The Healing Time

by Lucilla Andrews

  ‘Straight case of the devil you know?’

  ‘Precisely.’ I looked straight at him. ‘Particularly when you happen to have first-hand experience of the fact that said devil, for all his faults, knows his job inside out.’ He had suddenly turned off his overhead light. ‘Going to try for sleep, now?’

  ‘Sure to God, Mrs H, are you telling me I’m not dreaming already?’ I had forgotten he could mimic. He had Brendan, exactly. ‘Will you get out now and leave a decent man to sleep in peace.’

  ‘Sleep well.’ I had left him and closed his door.

  Hills got off the chair. ‘No change here. Soothed Dr K?’

  ‘Had a go.’ I sat down and went on with my report. The blood went on dripping and Nanny’s lights stayed out.

  Paul lay like the statue he had seemed all night. By three-thirty his lips were less white and the waxiness was fading. Dr Shaw rang after the 4 a.m. check. ‘He’s evened up!’

  ‘God bless you, Doctor!’

  At five, he watched me change vacolitres. The moment of switch-over was the tricky one. He breathed out. ‘God bless you, Staff. That nine up?’

  ‘Yes. Showing in his pulse and pressure, now.’

  He walked over and pressed his face against the window. ‘Dawn soon. God bless all good little donors sleeping the sleep of the blessed in their good little beds ‒ and don’t I wish I were in mine.’ He came back to look at the quarter-hourly chart. The graph was very slowly but steadily rising. We smiled and shook hands, then he removed himself to his lab still smiling. I sat on the locker-seat and grinned like the Cheshire Cat.

  Hills was at the desk watching Nanny. It was about twenty minutes later that I heard her answering the phone. ‘Nurse Hills, William and Mary Ward. Yes, Sister? I’ll get her.’

  I was sitting on the locker-seat with the open report book on my lap. I had it on the bedtable when she arrived. ‘Night Super wants you.’

  ‘What’ve I forgotten to put in my 2 a.m. report? Stay here whilst I find out.’

  I had not forgotten anything. The Night Super wanted me to work two extra nights, take Sunday and Monday off, and have the missing night off taken with my usual at the end of next week. ‘Could you possibly rearrange your domestic affairs just this once, Staff?’

  I only hesitated briefly. Ann would rally and Marcy probably enjoy the change. ‘Yes, Sister.’

  ‘That’ll be a great help, my dear. Thank you. And how is Mr Streeter?’

  My news pleased her still more. ‘Most hopeful.’

  She rang off ‒ and one short, one long, one short buzz jangled every nerve in my body. I ran the short distance to William Small Ward Two and felt myself go as white as Hills, but in relief. ‘It hasn’t stopped, love!’

  ‘I thought it had.’ Her voice shook. ‘I got in a panic I was sitting staring at it and I was sure it had stopped. It hadn’t.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Mistake on the right side.’ I checked everything for myself a second time even though one glance had shown all was in order. ‘These things happen on nights ‒’ I broke off as we both heard Joel opening his door.

  ‘Staff! He must’ve heard!’ She was whiter than ever. ‘What’ll he say ‒’

  ‘Stay here. I’ll cope.’ I shot out into the corridor, put a hand on Joel’s shoulder, and gently propelled him back into his room, closing his door behind me. ‘False alarm.’

  He was now allowed to get up and potter round his room for a few minutes morning and afternoon. That did not include leaping out of bed, grabbing his dressing-gown in the dark, and hauling it on inside out. He had to prop himself against the wall. ‘Truth?’

  ‘Would I be here now if it wasn’t?’

  ‘No.’ He was as white as Hills. ‘Sorry about this. I was actually asleep. Reflex action to that mayday.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. Nearly gave me a coronary.’ I stood against the wall beside him. ‘Let’s have your arm, Joel.’ I draped this over my shoulders before he realised what I was doing. ‘Lean on me and let’s get you back to bed before you pass out on me again.’ I put my right arm round his waist. ‘Ready when you are.’

  ‘Hold it, Pip, the floor’s taking a dive.’

