the letter tucked into his pocket, neatly encased in a new blank envelope now. He’d have to see where he could deliver it, that was the thing. Newspapers were in Fleet Street, that much he knew; so he’d just get a bus at the end of the Highway and go up to Fleet Street and see which of the newspaper offices were open. Then he’d walk in as calm as you like and talk to them and show them his letter and hear from them right away what they were going to do. The whole idea was so sensible he couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t thought of it before. Just writing the letter had seemed all that was needed to start with, but of course he’d been wrong about that. It was making sure he told someone what was in it that mattered. And that was what he was going to do, right now.
Oliver and Kate drove home to Finchley in silence, she huddled into the corner of her seat and he driving with his shoulders held very straight and with elbows held stiffly as he clutched the steering wheel and stared directly ahead all the time, never looking at her. There seemed little to say; by the time they had left the Pelhams Richard had been well tanked up and Esther a little flustered and they had hugged her warmly as they left and asked her if she wanted any help with him, but she had laughed grimly and said she was used to Richard on Sunday nights; not to give it a thought. So they hadn’t, and now they sat in a far from companionable silence as the car slid through the dark uncrowded streets, making the lights dance in their eyes as it bumped over the occasional studs and broken asphalt.
Kate stirred when he stopped outside the house, instead of driving straight into the garage, and frowned sharply.
‘Aren’t you putting the car away?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But I want to nip on to the studio first. Do you mind? I won’t be long, but I’d rather pick up some of the things I’ll need tomorrow before I go to bed. I’m not too sleepy and — well, I should read it up. I should have thought of it when I left on Friday, but you know how it is on Fridays. Big day, Friday —’
‘Yes,’ she said, and depression settled over her like a thick old blanket. The last time he’d behaved like this, needing to go off on his own, just to drive about and think his own thoughts, they’d nearly broken up. She remembered it all too painfully, as well as the long weeks of his silence and spurts of anger and then the huge row that had at last ended it and cleared the air with such intense sex they’d both been exhausted. But this time they’d had the row and the air-clearing first; did that mean that after he went off driving around this time he really would decide they couldn’t stay together? That had been the problem last time, and clearly it still was. Bloody Sonia, she thought with all the venom she had in her. Bitch Sonia. I wish you were dead, dead. I really wish you were dead. And the sour taste of guilt filled her mouth for feeling so.
‘So you don’t mind?’ he said, peering at her in the dimness, and she could see the troubled glint in his eyes and felt, for a moment, a little better. If he was worried about how she felt, wasn’t that a good sign?
‘Of course I do,’ she said, as heartily as she could, trying to sound natural. ‘I want you in bed with me. I need to curl up with someone warm. But I can hang on if I must. Don’t be too long.’
He managed a grin then. ‘I won’t,’ he said, ‘because I really am going back to the office for some papers. I’ve got that bloody man from the Environment Office in tomorrow about the Green Belt. Believe me, I need to bone up. I’ll be home before —’ He squinted at the dashboard clock which read eleven-ten. ‘No later than half past midnight. OK?’
‘OK,’ she said and stood there on the pavement watching the red rear lights of the car driving away into the distance. She felt awful, even though he’d said that. Because why on earth hadn’t he just asked her to come with him? She would have gone, he must know that; and the thought slid into her mind like a worm under a stone.
Is he going to see Sonia?
Chapter Seven
Suba was beginning to enjoy herself. She still got tired quickly and her feet hurt a good deal, as did the muscles down the backs of her legs, but it wasn’t so scary any more. Now when she pushed open the big doors to Annie Zunz Ward each morning there was no sick feeling of cold fear; just familiarity. The patients had stopped being terrifying strangers but were people she knew, like Mrs Walton and Mrs Malone, old Mrs Halliwell and Tracy and Dawn.
She liked Tracy and Dawn, a pair of giggling teenagers who seemed not to mind at all that they had to expose their most private parts the way they did when they had their dressings. Why they had needed the operations they had had Suba didn’t know, and really didn’t want to; all she knew was that twice a day both of them had to lie there on their beds behind the screens, knees bent and flung wide apart while Sister did all sorts of odd things to them. Suba would stand there and carefully not look, though she was supposed to be learning, because she just couldn’t, and the girls would giggle and Sister would tease them cheerfully and it was all — well, to Suba it was all very odd.
