Coronation Wives

by Lizzie Lane

  ‘Could you drop these down to records? They’re dead files – patients who are no longer patients, for one reason or another.’

  He looked pleased with himself. His eyes were bright and his clothes seemed crisp, as though they were new and had not yet been washed and ironed. She should have wondered about his demeanour and questioned whether the slick presentation was for her benefit. Instead she eyed the files and wondered how long it wodld be before Susan’s notes were on their way to the archives, hopefully because she was cured and had gone home.

  Jonathan rested his hands palms down on her desk and leaned forward. Janet was only vaguely aware that his nose was almost in her hair.

  ‘You smell wonderful.’

  Janet didn’t register what he’d said. Her mind was occupied. ‘How many die?’

  She didn’t see Jonathan’s wavering smile or the disappointment in his eyes. He straightened and said, ‘Not too many.’

  ‘How many are crippled?’

  He frowned as though all his thoughts were concentrated on the question. ‘More than we’d like. It depends on whether the nerves of the limbs and the motor area of the brain have been affected. Cells die. Some recover and, as I’ve already told you, the physiotherapists do a wonderful job.’

  Janet continued to stare silently at the files. Please, she prayed, let Susan pull through. Crippled if she has to be, but not dead. Please, not dead.

  ‘Is something wrong?’

  When it came to bedside manner, Jonathan had to be one of the best. He was looking at her as if waiting to be told where it was hurting. First as last, Jonathan loved his job and cared for his patients. She had to trust him.

  ‘Susan’s here,’ she blurted and waited for his reaction.

  First there was puzzlement as he tried to remember where he’d heard that name before.

  ‘Susan. She fell into the pool at Clevedon. Remember?’

  He threw his head back and ran his hands through his hair. ‘I’m sorry. I must seem a heel.’

  She didn’t contradict his comment but said, ‘That’s why I changed my mind.’

  He looked embarrassed as if considering himself stupid that he hadn’t guessed at the reason, though it would not have been possible.

  ‘But you were so prepared that day at the flat …’ He paused and shifted from one foot to another.

  ‘The condoms really were Dorothea’s idea. She misconstrued – just like you did.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Now you know.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Nonplussed was the only way to describe him at present – or was it? How about approachable?

  ‘I want to see her,’ she blurted, looking at him intently as if willpower alone could force him into agreement.

  ‘You can’t.’ He cleared his throat anxiously. ‘Look, Jan, I recommended you for this job. Don’t drop me into it with the old man. I’ve got a career to think of.’

  ‘Among other things! So it was all tosh about me getting more interested in medicine. All you really wanted was a little something to warm your bed on certain nights of the week. Who warms it on other nights, Jonathan? A little nurse? Someone from the village? You owe me a favour.’

  ‘Now come on.’ His smile irritated. She felt like slapping it from his face. He went on, ‘I never promised you a serious relationship. You’re a modern woman who—’

  ‘You wouldn’t want upsetting your relationship with your mother!’ Janet snapped. To her great satisfaction, he really did look as if she had slapped him in the face.

  ‘I see you’re in no mood to talk sensibly.’ Indicating the files he’d left on her desk, he added, ‘I want those dealt with immediately.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you know where it is?’

  Janet bundled the files into a tidy heap. ‘I think so.’

  After he’d left she flung her arms over the typewriter and rested her forehead on the coldness of the metal. This was a crazy situation. Deep down she knew she was placing Jonathan in a very difficult situation, but it couldn’t be helped. Susan needed her. She was sure of it and whether Jonathan assisted or not, she would succeed in seeing her. Something would turn up.

  Tucking the files under one arm, she left the office, turned right outside the door and followed the direction painted on the wall that said ‘Archives’. Flimsy partitioning between offices and wards, relieved at intervals by panes of thickly frosted glass, formed a seemingly endless corridor, loose in its frames and rattling every time a door opened and caused a cross draught.

