by Mary Renault
“Are you unhappy?” she said.
He stared at her for a moment as if he were bringing her into focus, then smiled.
“No. I was resting. You wanted me to rest.”
“You sound better.”
“Perhaps I am.”
But she saw, when she looked, that he was beginning to bleed again. Presently she would have to get Pratt to help her with the dressings. She straightened the clothes.
“You’ve never belonged to another person, have you?” She had not meant to say it; but some compulsion in her brought it out.
He did not answer at once. “I think,” he said at last, “that it’s better to take death in one piece.”
After that she left him undisturbed, and presently he slept again, more deeply than before. Opening her notebook, she added to what she had already written, “Has been somewhat restless, but has slept for short periods. Fluids taken well.”
The handle of the door turned softly, and the pink sleepy face of the probationer looked in.
“Please, Nurse, Nurse Pratt says we’re just going to do Barton, and could you come for a minute and help lift?”
Colonna raised her eyebrows. “Nurse Pratt was particularly anxious for me not to leave this patient.”
“She said it would only take a minute. He’s so heavy, you know, he really needs three. If you’re not too busy.” Her amateurishly-pleated cap disappeared again. She was in awe of Colonna.
Colonna straightened her long limbs, cramped from the chair, stretched, and looked under the cradle at the sandbags and drainage-tube. Everything was in order. She replaced the coverings softly, and looked up to find him awake, his eyes smiling at her.
“She sent for this time, didn’t she?”
“Yes, but I don’t have to go. Are you comfortable?”
“Yes. Do you know—I am.” She hesitated by the bed, making a needless adjustment of the cradle. “The other nurse heard her, too,” he said. “So it isn’t your responsibility.”
“I’d better go, I suppose. She’ll drop the man, or something. I shall only be gone a minute. You’ll be all right?”
“I shall do very well. Don’t be angry with me.”
“Angry? You’ve—you’re a very good patient.” She turned away quickly to the door; but when she had opened it she came back again. “There’s nothing you want before I go?”
“No. Thank you. Nothing now.”
“I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Yes.”
In the main ward the screens were round the bed of a hernia patient of sixteen stone.
“I thought,” said Pratt, “that as you’d already left your patient for more than half an hour, another minute wouldn’t hurt.” She slid her hands under Burton’s broad buttocks.
“All right”—Colonna clasped her wrist from the other side—“if you can’t manage it between you. It’s only knack. You have to teach the pro’s to lift some time or other, you know. Keep your head forward, Barton. Ready—up!”
“Thank you, Nurse,” said Pratt distantly. “We shan’t need you any more. You can go back to your patient now.”
“May I really?”
For Pratt’s benefit she drawled, and strolled casually away. But when she was outside the screens she hurried, and crossed the passage nearly at a run.
As soon as she was over the threshold she knew: and knew, then, that she had always known.
His eyes were open, and his mouth set; but his face had no look of resistance or dismay, rather of an intent and eager concentration. The spent traces of a striving which might have been of the body or the mind, only made more complete the alienness of death, the absolute having done with effort, with direction, with desire. She looked down at him, confused with doubts and discoveries of herself, bewildered by what she felt; turning to him as though, if she asked him, he would clarify it all; but he was no longer concerned with her.
The door was still open behind her. She went over on tiptoe, and shut it without sound. Returning to the bed, she folded back the clothes and lifted the cradle. The linen towel that had fixed his waist, loosened from its sandbags, lay crumpled under his left hand. Against his right arm, the mattress was still dented with the thrust of his elbow.
She did not pause, but, as swiftly as if this purpose had brought her, smoothed out the towel, rolled its ends in the sandbags, and laid them closely against his sides. Nothing else had been disturbed. She covered him again, and, seeing that his head was turned a little towards the left, set it straight. When it was done she was still for a moment, looking down at his face between her hands: searching it for she knew not what tacit confidence, or acknowledgement, or even irony. But there was nothing, or nothing related to any thought or emotion that she knew; only the fixity of a forgotten aim, the intentness of an amazement quenched and over.
