Heartbeat (Medical Romance)

by Ramsay, Anna

  'Wherever have you put all that hair?' queried Bea, peering at Jenni's neat French pleat.

  Jenni laughed. 'Years of practice! I can do it with my eyes closed in about twenty seconds.'

  'Oh-oh, someone’s crying. We’d better investigate.’

  The nurses walked into a hub of chatter in the children’s ward where Jenni could see nine or ten infants laughing and splashing as they were given their morning baths in big tin tubs. Two girls in yellow overalls covered by plastic pinafores were supervising the proceedings, helped by the women who squatted on mats among the cots: mothers, sisters, aunts—whoever could be spared to stay with a sick child.

  Morning sunshine streamed in through the windows, and though the room was overcrowded and not much bigger than a large bedroom, it was cheerful and fresh with white walls and blue paint-work. A sugar-paper frieze drawn by the Sunday School and colourfully depicting African village life, ran all round the walls to brighten the stay of children who had to be kept in for treatment. Wherever possible, explained Bea, they were allowed home. If seriously ill and beyond the help of the Mission doctors, they would be transferred by ambulance to the General Hospital in Moshi.

  A tiny boy with matchstick-thin limbs, a swollen stomach and soap in his eyes, was sobbing piteously. Jenni scooped him out of the bath and cuddled him, making crooning noises. The scene was a news-still become three-dimensional and a lump rose in Jenni's throat. Here at last were the children she had yearned to work amongst. And paediatric nursing was the special skill she could offer. It wasn’t all about Paul. No it certainly was not.

  His eyes free of soap, the child examined Jenni in alarm and held his arms out to Sister Bea, keening to be rescued from this strange being. The other children grew quiet and they too latched on to Jenni with timid, wondering eyes. The mothers stopped their chattering and stared. One of the helpers took the boy and after delivering a smacking kiss to each tear-stained cheek wrapped him in a dry towel, saying, 'There there,’ over and over again.

  'They think your head's on fire,’ warned Bea. ‘Pat your hair and keep smiling. Show them it isn't hot.'

  Bea spoke rapidly in a tribal dialect, her words incomprehensible to Jenni but the tone of her voice just like any mother's coaxing a smile from a troubled child. The children giggled and shy smiles broke out. Reaching into a recovery cot, Bea handed Jenni a baby with bandaged eyes who dabbed sightlessly at her freckles and discovered instead her tip-tilted nose, crowing with delight.

  'Ross operated on this little chap before he left for Dar. And those two over there. Congenital cataracts—tragically commonplace in this part of the world.'

  The baby clung to her and with regret Jenni lowered him back into his cot, planning to come back and cuddle the child the first opportunity she got. Where was his mother? He seemed quite alone. She went round to each child, helping with a T-shirt here, straightening a cotton blanket there, holding a small head while a thirsty mouth slurped water from an enamel mug, stroking a sticky brow and all the while smiling, 'Jambo! Hello. Jambo!’ to the women crouching nearby.

  Bea was busy instructing the local girls she was training in basic nursing care. When she had finished she beckoned Jenni to her side.

  'Through here you'll find the kitchen and the sluice, and beyond them the Outpatients' Room and our mini-marvel OR and the autoclave room.' Sister indicated for Jenni to go ahead.

  'What a blessing, having an eye surgeon of Dr Mcdonell’s calibre working here. The thought of him going back to Liverpool just breaks my heart. But there, we should be grateful he cared enough to come to us in the first place. I’m told,' said Sister confidingly, 'he needed to get away for a while. Personal circumstances. Not that Ross is a man to air his washing in public, though he'd find nothing but understanding at the Mission. Goodness only knows but we've all got skeletons in our cupboards.'

  Talking of cupboards reminded Jenni that she'd left the vaccines and medical supplies in hers. She must hand them over today.

  'I sense he may have known deep unhappiness,' sighed Bea, opening the door of the cubbyhole that served as a sluice. 'Sometimes I see a look in his eyes that makes me wonder if ... Not quite like you're used to, dear, but it serves, it serves. The kit for the urine tests you'll find in the cupboard above the sink.'

