When I finished my slips I remembered I had no runner to deliver them, and I couldn’t leave this room. I swallowed down my anxiety and tucked them in my bib pocket for now.
Ita Noonan was staring off into the corner of the room, egg on her chin. Most of the cut-up sausage was still on her plate, but the whole one was gone. Could Delia Garrett have knelt on the vacant cot and stolen food off her neighbour’s plate?
Avoiding my eyes, the younger woman wore a faint smirk.
Well, one sausage—whatever it was made of these days—wouldn’t kill her, and Ita Noonan didn’t seem to want it.
The delirious woman skewed sideways all of a sudden, and her tray clattered down between her cot and the medicine cabinet. Tea spilled across the floor.
Mrs. Noonan! I stepped over the mess and studied the sheen across her scarlet cheeks; I could sense the sizzle of her skin. My thermometer was already in my hand. Pop this under your arm for me?
She didn’t respond, so I hoisted her wrist myself and tucked the thermometer into her armpit.
As I waited, I took out my watch and counted Ita Noonan’s noisy breaths and her pulse—no change. But the mercury had bumped up to 104.2. Fever did have power to burn off infection, though I hated to see Ita Noonan like this, sweat standing out along her intermittent hairline.
I stepped around her upturned breakfast to get ice from the counter, but the basin held only a puddle around a solitary half cube. So instead I filled a bowl with cold water and brought it over with a stack of clean cloths. I dipped them into the bowl one by one, squeezed them out, laid them over the back of her neck and on her forehead.
Ita Noonan twitched at the chill but smiled too, in instinctive politeness, more past me than at me. How I wished the woman still had wits enough to tell me what she needed. More aspirin might lower her temperature, but only a physician could order medicine for a patient; Dr. Prendergast was the one obstetrician on duty, and when was I likely to lay eyes on him this morning?
Now that I’d done all I could think of for Ita Noonan, I bent to pick up the tray and the plate. The handle was off the cup, in two pieces. I mopped up the puddle before someone could slip in it.
Shouldn’t you call someone to do that for you? Delia Garrett asked.
Oh, everyone’s swamped at the moment.
Technically, a spill came within the orderlies’ remit if one had no ward maid, probie, or junior nurse, but I knew better than to ask them. If one called those fellows in over a splash of tea, they might take offence and turn a deaf ear next time, when it was wall-to-wall gore.
Ita Noonan’s fiery face on the pillow seemed preoccupied. Lovely day for a dip in the canal!
Did she believe she was bathing? Something made me check under her blanket, and—
She’d flooded the sheets. I withheld a sigh. She mustn’t have passed water at all when I’d taken her to the lavatory. Her bed needed making now, and a pair of nurses could do it if the patient was co-operative, but there was just one of me, and Ita Noonan so unpredictable.
I had the machine on hire purchase, she complained, only they dropped it off the balcony…
The delirious woman was caught up in some old or imagined disaster.
Come on, now, Mrs. Noonan, just hop out of bed for a minute so I can strip these wet things off you.
Smashed my holies, so they did!
Delia Garrett announced, I need the lavatory.
If you could wait just a minute—
I really can’t.
I was tugging a top corner of Ita Noonan’s sheet off the mattress. I’ll give you a bedpan, then.
She poked one pale foot out and said, No, I’ll go on my own.
I’m afraid that’s not allowed.
Delia Garrett let out a harsh cough. I’m perfectly able to find my way, and I need to stretch my legs anyway, I’m stiff from lying here like a sow.
I’ll bring you, Mrs. Garrett. Give me two ticks.
I’m simply bursting!
I couldn’t block the door or chase her into the passage. I said sternly, Please stay where you are!
I abandoned Ita Noonan and her sodden bed and nipped into the passage. The nameplate on the first door said WOMEN’S FEVER.
All seemed calm inside. Excuse me, Sister…Benedict?
Unless it was Sister Benjamin? The tiny nun looked up from her desk.