  Recalling the verbal information given to her on arrival, the archives were situated in a less frequented part of the sanatorium. Voices, footsteps and the sucking grind of rubber wheels against polished lino echoed in the emptiness against the cold, brittle glass.

  The painted signs carried on, but she came to an abrupt halt at a place where a hospital trolley had been pulled across the corridor. Two men stood with a ladder, looking up at the overhead pipes which ran the length of the corridor. One of them spotted her.

  ‘You can’t go this way, luv. There’s been a water leak.’

  She stopped. ‘Can I get there another way?’

  The man stroked his chin, early beard growth rasping beneath callused fingers. He pointed. ‘Down there, first left, through the tunnel, take a right, then another left past the wards …’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She headed the way he’d stipulated, then turned a corner out of their sight. Determination and downright curiosity made her follow a sign saying ‘Medical Staff Only’. Dear me, I’m lost. The words were on the tip of her tongue, just in case someone caught her.

  Around another corner, a wider corridor, then a dead end. Her foot knocked against something and sent it scuttling across the floor. A pair of spectacles nestled against the wall. She picked them up and looked around her. There wasn’t a soul to ask if they’d dropped their spectacles, or for them to ask her awkward questions, so she put them in her pocket.

  Immediately ahead of her was a pair of double doors. She swept forward, not really looking, unaware of her surroundings until she was standing in the middle of a ward.

  Grey and ill-lit, the ward was sombre, like the inside of a tomb, except that a tomb is silent. In this place the air was filled with the sound of the heaviest breathing she’d ever heard, each breath evenly spaced from one to the next, devilishly loud and metallic. Yet these were no monsters of the imagination. The source of the sounds was there before her. Three on one side, three on the other, these huge, grey-green cylinders looked as if they should be holding fuel, but were in fact holding something much more precious. Out of the end of each one poked a human head and above that were a bank of mirrors.

  ‘Hello,’ said a small, thin voice.

  Janet couldn’t tell who had spoken, though she was sure it wasn’t Susan. There was no moving of head, no interested gaze turned in her direction. So how could they see her?

  The mirrors!

  A rectangular world seen at second hand and back to front. What the mirror reflected was all they had.

  These cylinders, these great breathing beasts were iron lungs, alternately providing air then a vacuum, aiding a damaged respiratory system to breathe. Without them, these children would probably die.

  If she’d been less shocked she would have stood her ground, said hello back and perhaps held more of a conversation, but she couldn’t. One arm round the files, she reached behind her and pushed the door back with the other. Step by step she backed out, glad to get out of there, glad to regain a corridor that echoed to the sound of her footsteps where the air was still and not traversed by the sound of devilish breathing.

  Once outside the doors swung back into place. Janet stood and stared at them. The round windows set at eye level swam like twin moons before her eyes. Until this moment she had never really visualized the full implications of the reports and letters she typed, the files she kept in meticulous order, or the phone calls she fielded for Professor Pri
tchard or Dr Driver from orthopaedic specialists, neurologists and the doggedly determined physiotherapists.

  She had entered one of the wards – yet not any ward – not one where the physiotherapists forcibly exercised withered limbs, but the ward from hell itself where children’s lungs were pressurized into working by the relentless persistence of machines resembling metal coffins. The experience left her nerves on edge and ill-prepared for what happened next.

  ‘What are you doing here, Miss Hennessey-White?’

  Janet jumped and spun round so fast that she almost fell against Professor Pritchard.

  ‘I’m on my way to the archives,’ Janet blurted, the files clasped tightly against her bosom. ‘The other way was closed. A burst pipe apparently.’

  ‘I hope you did not go into that ward, my dear. As I told you, polio is a highly infectious disease.’

  ‘No!’ she lied. ‘Of course not.’

  Professor Pritchard knotted his copious brows and studied her face as if she were less than human. Now she knew what a microbe felt like when subjected to microscopic scrutiny. ‘Carry on, woman. You’re not paid to hang around the corridors.’ He turned away.

