The Print Petticoat

by Lucilla Andrews

  My Aunt Monica arrived in the hospital the following evening. She had been on a visit to some friends, in Oban. ‘A beautiful place, my dear Joanna, but it rains all the time!’

  She left Scotland by the first train available after she had received the trunk-call the Night Sister made a couple of hours after my admission.

  Sister Catherine brought her in between my screens and sat her down on the chair-locker beside me.

  My Aunt Monica was dressed in green serge. She always wore green serge in England, even in midsummer, when an old-fashioned large-crowned oatmeal straw-hat and navy crocheted gloves were her only concession to the English sun. For the winter she had a grey felt pull-on, with a couple of wild duck’s feathers pinned in the brown ribbon band. Her gloves were yellow string. She wore her grey felt now.

  She followed Sister carefully, lifting her feet as she walked, in her anxiety to tread quietly. Her head was poised anxiously, as if she was afraid it would drop off her shoulders.

  Sister Catherine must have been putting the Fear of God into Aunt Monica. Her eyes were swollen, as if she had just finished crying.

  My Aunt never cried. It was her pride.

  ‘I am undemonstrative, Joanna,’ she told me endlessly when I was younger. ‘I am undemonstrative, but I feel deeply. I am womanish. Kindly control yourself, child!’

  Sister Catherine left us alone together. Aunt Monica took a hold on herself and my hand and said, well, well, Joanna, whatever would I be up to next?

  I was quite pleased to see her, but I was glad when Sister came back and gently swept Aunt Monica away after a few minutes. I knew I was in for the inevitable lecture on the wearing of vests. Together with Richard’s mother, Mrs Everley, my Aunt Monica considered wool next to the skin the answer to all life’s little problems.

  Beth came in one day during the next week.

  ‘I couldn’t get in, Joa. Sister was outside with a flaming sword. There’s a large No Visitors hanging on your screen. Most impressive.’

  I grinned. ‘I guessed as much. They think I’m booked.’

  You never die in St Gregory’s Hospital, London. You are lost, or you croak. If it’s considered unlikely that you will recover you are said to be booked.

  Beth met my eye. ‘Too right,’ she laughed.

  Beth once had an Australian boy friend. Periodically he still crops up in her conversation.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you do things in style. Allan is frantic. Richard rings me every night from Stevenswood, and Marcus is a changed man. For a quiet girl, Joa, you certainly do get around.’

  I smiled. ‘Someone else once said that ‒ but I’m damned if I can remember who.’

  I thought about what she had said. I still did no reading, and found even the wireless-earphones exhausting. A little gentle thought about my friends and acquaintances was the height of my occupations.

  I was sorry for Allan. Only slightly sorry, as I knew his distress would wear off. Allan always did the right thing, and the right thing for him at that moment, as my would-be prospective husband, was to look haggard.

  Marcus, I knew, was merely enjoying a new line.

  I clung to Richard’s telephone calls and felt my blood-pressure rise.

  ‘How did Richard know?’

  ‘The professor, of course. When he was down at Stevenswood for a teaching round.’

  Richard appeared round the foot of my bed that week-end. We did not talk much. We sat and held hands, and I felt safe for the first time in months. I knew that whatever happened on top, underneath Richard loved and wanted me as much as I wanted him.

  He sat on the locker-seat, and touched my cheek gently with his fingers.

  ‘You look better, darling. Better than you looked at Elmhall. Fernie must have put some good blood into you.’

  ‘Three pints,’ I smiled. ‘And incidentally a cut-down hurts like the devil.’

  ‘Don’t lose any more,’ said Richard. ‘I can’t risk you giving me another fright like that.’

  He picked up my hand in both of his and played with my fingers.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said, ‘how I felt when I heard. It was at lunch on Monday. The professor was holding forth on actinomycosis in soldiers of all things, when he suddenly switched round and said, “I was sorry to see Miss Anthony in Catherine. Bad luck that business, eh, Everley!” And I had to ask him what he meant.’ His voice was very quiet as he went on. ‘Darling Joa ‒ don’t do it again. I just can’t bear it. I didn’t realize how much I couldn’t bear it, till then. So don’t ‒ don’t have any more haemorrhages.’