I’m in charge of Maternity/Fever today, I told her. My voice came out too high, more cocky than careworn. I jerked my thumb over my shoulder as if to suggest that she mightn’t have heard of our little temporary ward. I should have introduced myself first, but I’d missed the moment. Sister, I wonder if you could ever spare me a junior or probie?
She was well-spoken, her voice soft. How many patients have you in Maternity/Fever, Nurse?
I felt myself flush. Just two at the moment, but—
The ward sister cut me off. We have forty here.
I glanced around, counting; she also had five nurses under her. Then could you at least get a message to—
Not Matron, I reminded myself. On this topsy-turvy day, Matron might be in one of these cots; I scanned the rows. Mind you, I wasn’t sure I’d recognise her out of uniform.
Could you ask whoever’s standing in for Matron? I really need assistance rather urgently.
I’m sure our superiors are well aware, said Sister Benedict. One does one’s bit. Everyone must pull together.
I said nothing.
Like a curious bird, the nun put her head to one side as if making a note of exactly how I was failing so she could report to Sister Finnigan later. You know, I always say a nurse is like a spoonful of tea leaves.
I couldn’t answer in case my words came out in a roar.
A hint of a smile for the punch line: Her strength only shows when she’s in hot water.
I made myself nod at this wise saw so Sister Benedict wouldn’t write me up for insubordination. I shut the door soundlessly behind me, then remembered the papers in my bib and had to double back and open it again. If I could leave you my supply requisitions, Sister, to pass on to the office?
Certainly.
I pulled out the fistful of curling slips and dropped them on the counter.
I half ran back to my ward.
Ita Noonan hadn’t stirred from her urinous bed. The younger woman’s need was more urgent, I decided. Let’s get you to the lavatory then, Mrs. Garrett.
She sniffed.
I steered her by the elbow. As soon as we were in the passage she began to scuttle, a hand clamped to her mouth. Oh, hurry, Nurse!
Halfway along the passage, she bent in two and threw up.
I couldn’t help noticing telltale pieces of sausage.
I fished a clean cloth out of my apron to wipe Delia Garrett’s mouth and the top of her nightdress. You’re all right, dear. This nasty illness can disrupt digestion.
Now I really needed to find an orderly to mop this vomit up, but Delia Garret gripped her belly and cantered away towards the lavatory. I followed, my rubber soles slapping the marble behind her slippers.
The sounds from behind the stall door told me she had diarrhea now too.
As I waited for Delia Garrett, arms crossed, my gaze was caught by a word on a poster still damp from the printer’s: bowels.
PURGE THE BOWELS REGULARLY.
CONSERVE MANPOWER
TO KEEP IN FIGHTING TRIM.
INFECTION CULLS
ONLY THE WEAKEST OF THE HERD.
EAT AN ONION A DAY TO KEEP ILLNESS AT BAY.
So we’d come to this—Anonymous had spewed his lifeblood all over Nurse Cavanagh in the street, and the government in its wisdom was prescribing onions? And as for the culling of the weakest, what cruel absurdity. This flu was nothing like the familiar winter bane that snuffed out only the very oldest and frailest. (If that one turned to pneumonia, it generally took them off so gently that we’d nicknamed it Friend to the Aged.) This new flu was an uncanny plague, scything down swaths of men and women in the full bl
oom of their youth.
Silence, now, behind the stall door. Mrs. Garrett, if I might just check the pan before you flush…
(Dark matter would reveal internal bleeding.)
Don’t be disgusting!
Water roared from the overhead tank when she yanked the chain.
Delia Garrett seemed shaky as I led her back to the ward. I hoped an orderly might have happened by and mopped up the sick-spattered marble, but no. I steered her around it, reminding myself that a mess was less important than a patient. A sponge bath in your bed and a new nightie, I murmured, and you’ll feel more like yourself. I just need to see to Mrs. Noonan first.
The delirious woman was blank, unresisting; she let me move her off her wet bed to the chair at its foot and wipe her clean. I got a fresh nightdress over her head and used the cloth tapes to draw it closed all down her side.
Delia Garrett complained that she was freezing.