  Jenni concealed an ironic twitch of the lips with a tactful hand. Personally, she couldn’t dredge up much sympathy for Dr McD. If anyone had suffered, it was Paul; but no one here seemed to know anything about the broken engagement, and she wasn’t going to gossip about having a sister who’d done something of which no woman could be proud.

  All the same, it was interesting to speculate. Had some professional crisis driven Ross McDonnell to pack scalpel and ophthalmoscope and head for Africa? Or was it a private affair, involving a woman?

  Paul might know. He was a man people would confide in.

  'Our layout here would make an architect's hair stand on end,' said Bea with cheerful unconcern. 'When we've got a bit more money we just tack on another section and everyone mucks in to help. We’ve even learned to make our own bricks from the red soil. Father Paul's worked like a Trojan, putting up buildings with his own bare hands.'

  She bustled ahead. 'Now these are the two adult wards. Sister Joanna is in charge here. And there's Dr Blarney taking samples for tests ... I don't think we'll disturb them, dear, you can pop in later. Have a quick peep in the Out-patients' Room. Ross has a clinic in here to-morrow afternoon. Sylvia usually works with him but she's on nights this week so I'll be asking you to take that job over.'

  'Of course, Sister,' responded Jenni, who was never going to shirk an assignment, however distasteful.

  'Now, while I supervise breakfasts, you have a nose round on your own and see where our equipment is stored. Then when you've got your bearings you'll be ready to get cracking. I'm afraid you're going to have to accept a flexible schedule.'

  'That's fine with me, Sister,' agreed Jenni cheerfully.

  Beatrice patted her arm, 'And I can tell you will be,' she said and hastened on her crêpe-soled way.

  DISPENSARY, read the black lettering on the opposite door. Thinking it was surely too early for anyone to be in there working Jenni tested the handle, expecting to find the place securely locked. Nothing of the sort. She peered inquisitively into a small but efficient laboratory. Three walls were fitted with waist-high lockable cupboards, ranks of bottles lining the open shelves above, neatly stacked cartons and dispensing paraphernalia conveniently to hand.

  A work bench ran the length of the window wall, with an inset sink at which a tall young African in a lab coat was washing his hands. 'Mr Mwinyi!' he whispered urgently. The head dispenser was seated on a high stool examining slides under a microscope. He turned round.

  'I’m so sorry – I didn’t mean to interrupt,’ apologised Jenni.

  Mr Mwinyi peered at Jenni over gold-rimmed bi-focals. ‘Nurse Westcott, is it not? His face lit up in a broad grin. He had greying hair and an enormous mouth of widely spaced teeth. ‘Come right on in, if you please, Nurse. Permit me to introduce my most able assistant, Kefa…’

  The young man was clearly shy of Jenni, retreating from the warmth of her handshake into his work. Reaching for a tablet counter, he began refilling small plastic containers, all the while darting sidelong glances at this vision in nurse's uniform.

  ‘Feel free to look around. Ask me any questions.’

  ‘CDM?' wondered Jenni aloud, reading out the mysterious initials on a huge bottle of liquid mixture.

  'Children's Diarrhoea Mixture. The dispenser wrung her hand and reminded her that they had met at supper the previous evening. 'How nice to see you again, Mr Mwinyi,' said Jenni hastily, afraid she might have given offence. 'You must forgive me for not immediately recognising you. In the past twenty-four hours I've been introduced to about fifty different people!'

  'And we Africans all look alike,' suggested Francis Mwinyi with a humorous twinkle in his eye. 'Now, miss, please sit here and view fo
r yourself this slide. You are of course regularly taking the malaria pills? Good. I will show you a typical example of plasmodium vivax, colloquially known as the malarial parasite.'

  Jenni hoisted herself up on to his stool and adjusted the microscope's eyepiece to suit her slightly short-sighted vision. She had examined slides like these as part of her nutrition course (which included an introduction to tropical diseases) but did not wish to give offence by saying so.

  The morning sped by with scarcely a moment to think of Paul. Ross McDonnell, she learned, had set off at daybreak for his weekly visit to a distant riverside village where he was treating all the children for bilharzia, contracted from playing in the murky larvae-infested waters. In her lunch break Jenni unpinned her hair and sat on the verandah with her feet stuck out into the sunshine and her legs shiny with cream, a sketchpad on her lap as she made swift charcoal drawings of the schoolchildren playing in the compound.