But still, she was enjoying her work now. Whether bedmaking or bedpanning, helping with feeding the older patients or cleaning up after Sister’s dressing round, she was Nursing. She always thought of it like that, with a capital letter. She was Nursing. And it was wonderful.
She liked her room in the nurses’ home, too. Some of the girls in her set had opted to live out, some of them with their families and one or two of the older ones, who had a bit of money of their own it seemed, to share flats not too far away, but she, together with Sian and Alice Abingdon and Barbara Darwood and one or two others, had a room in the big old house that abutted the Private Patient Wing. A small room, undoubtedly, but it had all she could possibly want; a bed, of course, and a wardrobe and a sort of combined dressing table and desk, and in th
e corner a small handbasin and mirror. She had arranged all her things neatly and put up a few photographs of the family and her holy pictures too, on the pin-board that was fastened to one wall, and had bought a rubber plant for the window sill so that it all looked cosy. And she had glowed when she had looked round at it all because it was so much nicer than home where she had had to share her bedroom with her two sisters. For the first time in her life she had her own place as well as her own choice of career. Not bad, she told herself with a glint of wickedness, when she thought of how her father had resisted her. Not bad for someone like me. I may be quiet and stupidly shy but I get what I want in the end.
She was even beginning to make friends. She had had some of a sort at school of course, girls she knew in her class, but they’d never been real friends; they’d always chattered and giggled about boys and that had always embarrassed her so much she had been aloof, so to be making so close a friend now was lovely. She liked Shirley Farmer a lot; she was a second year here on the Gynae ward, very senior to just a new first year, but still she was friendly and helpful to Suba and that was unusual, as Suba well knew from what the rest of her set said when they gossiped over meals. Most of the other nurses treated the new people as though they were dirt; it took a long time before a new intake was allowed to feel they really had a right to be at Old East. But Shirley wasn’t like that and Suba knew she was lucky to be working with her. A tall thin girl with a rather heavy face, she cared a lot about what she did, pernickety and careful to the point of being rather slow at her work. There were times when Sister would complain at her for taking so long over a job, but as Shirley said to Suba, ‘You only make mistakes in a hurry.’ So Suba would help her whenever she could, so that Sister would leave Shirley alone. And that helped their friendship too.
They talked about a lot of things, but mostly about Shirley’s group. ‘You’d like it, Suba, really you would,’ Shirley had told her earnestly as together they sorted out the linen cupboard, which had somehow got into a terrible tangle of sheets and pillow cases. ‘A lot of the people are Catholics like you, you see —’
Suba would slide away from that. She’d promised Daddy she wouldn’t join anything, not even a group where other Catholics belonged. He went on about it a lot. ‘We’re entitled to be here, Suba,’ he had said. ‘We’re legal immigrants and never let anyone ever say otherwise. But it doesn’t do to have your name on lists anywhere. To be members of groups and parties and so forth — that gets people into trouble. Remember what happened to your Uncle Sanjiv and his family —’
‘But they weren’t here legally —’ Suba had murmured but he’d run over that, refusing to listen to her.
‘They were caught and sent away because he joined the Labour Party. I told him he was a fool to get his name down anywhere but he wasn’t one to be told, ever. What could I do if he wouldn’t listen to me? But you listen to me. No joining anything. No names on computers, you understand me?’
She had tried to explain this to Shirley who had stared at her with blank eyes and then shaken her head impatiently.
‘This isn’t a political party!’ she said. ‘Of course it isn’t’ We’re just people who know it’s wrong to do what hey do here and want to stop it. You don’t have to put your name down anyway, if you don’t want. Just come to some meetings and you’ll hear what it’s all about. And then you can do what’s the right thing to do and everything’ll be fine. You won’t have joined anything but you can still help with the important work.
‘But you belong, Shirley, and you can do it, can’t you?’ Suba had ventured. ‘So you don’t want me as well’ But Shirley had just snorted at that.
‘I’m not on duty all the time, am I? Nor are you — and sometimes one of us is on and one is off and then what happens? It’s necessary to be ever vigilant. And then she had said that again, carefully quoting: Ever vigilant.’
So Suba had agreed at last because she wanted to be Shirley’s friend so much and Daddy need never know. She needed her, that was the nub of it; to be alone in so very big a place as Old East was not nice and though some of the others were pleasant enough — Sian was all right, sometimes, for example — no one had ever been as kind and as interested in Suba as Shirley. So Suba went to the meeting of her group.
