Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  “Hell, no.”

  “I went down to a Brought in Dead and all my bloody bedclothes had been chucked out of the window.”

  “It’d be Smyllie.”

  “It’s happened twice tonight.”

  “It’ll happen again; buy a padlock.”

  “I have but it’s been unscrewed.”

  “Get a bigger one.”

  He wondered if the night sister wakened some other person first to warn him, but she was too removed and dignified to question. He suspected everyone in turn, searching at mealtimes and in the evening’s drinking session for the most manifest hostility, the questioner who might reveal the greatest interest in his mood and response. In the end he decided to sit it out and say nothing to anyone, believing that whoever was responsible would ultimately grow tired of his assumed nonchalance. The atmosphere built up slowly. He talked as much as ever and stood his rounds of porter in the evenings to those who were on call. He started to carve his name on the table of the residents’ sitting-room, amongst those of contemporaries and predecessors, young, aging, senile or long dead, but grew bored and gave up at the “L” of Blaydon so that the only record of his apprenticeship was, “1939, J. BL,” sandwiched between “O’SHAUGHNESSY, ’78” and “P. MOORE, 1910.”

  He was given false calls. One night he was awakened at about twelve thirty and made his way through the long corridors to the O.P. Theatre. Screwed up beneath one of the red blankets a woman lay screaming on a trolley. Her face, tiny and misshapen with the screams, was as red as the blanket; a purple vein spanning the depth of her forehead filled as she called on Mary, Joseph and the saints for the pain that was in her. He could find no one on duty, no signs of an ambulance porter or of the night sister. “For God’s sake, Doctor,” she shouted, “it’s me bladder.”

  He tried to quieten her but she shouted louder than ever. He shouted himself through her screams. “When did this come on?”

  “Holy Mary, I’ll burst.”

  “How old are you? When was your last period?”

  “Jesus! Won’t you help me? Get a doctor!”

  “I am a doctor, now wait there a minute while I get someone.”

  “Examine me, for God’s sake!—Take a look at me belly. I’ve passed no water—”

  She screamed louder and longer than before.

  “I can’t look at you till I have someone else.”

  “Oh, the pain!”

  “Wait now, please.”

  “Get a cat’eter.”

  “Then you’ve had this happen before?”

  But she would not answer, only shrieking and screwing herself up in her agony. He tried to pull down the blanket from beneath her chin, but her hands flew to the edge of it, and he was seized with a sudden guilt, imagined her believing he was about to assault her, seeing himself disgraced when she complained against him. He ran to Groarke’s room and told him. Groarke put on a dressing-gown. “You should get de Burgh White.”

  “I can’t possibly, not again; I’ve had him out six times already this week. He thinks I’m the biggest fool in residence.”

  “What age is she?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea, she could be twenty or she could be fifty. She’s got a shawl on and she’s making so much noise that you can’t see her face properly.”

  When they got there the trolley was empty and the night sister doing her rounds.

  John asked where the case was and the sister said, “What case?”

  “The urinary retention.”

  “There’s no such case, Mr. Blaydon.”

  “But you called me.”

  “I did not.”

  “But, damnit, I was down here five minutes ago, she was on the trolley.”

  “Perhaps you’re sleeping badly, Mr. Blaydon? There’s been no case in the last hour, has there, Nurse?”

  “There’s nothing in the book, Sister, since eleven P.M.”

  Groarke looked at the speaker and then at John. Later he said, “It was that nurse, wasn’t it? The probationer?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well it was, she was killing herself laughing with me.”

  “She wasn’t laughing with me,” said John. “Are they all in it, then?”

  “What do you think?”

  “What had I better do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “D’you think they’ll keep it up the whole time I’m in residence?”

  Groarke said. “Probably.”

  Someone had pinned a map of France and the Low Countries above the mantelpiece of the sitting-room and flagged it with Swastikas and Union Jacks. The B.B.C. news bulletins were switched on regularly and Smyllie moved the pins with satisfaction as the Swastikas swept through Belgium and overran Lord Gort’s defences between the northern end of the Maginot Line and the Channel ports.

