by Mary Renault
Her feet stopped; and her mind, checking too, said “This kind of training” over again, and clicked to a standstill. She had come to a junction with another corridor, and, a little way along it, Valentine and Macklin, the senior house physician, were saying good night. They were dressed for the evening and had evidently just come in. Macklin had his back half-turned, but Valentine stood facing one of the big corridor lights, and there was nothing in her face that Colonna missed.
Just round the corner was a small staircase, leading circuitously to the nurses’ home. Colonna turned up it, glancing mechanically at her watch to make sure that she did not outstay the half-hour allotted for the meal. When she reached her room she sat down on the edge of her bed, dry-eyed, dry-brained, everything in her hard and dry. There was no palliative for what had happened, nothing at all even to take the edge off it. Valentine had seen her that morning, and had not told her that she was going out. She had not even said anything about the new dress she was wearing.
Colonna’s was the simple emotional finality of a child, for whom the moment’s experience colours all the future and tinges even eternity.
This one instant seemed to contain the gradual losses of a decade: the loss of pride, the loss of youth, the dawning on the imagination of what loneliness can be in middle-age.
At the end of the half-hour she tidied her uniform, and went back to the ward again. The transfusion in the side-ward was still going on. In the Sister’s sitting-room the donor, a plump sleepy young woman with her lipstick put on in a hurry, was sipping tea, her function discharged. A first-year probationer, borrowed from elsewhere, was taking nervous charge of the main ward.
“You might as well be getting back now,” Colonna told her. “Tell Nurse Pratt on your way that I’ve come.”
“Please, Nurse, I think I was to stay and help in the ward and you were going to ‘special’ the case. I think that’s what Sister said.”
“Oh, very well. Have you had your meal yet?”
“Well, no, I hadn’t time really to go down.”
“Go now, then. And tell Nurse Pratt I’m here.”
“Yes, Nurse. Thank you.”
Colonna made a round of the ward, attending to a few obvious necessities overlooked by the probationer’s inexperience; then returned to the Sister’s desk and, in a blind craving for distraction, fiddled with the papers and oddments scattered over it. In a small tin box, among the nibs, drawing-pins, and odd bone buttons from the surgeons’ coats, the key of the poison-cupboard lived. She fingered it over, thinking of things she had said to Valentine; they had only been threats at the time, but after all, she thought, that emptiness was less to be feared which destroyed even the consciousness of itself. Into Leslie, too, it would burn her final and ineluctable seal. Pratt came out for a moment in search of something, and she slipped the key quickly into her pocket. But they were still hard at it in the side-ward; she could see their shadows crossing and recrossing the lighted door. It seemed a pity that, instead of an ineffectual pint of blood, she could not hand them in a waxed phial the life she was weighing so distastefully in her hand. The imagination of it pleased her; in spite of all she had seen in hospital, death, to Colonna, was still essentially the supreme dramatic climax.
Pratt had pushed the trolley of instruments out from the side-ward into the passage. In a few minutes they would be ready to leave the patient to her. His case-sheet was lying on the desk; she picked it up, and stared at it vaguely, her eye lighting first on the age at the top corner. Twenty-nine. Only two years older than herself. For a man, at the beginning of things. That was another part of the injustice she had always resented. Her mind encountered the strongly-planted, confident shape of Macklin: she recoiled with a small physical movement which made the key in her pocket jingle against a couple of loose coppers. She picked up the case-sheet again.
Dully questioning what had arrested her, she read the name over twice before she took it in. She was still staring at it, wondering if a coincidence was possible, when Pratt trotted up to the table to give her her instructions. Colonna asked no questions; if she had been down to the dining-room she would know all about it and more, and had no wish to be asked by Pratt where she had spent the time.
“Nurse Lingard will be here to sit with him for a little while,” Pratt said, her whisper husky with chastened importance. “But I don’t think you ought to leave him at all. He’s a very difficult patient. He practically refused to have the transfusion; kept saying it was a waste or something like that. Mr. Rosenbaum was very good with him. Explained everything almost as if he were talking to another doctor. (He’s still in there now; you’d better hurry along as soon as he comes out.) In the end we told him the blood had been taken from the donor already, and that seemed to quieten him down.”
“And had it?”
“Oh, yes. I don’t think Mr. Rosenbaum would have said so if it hadn’t: he seemed to take it all quite seriously—a bit silly I thought, considering how collapsed he was. You expect them to wander a bit, I mean. I don’t like having these private patients in a general ward, it makes things awkward, really.”
“Well,” said Colonna, picking up a pulse chart, “you’re very unlikely to have him after tonight.”
Pratt pursed her lips. One did not make these observations about the relatives of members of the staff. “They won’t be able to plaster him, of course,” she said. “So be sure, won’t you, not to let him move?”
“I put you a binder and sandbags ready. Didn’t you fix them properly?” Colonna picked up her pen and notebook and went out.