  He got up to go. When he stood up he bent down and kissed my forehead.

  ‘Richard,’ I said, moving my face quickly, ‘Richard, don’t be such a bloody fool! You don’t want my bugs.’

  He smiled. ‘I don’t mind having anything of yours, my darling,’ he said, and left.

  Sister Catherine came round the screens when he had gone. ‘All right, Anthony?’ She looked amused. ‘I must say, my dear, you are very picturesque with your long pig-tails. I hope our Mr Everley didn’t excite you too much.’

  The ward-maid’s head shot up, like an Aunt Sally’s over the top of the screen. ‘Can I come and polish the locker now, Sister?’

  I was glad to see her. She prevented my answering Sister with anything but a smile. I could not stop smiling, and for the rest of that day I grinned all over my face like a Cheshire cat.

  I was still not officially allowed any visitors. Aunt Monica came in every afternoon for a few minutes. Sister Catherine had briefed her well, so she never talked much. If, as more often than not, I was asleep, she peered in between the screens, grunted, nodded to herself, and goose-stepped softly out of the ward again. There were a good many occasions when I was not sleeping all that soundly, but was not feeling sociable. That was how I knew how she went on when I was asleep.

  My Aunt Monica was staying with Beth at the flat in Water Street.

  ‘She’s adopted me, Joa,’ said Beth. ‘She makes me eat a good breakfast, and no fiddling with a bit of bread and marmalade! Also, she inquires about my underclothes.’

  ‘She would,’ I said, and we both laughed.

  It amazed and interested me how superbly selfish being a patient can make you. Also how easy it is to acquire the reputation of being a good patient. The words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ used in conversation occasionally will overwhelm the nursing staff with gratitude.

  Allan and Marcus both loomed daily round my screens, but were invariably moved firmly away by Sister Catherine or her staff-nurse before they could do more than ask how I was.

  ‘It’s a good thing Mr Kinnoch is a gynaecologist,’ said Sister one evening as she washed me. ‘I dread to think how I would deal with him if he was a house-physician. He would be up here examining patients all day. Your large student is bad enough. I’ve never known a young man so keen on writing case histories. I understand he has swopped all his surgical cases for my medical ladies. Still, at least I can throw him out easily ‒ an H.P. would make matters more complicated.’ Sister Catherine had the perfect technique as a blanket-bather. With her the inevitably tedious, slightly damp performance was an art. It was as if a soft, cool breeze passed over you on a summer’s day. Sister Catherine was more than a competent nurse, she was an inspired one. She was always a mental step ahead of her patient. She knew by instinct when I was feeling better and ready to chat and be all girls together; or when at other times I was a dumb patient, she dropped into the silent, neat-handed stooge.

  As soon as my temperature settled for a bit, they pushed my bed out on to the balcony, and there I stayed for the rest of my time as a patient in Gregory’s.

  It was very pleasant on the balcony. When I began to feel better, I decided there were a lot worse illnesses. That is, if you ignore the times when they stick a needle into the back of your chest, blow in air and collapse a lung. One thing about the illness, particularly important if you are a woman, it’s one with which you do look
attractive.

  As my bed was near the stone balustrade of the balcony, I could watch the people walking along the pavement on the opposite side of the road. We used to wave at each other a good deal. The Professor would probably have said waving used too many muscles, but it never did me any harm. When the wind blew up from the road I could hear the voices of the people below.

  ‘Poor dear,’ they would say, ‘ever such a sweet face! Looks ever so ill an’ all.’

  I used to simper and try and hack, for local colour, which pleased me as much as it did them. I always prayed no one from the ward would ever come out and catch me playing the fool.

  Before I started nursing I invariably associated pulmonary tuberculosis with Mimi singing at the top of her voice and coughing up her guts in the last act of Bohème. I couldn’t sing a note but I had hardly any cough at all.

  There were other things besides myself that interested the pavement strollers.

  ‘The poor nurses,’ they would say, ‘it’s not right!’

