by Jane Arbor
But even bed-making was not the carefully, measured art that it had been in training school. Sara found herself momentarily holding sheets and draw-sheets and blankets, only to find them snatched from her grasp by her partner and even—yes, by Sister herself, who said again: “Tch, tch! Watch me, Nurse,” and took Sara’s place for the completion of three beds before handing the task back to her.
And the incident of the flowers and of the beds was, to Sara’s bewilderment, to be repeated often throughout the day. Whatever her task, Sister could be relied upon to appear at some stage, to utter her usual impatient exclamation and to complete the work herself before thrusting her baffled junior on to something else.
Sara, sent with scouring-powder and disinfectant to clean a bathroom, thought deliberately: “I wouldn’t put it past her to come in here, to roll up her sleeves and to show me how to put a higher polish on the bath!” And in her anxiety to be finished and away before this could happen she cannoned from the room, straight into a male chest which resisted her firmly and quite painfully.
A pair of white-sleeved arms thrust her back upon an even keel and her nervous glance met two merrily accusing eyes in a round, fair-skinned face.
The young man said: “Hullo—a new young ’un? Why didn’t they tell me? And why didn’t they tell you that it’s etiquette to stand to attention to the medical staff? What’s more, is that the new official angle for caps since yesterday?”
“I—I’m sorry.” Sara drew herself up and made an ineffectual gesture towards her cap, only to find her hands full.
He eyed her amusedly for a moment. Then: “Oh, relax, do! I’m just a poor houseman—though I’ll be a registrar and a consultant one day. Meanwhile—allow me—” With an absurd bow he took the scouring powder and the disinfectant from her and Sara’s hands went instantly to her cap.
“It’s my hair, you know. It won’t hold it firm,” she mumbled thickly, owing to the pins between her lips.
“What’s wrong with elastic?”
Sara stared, deciding that though his chest might be about as yielding as armour plate, she liked his face. “I didn’t know it would be allowed,” she said.
“Why not? Anyway, I thought girls couldn’t manage to support life without it. And under there—” he flicked a forefinger towards the soft down at her neck—“it’d never be seen.”
“Thanks awfully. I’ll try it,” she promised.
“Don’t mention it. No charge,” he said loftily. “Meanwhile I suppose we shall meet again?”
“If you work on this ward—I mean, visit your patients here—I expect we shall.” said Sara.
“Oh, that—yes, I’m practically married to Men’s Medical for the moment,” he said with mock bitterness. “But they give me an hour off duty now and again. What about you?”
“I expect so—I mean, yes, of course.”
“Then it’s agreed?” His grin was cheekily confident.
“What is?”
“That two off-duties equal one date?”
Sara flushed furiously. “No, of course not!”
He remained unperturbed. “All right, have it your own way—for now. Meanwhile what’s your name? Mine’s Simon Glenn.”
“It—it’s Sara Spender. But you needn’t remember it, because it doesn’t signify—” And Sara snatched the ward’s property from him and fled, furious with him for his presumption and even more furious with herself for having told him her name.
She left Dr. Simon Glenn, house physician of six months’ standing, slightly abashed—but only slightly. “You rushed your fences, lad,” he adjured himself. “But if she’d really meant to slap your face she wouldn’t have told you her name. Sara—sort of old-world—Ah, well, there’s plenty of time—” And he went upon his way, twirling his stethoscope and whistling “If You were the Only Girl in the World” just off-key.
Sara’s day—a whirl of disjointed impressions which she was going to have to sort out later—ended at eight-fifteen, just when her feet, she felt, were about to utter their own protest against running about ceaselessly and achieving very little.
But before she went off duty Sister Bridgeworth found time to say approvingly: “Well done, Nurse. You’ve worked well. That’s what I always say—a nurse who can work alone and completely without supervision will always be valuable to me!” Clearly Sister Bridgeworth had no inkling that she had snatched at least half Sara’s work from her and had done it herself!