  The teacher on playground duty wagged a reproving finger when a straying football thudded against the dispensary window. A few swift strokes and he was included in her scene. A group of little girls in bobbing cotton skirts—she judged them to be about seven or eight years old—whirling red and yellow hoops round and round their waists and skinny legs, counted shrilly in English. And a crocodile of tiny tots playing Follow my Leader got tangled up in the older boys' cricket—a game taken very seriously indeed, judging by the protesting cries of the enthusiastic team as the squealing children trundled heedlessly past the stumps someone had painted for them on the school wall.

  Paul's handiwork, guessed the amused artist. He'd always been potty about all kinds of sport. No need for a PE master in this school.

  Enchanted by the scene, Jenni’s sketchpad slipped forgotten from her lap. The headmaster, a tall African wearing serious-looking spectacles, came out of the school clanging a handbell, and the chatter and laughter ceased on the instant. The children formed orderly lines and marched back to their classrooms. Jenni glanced at her watch. Ten more minutes and it would be time to set up the ante-natal clinic.

  The compound settled into a sultry stillness, the doves dozing in the gum trees, just the buzz of a distant motor—probably the bus, running an hour or so earlier today. She stretched and yawned, wriggling her warm toes and rubbing her legs which were still a whiter shade of pale …

  Next instant the peace was shattered by a man’s voice, screaming horribly with pain! The noise came from behind the kitchens. Shocked, Jenni shoved her hot sticky feet back into her Birkenstocks and took the verandah steps in one leap, almost tumbling flat on her face. Regained her balance and set off at a gallop. Faces appeared at doors and windows, amazed to see the nurse they had already christened 'the fire woman', her hair tumbling over her shoulders, dashing through the red dust towards Bwana Mac, who was half carrying, half dragging a writhing African whose groans of 'Uchavi! Uchavi!' echoed round the compound.

  Between the two of them, doctor and nurse got the poor fellow into the same treatment room where twenty-four hours ago Jenni herself had received scant sympathy at the hands of Ross McDonnell.

  'Stay with him,' barked Ross, striding off to the dispensary where he went into rapid consultation with Francis Mwinyi.

  The man refused the treatment couch and squatted in a corner on the goat-skin seat of a native stool barely a foot off the ground, bony legs in flapping cotton trousers bent double and his shirt concertinaed about his middle.

  'Uchavi!' he continued to moan, and Jenni with a cool damp flannel wiped away the pearls of sweat running down into his eyebrows. ‘It’s all right,’ she said over and over again, crouching down and putting her arm across the bony shuddering shoulders, feeling worse than useless but trying to sound as calm and reassuring as possible. 'The doctor—Mganga—he will make you better.'

  Ross's legs suddenly appeared in her line of vision, an impressive pair of hard-muscled thighs right on a level with her eyes. 'He keeps saying something that sounds like uchavi,’ she said urgently.

  'He thinks he's been poisoned by the witch doctor—some quarrel in his village with another man. I found him by the roadside, trying to drag himself here.'

  'Poison? Oh, good grief!' What antidote could there possibly be for a witch doctor's lethal concoction.

  Assuming water was all Ross could offer, Jenni reached up to take the enamel mug from him but he brushed her aside so roughly that a few drops splashed down the front of her uniform. Starting at the sensation of cool liquid on bare skin, she glanced down at herself in some surprise—and with mortification realised why the doctor had rebuffed her helping hand.

  'Sorry,' she muttered, fastening the poppers down her front. 'I was sunbathing, that’s all.'

  Ross didn't need to comment. His thoughts were writ clear all over his sardonic face. Daft little freckled Pom, you won't last five minutes out here. He squatted down beside his patient.

  'Dawa ya nguvu!—powerful medicine!'

  Wrong-footed yet again, Jenni watched in silence as their patient swallowed the drink in great gurgling gulps, his hands shaking so much that Ross had to hold the mug to his lips. When every drop was drained, the sick African fell back against the wall, exhausted.

  Jenni didn't relish witnessing the dying spasms of a poisoned man.

  With surprising gentleness Ross lifted the thin figure bodily and placed him, unresisting now, on the treatment couch. For the next three minutes the two watched intently as the stiff neck relaxed, the head sinking into the pillow, the groans becoming sighs of weariness.