  Sister Catherine and I discussed this typical attitude of Londoners.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Sister, ‘but when I remember how my feet hurt when I was a junior pro ‒ maybe it isn’t right at all.’

  ‘Not at all!’ I added. The Havenne had left its mark on me.

  I was pushed indoors only for my morning and evening wash. After supper I was always returned to the balcony for the night.

  I was allowed more visitors on the balcony. Now I was sleeping properly at night for the first time since my admission. I liked being visited. Every night Allan or Marcus, and sometimes both, would come up after nine o’clock. Wrapped in scarves, overcoats, and gloves, they would sit on the end of my mackintosh-covered bed and give me the gossip of the hospital. The pin-points of their lighted cigarettes glowed in the darkness. Allan’s characteristically steady in his mouth or hand, Marcus’s weaving stars as he gesticulated.

  I could tell things happening with those two men. With Allan particularly it was obvious that some kind of change had taken place. At first he had been genuinely upset and shocked by my illness. Now that I was better, now that it was as certain as it ever can be that I was not going to die just yet or be in danger of dying, he was feeling the dullness of the anticlimax. There was an almost guilty air of relief about him as he gradually realized that I had not accepted his proposals and that consequently he was bound to me by ties that existed only in his imagination. It was hardly possible to blame him for this realistic view: he was suddenly and clearly taking stock of our relationship; T.B. in a prospective wife, though not an insuperable difficulty in itself, does present certain complications which, if possible, it is better to avoid. If we had been engaged I don’t think Allan would ever have suggested breaking it off himself. All the same, I am pretty certain he would have thrown up the bargain had I suggested it.

  He said nothing of all this to me for quite some time. As I was not emotionally entangled with him myself I was able to take the change with almost academic interest. Once I reached the stage of registering men again I realized it was all over. One night he leaned over the balcony and watched the black endless lines of the traffic moving past the hospital A hundred yards beyond my balcony the road turned sharply, and every now and then as a bus swung round the corner its headlamps would catch Allan in the beams of a searchlight I saw his outline, sharp and clear, while he gently flicked ash into the depth below.

  ‘Do you remember that night in the park, Joanna?’ he said slowly. It had been one of our last evenings together. We had been to a movie, then walked leisurely back arm-in-arm through the park and Knightsbridge, before he took me back to the flat. We had stopped in Sloane Square and sat on a bench. Allan had been very much in love with love that night.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ he had said. ‘Extraordinary to think that it will all end. That one day I’ll get over you. That I’ll wonder what it was all like ‒ how I loved you. When I love you the way I do now.’ He had moved his arm up round my shoulders. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no Joanna it can’t stop! It won’t ever stop. You’ll have to marry me.’

  I remember I never answered. He had not really wanted any answer. He was thinking aloud. Then a policeman passed and said good-evening, and we said good-evening back and moved on towards the flat.

  Allan was talking softly now, in the same way. To himself.

  ‘I would never have believed, then, that you could be right. Pity, all the same ‒ that you are.’ He turned, his back to the road, his face gone from me, just a square shadow in the darkness around me. ‘Pity we can’t go back, Joanna. But you can’t push back the Thames.’

  I had never answered him, as I have said. If I had, I would have said what he had wanted me to say. I knew what he wanted me to say at this moment, and I said it.

  ‘That’s the way it is, Allan, and it’s better that it should be. I wouldn’t have made you happy.’

  ‘No’ ‒ his voice was genuinely sad ‒ ‘no, I don’t suppose you would have.’ He sighed, and when he spoke again his voice was puzzled.

  ‘I loved you so much, Joanna. I’m sure I still do. In a different way.’

  I turned my head on my pillow, to the side that the light from the traffic never reached, where I was private. I smiled. Now it was all over, now nothing I said could hurt Allan any more, my part was easy. I could play at platitudes without worrying that he might take me literally.

  ‘I know you do, Allan,’ I said seriously. ‘And I know we will always be friends,’ I added, to my shame.

  ‘We will, Joanna,’ he said, so fervently that I felt genuinely shamed.

  He went inside a few minutes later, having narrowly missed asking me to be a sister to him.