  I moved fast and, facing him, got both arms round his waist. ‘Put your other arm on my shoulders and let your head flop, Joel. That’ll do it.’ I didn’t add, I hope or mention the facts that we were too far from any chair and that if I now let go of him he would undoubtedly go down and split the clips that had not yet been removed from his wound. As he knew all that he obeyed without question. I could feel his muscles go limp and he was very heavy, but between the wall and my training in lifting, I was able to support him. My back took nearly all the strain and since one’s back muscles are the strongest, that was my intention.

  It was about a minute before he raised his head from my right shoulder. ‘Thanks. You’ve stopped revolving. I can make it now.’

  His colour was a little better, but his chin was still too blue, his eyes too shadowed, and his upper lip still glistened. ‘You may be happy to risk it, but I’m not. Paul’s picking up nicely, but I’m not pushing my luck. So you keep hanging on to me and I’ll steer you back to bed.’

  He had been removing his arms. He let them stay hanging over my shoulders. ‘Paul’s balance?’

  ‘Evened up at four. The lot now going up. Come on, duckie. Bed.’

  The relief in his smile transformed his haggard face. ‘You nurse me much longer, Pip, and you’ll have a rip-roaring schizo on your hands. One minute, the Beloved Physician, the next, back to all of eight! This how you treat all your patients, or just the difficult ones?’

  ‘Only those I have to coax into bed.’

  I was now helping him back on to the high bed. His stifled laugh nearly had him on the floor. ‘Only a nurse could blandly come out with something like that!’

  ‘Not at all.’ I told him about Trevor as I straightened his bedclothes. I didn’t ask him to keep it to himself as I knew he would. He clutched at his dressing with both hands and was still smiling when I turned off his light.

  Hills, next door, was still ready for a nervous breakdown. ‘How can you be sure he won’t shop me, Staff?’

  ‘Because I am sure. I’ve known him a long time.’

  ‘You never told me that!’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I forgot. One does.’

  The sky was pale grey when Paul Streeter opened his eyes and instantly looked up at the vacolitre hanging like some exotic scarlet plant from the white stand. Then he saw me on his locker. He smiled slowly and jerked up his right thumb. I wished the blood donors could have seen that.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ENOUGH PROVES ENOUGH

  When I got back from taking Marcy to school that morning I sat down on my living-room sofa to summon up the energy to get out of my outdoor things and go to bed. I took off one glove. I was still wearing the other when Ann shook me at half-past twelve.

  I did not really surface through the waves of sleep. I merely made the attempt. ‘Three already?’

  George was on the phone for me. From the hours of silence she had thought I had long gone to bed and had only come in intending to look round my bedroom door in case I happened to be awake. ‘He said not to wake you, but he’d like to speak to you if possible as it’s rather important.’

  ‘Important!’ I leapt up with the exaggerated reactions of fatigue and charged into the hall. ‘George? Pippa! Something wrong with Marcy?’

  ‘Christ! Are you bloody neurotic about that poor kid! You’ve got a good I.Q., Pippa! Use the bloody thing for a change! If the school had to contact you about Marcy in school hours, you know dead well the call would come from the head.’

  I picked the whole telephone off the hall table, loosened the flex, and sat down on the floor with my back against the wall. Dusty appeared from nowhere, decided I was making like Joel in the lift and she had to make like a St Bernard. George was still busy on the damage I was doing Marcy’s psyche. ‘Pippa, you there?’
r />   ‘Yes.’ I had to open my eyes as every time I shut them Dusty licked my face. ‘Blast finished?’

  ‘Er ‒ yes.’

  ‘Then what do you want?’

  ‘If that’s your mood, I’m not sure I do.’

  I opened my mouth to blast him back, decided it wasn’t worth the effort and an apology was generally the quickest way out. ‘Sorry, George. Not properly awake.’

  ‘You can’t blame me for that! I told your cousin not to disturb you.’

  I was now awake, but at that particular pitch of mental fatigue that gives one great clarity of thought. It is a pitch well known to anyone working very late before any exam. Suddenly after flogging oneself for hours, the breakthrough comes and previously insoluble problems seem to sort themselves out whilst all one has to do is sit there and watch. So I sat and watched myself as well as George. I made the soothing Aunt Clara-type noises he wanted and he talked about the two tickets he had managed to get hold of for some Bach concert tonight and the precise ingredients of the meal he thought I might enjoy helping him cook in his flat later. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘we should have an amusing evening.’