  At last the doctor spoke, and his voice was quiet with a relief which Jenni readily shared. 'He'll be OK. We can leave him to sleep it off and then he can go back to his home.'

  He opened the door and waited for Jenni. 'Come on, milkmaid, time to get the next show on the road.'

  Jenni walked past him with her nose in the air. I know your game, you’re trying to provoke me so you can tell Paul I don't fit in with your precious team. Well, you're going to be disappointed because I plan to stay cool till I've been here long enough to prove my worth. After that, Ross the Boss, when the time comes I shall ex-plode!

  Chapter Four

  'If it’s not a cheeky question' said Jenni at supper that night, 'what exactly is this?'

  ‘Goat's meat stew,’ said Paul. 'Often on the menu,' he said, adding with a wink, 'unfortunately. Seconds, Ross?’

  The doctor was sitting opposite them at the long trestle table. He shook his head.

  'It’s bit like eating stringy chewing gum,' muttered Jenni, massaging an aching jaw.

  Matt looked up from his laden plate and guffawed. 'Dead right, babe!'

  They were serving themselves from a giant stewpot, adding a helping of the thick maize porridge called ugali. Matt handed along a dish of sliced carrots and spinach. 'Try this—real good.'

  'When I first came out here,’ Paul reminisced, ‘what I missed most was Jenni's mother's home cooking. Ah, those potato soups … and the Irish stews simmering on the Aga.'

  ‘And the porridge,’ she reminded him eagerly, ‘remember how you loved Mum’s porridge.’

  The doctor was listening with acute silent interest, those deep-set steel-grey eyes settling upon her with that heavy gaze. So Paul was there at breakfast-time too … interesting! She could just imagine the way his mind was working as he sussed out what was going on in her relationship with the mission priest. Well it wasn't as if Paul was a monk who had taken special vows or anything. He could do as he damn well liked, and so could she.

  'All credit,' Paul was saying to the table at large, 'to our dear Sisters who've done a terrific job improving the menus. The occasional lapse is good for the soul.'

  'Sole!’ sighed Sister Joanna. ‘Oh for a freshly grilled Dover sole with a nice crisp green salad.'

  Jenni tittered. Ross McDonnell's scrutiny was making her peculiarly nervous.

  Declining the fresh dates, she escaped from the supper table and investigated the small library of paperbacks shelved in a
quiet corner of the L-shaped room.

  Here was the one place in the Mission which conjured up visions of Old Colonial days with the ceiling fans and spindly bamboo tables. Earthenware pots of tall green palms and basket chairs lined with faded batik cushions. Jenni picked out a dog-eared novel and settled in one of the creaky chairs, her red cotton mini-skirt riding up over her pale freckled thighs. She looked over her book at Paul, admiring his tough physique revealed now he was out of his cassock and clad in the usual bush gear of khaki shorts and shirt, sleeves rolled up over his strong brown arms and his rugby-player legs … perhaps not quite as ‘wow!’ as in the old days, but still worth eyeballing.

  'What's that you're supposed to be reading?' asked Ross, observant as ever, heavy emphasis on the ‘supposed.’ His hand closed firmly over her own and tilted the book's cover towards the light. He read the title and gave a snort of amusement.

  Jenni snatched her hand away and the paperback fell to the floor, cover upwards. “Where Angels Fear To Tread.”

  Damn and blast, why hadn’t she chosen the Dickens! ‘You wouldn’t like it,’ she retorted, ‘too many long words.’

  Ross laughed and said amiably enough, ‘I brought your coffee over.’ He settled himself with a creak of wickerwork into the chair beside her. Everyone else was out of earshot.

  What did he want with her? Why couldn't he leave her in peace?

  'Rum do, that uchavi business.’

  Jenni didn't respond, recollecting the abrupt way she had been pushed aside when they were dealing with the poisoned African. A faint blush pinked her cheeks. Her fingers touched the buttons of her linen shirt, checking that all was secure on the Westcott front.

  She was going through the motions of page-turning, acutely conscious of Ross's proximity. He had picked up William Boyd’s A Good Man in Africa, the sprawl of his long legs mere inches from hers.