A Hospital Summer
Page 26
He flushed and fingered his tie. ‘When are your next nights off?’
‘Not till Thursday, Friday, Saturday next week.’
‘If I can swing it with my boss to get off Saturday, date? You can have the tea then.’
She hesitated, still gazing at his face but seeing another man’s. Hell, she thought, he won’t like this and nor will I. And then she thought, My God, the things I do for England. ‘Okay, but only if I can have the lot tonight.’
He didn’t hesitate. He knew she was just playing hard to get and he didn’t hold it against her. He was twenty-three. He understood women. ‘You’re on. I’ll nip it up later. Now about our date ‒’
She waved him to silence and tilted her head to listen. ‘Night Sister’s heels on the stairs ‒’ she fled silently into the stockroom.
Sullivan froze with terror. Being so newly qualified he had not yet shed his awe of the ward sisters or the more experienced staff nurses, and in the latter category he placed Nurse Dean as a spine-chilling example. But in common with the entire junior resident staff he placed the Senior Night Sister in Martha’s, London, in a class of her own; the Senior Night Sister struck the Fear of God and impotence into every houseman in every branch of the hospital.
The Senior Night Sister was a thin grey woman in her forties with the perpetual stoop, hushed voice and pallor of the permanent night worker and the perpetually severe expression of a sufferer from chronic indigestion. She favoured Sullivan with a reproving nod as she walked to the ward entrance, to look all round without stepping over the threshold. She turned back to him. ‘If you’re waiting for Nurse Dean, Mr Sullivan, you had better come back later. Mr MacDonald,’ she added in the tone others reserved for the Almighty, ‘is in the ward.’
‘I’ll do as you say, Sister.’ Sullivan retreated thankfully to the stairs.
Night Sister turned her reproving gaze on Nurse Carter who, as etiquette demanded, had re-appeared from the stock-room and stood at her elbow, her hands correctly held behind her back. ‘I’m not here for my round, nurse. I just want a word with Mr MacDonald. I’ll wait. Carry on with your routine.’ Nurse Dean, on her toes, had watched this exchange over the top of the screens. She didn’t mention it yet to Mr MacDonald. She settled back on her feet and returned her attention to the Major’s pulse-rate.
Major Browne was still under the anaesthetic and the green bag fluttered rhythmically against his thin narrow chest. The shock had yellowed the tan and smoothed the lines in his high forehead, his blue-veined eyelids were peacefully closed and he looked asleep rather than unconscious. Briefly, Mr MacDonald held the mask a little above the narrow, fine-boned dreamer’s face. An anaesthetic dreamer’s face. ‘Doesn’t look fifty-four or a professional soldier,’ MacDonald observed in the quiet, flat tone used by all the staff at night since it carried far less than a whisper.
Nurse Dean nodded non-committally and kept her gaze on her watch. ‘142,’ she said a minute later. ‘Thin but very regular.’ She looked at the unconscious man. ‘Very thin but wiry. Kept himself in good shape. The Army’ll have helped him there ‒ it’ll help him now.’
MacDonald said nothing. He replaced the mask and wondered how the owner of that face had endured years of Mess life or would endure the prospect of his future life when he came properly round. He stepped back to measure with his eyes the height of the wooden blocks raising the foot of the bed. The angle was so acute that they had just had to tie on a pillow to pad the headrails and with crepe bandages tied the end of the huge, electric bedcradle to the footrails. The top of the bed was made up in two parts to leave constantly exposed the massive bandages covering the right hip and the sandbags packed around it. MacDonald looked unemotionally at the bandages, then turned to time on his watch the rate of the blood dripping through the glass drip-connection fitted into the transfusion apparatus. The transfusion stand was by the footrail and the blood was flowing into an ankle vein in the left leg. ‘Give him the rest of this bottle and the next at this rate, then if he’s still holding, slow the one after to half.’ He didn’t add, if he’s not holding let me know, as that was the established procedure in such circumstances. He pulled down his face mask and for a few minutes stood in silence watching his patient. This was one of his professional habits, but it often surprised sisters and staff nurses working with him for the first time, as it was one more commonly met in physicians than surgeons.
At thirty-four MacDonald was the oldest and professionally most experienced man on the resident staff. With the single exception of the Senior Night Sister, he was the oldest member of the entire staff on-duty in the hospital that night. Just then his exact age was impossible to guess, as even in the red glow his angular, long-jawed face was grey with fatigue and his dark eyes were bruised with black. He never looked physically strong, but this was generally ignored by those who worked with him, since he had the apparently limitless physical and mental stamina of the strong-minded in their prime. In many ways he was a remarkably shrewd man and he had that disconcerting mixture of great sensitivity and great insensitivity that often accompanies an exceptional talent for surgery. His job as Senior Surgical Officer demanded all his stamina and skill. Last night he had had two hours’ sleep and this morning the theatre had recommenced operating at six. He had lost count of the number of patients he had operated on during the day. (Twenty-three.) He would not have remembered what day it was had his wife not reminded him this afternoon that it was Thursday. ‘You know I always have a half-day on Thursday. The Head was so helpful when I said I simply must come to London to see you. I just had to talk to you after your last letter and you know you never seem to be free to come home these days. The Head was marvellous. She said she’d take my morning periods herself and so long as I was back at school second period after lunch tomorrow she could cope …’
MacDonald brushed a hand over his eyes as if that could brush out the memory and bent over the bed to raise each limp eyelid in turn. He rested a hand on the yellow forehead. ‘He’ll do, for just now.’ He straightened and glanced over the screen behind him. ‘Night Sister’s in the flat.’
‘She’s been there quite a while. Sullivan was there but she got rid of him.’ Nurse Dean kept her calm gaze on her patient. She was far too conscientious ever to risk looking into MacDonald’s eyes in the ward. ‘Obviously waiting for you but can’t be urgent or she’d have come in, and she’s not here for her round as she sent Carter away. I’ll just get Smith to take over here. She seems to have settled Briggs now and Jarvis is asleep again.’
‘Jarvis ‒ oh, yes ‒ your coronary. Right. Better see what Night Sister wants.’ But he didn’t move. He looked at her face, and kept the pain out of his voice but not his eyes. ‘I didn’t like taking it off,’ he said.
She didn’t look up. ‘You had to save his life.’
He grimaced. ‘Christ ‒’ he spat under his breath, ‘would I have butchered him for any other reason?’
Nurse Dean blushed for his bitterness. ‘I’ll get Smith,’ was all she said.
MacDonald walked away slowly as an old man. For a fractional moment she watched the back of his long limp white coat and the truth was in her eyes. Then she drew on the armour of her training and went round to Briggs’s bedside. She was still reporting on the Major to her colleague when they heard another flying bomb, this time unheralded by sirens, streaking inland and on over the river about a mile away. Nurse Dean glanced quickly away from Nurse Smith and watched the sleeping Briggs as she continued to mouth her report. All the night nurses could lip-read. Nurse Smith folded her arms to hide the tremor of her hands and her mouth went so dry she couldn’t have produced a voice, and only just managed to move her lips for the necessary monosyllabic replies. And she could only make them when the bomb was well away.
In the stockroom, Nurse Carter stopped rolling cotton wool balls into dressing swabs, closed her eyes and prayed. In the flat, MacDonald and the Night Sister exchanged resigned glances.
As so often happened in the war, neither the thre
e nurses nor Mr MacDonald heard the one bomb that night that affected all four personally and permanently.
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