by P. D. James
But she was not the only one at the table to notice his arrival. She felt rather than saw Sister Gearing stiffen and a second later heard her say: “Well, well. The handsome sleuth! He’d better feed with us or he may find himself in a gaggle of students. Someone should have told the poor man how the system works.”
And now, thought Sister Rolfe, she’ll give him one of her street corner come-hither looks and we shall be burdened with him for the rest of the meal. The look was given and the invitation not refused. Dalgliesh, carrying his tray nonchalantly and apparently completely at ease, threaded his way across the room and came up to their table.
Sister Gearing said: “What have you done with that handsome Sergeant of yours? I thought policemen went about in pairs like nuns.”
“My handsome Sergeant is studying reports and lunching on sandwiches and beer in the office while I enjoy the fruits of seniority with you. Is this chair taken?”
Sister Gearing moved her own chair closer to Sister Brumfett and smiled up at him: “It is now.”
2
Dalgliesh sat down, well aware that Sister Gearing wanted him, that Sister Rolfe didn’t, and that Sister Brumfett, who had acknowledged his arrival with a brief nod, didn’t care whether he joined them or not. Sister Rolfe looked across at him unsmilingly and said to Sister Gearing: “Don’t imagine Mr. Dalgliesh is sharing our table for the sake of your beaux yeux. The Superintendent plans to take in information with his braised beef.”
Sister Gearing giggled: “My dear, it’s no use warning me! I couldn’t keep a thing to myself if a really attractive man set his mind to wangle it out of me. It would be quite useless for me to commit a murder. I haven’t the brain for it. Not that I think for one moment that anyone has—committed murder I mean. Anyway, let’s leave the grisly subject during lunch. I’ve had my grilling, haven’t I, Superintendent?”
Dalgliesh disposed his cutlery around the plate of braised beef and tilting back his chair to save himself the trouble of rising, added his used tray to the stack on the nearby stand. He said: “People here seem to be taking Nurse Fallon’s death calmly enough.”
Sister Rolfe shrugged: “Did you expect them to be wearing black armbands, talking in whispers, and refusing their lunch? The job goes on. Anyway, only a few will have known her personally, and still fewer knew Pearce.”
“Or liked her apparently,” said Dalgliesh.
“No, I don’t think they did on the whole. She was too self-righteous, too religious.”
“If you can call it religious,” said Sister Gearing. “It wasn’t my idea of religion. Nil nisi and all that, but the girl was just a prig. She always seemed to be a damn sight more concerned with other people’s shortcomings than she was with her own. That’s why the other kids didn’t like her. They respect genuine religious conviction. Most people do, I find. But they didn’t like being spied on.”
“Did she spy on them?” asked Dalgliesh.
Sister Gearing seemed half to regret what she had said. “Perhaps that’s putting it a bit strongly. But if anything went wrong in the set you can bet Nurse Pearce knew all about it. And she usually managed to bring it to the notice of authority. Always with the best motives, no doubt.”
Sister Rolfe said drily: “She had an unfortunate habit of interfering with other people for their own good. It doesn’t make for popularity.”
Sister Gearing pushed her plate to one side, drew a bowl of plums and custard towards her and began to extract the stones from the fruit as carefully as if it were a surgical operation. She said: “She wasn’t a bad nurse, though. You could rely on Pearce. And the patients seemed to like her. I suppose they found that holier than thou attitude reassuring.”
Sister Brumfett looked up from her plate and spoke for the first time.
“You’re not in a position to give an opinion on whether she was a good nurse. Nor is Rolfe. You only see the girls in the training school. I see them on the wards.”
“I see them on the wards too. I’m the clinical instructor, remember. It’s my job to teach them on the ward.”
Sister Brumfett was unrepentant. “Any student teaching that’s done on my ward is done by me, as you know very well. Other ward sisters can welcome the clinical instructor if they like. But on the private ward I do the teaching. And I prefer it that way when I see some of the extraordinary ideas you seem to put into their heads. And, by the way, I happen to know—Pearce told me, as a matter of fact—that you visited my ward when I was off duty on 7th January and conducted a teaching session. In future, please consult me before using my patients as clinical material.”
Sister Gearing flushed. She tried to laugh but her amusement sounded artificial. She glanced across at Sister Rolfe as if enlisting her aid but Sister Rolfe kept her eyes firmly on her plate. Then, belligerently and rather like a child determined to have the last word, she said with apparent irrelevance: “Something happened to upset Pearce while she was on your ward.”
Sister Brumfett’s sharp little eyes glared up at her. “On my ward? Nothing upset her on my ward!”
The sturdy assertion conveyed unmistakably that no nurse worthy of the name could be upset by anything that happened on the private ward; that upsetting things just weren’t permitted when Sister Brumfett was in charge.