Rosenbaum was just leaving when she got to the sideward door. He had been washing his hands, and was still holding the towel and screwing it absently into a ball. He stood in the doorway with a kind of discomposed look, like an actor who has been given the wrong cue. Colonna heard a voice say, with a quiet not so much suggestive of weakness as of a careful courtesy, “You mustn’t worry.” This was a favourite valediction of Rosenbaum’s; but it was not Rosenbaum who had spoken.
He left without looking at Colonna; in any case, they had always disliked one another cordially.
There was still a good deal of litter left in the room from the transfusion, and Colonna set about clearing it up. The red shade had been taken from the light over the bed, and thrown over a chair; she collected and replaced it—easily, for she was tall enough to reach the bracket without a chair. A gap at the bottom of the shade dropped a pool of yellow light on the face of the white-lipped young man lying, pillowless, on the bed. He had shut his eyes, probably because the glare worried him. She pinned the shade together and closed the chink.
So this is Vivian’s brother, she thought; her mind partly rousing itself from the daze of misery which had, for a moment, obscured everything but the routine task lying next her hand. Surely Vivian had said that they were alike. How vague people were about their own appearances. Poor Vivian, she was very fond of him. Colonna repeated this to herself, trying to make it mean something; but it was only words in her mind. She could not believe in her heart that after what had happened Vivian, the hospital, the universe itself could remain real and unchanged.
Routine, however, remained, distantly connecting with sanity. She pushed the trolley into the main ward for the probationer to clean, tidied up, filled a feeding-cup with lemon water, made out a half-hourly pulse chart, and slipped her hand under the clothes to take his pulse. He opened his eyes. She saw that they were nearly the same colour as Vivian’s, but with less brown in them and more green.
“Again?” he said.
“Just every half-hour.” Mechanically Colonna assumed her professional voice. She picked up the chart and marked the first point of the graph.
“Does that give them a line on the next case?” His voice had got a little stronger, and sounded faintly interested.
“No, it’s just to see how you’re getting along.”
“I shouldn’t worry, then. You’re busy, aren’t you?”
“Not really
. I’m just here to look after you.”
“I see.” He was silent while she put the chart away, and then said, “I hope I shan’t need to keep you very long. About how long does it take, as a rule?”
Colonna selected the correct response, mechanically, as she would have put her hand in her pocket for her surgical scissors. Situations like this were always having to be met.
“That depends. It’s difficult to say how long bones will take to unite. They’ll know better when they’ve X-rayed you a few times.”
His greenish eyes flicked up at her face. Defensively she added, “Really, only a surgeon could give you an opinion.”
“I did ask him. But he thought I was afraid.”
Colonna opened her mouth. The words she had expected to find in it were absent, and she closed it again.
He seemed to consider for a moment, then asked, curiously, “Or is that part of professional etiquette?”
She could think of nothing. Behind his almost motionless face another face seemed to stir, having a different and secret vitality of its own.
“It’s preferable, I think, to know.” He said it like a reflection rather than a request.
Colonna pulled herself together. “I don’t expect Mr. Rosenbaum knew himself. It’s very hard to tell exactly. Would you like a drink?”
“Thank you. I believe I am thirsty.”
She held the feeding-cup for him. He choked a little over it, and apologised. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just practice. You’ll soon get used to drinking on your back.”
“Thank you,” he said when she had wiped his mouth for him. “I’ll be able to do it myself next time. I can use my hands, you know, quite well.”
“You must keep very quiet just at first.”
“At first?” His pale lips twitched at the corners. Avoiding his eyes, she put the cup back on the locker and folded the napkin away.
“By the way, who gave me the blood for the transfusion?”
“A Miss Pomfret. One of our regular donors.”
“That round girl in blue who passed the door?”
“Yes, that would have been Miss Pomfret, I expect.”
“And how much of me is Miss Pomfret?”
“About a pint.”
“Mic would laugh at that.”
She did not contradict him.
Rousing himself—he had been abstracted for a moment—he said, “You might thank her from me. Tell her I—enjoyed her blood very much. Or what does one say?”
“I’ll tell her next time she comes.”
“Why do you suppose they gave it me?”
“To make you stronger.”
“God Almighty,” he murmured, and relapsed into silence.
Colonna settled herself in the chair, her notebook in her lap. What would he answer, she wondered, if she were to ask him, “What do you expect of death, behind all this reason?” All she was sure of was that the question would neither shock nor dismay him; that he would answer as simply as if she had asked him about the weather, would speak the truth and would tell her nothing. She would hear the words; they would beckon her like the sound of verse in an unknown language, magical and meaningless: solitude speaking to loneliness, a gulf too great for translation to bridge.
She hoped he would die easily. He would live longer than he supposed; for another night, perhaps for two. The transfusion had done wonders and, by the look of him, his constitution had been like iron. Thinking of him, she began for the first time to taste death with the senses of the imagination; the losing of touch and sight, knowledge and experience, the inexorably advancing dark. It had been in her mind till now a situation, never an experience. She sat silent, the footlights of her private theatre suddenly, chillingly extinguished.
He had turned his eyes away from her, silent with himself. For him, she thought, there was no imagining; it was now, and here. For him there was no afterthought, no compromise, no excuse.
The Night Sister, her torch and notebook in her hand, came gingerly round the door.