At supper Sara compared notes with a fellow student-nurse who had been sent to Kathryn’s ward and who claimed that Kathryn was a “marvellous” Sister to work under. But all day Sara had not seen Kathryn until she was in her room after supper and a knock sounded at her door.
Kathryn came in, her dark eyes bright with eagerness to hear how Sara had “got on”.
Sara took a deep breath of despair. “I shall never learn anything'.” she declared dramatically. “You said Sister Bridgeworth was grand. I think she’s impossible!”
“She is grand. Why, what happened?”
“Well, for all she allowed me to do, I might as well not have been there. But as I was there, she was on my tail all day, doing everything for me!”
Kathryn threw back her head and laughed. “Oh dear, has she been at it again? I warned her that you were intelligent and keen, hoping to fend her off! But it’s really her only fault as a Sister—that she is so capable and quick herself that she can scarcely bear to see anyone work at their own pace. Even then she never nags—she just falls to and helps.”
“I’ll say she falls to!” declared Sara with feeling. “What’s more, she had the audacity to congratulate me on being able to work alone. Alone—I ask you!”
Kathryn laughed again. “Poor Sara! You see, that’s another thing about Bridgeworth—half the time she doesn’t realise that she has to have her finger in every pie on the ward.” Privately Kathryn resolved to say a word to Sister Bridgeworth, but for discipline’s sake she would not tell Sara so. She added gently: “All the same, forgetting Sister’s oddities, how did you really like it?”
Sara sat down on the bed and stared at her fists curled childishly between her knees. “I think I loved it,” she said slowly. “Only—”
“Only?”
“Well, nothing really happened. And somehow I didn’t get the feeling—which I expected—that I was really nursing. Nothing I did—or Sister Bridgeworth did for me—seemed to add up to actually curing people or saving their lives.”
Kathryn understood. She said: “But Sara dear, nursing is like that. I’ve always thought of it as a gigantic pattern that is made up of bits—you and me and the other nurses, the patients themselves, the house surgeons, the registrars, the specialists and even other hospitals, when the patients come to us or ours go to them. It is a pattern that goes on and on ceaselessly. And it’s so linked together by everyone’s work—all their work—that I suppose that, almost any day on any ward, you could say ‘nothing’ happens. But for all the ill patients who come in, others are going out cured. So that something has been accomplished in between. And nursing is the ‘something’ that has.”
Sara said a little bleakly: “But don’t you ever have the satisfaction of feeling that you are fighting illness, instead of just keeping it at bay?”
Kathryn smiled. “Not as often as you’d think, mainly because you aren’t fighting alone—only as part of a team. But the rare times that you do—believe me, they make all the rest worthwhile.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” said Sara.
“It’s only the way I look at it myself,” Kathryn reminded her.
“It’s good enough for me,” declared Sara loyally before going on to ask about Kathryn’s own ordeal—her first meeting with the new specialist to her ward.
“Dr. Brand? He’s—awfully capable. I think.” Kathryn hoped she had sounded non-committal, but Sara’s quick ear had noted the brief hesitancy.
“Capable—but you don’t like him otherwise?” she queried. “Is he going to
be cantankerous?”
“No, I’d say he’s much too controlled and sure of his own skill for that.” Again Kathryn paused. “Something I didn’t know is that he’s a great friend of Steven Carter’s.”
“The doctor who asked you to marry him and then went out to Africa?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” The news, to Sara had not much significance, and Kathryn changed the subject to tell her that as the following day was her day off duty she proposed to spend it with the Thorleys, asking Sara what messages she had for Carol.
Sara eagerly gave several, produced from a drawer a bar of chocolate for Carol, and warned Kathryn that she must on no account fail to enquire for Edward.
“Edward?”
“Carol’s teddy-bear. He’s been sickly—malingering, I suspect, but I daren’t say so—ever since I began nursing training. Last night I took his temperature—under his arm, as his mouth doesn’t open.”
“I hope it didn’t give cause for alarm!” laughed Kathryn.