I pulled a folded blanket from the cupboard and handed it to her. I swathed Ita Noonan in a second one to keep her warm until I had a dry bed for her.
This reeks!
That means it’s safe, Mrs. Garrett. They hang them over racks in an empty room, and they burn sulphur in a bucket to make a gas strong enough to kill every last germ.
She murmured, Like the poor Tommies in the mud.
Every now and then this spoiled young woman surprised me.
At least my brother had never been gassed. Tim had twice collapsed from heatstroke in Turkey, and he’d caught trench fever, but he’d managed to get over it, whereas many soldiers carried it in them, a cup of embers that could flare up at any time. That was the joke of it—physically, my brother was still the man he’d been before the war, when he’d worked in a haberdashery firm (gone out of business now) and went to the roller rinks with his pal Liam Caffrey every chance he got.
The door swung open, and I jumped.
Dr. Prendergast, in his three-piece suit, on his rounds at last. I was glad to see him but mortified by the timing. Please let him not ask why both my patients are huddled on chairs. And could that be a spatter of Delia Garrett’s vomit on his polished shoe? If Sister Finnigan heard how things were falling apart on my first morning of holding the fort, she’d never entrust me with the responsibility again.
Prendergast was preoccupied with tying the strings of a mask at the back of his head. Oddly plentiful hair for a man of his age, a bog-cotton shock of white.
You heard we lost Mrs. Devine in the night, Doctor?
His voice was flat with fatigue. I certified the death, Nurse.
The man had been up since yesterday morning, then. He held on to the stethoscope around his neck with two hands as a swaying passenger on a tram might grip an overhead strap.
The cunning of this malady, he murmured. When a patient shows every sign of being on the mend, I’ve told the family not to worry, and then…
I nodded. But these days nurses had strict instructions not to waste a second of a physician’s time, and here we were fretting over a dead woman. So I grabbed Ita Noonan’s chart off the wall and handed it to him. Mrs. Noonan’s twenty-nine weeks on, Doctor.
Dr. Prendergast caught his yawn in his hand. Mildly cyanotic, I see. How’s her breathing?
Rather effortful. Delirious for two days now, temperature ranging up to a hundred and five.
Her blanket was trailing, I saw; I snatched it up and wound it around her. Let him not notice that she wet herself. I asked, Should she have more aspirin?
(Nurses weren’t supposed to have any views on medicine, but this man was so tired, I thought I’d nudge him along.)
Prendergast sighed. No, the high doses seem to be poisoning some patients, and quinine and calomel are just as bad. Try whiskey instead, as much as she can take.
Whiskey? I asked, confused. To reduce fever?
He shook his head. For soothing discomfort and anxiety and promoting sleep.
I wrote down the instruction in case another doctor were to query me about it later.
Now, how’s Mrs.…
His gaze was foggy.
Garrett, I reminded him as I handed over Delia Garrett’s chart. Recent emesis and diarrhea, and her pulse force, ah, still seems high.
I had to phrase that tactfully so he wouldn’t bristle at the implication that a midwife could tell with her fingers what a physician relied on fancy equipment to determine.
Prendergast hesitated, and I feared he was going to say he hadn’t time to take a reading. But he got the sphygmomanometer out of his bag.
I slid Delia Garrett’s pink hand through the cuff and tightened it around her upper arm, then he inflated the cuff with the hand pump. The process was little more complicated than tightening a rope; it occurred to me that any of us could be taught to use this thing.
Ow!
Just a minute more, Mrs. Garrett, I said.
She coughed discontentedly.
He fitted the yellowed tips of the stethoscope into his ears, pressed the flat disk against the soft crook of her elbow, let the cuff deflate, and listened.
After a minute, Prendergast dictated: Systolic blood pressure is one hundred and forty-two. A few moments later, he said: Diastolic is ninety-one, Nurse.
Diastolic BP 91, I added to the chart.
Prendergast didn’t seem that impressed by the figures. A bounding pulse is common in the last months of pregnancy, he murmured as I packed up the device for him. If she gets very agitated you could give her bromide.