Colonna rose. The Sister was short and stout, pasty from her subterranean life, and had the air of always being oppressed with secrets too great to bear. She crooked a conspiratorial finger, and Colonna followed her out into the passage.
“How does he seem, Nurse?”
“His condition has improved a good deal, Sister.” She quoted his rates of pulse and respiration.
“That’s right, Nurse. Is he taking anything by mouth?”
“Taking fluids quite well, Sister.”
“That’s right, Nurse. I just wanted to make sure he was all ready before I sent Nurse Lingard to sit with him. You want to keep an eye on him, Nurse.” Her voice dropped a couple of tones. “Nurse Lingard’s only in her first year and there might be a change at any moment, you can’t never tell.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“We’ve sent for his father, but he lives up in the North of England. He can’t be here before tomorrow morning. I hope he won’t be gone before then. Poor boy; clever, too, from what I hear. Oh, and Mr. Rosenbaum particularly says, will you have him waked if his condition gets worse.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“It’s been a great shock to Nurse Lingard. About half an hour, I told her she could stay, but you don’t want to have her here too long, if it seems to be upsetting him. I shouldn’t like him to go before his father comes, not if we can help it.”
“Yes, Sister.”
The Sister put her hand on the knob of the side-ward door; and, as if the action had pressed a switch in her face, its expression changed to a soothing, solicitous cheerfulness. Colonna followed her in. He had got an arm out of bed, and was reaching it cautiously towards the cup on the locker. The Sister, her starched skirts rustling, bustled across the ward and forestalled him. Over the cup she darted at Colonna her routine look which said, “You must have been neglecting him to make him do that.” During this momentary pre-occupation she tipped the cup too sharply, and he choked again.
“I’m so sorry,” he said as if he were getting used to the sound of it. “I was trying to practise.”
“Now you mustn’t go trying anything like that, there’s a good boy.” She wagged her finger at him. “You’ve got Nurse here to do everything for you.”
“I know. Thank you. But I’ve always been used to doing things for myself. I’d rather, really, as it doesn’t make any difference.”
“Well, I never, difference indeed. You’ve got to save up every bit of strength to mend that back of yours. Hasn’t he, Nurse?”
Colonna formed her face into a conventional pattern.
“It’s very good of you”—he formed the words rather slowly and carefully, as if to be sure of getting himself understood—“to take such care of me. But I’m sure you’ll understand that I don’t want to make this a needlessly long business. It takes up your time. And I don’t care for loose ends. Besides, I think it’s—probably an experience you should come to with your perceptions still awake. So you see—?”
His voice had struggled a little unevenly with so long a speech, but he finished with a faint sound of satisfaction, like one who knows he has succeeded in making himself clear.
The Night Sister clicked her tongue against her upper plate; a gently reproving, encouraging sound.
“Now, you don’t want to worry. We’re all out to get you better just as quick as ever we can. And the way you can help us best is by lying quiet and doing just what Nurse here tells you, and not trying to move or worrying or anything like that. I’m sending your sister to sit with you for a little while; but you mustn’t go talking or getting excited. Now you do see, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I see. Thank you. Good night.”
The Sister went out, beckoning Colonna with an eyebrow.
“You want to watch him, Nurse. He’s not a good patient, not a good patient at all. These clever men, they’re often the worst. They worry about themselves, and they won’t be told anything. You be careful and keep
that binder very firm. Matron would never forgive me if anything was to happen, particularly before his father comes.”
“Yes, Sister.”
Colonna went back into the side-ward. He greeted her with the kind of look which shares a joke too obvious to need underlining with a smile.
“I’m just going to turn back the clothes a bit,” she said, “and see if your sandbags are all right.”
When a spinal case could not be plastered, it was kept splinted with a strong roller towel, the ends of which were made fast under narrow sandbags laid closely against the patient’s sides. Colonna saw that everything was firmly in place and that the haemorrhage had, for the moment, stopped.
“What’s that arrangement for?” he asked her, interested.
“To keep you from moving your back.”
“What would happen if I did?”
“You’d be likely to damage your spinal cord.”
“More than now?”
“Probably a good deal more.”
“You mean it would?”
Colonna hesitated, suddenly cautious. “It would be pretty serious. So we must be careful, as Sister said.” She picked up the cup. “Would you like to hold this, if I just steady it?”
He took it, managing very well. “Thank you. You remind me, do you know, of a man at Cambridge.”
“What sort of man?” asked Colonna, automatically pleased.
“Terrible. But very good-looking.”
She laughed; then, remembering, said, “You’re talking too much. You really must rest now.”
“Yes.” He was quiet for a little while; and she saw, when the false vitality of motion had left his face, that he looked more exhausted than before. Suddenly he said, in a stronger voice, “The Sister seems to hold you responsible for my—behaviour.”
“They do, in hospital, you know.”
“It’s hard,” he said, “to get used to that kind of thing.”
“Yes, I can imagine that.” She saw that it was time to take| his pulse again. It was weaker and more rapid than before. “You must keep quieter,” she said, and sat down with her notebook in front of her.