It had been rather awful. A small hall, behind the church in Hooper Street, a scruffy grubby place, dull and dirty. But there had been a lot of people there at least a dozen, and someone had made tea and handed round biscuits which had made it seem a bit less miserable But then they’d shown the film and Suba had sat there with the crumbs of the biscuit sickly sweet in her mouth and the smell of the overstrong tea in her nostrils and watched and felt sick.
It wasn’t that she didn’t know about such things, of course she did. The nuns at the convent had told her it happened and what a sin it was, and she knew that for all that, there were people who did it. But to see it, in colour, even on a small screen and a rather jumpy scratchy film, was different. They showed her the baby growing in the womb, and then showed, with cartoon-like pictures, how these wicked people introduced their instruments and destroyed the baby, tearing it apart, pulling off its head and arms and legs; and the taste of biscuit in her mouth had gone sour and she had been afraid she would be sick. Her mother had warned her right from the start when she had said she wanted to be a nurse that she had a delicate stomach and was sick easily, and she had had to work hard to overcome that in the wards. Now she could deal with bedpans and people being ill and manage to keep her own insides under control even though she had to look away sometimes, but this film nearly finished her, it was so awful.
Because after they showed the diagram pictures they showed close-ups of the real thing, the pieces of dead baby on a gauze swab. Well, the voice in the film said it was a dead baby though it was hard to be sure; all she could see were great red blobs and lumps but that was enough for her stomach. And she closed her eyes and waited till the wave of sick feeling went away, trying not to hear the deep voice on the film dwelling in such detail on what the instruments did and how the baby suffered this terrible pain and anguish —
After that she tried not to listen so much when Shirley talked about it, but it wasn’t easy, because Shirley was obsessed with it. She went on and on whenever they were together and doing anything without people able to overhear them, about the awful way women behaved and how they had sex without caring and then destroyed the babies they carried, just like that; and Suba would nod and agree, for of course she was right. Hadn’t she been told that all along by the nuns? But all the same she wished Shirley wouldn’t go on about it quite so much.
And then there was the matter of Mrs Walton. That really had made things difficult with Shirley.
It had been a busy week, one of the busiest, Sister had said, this summer, and Mrs Walton’s operation had been cancelled twice because emergencies had come in and they just couldn’t take her to theatre. She’d been ever so upset about it, Mrs Walton; she’d cried and then she’d shouted at Sister when she tried to tell her she’d have to go home for a while and come back later when they had a bed and she’d refused to go and they’d had to send for the medical social worker as well as the consultant, and Suba had heard what it was all about because she was making up the bed next to Mrs Walton’s while they were all talking behind the screens and she explained it all to Shirley afterwards.
‘She’s got three children, quite small ones, and they had to go to a foster mother so she could come in here, and she didn’t want to upset them taking them home and then having to send them away again. So that’s why she won’t go until she’s had her operation. And then the consultant said — what’s her name? — she said —’
‘Miss Buckland,’ Shirley said and seemed to sneer a little. ‘She’s Miss Fay Buckland. Always on the telly she is, on about Women’s Lib. She’s public enemy number one, the group says, the way she is. Does abortions all the time. She’s awful.’
‘Well, she was very nice to Mrs Walton. Sai
d she understood and of course she wouldn’t have to go until the operation was done. And then she said it was going to be a difficult matter because of the dates —’
Shirley lifted her head sharply at that. ‘Is she another one of them then?’ and she sounded positively eager. ‘I’m supposed to count up all the abortions they do here to tell the group.’
‘But she’s not — I mean Miss Buckland’s allowed to, isn’t she?’ Suba said. She didn’t like abortions any more than Shirley did, knew they were wrong, but it wasn’t as though they weren’t legal. It was one thing, Suba thought, to make a fuss if people did things against the law, but what was the point of making a fuss if it was allowed?
‘How can it be allowed if it’s wrong?’ Shirley said hotly. ‘It doesn’t matter what the law says. It’s what’s right and what’s wrong that matters —’
Suba had stared at her over the bed, holding in both hands, tightly, the pillow she had been fitting with a clean cover. ‘But it is different, Shirley. I mean, I know what you mean about not wanting abortions and when that man at the group said about trying to get the law changed, well, I can see that. But what’s the point of reporting Miss Buckland if what she’s doing is legal? I can’t see that it makes any difference —’
Clinical Judgements Page 8