  At odd hours of the day the residents gathered there on the battered armchairs beneath the rows of old photographs of the hospital’s staff from 1890 onwards to listen to the bulletins, but no one discussed them very much. John liked to get hold of Groarke and ask him whether he thought France would fall, and if so whether the Germans would invade England. Groarke would get excited about this; they would work one another up into lugubrious prophecies and then as suddenly start to laugh. They laughed at the thought of the War Cabinet fleeing in cruisers to Ottawa whence speeches would be relayed to the English, telling them to hold out at all costs; they laughed at the Home Guard wheeling tree trunks across the roads and at the thought of clouds of gas enveloping the club men in the West End of London.

  “But what’ll we do, Mike, if it’s all over before we qualify?”

  “Work for the Germans.”

  “Would you, seriously?”

  Groarke would then give his imitation of a Nazi doctor in charge of a laboratory doing experiments on Jews. He did this with great conviction, silently, making his mouth straight and his neck bulge over his collar. A vein came up between his eyes, which themselves grew bloodshot as he twirled the valves of imaginary presses, flicked the switches of elaborate machinery, rolled back his cuffs to do a titration of Jewish spinal fluid or a living autopsy of a pancreas. Occasionally he would gesture to an underling to wheel in another case or send out the remains of the previous one to the crematorium; but the scene always ended in mime with Groarke being presented by his Führer with the Iron Cross first class, and the Nobel Prize. He imitated the sound of the Führer’s kiss on his cheeks as he bowed his head, then straightened himself, gave the Fascist salute, retreated three paces, saluted again, turned about and left the room.

  The other residents objected to this pantomine; they discerned in it, as did John, something derogatory to themselves, to Ireland and to Medicine. Groarke, sensing this unease on his return to the room, would then drink two or three more bottles of Guinness and start discussing the role of the Free State Army in the war or giving accounts of imaginary interviews he had had with Dr. Christian Luthmann, the Nazi press attaché to the German Consulate in Merrion Road.

  “Last night,” he would say, “I sold him a map of Dublin’s A.R.P. System and the exact location of the anti-aircraft battery in the Vico Road, the only one in Ireland.”

  He would suggest that Fergus Cloate, who had joined the R.A.M.C. and been given the rank of major as a surgical specialist, had taken a small transmitter with him by means of which he was relaying information directly to Luthmann.

  He would talk about German parachutists landing by moonlight in Phoenix Park and tell Bethelgert that the days of the Kosher slaughter house in the Ring Road were numbered.

  John encouraged him in this kind of conversation; egging him on by pretending to be offended, by voicing the sullen and unspoken reactions of the other residents. Sometimes he would get Groarke really angry by suggesting that he was not joking at all, that he had the smell of true treachery about him; and when this happened Groarke would shut up tight and go out to drink on his own or to work up his textbooks in his room.

  T
he next day John would apologize and Groarke would say, “It’s yourself you’re offending, not me. We know, the two of us, what’s there inside of us, but that doesn’t make us the friend of ourselves or anybody else.”

  John said, “You don’t understand me, Mike. I’ve grown to hate Ireland as much as I love Dymphna, not more.”

  “More.”

  “If she’d settle,” said John, “I could love it all, everything.”

  “She’d soon have you hating it again.”

  “Not if she were to marry me.”

  Groarke laughed, how he laughed, but he would not explain why, though once he said, “There’s something in us. You’d better read Joyce, he took it with him to Paris and died of it. Don’t think you’d ever get Ireland, you’d sooner get the Uprichard”—he often called Dymphna this. “She’s one of the ones that’s not meant to be had, she’s a eunuch soul like Ireland.”

  “Well then, tell me why I hate Ireland.”

  “You’re fly, like ourselves. You know what goes on. And hungry, you’ve got a hunger, the Devil in you that’s never been censed.”

  “You’re not a Catholic, are you, Mike?”