Sister Gearing shrugged. “Well, something upset her. It could have been something totally unconnected with the hospital, I suppose, but one never quite believes that poor Pearce had any real life outside these walls. It was the Wednesday of the week before this block went into school. I visited the chapel just after five o’clock to do the flowers—that’s how I remember which day it was—and she was sitting there alone. Not kneeling or praying, just sitting. Well, I did what I had to do and then went out without speaking to her. After all, the chapel’s open for rest and meditation and if one of the students wants to meditate that’s all right by me. But when I went back nearly three hours later because I’d left my scissors in the sacristy she was still there, sitting perfectly still and in the same seat. Well, meditation’s all very well, but four hours is a bit excessive. I don’t think that the kid could have had any supper. She looked pretty pale too, so I went up to her and asked her if she was all right, if there was anything I could do for her. She didn’t even look at me as she replied. She said: “No thank you, Sister. There was something troubling me which I had to think over very carefully. I did come here for help but not from you.”
For the first time during the meal Sister Rolfe sounded amused. She said: “Caustic little beast! Meaning, I suppose, that she’d come to consult a higher power than the clinical instructor.”
“Meaning mind your own business. So I did.”
Sister Brumfett said, as if feeling that her colleague’s presence at a place of worship needed some explanation: “Sister Gearing is very good at arranging flowers. That’s why Matron asked her to look after the chapel. She sees to the flowers every Wednesday and Saturday. And she does very charming arrangements for the Annual Sisters’ Dinner.”
Sister Gearing stared at her for a second and then laughed. “Oh, little Mavis isn’t just a pretty face. But thanks for the compliment.”
A silence fell. Dalgliesh addressed himself to his braised beef. He wasn’t disconcerted by the lack of conversation and had no intention of helping them out by introducing a fresh subject.
But Sister Gearing seemed to feel that silence was reprehensible in the presence of a stranger. She said brightly: “I see from the minutes that the Hospital Management Committee have agreed to introduce the Salmon Committee proposals. Better late than never. I suppose that means that Matron will be head of the nursing services over all the hospitals in the group. Chief Nursing Officer! It’ll be a big thing for her, but I wonder how C.B. will take it. If he had his way, Matron would be given less authority not more. She’s a big enough thorn in his flesh as it is.”
Sister Brumfett said: “It’s time something was done to wake up the psychiatric hospital and the geriatric units. But I d
on’t know why they want to change the title. If Matron was good enough for Florence Nightingale it’s good enough for Mary Taylor. I don’t suppose she particularly wants to be called Chief Nursing Officer. It sounds like an army rank. Ridiculous.”
Sister Rolfe shrugged her thin shoulders. “Don’t expect me to get enthusiastic about the Salmon Report. I’m beginning to wonder what’s happening to nursing. Every report and recommendation seems to take us further away from the bedside. We have dieticians to see to the feeding, physiotherapists to exercise the patients, medical social workers to listen to their troubles, ward orderlies to make the beds, laboratory technicians to take blood, ward receptionists to arrange the flowers and interview the relatives, operating theatre technicians to hand the surgeon the instruments. If we’re not careful nursing will become a residual skill, the job which is left when all the technicians have had their turn. And now we have the Salmon Report with all its talk of first, second and third tiers of management. Management for what? There’s too much technical jargon. Ask yourself what is the function of the nurse today. What exactly are we trying to teach these girls?”
Sister Brumfett said: “To obey orders implicitly and be loyal to their superiors. Obedience and loyalty. Teach the students those and you’ve got a good nurse.”
She sliced a potato in two with such viciousness that the knife rasped the plate. Sister Gearing laughed.
“You’re twenty years out of date, Brumfett. That was good enough for your generation, but these kids ask whether the orders are reasonable before they start obeying and what their superiors have done to deserve their respect. A good thing too on the whole. How on earth do you expect to attract intelligent girls into nursing if you treat them like morons? We ought to encourage them to question established procedures, even to answer back occasionally.”
Sister Brumfett looked as if she, for one, would willingly dispense with intelligence if its manifestations were so disagreeable.
“Intelligence isn’t the only thing. That’s the trouble nowadays. People think it is.”
Sister Rolfe said: “Give me an intelligent girl and I’ll make a good nurse of her whether she thinks she has a vocation or not. You can have the stupid ones. They may minister to your ego but they’ll never make good professional women.” She looked at Sister Brumfett as she spoke and the undertone of contempt was unmistakable. Dalgliesh dropped his eyes to his plate and pretended more interest than he could feel in the careful separation of meat from fat and gristle.
Sister Brumfett reacted predictably: “Professional women! We’re talking about nurses. A good nurse thinks of herself as a nurse first and last. Of course she’s a professional woman! I thought we’d all accepted that by now. But there’s too much thinking and talking of status nowadays. The important thing is to get on with the job.”
“But what job exactly? Isn’t that precisely what we’re asking ourselves?”
“You may be. I’m perfectly clear what I’m doing. Which, at the moment, is coping with a very sick ward.”
She pushed her plate to one side, flicked her cloak around her shoulders with brisk expertise, gave them a valedictory nod which was as much a warning as a good-bye, and strutted out of the dining-room with her brisk ploughman’s waddle, the tapestry bag swinging at her side. Sister Gearing laughed and watched her go.