“No. I had to leave room for a bit of fluctuation, so I made it a hundred and one degrees and warned against shock to the patient. He may be considerably better to-day—or he may be worse.”
“Well, I’ll certainly ask after him,” promised Kathryn as she prepared to go to her own room.
But before they parted Sara asked with studied casualness: “I say, house surgeons and house physicians—do they visit the wards often?”
“Mostly every day, and one or the other of them must be always on call. Why?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Sara indifferently. “I only wondered.”
When Kathryn reached Barbara Thorley’s house the next day she found that the unfortunate Edward had been put to bed in a doll’s pram on the sun-porch, but Carol, of course, was at school. She attended morning kindergarten at the grammar school where Victor Thorley taught, and Barbara chuckled as she related how the two of them set out together each morning, holding hands and usually in solemn conversation.
“From the time they both kiss me good-bye I’m made to feel that I have no share in the weighty matters that exercise them,” she laughed. “ ‘School’ claims them from that moment.”
“I daresay they make up for it when they come home,” suggested Kathryn.
“The hug I get from Carol certainly does. As for Victor, he adores his work so much that I’ve always said he has never been wholly mine since we married.” But the gentle contentment in Barbara Thorley’s tone belied her words. She went on: “As you know, Victor doesn’t get in until tea-time, and Carol has lunch at school, and I meet her bus after I’ve had lunch myself. She goes to rest in the afternoon, so if you won’t be bored, Kathryn dear, I’d planned just a quiet day for us both?”
“You know I’d like it more than anything,” Kathryn protested. “One of the things I’m most grateful for in being able to come here to you and Victor is that I need do nothing by the clock, whereas in hospital my day is positively ordered by it.”
Barbara glanced at her a little critically. “You look tired, Kathryn, I think.”
“Not tired ”
“Worried, then? Some difficult cases—or oughtn’t I to ask?”
“No, nothing in particular, I think.” Momentarily she was tempted to confide in Barbara, but she decided against it, mentally squaring her shoulders against yesterday’s unpleasant memory. For what, really, did it amount to? A personal clash between herself and Adam Brand, but one which certainly could not be allowed to affect the team-work of the Sister of the children’s ward and its specialist. And since that point of contact was likely to be the only one between them, what was there to worry about, after all?
Helped by the pleasant serenity about her, her spirits had lightened considerably by the time she and Barbara went to meet Carol, who flung herself dangerously down the bus steps and into Barbara’s arms.
Then she shook hands with Kathryn, demanding with a fascinating gap-toothed smile: “When is Sara coming again?” and: “Did you see Edward in bed? How did you think he was?”
Kathryn considered the question gravely. “Not quite himself, perhaps. A little pale—”
“Could be. The other day we gave him a dry shampoo with fuller’s earth, after which he was considerably paler than before!” put in Barbara with amusement. “What did you do at school to-day, darling?”
Carol gave thought to her morning’s activities. “We sang,” she submitted at last. “And I made a mat.” The mat, duly produced, was a four-inch square of coarse rug-canvas laboriously cross-stitched in wool.
“It’s for Sara,” explained Carol hastily, lest there should be competition for its possession.
Naturally no one laid claim to it, and it went, with Sara’s chocolate, to join a strange assortment of treasures at Carol’s bedside when she went to rest. The other two adjourned to the sitting-room for a lazy afternoon; Kathryn amused Barbara with a spirited account of Sara’s losing battle for full employment on Sister Bridgeworth’s ward, and then they talked desultorily of other things until after a pause Barbara said thoughtfully:
“Kathryn, I’ve been wondering—have you ever had reason to think that you had made an enemy of Thelma Carter?”
“Of Thelma?” Kathryn’s brow puckered as she sought for time in which to answer the question.
“Yes. We were both at the same tea-party yesterday. Incidentally, how is it that she can always manage to attend any social function whatsoever? You have told me, but I forget. Doesn’t she have regular duty hours at the hospital like you?”