  But to this Groarke said only, “There’s a few; more than in England. Where you’ll find the Church, just outside it you’ll get experts in the sharper sides of invective.”

  He would change the subject and it would be closed for a long time. After such an airing they would work hard together for a week or two, then ignore one another.

  Groarke was getting letters from Cloate. John saw them in the letter-rack in the sitting-room with a Field P.O. frank on them and a white label “Censored by Censor Number 83642.” One day when Groarke was opening one, John asked him how Cloate was; and Groarke said, “He’s getting a thousand a year for appendicectomies and herniotomies!”

  “Does he send you money?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s good for the bastard.”

  They were taking their course in Anaesthetics from a drunkard with blue eyes. There was something perilous about these selective eyes of old McIndoo’s over a theatre mask. They fixed more constantly on John than on most people and through the mask beneath them was exhaled the sweet wheaty smell of Irish whiskey, morning, afternoon, and probably at night, too, if McIndoo had not had a junior to do the emergency work for him.

  McIndoo was not a very advanced anaesthetist; he did not like all the modern machines and gases, nerve-block techniques, intravenous inductions, and left all these to a deputy who was not qualified to give the residents their certificates of competence. McIndoo believed in the Clover’s Inhaler, a very simple apparatus consisting of a large red rubber balloon, known as the re-breathing bag, attached to a chromium-plated sphere with valves and sliding panels through which fresh ether could be poured into the central chamber. By opening different valves the patient could be persuaded to breathe varying mixtures of ether, oxygen, and his own exhaled carbon dioxide from the rebreathing bag. In general, ether and oxygen were quite sufficient for the induction and maintenance of anaesthesia; if this became too shallow, the ether could be increased and the oxygen diminished; on the other hand if the respiration became too depressed, the use of the re-breathing bag flooded the patient’s system with carbon dioxide and ensured the stimulation of the respiratory centre in the medulla oblongata of the brain stem. This had the effect of making him breathe more deeply in his need to secure more oxygen, and the anaesthetist could then take advantage of the response to administer the appropriate percentages of ether and oxygen.

  Though antiquated, the method was fundamentally sound since it depended on a natural and primitive reflex; its defect lay in the fact that only long clinical experience could advise exactly which percentages of the three gases was appropriate at any given moment. The patient was, so to speak, balanced like a ping-pong ball at a rifle range on a triple fountain, now sinking, now rising, a little, but liable if the jets fluctuated too violently to rise or sink too far.

  From long practice McIndoo himself could tell with a single flick of the patient’s eyelid and a feel at his pulse exactly in which direction his anaesthesia was bearing. The big man’s ears must have been unconsciously tuned to the inhalations and exhalations, measuring their rhythm and depth so that he could anticipate both the patients’ and the surgeons’ needs. If the former was too “shallow” the surgeon would complain of insufficient muscular relaxation and would be dragging on his retractors and muttering into his mask; if too deep the field would be flooded with black blood and everyone from the operator down to the theatre probationers would be tense and alarmed.

  McIndoo could choose, as he wished, to give his students either a smooth or a rough passage. He spoke in monosyllables which could be gentle or disturbing. He could say “Bag” as softly as a man in the seduction of an opium dream, or he could growl it like a bulldog with its jaws clenched on a postman’s buttock. He could put out a spatulate thumb three seconds before the nick of time and twitch a valve, or shove out a fist, snatch the whole apparatus and wind the student with his elbow at the same moment. His blue, very blue periwinkle eyes could protrude kindly above the mask, full of tired affability, or they could glaze and bore like an oxyacetylene flame. He could shout, “Bag! Fool! Ether! Bag! Blast!” and then add a noise of his own and take over the whole management, leaving the student standing uselessly behind him with nothing to do except avoid the eyes of everyone else. In very rare instances he could refuse to sign the certificate which was an essential preliminary to sitting Finals Part II and make the student repeat the course.