“Poor old Brum! According to her, she’s always got a very sick ward.”
Sister Rolfe said drily: “She invariably has.”
3
They finished the meal almost in silence. Then Sister Gearing left, first murmuring something about a clinical teaching session on the E.N.T. ward. Dalgliesh found himself walking back to Nightingale House with Sister Rolfe. They left the dining-room together and he retrieved his coat from the rack. They then passed down a long corridor and through the out-patients’ department. It had obviously only recently been opened and the furniture and decoration were still bright and new. The large waiting-hall with its groups of Formica-topped tables and easy chairs, its troughs of pot plants and unremarkable pictures was cheerful enough, but Dalgliesh had no wish to linger. He had the healthy man’s dislike and disgust of hospitals, founded partly on fear and partly on repugnance, and he found this atmosphere of determined cheerfulness and spurious normality unconvincing and frightening. The smell of disinfectant, which to Miss Beale was the elixir of life, infected him with the gloomier intimations of mortality. He did not think that he feared death. He had come close to it once or twice in his career and it had not unduly dismayed him. But he did grievously fear old age, mortal illness and disablement. He dreaded the loss of independence, the indignities of senility, the yielding up of privacy, the abomination of pain, the glimpses of patient compassion in the faces of friends who knew that their indulgences would not be claimed for long. These things might have to be faced in time unless death took him quickly and easily. Well, he would face them. He was not arrogant enough to suppose himself secure from the lot of other men. But in the meantime, he preferred not to be reminded.
The out-patients’ department was next to the casualty department entrance and as they passed it a stretcher was wheeled in. The patient was an emaciated old man; his moist lips spewed feebly above the rim of a vomit bowl, his immense eyes rolled uncomprehendingly in the skull-like head. Dalgliesh became aware that Sister Rolfe was looking at him. He turned his head in time to catch her glance of speculation and, he thought, contempt.
“You don’t like this place, do you?” she asked.
“I’m not very happy in it, certainly.”
“Neither am I at present, but I suspect for very different reasons.”
They walked on for a minute in silence. Then Dalgliesh asked if Leonard Morris lunched in the staff dining-room when he was in the hospital.
“Not often. I believe he brings sandwiches and eats them in the pharmacy office. He prefers his own company.”
“Or that of Sister Gearing?”
She laughed contemptuously.
“Oh, you’ve got on to that have you? But of course! She was entertaining him last night, I hear. Either the food or the subsequent activity seems to have been rather more than the little man could take. What thorough little scavengers the police are! It must be a strange job, sniffing around for evil like a dog round trees.”
“Isn’t evil a strong word for Leonard Morris’s sexual preoccupations?”
“Of course. I was just being clever. But I shouldn’t let the Morris-Gearing affair worry you. It’s been hiccuping on for so long now that it’s become almost respectable. It isn’t even good for a gossip. She’s the kind of woman who must have someone in tow, and he likes someone to confide in about the awfulness of his family and the beastliness of the hospital medical staff. They don’t exactly take him at his own evaluation as an equal professional man. He’s got four children, by the way. I imagine that if his wife decided to divorce him and he and Gearing were free to marry nothing would disconcert them more. Gearing would like a husband no doubt, but I don’t think she’s cast poor little Morris for the role. It’s more likely …”
She broke off. Dalgliesh asked: “You think she has a more eligible candidate in mind?”
“Why not try asking her? She doesn’t confide in me.”
“But you are responsible for her work? The clinical instructor comes under the senior nurse tutor?”
“I’m responsible for her work not her morals.”
They had reached the far door of the casualty department and as Sister Rolfe put out her hand to push it open Mr. Courtney-Briggs swept in. He was followed by a half-dozen chattering junior staff, white-coated and with stethoscopes slung round their necks. The two on each side of him were nodding in deferential attention as the great man spoke. Dalgliesh thought that he had the conceit, the patina of vulgarity and the slightly coarse savoir-faire which he associated with one type of successful professional man.
As if reading his thoughts, Sister Rolfe said: “They’re not all alike, you know. Take Mr.
Molravey, our ophthalmic surgeon. He reminds me of a dormouse. Every Tuesday morning he patters in and stands for five hours in the theatre without speaking an unnecessary word, whiskers twitching and picking away with fastidious little paws at a succession of patients’ eyes. Then he thanks everyone formally down to the most junior theatre nurse, peels off his gloves and patters away again to play with his collection of butterflies.”
“A modest little man, in fact.”
She turned towards him and he detected again in her eyes that uncomfortable elliptical flicker of contempt.
“Oh no! Not modest! He gives a different performance, that’s all. Mr. Molravey is just as convinced as is Mr. Courtney-Briggs that he’s a very remarkable surgeon. They are both vain in a professional sense. Vanity, Mr. Dalgliesh, is a surgeon’s besetting sin as subservience is a nurse’s. I’ve never yet met a successful surgeon who wasn’t convinced that he ranked only one degree lower than Almighty God. They’re all infected with hubris.”