“Dead?” said Pratt. She pushed back her chair so that it squeaked on the polished floor. “What do you mean? When did he go? Why ever did you leave him just now? I told Nurse to tell you not to come unless everything was all right. It was up to you. It’s your responsibility. You’re senior to me.”
“I’ll take it,” said Colonna slowly. “You needn’t worry. I’m leaving the hospital in any case.”
“I must ring up Night Sister. I don’t know what she’ll say.”
“I’ve rung her already. Oh, by the way, you’d better take this key. I took it by mistake for the stationery one.”
“And Mr. Rosenbaum not called after he specially said. I can’t understand how anyone who took the least interest in a patient—”
She rustled down the ward, Colonna keeping pace with a long silent stride. Her advantage of inches always irritated Pratt at close quarters. Near the door she turned to hiss over her shoulder, “And you’d better not start the Offices till I’m there to help you. I want to be sure of having him look nice when his father comes.”
-26-
“THE WHOLE THING IS,” said Evans, “that you won’t look at things class-consciously.” He swivelled round on his stool. “When you reduced a thing to its simple economic factors—”
“Yes,” said Mic. “I know. Look here, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’ll have to turn these cultures over to you. I’ve been through everything I can manage left-handed.”
“O.K. If Mister Scot-Hallard can bear up. I know he likes his actinomycoses to get a university education.”
“These are the treated ones and that’s the control. I’ve put down some notes about them—can you read the writing?”
“Looks better than usual, to me. Well, as I was saying, it all boils down to the economic factor in the end. Take this smash of yours, for instance. If the State—seen the police yet, by the way?”
“Yes, this morning.”
“Spot of bother, I suppose?”
“The blood-counts are here. I’ve done those. And there was one for grouping lying about, so I did that too. Have you got the slip anywhere? It’s a two.”
“Oh, you wasted your time doing that one. That ought to have been thrown away. Some mess of Solly Rosenbaum’s, took it for a transfusion and found it had been done already, or something. Chap’s dead, anyway. Any others? … I say, Freeborn? That the lot?”
“Yes. That’s all.”
Mic reached for a box of paper-clips, and began to attach a pile of specimen-slips to their reports.
“Here,” said Evans, “I can do that for you in half a minute. Gets on my nerves to see you fumbling about with-one hand.”
“Don’t look, then,”
“What you like, of course. Arm hurting?”
“No, thanks.”
Evans returned to his microscope.
Mic worked through the reports, stacked them, and reached over for some finished notes that had to be sorted for filing. The second sheet he came to was headed, “Jan Lingard. Male. 29. Ward: Trafalgar.” Then a long screed in Rosenbaum’s twirled writing, and at the end, in red “Died, 5.15 A.M.” Mic remembered the quarter striking as he la
y awake on one of the Casualty examination-couches. It had sounded exactly like all the others. He filed the notes and picked up the next—“Gladys Simmonds. Female.” His mind, slackening in weariness, suddenly refused it all. Nothing had happened. He had had a bad night, one of the nights when coughing kept him half-awake and made him dream. Jan was at Cambridge, and owed him a letter.
He reached for another file, and, in moving, jolted his sling against the edge of the bench. With the small, dulled echo of pain, suddenly everything was present again; the wind, the moon, the lopsided beam of the headlight; the guard’s unheard whistle. But the train had gone. There was left the empty platform, the grey light in the roof, the stale advertisements; paper blowing about, incompetent passengers asking porters the way.
“Well, Freeborn.” Dr. Esmond Lampeter paused behind him, shrugging his scrawny shoulders into a clean white coat and fastening it, as usual, by a single button in the wrong hole. He had a face like a cleanly and intelligent vulture; his predatory nose supported a pair of spectacles, dwarfed by its size, which he was continually straightening, a gesture which showed the back of his right hand, glazed by an X-ray burn thirty years old. “This is the last place where I thought of looking for you. Just been making inquiries’ which of the wards I’d find you in. Never thought of you struggling up here.”