  Perversely, I now wished Allan had waited a little longer to tell me he had recovered from his bout of unrequited love. My morale, held up though it was by fleeting visits from Richard and his regular letters, was still not as high as it could be. I wanted all the gratuitous affection I could lay my hands on in those days. Richard when he came to see me was as delightful as I could wish, and his letters amusing and, as I have said, frequent. He always was a great one for letter-writing, so there was precious little significance in my post. The future was still a forbidden subject. I was neither ill enough nor fool enough to ignore his reticence to myself, or forget that even on his first visit he had said a lot about how he felt but had carefully never asked how my own emotions were getting along.

  There are always long hours of boredom and doubt when you are ill in bed. Allan, with his stolid, respectable, and apparently enduring love, had done a lot to bolster me up in my bad moments. It was illogical and ridiculous, but now Allan had gone I was lonely and sad.

  I turned away from the outline of the dirty-linen bin on which I was concentrating and looked at the road instead. Suddenly I wished Marcus would come up and pay me a visit. With Marcus you could always be sure of a good laugh. As he was at present running two equally promising romances with two different staff-nurses, I decided he was probably well occupied somewhere in the depths of the nurses’ home. Sister Catherine had given me this bit of gossip, as one of the staff-nurses involved was her own staff-nurse, Nurse Gray. I smiled as I thought about Marcus and his young ladies, and I felt a lot better.

  That night the snow came. The first snow of the winter. I woke at 4 a.m. to find the two night nurses silently pulling my bed from the balustrade to the shelter of the inside wall.

  ‘Sorry we woke you. Miss Anthony,’ said the Senior Nurse. ‘Are you very cold? Would you like to come in?’

  ‘No, thanks. I mean, I’m quite warm. But aren’t you girls freezing in those short sleeves?’

  They said no. They were so busy inside that they had not known it was snowing till they saw the white piling up on the window-sills.

  ‘I’ll take your bottles, Miss Anthony,’ said the pro. When she came back she brought me a cup of tea as well. I lay leisurely drinking the tea, watching the snow-flakes. There was no wind, and the sno
w floated straight down into the road, and soon it was covered, thick and silent. The smoke-stained houses opposite were strange, clean and empty. I felt as if I was alone in the world. No-one to see the snow. No-one to move. It was as if I was in the centre of one of those glass snowstorm balls I had when I was a child. Peaceful and quiet until you shake the ball and then the snow goes mad. Not that there was anything fantastic about the snow I was watching.

  It was most orderly, well-mannered snow. I decided my life was more like the toy than the real thing. I had given my ball a shake when I left Elmhall, since when fantasy and I had walked hand in hand.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Christmas as a Patient

  Marcus qualified early in December, and, as is the usual case in a teaching hospital, he applied for a house job at St Gregory’s. He came up to see me the night the results came out. He was very pleased with life and more than a little drunk.

  ‘Hi, darling! Take a good look at me ‒ the big doctor!’

  ‘Marcus,’ I said, ‘I’m awfully pleased. Tell me all about it? Was the viva awful?’

  ‘Not too bad,’ he grinned, swayed slightly, then sat down on the side of my bed. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘At least this way your bed’ll keep still. If I concentrate very hard the linen bin’ll stop revolving.’

  ‘Marcus, stop your drunken meandering and tell me about your finals.’

  ‘Drunken nothing ‒ just you wait, darling, till I’ve drunk all I mean to drink tonight! Then you’ll see. As you were. I had old Maynard. He was so damn’ terrified I would draw a gun on him that he didn’t dare ask a thing. Just “Yes, Mr Ormorod”, “Of course, Mr Ormorod”, “Anything you say, Mr Ormorod”.’

  He stood up and leant with his back against the balustrade.

  ‘Why don’t you take a tip from him, Joa? Follow the Prof. Be a yes-girl.’

  ‘Marcus ‒ dear. Marcus ‒ surely you have enough young women swooning at your every word. Why me?’

  ‘I thought I told you once ‒’ he began, his voice almost serious, then he laughed. ‘Why not, darling? Shall I have to put a bullet through you like Maynard’s stooge to show I mean business?’