  John told Groarke, “I’ve had it. I’m blue with funk. How can you tell whether the patient’s too shallow with a surplus of oxygen or for lack of carbon dioxide? If I give oxygen he yells out ‘Ether!’ when I give ether he shouts, ‘Bag!’ when I pump on the bag he says, ‘Oxygen, you fool!’ ”

  “You ought to do some on your own in Out-Patients’ Theatre.”

  “Don’t be stupid, no one will let me.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “De Burgh White calls me the “Surgeon’s Dilemma.” I went in there yesterday when Gibson was doing an emergency herniotomy. I told him I was on duty and he ignored me completely, he said to Clery, “For God’s sake, Sister, get me some half-wit for the anaesthetic, but not that one!”

  “You’re breaking up,” Groarke said.

  “That whiskey-swigging old bastard isn’t going to finish me.”

  “ ‘Come the four corners of the world in arms,’” Groarke quoted. “He’s going to hold you back to repeat the course.”

  “I’m as competent as anyone else.”

  “You were, you mean.”

  “Was, then.”

  “He’s out to break your nerve.”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

  “And you know why?”

  “The paper, I suppose. I never thought McIndoo would have been interested enough to read it. He looks as though he runs to very simple rules, those blue eyes and the monosyllables, the hair on his arms.”

  “He’s a mystic,” said Groarke, “a whiskey mystic. They’re often the most dangerous. He dislikes you more than Gibson, Lait, Macdonald Browne and Heaton put together.”

  “Why not Cloate too?”

  “Cloate’s gone.”

  There was a pause after this. Then John said, “But why should that man hate me more than the rest of the staff? He’s anaesthetist to about three hospitals but they’re Mungo Park’s men from start to finish.”

  “War record; Anglo-Irish; medals up. You’ve attacked Ireland and let England down at the same time. You’ve broken through his compromise.”

  “I haven’t let England down, or if I have, apart from the paper, you’ve done it too.”

  “I’m Anglo-Irish, too,” said Groarke, “so it doesn’t worry him.”

  At the end of the course a week or two later John’s name was posted on the board as having failed to satisfy t
he anaesthetist.

  He caught Dr. McIndoo in the consultants’ room where he was taking off his British warm before the start of the morning’s cases.

  “Why did I fail in Anaesthetics, sir?”

  “Because you are a fool.”

  “I meant what was my principal mistake?”

  “Being a bloody fool.”

  “Where the anaesthetics were concerned, sir?”

  “You start again when I’ve had your additional fee.”

  “What guarantee have I that you’ll pass me next time?”

  “None. Now get out.”

  The weather was very hot. On his afternoons off he took Dymphna out bathing at the Kingstown baths.

  At this time he was being what she termed “sensible” about her. But since half measures never satisfied him he was being more than sensible. Whereas she had suggested he should not worry about Groarke, Collins, and the others whom she saw regularly, but should enjoy such times as he himself shared with her, he for his part had effected a censorship of his thoughts so that she began to complain of his silences and the paucity of his curiosity. She did this only until she had assured herself of his continued love, and then she smiled about that.

  “So that’s forbidden ground,” she would say when he refused to tell her. something, “so we won’t ask you that one.”

  She was very delightful over it all, not making him feel that his reserve was a sulk, but that it was something more endearing and mature. His criticisms of his conduct came from himself; he was quite unable, convincingly, to discredit her with the shifts to which he had put himself even though the distaste he felt for them came from seeing them through what he imagined to be her eyes.

  He had taken to smoking a pipe and sat puffing it beside her on the long bus ride to Kingstown. He did not enjoy it as much as cigarettes, but it was something to hang on to and he believed that since it suggested tranquillity it might help him to obtain it.

  For at this time he was very nervy indeed; his world seemed to have been arrested, to have been stilled in a gigantic pause which it was quite beyond his own power to terminate. Examining, as he had done, his aims in their several directions, he had to admit that they might prove totally inconclusive in each. Yet he felt that soon as one single endeavour succeeded for him, then all else might easily and astonishingly follow.