“I think not. You see, she only helps with some clerical work in the Social Worker’s office, and it is not very exacting, I gather. And she has always let it be supposed that as she and Steven had money of their own she doesn’t really need to work. But what did you mean, Barbara?”
“Well, she was talking yesterday—not directly to me and not in the slightest confidence—about Steven and his Nigerian appointment, saying that it was no wonder he’d succumbed to the climate since, through no fault of his own, when he went out his whole mental and physical resistance had been sapped. He had no reserves, she said, with which to combat anything he might have to face. She paused there to allow that to sink in, and when someone had asked her what she meant, she said that a girl he had been in love with had encouraged him almost to the point of marriage and then thrown him over at the last minute. And then, with an air of challenge, she asked if anyone could blame a sensitive man like Steven for allowing it to destroy his whole spirit. Anyway, she certainly couldn’t!”
“Was that all?” asked Kathryn, her face white.
“It was—if only because of the restraint of everyone present in not asking her who the girl was. But if anyone had, I can’t decide whether she would actually have mentioned your name—risked slander, in fact. Steven did ask you to marry him before he left England, didn’t he, Kathryn?”
“Yes—and I refused him because I didn’t love him and hadn’t entertained for a moment any idea of marrying him. But Steven accepted that, and he didn’t blame me. We parted friends, and at the time Thelma knew that.”
“Then why should she have concocted this fantasy since?” puzzled Barbara. “Could it be that she wanted you two to marry so much that her disappointment for Steven had to find a scapegoat in you?”
Kathryn shook her head. “Thelma never wanted Steven to marry me,” she said slowly.
“But?”
“She’s younger than he is—Steven is thirty-five—but I think she must always have dominated him as she does still. I sensed from the beginning that she would resent his marrying me—or even anyone to whom he might transfer his loyalties. I hate saying this about her, but I think if I’d ever considered marrying Steven, Thelma in the background would have made things too difficult.”
“You would have been marrying Steven, not Thelma,” Barbara reminded her gently. “No one in love should allow in-laws to matter so much.”
Kathryn sighed. “If I had loved Steven, that would hav
e been different, I daresay. But I didn’t, and I’ve always been content to leave him to Thelma’s influence. Going out to Africa with Steven wouldn’t have solved matters either, for she has always planned to go out there too, I understand.”
“Then the sooner she goes, the better—or learns to hold her tongue,” declared Barbara, with unwonted asperity. “After what you’ve told me, the things she implied yesterday were a sheer, wanton destruction of your character—”
“She ‘named no names’, remember,” put in Kathryn a little bitterly.
“But that may have been only because we didn’t question her. It could be that, given the right confidential atmosphere and a really sympathetic ear, she wouldn’t have any scruples, though of course nobody who really knew you would listen—”
“No one who knew you would listen.” But Adam Brand must have listened to Thelma’s version of the break with Steven, for there could be no other explanation of his distorted judgment of her action. Adam Brand had based his first impressions of her, a stranger, upon the trust he put in Thelma Carter’s word! That meant that he must know her very well indeed, and at least as well as he knew Steven. Even better, probably. For though Steven would surely have told the truth, only a closeness with Thelma that went far deeper than friendship could have persuaded Adam Brand to accept and voice her judgment as unquestioningly as if it were his own.
Strangely, Kathryn found that she cared that it should be so, even more than she minded that Thelma was setting no check to her tongue elsewhere. More than anything it mattered that Adam Brand should come to judge her fairly. More than anything it mattered that he, of all people, should know her for what she really was, and her thoughts began to grope for ways in which that might be achieved.
She supposed that she could face Thelma in his presence, demanding that the other girl should repeat her malice. But how undignified that would be! She could write to Steven, asking him to see that Adam Brand learned the truth. But how to explain to Steven why she cared that he should? At every turn of her thoughts pride stepped in, telling her mockingly that for pride’s sake she would do nothing—nothing at all.