  Shaken, Janet stood as if frozen. Later, she’d be glad that she had. He opened a single door set in an alcove to one side. For a moment she glimpsed gowns, caps with flowing cotton ties and facemasks, clothes that offered some protection against the disease and made the wearer almost unrecognizable.

  Unrecognizable!

  As she followed the corridors towards her office her fingers curled more tightly around the spectacles that she’d found.

  She pictured the door the professor had opened. Had it had a key? She couldn’t visualize one in her mind though that didn’t mean he hadn’t used a key, merely that she hadn’t noticed he had. Butterflies took flight in her stomach. This could be it! This could be her way of seeing Susan. The professor’s warning about contagion came back to her. Surely she couldn’t contract the disease just by entering the ward?

  Mrs Prendergast, the hospital almoner, passed her in the corridor close to her office and beamed broadly as if she knew Janet’s greatest secret. ‘There’s always someone in your office, Janet my dear. Aren’t you the lucky one?’

  Mrs Prenderdgast winked wickedly and Janet almost blushed. Jonathan again! Well, if he had it in mind to offer her help in exchange for a night out at the village pub, he was out of luck.

  Adopting a wide smile, she flung the door wide and breezed in, then stopped in her tracks.

  ‘Hello, darling.’

  Smartly attired in a rust-coloured suit trimmed at the neck with a thin strip of rabbit fur, her mother rose from a chair.

  ‘Mother!’ Janet hugged the files to her chest then groaned. The files! She stared at them in disbelief. ‘Oh no!’ She’d been so absorbed in her plans that the archives and the files meant to be deposited there were completely forgotten.

  Charlotte looked taken aback. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps I should have telephoned to let you know I was coming.’

  Janet placed the offending files on the desk and decided her mother deserved an explanation. ‘I was meant to take these files to the archives, but I saw …’ She couldn’t go on. The vision of the children entombed in metal cases was too recent and too raw to put into words without getting hysterical. She made a big effort to collect herself then asked, ‘Can I get you some tea?’

  There was a smile on her mother’s mouth as she shook her head. The look in her eyes was not easily readable.

  Janet dutifully kissed her mother’s cheek and breathed in the familiar smell of expensive perfume and quality face powder. She’d certainly dressed for the occasion, you had to give her that. But what occasion? Initial delight was tempered by instant suspicion.

  ‘I had tea with Professor Pritchard.’

  Janet glowered, picked the files up from her desk and, in a fit of temper, slammed them down again. ‘Don’t tell me! You’ve been worrying about me catching polio and asked him to accept my resignation! Well I’m not giving up my job, Mother, and I am not coming home and I thank you not to interfere with my private life.’

  Charlotte got to her feet, turned her back on Janet and looked out of the window. Her shoulders heaved as though she’d taken a deep breath prior to diving into an even deeper pool. ‘Your father got me an interview with the Professor. I was quite sure I could persuade him to let Edna and Colin see Susan once the contagious period was over. He refused and lectured me as if I were merely a child. Visitors are not considered beneficial to patient recovery.’ She spun round suddenly, her grey eyes blazing with anger. ‘They’re children, for God’s sake! Mere children! What’s the matter with these people out here? Have they no souls?’

  Contrite, Janet asked, ‘Did the Professor say whether she’d be all right?’ She remembered Susan running out from the Arcade that day she’d gone to the police station and got caught in the rain, the feel of her hand, warm and plump within her own. She remembered her at Clevedon, her dress tucked into her knickers, not at all ladylike, but very practical.

  Charlotte wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Suddenly she looked tired, and very much older. Janet’s heart went out to her, but she couldn’t physically reach out to her. It still sometimes felt as though her mother did not quite belong to her.

  Charlotte continued. ‘The Professor said that she had been unfortunate to pick it up this late in the year, that the incubation period can be up to thirty-five days. Apart from that she could be in here three months, perhaps six or even more. It depends on the severity of the attack, but no matter how long she is here, visitors will not be allowed.’

  Janet sucked in her breath and sank into her iron-framed typist chair. ‘Poor Susan. Poor Edna.’ Their misfortune had touched all of them.