  If we didn’t, since he would not be conducting the Brandenburg, playing the harpsichord for the Concerto in G minor, and I was lined up for the cooking, no one could possibly blame him.

  ‘Sounds great, George, and thanks for asking me, but I’m afraid it’s out as ‒’

  ‘You’re not going to dish out the old baby-sitter problem again? I’m sure your cousin won’t mind taking on an extra evening. As she hasn’t any kids of her own, she’ll probably enjoy it, or is that the rub?’

  ‘George, if anyone’s being neurotic ‒’

  ‘Don’t get mad at the lad for a little plain speaking.’

  I said wearily. ‘I’m not mad at you, love.’ That was true. The only person I was mad at was myself. It wasn’t his fault he shared some qualities with Marcus. But I should have remembered I had only been able to overlook those same qualities in Marcus because he had had so many others and those others I had loved.

  I explained exactly why tonight was out.

  He did not try to understand, and again it wasn’t his fault he didn’t wholly succeed. Though accustomed to being involved in extra-mural activities at school, as these were mainly on a voluntary basis, since he was neither a head nor deputy-head teacher, he regarded any employee’s rights to fixed days off and holidays as inviolable. He kept saying, ‘They shouldn’t be allowed to muck you around like this.’

  His reaction was far from uncommon, and one of the two main reasons why most nurses marry doctors and vice versa. The other was the obvious one that one marries whom one meets. Every now and then, some Marcus or his female equivalent was sufficiently in love to put up with last-minute date cancellations, missing the first act of a play or waiting alone two hours in a restaurant without taking violent umbrage. The umbrage-takers were in the overwhelming majority and since there are few things to beat trying the temper than an unexpected, unwanted, unpaid, but essential stretch of overtime the clash was as inevitable as the final break-up.

  George had enough insight to aim his umbrage at the system. He didn’t blame me. He was sorry for me. ‘All your time’s taken up being either a nurse or a mum. It’s such a waste of you as a woman. Do you ever have time to remember you’re one?’

  I didn’t. I didn’t mind that much. Perversely, I minded very much being reminded of the fact. I thanked him for the kind thought.

  ‘Doesn’t seem to have done much good.’ He sighed. ‘Now I’ll have to get rid of these bloody tickets. I don’t want to go alone.’

  ‘Then take someone else.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I dunno. No, wait, I do! Maggie MacDonald. She’s off tonight. I don’t know if she likes Bach, but you could ring the ward and ask her. She’ll be there till five-thirty.’

  He hesitated. ‘Why should I want to spend an evening with that woman? Or she with me?’

  ‘I don’t know about you. I think she’d quite like it.’

  ‘Pippa, on what grounds can you possibly think that?’

  A MacDonald twin had come in at the front door. He wore a kilt; a white open shirt, a kind of milkman’s plastic pouch hanging from one shoulder, and a bowler hat. He raised the hat politely as he stepped over my feet and jammed it back on as he went on upstairs. As my mental breakthrough was now complete, I wasn’t at all sure if he was really there or in my subconscious. Yet why would I dream up a bearded young Scotsman in a bowler hat?

  ‘Pippa! We been cut off?’

  ‘Sorry. Why do I think she’d quite like it? Because she’s told me she likes you. She thinks you’re a sweet boy ‒ as you were ‒ laddie.’

  ‘Not really?’ From his voice he was smiling.

  ‘That’s what she said. Take it from there.’

  ‘I may do that.’

  Ann had been listening. She followed me back into my living-room and watched me wind a rug round myself. ‘Wasn’t that crazy?’

  ‘No.’ I flopped back on the sofa and stretched out. ‘I’m not going to bother to undress. I’ll have a bath later. Wake me at three.’

  Nurse Grey was in charge that evening. She looked up in surprise when I walked in with Nurse Carter, the junior who had replaced Parsons’ set-mate Adams. Carter was in Hills’ set. She was exceedingly tall, very thin, and the bun in which she had pinned up her long straight red hair was already very untidy. She had still to find the answer to her acne and what to do with her hands and feet. When she found out, she was going to be a knock-out. Her features and lapis-lazuli eyes were lovely.