“I haven’t done a great deal, sir. I just wanted to keep the special stuff going. My notes are a bit unintelligible, I’m afraid, to anyone else.”
“Shouldn’t be, ray boy. Never be indispensable, it’s good art and bad science. What if you’d been killed, hm? Leaving me to decode that scrawl of yours, wasting my time. … Sorry to hear about the young fellow with you. Know him well?”
“Yes, sir. Fairly well.”
“Hm, sorry about that. Well, you get away home and take it easy. Looks a touch of delayed shock about you, pretty sure to be.”
“I’d sooner be here, sir, if there’s anything you can use me for. I feel all right.”
“No difficulty about that, if you feel up to it. I’m getting out some cancer statistics that want checking with the notes. Long job, I’m afraid, knock off when you’ve had enough.”
He went to his desk behind the glass screen, and came back with some figures he had annotated in his beautiful Greek-formed script. Mic left him with regret; the man’s benevolent impersonality, like the wash of air over a wide plain, gave one the sense of freedom from oneself. He got down a thick volume of notes and tried to concentrate on it; but he ached all over with stiffened bruises he had not felt until today, and in his mind he kept seeing Jan’s profile under a cotton sheet in the mortuary, with its feel of stale and hackneyed death. There should have been fire for Jan; an olive-wood pyre, or a raft, of pine burning on the water, releasing his restless limbs into light ashes and warm rising air. How would he endure the enclosing boards, the earth’s weight, the smug encumbrance of the stone? The thought became a horror to him, till its violence jerked some compensating balance into play; and suddenly he seemed to see Jan, arrested for a moment in going about his affairs, turning in the sunlight to smile at his childishness.
He spread out Lampeter’s figures on the bench in front of him, and forced himself to attend. Everything was in order and exquisitely clear; it was true enough that if Lampeter himself were to drop dead tomorrow, his successor would find his unfinished work as intelligible as a text-book. Mic, in his checking, worked over the columns and delicate annotations with a kind of abstract love. He began to grasp the novel plan of the statistics; a few minor additions, even, suggested themselves to him, and he noted them on a rough pad of his own, in the straggling, back-sloped lettering of his left hand. Once, at a useful idea, he found himself smiling in pleasure and paused amazedly: till he reflected that here, in this clearness, was all of Jan with which, henceforward, he need be concerned.
“Morning, Freeborn. Have you—Hullo. What have you been doing to yourself this time?”
It was Scot-Hallard, freshly arrived, looking brisk and hearty from his walk through the morning’s frost. He peeled off his overcoat as he spoke. He often came on foot when it was fine. His heavy shoulder, intervening between Mic and the nearest window, seemed to block out all the light. The swing doors were still flapping behind him, and the wind of his brisk passage disarranged the papers on the bench. He looked at Mic and his sling with irritation, as at an instrument-trolley short of a pair of forceps.
“It’s only a collar-bone, sir.” Mic straightened his notes mechanically. Scot-Hallard leaned a square hand, with wiry black hair growing upward to the wrist, against the edge of the bench. His clothes seemed, in spite of their excellent fit, to be strained a little by the force they enclosed. The cold had congealed his breath in a little fringe of droplets along the bottom of his moustache. Mic moved back an inch or two in a vague physical distaste; not giving much thought to the feeling, but obeying it like a habit which other preoccupations push into the background. “Had you come about the biopsy results? I’ve got them here, they’re both squamous epitheliomata.”
“Thought so. How are the cultures going?”
“I’m afraid I’ve had to pass those on, sir. I thought they were a bit delicate to fiddle with like this. Evans has them, and the results up to date. I explained what you wanted done.”
“Yes, yes. Pity. All right. I’m sending up a cervix I want pickled in section for the nurses’ gynaecology course—oh, but I suppose you can’t do that with one hand either.” He looked impatiently over Mic’s head at the other benches. “Oh, well, tell someone about it, will you? Can’t stop now.” He slung his coat over his arm and strode off, setting the papers fluttering again.