Hadn’t the man heard me say Delia Garrett had just thrown up? A sedative was so hard on the stomach, I’d prefer not to inflict that on her…
But I’d been taught never to contradict a doctor; it was held that if the chain of command was broken, chaos would be unleashed.
Prendergast rubbed his eyes. I’m off home now.
While you’re gone, I asked, which obstetrician—
They’re bringing in a general practitioner to help out in the women’s wards.
A GP in private practice—so, not the specialist we needed. I asked uneasily: Is he at the hospital yet?
Prendergast shook his head. At the door he said, Dr. Lynn’s a lady, by the way.
I thought I heard a touch of disdain. There were a few female physicians these days, though I hadn’t yet served under one. What I needed to know was, till this substitute presented herself, who could I call on for my patients?
Delia Garrett jumped up. Nurse Julia, can you get me out of this filthy thing now?
Yes, the minute I’ve dosed Mrs. Noonan, but do stay off your feet, won’t you?
She subsided in the chair.
I made up a lidded cup of hot whiskey and water for Ita Noonan, sugared to be more palatable. After the first sip she sucked it down like mother’s milk. Then I went to fetch a clean nightdress from the press for Delia Garrett.
Uncovered, her belly was silvered with the snail trails of her previous two pregnancies as well as this one.
I hadn’t yet felt that broodiness older women had warned me I would. I’d specialised in midwifery because the drama of it drew me in, but I’d never imagined myself as the woman at the centre of the mystery, the full moon rounding, only as the watchful attendant.
Thirty tomorrow. That ring of being past one’s best.
But thirty wasn’t so very old, I told myself. By no means too late to marry and have children; only, on the balance of probabilities, unlikely. And even less likely, I supposed, now so many men had been lost in the war, either facedown in some foreign field or just not interested in finding their way back to this small island.
I got Delia Garrett’s nightdress on and tied the side tapes, then tucked her back into bed and wrapped her up well against the autumn air whistling in the high window.
I finished stripping Ita Noonan’s mattress. I was relieved that the mackintosh drawsheet had caught all the urine; the cotton sheet and underblanket beneath it were still dry.
What I couldn’t quite put my finger on was whether I wanted a husba
nd. There’d been possibilities along the way, pleasant young men. I couldn’t reproach myself with having thrust opportunities away, but I certainly hadn’t seized them.
Would you be Nurse Power?
I whipped around to see a youngster in civvies in the doorway, brassy hair scraped back and oiled down but a frenzy of curls at the back. Who are you?
Bridie Sweeney.
No title, which told me she wasn’t even a probie. So many young women were being rushed through basic first-aid training these days.
Delia Garrett asked, And what might you be, Miss Sweeney, a volunteer nurse?
The stranger grinned. I’m not any kind of nurse.
Delia Garrett threw up her eyes and went back to her magazine.
Bridie Sweeney turned to me. Sister Luke’s after sending me to lend a hand.
So this was all the night nurse had managed to dig up for me—unqualified; uneducated, by the sounds of her accent; and with a clean, new-hatched look like nothing had ever happened to her. I could have slapped this Bridie Sweeney from sheer disappointment.
I said, The hospital has no funds left for casual staff. I hope Sister Luke told you there’s no pay?
I wasn’t expecting any.
She was the pale, freckle-dusted type of redhead, light blue eyes, brows almost invisible. Something childlike about her translucent ears; the one on the left angled a little forward, as if eager to catch every word. Thin coat, broken-down shoes; on an ordinary day, Matron would never have let her in the door.
Well, I said, I could do with a runner to fetch and carry, so I’m glad you’re here. This is Mrs. Garrett. Mrs. Noonan.
Good day, ladies, Bridie Sweeney said with a bob.
I took a folded apron down from the press.
The volunteer was a scrap and looked even thinner once she’d taken her coat off; she had to wrap the apron’s ties around her waist twice. With frank curiosity, she watched Ita Noonan rocking on the little chair by her cot, wheezing a song. She remarked, I’ve never been in a hospital.
The Pull of the Stars Page 4