  ‘Watkins got the plague?’ demanded Grey. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Yesterday. She took it home on nights off. Night Super’s just told me her med cert’s en route.’

  ‘Sister know?’

  ‘I told her this morning as Mrs Watkins rang the office last night.’

  ‘Oh.’ Grey glanced at Carter and let it go until she and I were alone after the report. ‘Sister was in one of her rare right tizzes when she went off. I expect that’s why she forgot. She didn’t say why the tiz, but she never does. I suppose her brothers aren’t in the nick?’

  ‘They weren’t an hour ago.’

  ‘Then what’s eating Sister this time?’

  I said, ‘Quite honestly, I can’t tell you.’

  She had had a very heavy day. I wasn’t her patient, so she took that at face value. ‘You on tomorrow night?’ I nodded. ‘Poor you! Going to last out?’

  I smiled. ‘I hope so.’

  ‘But how’ll you sleep tomorrow? No school. What’ll you do with your infant?’

  That surprised me. She was a nice girl and I liked her, but being single and living in the ultra-comfort of the Staff Nurse Home, until now it had never dawned on her that my domestic arrangements might present certain problems to a night nurse. I explained David was taking the day off as he wanted some seaside local colour and hiring the MacDonalds’ Mini for the day to drive Ann and Marcy to Brighton. ‘Should give me a long day’s sleep.’

  ‘You look as if you’ll need it. How much on average do you get?’

  ‘Five hours.’

  ‘That was Joel Kirby’s guess when I was taking out his clips.’ She was looking at me with new interest. ‘I never realised till then that you two had known each other so long. Neither of you gave that impression when he was up and about.’

  I shrugged. ‘You know how it is. Long time no see ‒ no think.’

  ‘How extraordinary!’ She was smiling. ‘That’s exactly what he said. Your minds must work alike.’

  ‘Occasionally. How much longer’ll he be with us?’

  ‘There’s nothing official yet, but I doubt more than a day or two as we’ll need his bed. As he had that dodgy start, I personally think the S.S.O.’ll want to hang on to him until after the fourteenth day. He can stay around in his room at the House. But I know where he’s going on sick-leave.’ Her eyes glistened. ‘Three guesses?’
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br />   ‘I’m a lousy guesser. Where?’

  ‘He’s been invited to spend his sick-leave in the bosom of the Brecklehurst family! Our Lizzie never misses a trick! How’ll the poor man get out from this?’

  ‘Knowing Joel Kirby, I’d say if he wanted out, he wouldn’t let himself be pushed in.’

  ‘In health, yes. But anyone can sweet-talk a sick man.’

  She was only voicing a thought I would have upheld as a fixed law up to last week. ‘I wonder?’ I thought aloud. ‘Does illness really soften up, or does it just caricature? Like the way old age caricatures youth? Making the kind kinder, brave braver, bitchy bitchier?’

  Grey did some thinking. ‘Maybe you’ve got something there. Yet if Joel’s so eager, why wait so long to marry the girl?’

  ‘By waiting they’ll have seen much more of each other. Though residents do marry, hospital medicine’s still geared to the monastery. Different story when he’s over his present job. He’ll then be a junior pundit somewhere, and even junior pundits earn good money and can have home lives.’

  She smiled reluctantly. ‘You sound like my R.L.!’

  ‘R.L.? Sorry. New one on me.’

  ‘Reluctant Lover. My orthopod. God! The trouble that man’s common-sense causes me! Other girls have to repel boarders. I can’t even get him over the side! He’s got principles.’ From her expression she rated these with St Anthony’s Fire. ‘Or do you think I’m just under-sexed? I think I must be as I haven’t a big bottom. In fact, I haven’t got one at all.’ She turned herself round for me to inspect. ‘My R.L. says he doesn’t mind but I’m sure he does. Men go for big bottoms!’ She walked round me. ‘I wouldn’t call yours big though you’ve got more than me. Did your husband mind?’