  Janet clasped her hands together on the desk in front of her and closed her eyes. She chose not to mention her plans for seeing Susan, at least, not yet. ‘Are you home at the weekend, Mother?’

  ‘Yes. All alone. Your father’s gone to Devon with Geoffrey. They’re going to do some fishing and other things that boys like to do.’ She laughed, then stopped abruptly and looked pained, as if it was slightly distasteful to laugh at a time like this, in a place where sick people hoped to be made whole again.

  ‘I’d like to come home this weekend. I’d like to see Edna.’

  ‘Of course.’ Her mother showed no sign of being surprised.

  ‘And I think you should know that I’m not living with Jonathan. That’s not the way it is.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  Janet studied her mother for any sign of what she was really thinking. The serenity of her expression was unchanged. Always smart, always saying the right things.

  Her mother glanced at the floor as if she needed to think carefully about what she would say next. She looked back to Janet, her gaze unblinking. ‘Ivan is still with us.’

  Janet swallowed and tapped her fingernails against the pile of files. ‘Is he?’

  ‘He’s been through a lot, Janet. Honestly, if you knew …’

  ‘So have I!’

  ‘I don’t think there can be any comparison,’ she said, her voice soft, similar to how it had been when Janet had been a child and had woken in the dead of night from a bad dream.

  Janet took a deep breath. ‘No! Perhaps not.’ She was not going to divulge details about the foreign man, the rape, the darkness of the night – or her hatred of any song by Doris Day.

  ‘I’d better be going.’

  After a light brush of lips against cheeks, Charlotte reached for the door, her movements languorously graceful, perfect in her poise and her appearance. Ah, thought Janet, in a sudden moment of reflection and remembrance, but you’re not perfect and I know that you’re not.

  ‘I’ll look forward to seeing you at the weekend,’ said Charlotte lightly, then more seriously. ‘You’re still my daughter, Janet. I don’t expect you to be a saint.’

  Janet’s response was curt. ‘None of us
are saints, Mother. Not even you.’

  For the briefest of moments, her mother’s expression stiffened and her smile was short and nervous.

  After she’d gone Janet leaned against the door, closed her eyes and cast her mind back over the years to when she had run away from school, come home in the middle of the night, and seen her mother in bed with a man who was not her father.

  The Professor gave her plenty of work for the rest of that day, but did not comment on her mother’s visit. Saltmead Sanatorium was his world, an empire in which his word was law and the world outside an imposition that he could well do without. All he related to Janet was dictation and instructions regarding the preparation of reports.

  Reports were exactly what she wanted to see, and one above all others, that of Susan Smith. Among the pile of buff files for discharged patients and blue for current, was one with a yellow memo attached. She burrowed down to it, saw the name and, trembling with trepidation, opened the file. A preliminary appraisal of her condition had been carried out. One leg. One arm. Janet’s hand went to her chest in an effort to ease the sudden stab of pain. Please, she prayed, closing her eyes and focusing all her energies on whatever and whoever might be listening, please make her better.

  When she blinked her eyes open, the words Hannah More leapt up to her from the head of the medical report. Besides it being the name of a famous Bristolian philanthropist, it was also the name of a ward close to the one full of iron lungs and the roomful of protective clothing.

  Thoughtfully she opened the top drawer of her desk and took out the pair of spectacles she’d found. Holding them carefully over her wastepaper bin, she pushed each lens out of its socket. Silently they dropped among the bits of screwed-up paper and other debris. They were a little large and slid down her nose, but with enough sticky tape wound around the leaves, they’d serve her well. Until they were needed, they would live at the rear of the top drawer of her desk hidden behind notepads, pencils, and a packet of carbon paper.

  After she’d left Janet, Charlotte sat in her car, the engine idling as she eyed the green and cream sign fixed to the fencing beside the main gate. It held great significance for her. Back in the forties it had said something entirely different. Nowadays the inmates were very ill; back then they had been enemies.