Mic re-arranged them, settling his arm into a more comfortable position against the edge of the bench. Dimly he recalled that Scot-Hallard’s approach had often been enough to disorganise his mental processes for ten minutes afterwards; wondered at it ,and got on with what he had been doing.
Behind the screen Lampeter straightened his glasses, removed them, polished them with the piece of greyish chamois he kept in his drawer, and focused them on Scot-Hallard as he barged the swing doors open with his shoulder and disappeared. Somewhere in the innocent scientific Eden of the Senior Pathologist’s mind, an unregenerate Adam muttered; observing, for the hundredth time, that Scot-Hallard used the place as if it belonged to him. Surely, in heaven’s name, thought Lampeter, there were enough semi-skilled assistants about to deal with the surgeons’ routine tests? It was like Scot-Hallard to appropriate Freeborn. Only the best was good enough for him, whether he could use it or not. And wasting the lad’s time—wasting Lampeter’s, in effect—over this actino experiment which, if he read his current literature more carefully, he might know had aborted in Germany a couple of years ago. Well, he had not asked Lampeter’s advice in the matter, and Lampeter had no intention of tendering it unsolicited. He decided, however, that later on he would lend young Freeborn the relevant paper, casually, among a pile of others: his German would be perfectly adequate. Unless, indeed, he had read it already; he kept remarkably well abreast of things. Lampeter became conscious of a mild enjoyment, and reproved himself.
Well, he reflected, scratching a sparse eyebrow with the butt of his pen, in a few months now there would be no more Scot-Hallards for him. He hoped that freedom from these petty annoyances would not impair his flexibility, an asset important now as never before. A pity, he thought, to be leaving a lad like Freeborn behind to be made a hack of. He had the right of way of going about things, and his heart was in it; witness the way he had crawled up to his bench this morning, as soon as he was discharged. It was what one would have done oneself at that age; but the moderns, most of them, were soft. His sense of proportion, too, was sound; he had been in no doubt which part of his work to turn over to Evans.
With sudden resolution, Lampeter unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk, straightened his glasses which the abrupt movement had displaced, and took out a file. After all, why not? He had short-listed St
eadman very reluctantly. He was overfond of rushing into print, and for pot-hunters Lampeter had very little time. Young Freeborn would provide more work for less noise. Scot-Hallard might not be pleased; but Scot-Hallard was not, after all, quite the pathologist he esteemed himself to be. Scot-Hallard could manage with Evans very well.
Thumbing the neat file over, he reached a leaf containing a list of names; scored one out with fine parallel pen-strokes, and inserted “?, Freeborn” in its stead.
Mic worked on till after dark. Lampeter, who thought he looked ill, stopped on his way out to tell him to go home; but in the end he persuaded someone to let him stay on and finish a test that would not be ready till after six. He had only dozed for a couple of odd half-hours in the night, and was feeling rather sick, aching and heavy-headed, but adequate to this kind of work, which he could have done in his sleep. He filled in the time with filing, and any trivial arrears that came in his way. As weariness grew on him, his reluctance increased to leave this sheltering frame of small activities and entrust himself to solitude. Since, however, the moment had to come, he would not let himself linger beyond the end of what he could usefully do, but tidied up and went away down the deserted yellow-lit corridors, turning them, as he snapped off the switches, into caves of echoing darkness behind him.
When he was out of the gates he began walking mechanically down the blind alley where he generally parked the car, then remembered and went back to the main road. It seemed a long way to the flat; he found that he had wrenched his ankle the night before, not badly enough to be noticed at the time; now it had grown stiff and nagged a little with each step. The night had become very cold, and the air felt heavy as if with the promise of snow. A few tiny flakes were floating in the air, so small and light that they seemed to rise and be blown away again before they could touch the ground.
The flat, unlived-in for twenty-four hours, struck chilly as he let himself in. He had forgotten that the table would still be littered with the last meal he and Jan had eaten together. Bread-and-cheese and beer and celery. Jan had arranged the celery-tops in a feather fan on his side-plate. Mic remembered his brown hand touching the pale leaves as he talked. The cold had kept them crisp; they might just have been bitten off.
