by Paul Butler
“Hold this, Nurse,” Grenfell says.
The stripes of sunlight fade with a passing cloud. Those are his words, not Grenfell’s. The rival intern has no right to use them. He feels stripped and discarded like one of the sweat-stained bandages lying in the bin by the examining stool.
“Yes, Doctor,” she replies.
Only three syllables, but more than he has ever received from her, and in tones laced with such respect, such esteem, and even tenderness, he feels as though he has been punched in the solar plexus. All interns are entitled to be called doctor, but only now and with the bitterest of realizations does it occur to the young doctor that Nurse Mills has never granted him this courtesy. The bands of sunlight return and intensify like rings of fire.
There is a movement behind him. Grenfell has sidled up to Dr. Bleaker, who stands scribbling on his notepad and humming tunelessly.
“It’s the alcohol that retards healing, Dr. Bleaker.” Grenfell has the confidence of a hospital director as he confers with the supervisor, and the young doctor hates him all the more for it. “Only a change in lifestyle will be of any help.”
“Such is the task of the physician, Grenfell.” The words rise from Dr. Bleaker’s humming like unexpected highlights in the melody. “We patch, mend, and prescribe, but the patient’s life is his own.”
“I’d like to give the man a good talking-to,” Grenfell says.
“Very noble of you, I’m sure, Grenfell,” says Dr. Bleaker, still scribbling. “Be my guest.”
Grenfell’s footsteps retreat again. The young doctor replaces a stopper as quietly as he can. He wants to hear the promised exchange.
“How much did you drink last night?” Grenfell asks matter-of-factly. His voice is calm and preoccupied as he works on the man’s dressings.
“I can’t rightly remember, sir,” the patient replies. The young doctor caught sight of him—a wizened, red-eyed man in his forties—as he entered. He can easily imagine, without turning to see, the amused, glassy-eyed expression as he answers the young upstart.
“I suggest you try.”
“Well now. There would be five in the Bull and Thistle, another five in the Ten Bells, a flask of gin, and then things begin to get hazy.”
“You’re drinking far too much.” Grenfell’s voice seems petulant and immature now, an unflattering contrast to the cavernous tones of the man he upbraids.
“So they tell me, sir, so they tell me,” comes the reply, once more wise and unruffled, “but I’ll soon be on board and out of harm’s way.”
Silence. It seems for a moment that Grenfell has given up.
“If you continue to drink as you do,” he resumes, the pitch of his voice rising, “your liver will give out completely and you will be quite unable to work.”
“Ah, then I will find a good woman to care for me,” says the sailor. The eavesdropping doctor imagines a winking eye toward Nurse Mills. The vision momentarily shakes his automatic allegiance to Grenfell’s opponent.
“I’m afraid it’s more serious than that. Cirrhosis of the liver is likely quite advanced already, but the body’s natural defences are also being threatened. The infections I am treating should have healed long ago.” The ruffling sound of a bandage being tied. “I have seen this before.” A slight cough. “If you continue as you do now, you will not live beyond a year.”
The spirit-laced air of the clinic seems to grow hotter. The young doctor looks hard at a prescription formula, waiting, hoping for Dr. Bleaker’s reproof, for the pleasing crash of a fall from grace. In the hazy corner of his vision he sees the supervising physician turn upon his stool and pull his spectacles an inch down his nose.
“A sad thing, for sure, Doctor,” says the sailor, quite unmoved, “but have you not found that life can be a mixed blessing?”
The slow, almost ponderous nature of the response, the complete lack of aggression or excitement in the voice, shows clearly that the man is in earnest. He knows the likely cost of his habit, and Grenfell’s attempt to shock him is as redundant as it is cruel.
“Nice try, Grenfell,” Dr. Bleaker murmurs, replacing his spectacles and turning back to his workbench. Not the reproof the young doctor was hoping for, but still he feels hope stirring. Nurse Mills can’t be impressed now. Grenfell has proven himself to be callow and presumptuous.
The sunlight fades and returns, not as rings of fire this time but as something more benign—the stripes on a fairground balloon. He knows he feels suddenly optimistic—and knows such optimism is a fault of his—but can’t quite place the source for his sudden hope. Laying aside his prescription and picking up a pestle and mortar, the young doctor wonders if he has misread Nurse Mills’s reaction to Grenfell. Does a smile so easily won denote romantic attraction, or a more sisterly sentiment? Of course, he thinks. Romantic love is guarded and shy; it protects itself with fervour until it finds a safe place to land. It doesn’t smile and gaze and lean toward the object of its devotion.
Hope tips into something like belief as he sets about crushing salt crystals in the mortar bowl. If Nurse Mills is stiffer and more formal with himself than with Grenfell, this is a good thing. A woman only stands aloof when there are powerful emotions to guard. He wonders now if there might have been a studied aspect in her manner when she seemed to avoid his eyes.
Hairs prickle on the back of his neck as the patient scuffs off the chair and lopes out of the clinic. The idea of Nurse Mills trying to make him jealous is intoxicating. It opens up a whole world of deliciously lurid and dramatic scenes: Nurse Mills trotting haughtily by him in the street, he grabbing her wrist, forcing her into an embrace to which she succumbs at first only with resistance then with a gasp of gratitude and a breathless “at last!”; the young doctor restored to his position with the patients in the afternoon, being cold and indifferent as he takes from her the scissors, bandages, and stitches, then as the shift changes and they prepare to leave, her coming trembling and white-faced to him, asking what she has done to cause offence.
No end of permutations tingle through his blood, and he can’t resist a backward glance at Grenfell and Nurse Mills. Grenfell’s face is blotched and pink. He busies himself with a notebook, his thick hair tufted like that of a boy who has been roughhousing. In the corner, wrapping unused bandage, Nurse Mills works quietly, face hidden, sunlight striping her uniform. The scene presents itself as a picture of disillusionment. The young doctor’s elation is almost complete.
— Chapter Three —
A ring of sunshine just beyond the shadow of the great Cathedral dome bathes Nurse Mills and her young nephew. The blood pounds in the young doctor’s ears. She is merely seconds away from him now. The first autumn leaves tumble in the breeze, skittering around the ankles of the lady with a white parasol and the fork-bearded gentleman. The couple walks arm in arm a short distance ahead of the young doctor. The nephew, perhaps eleven or twelve years old, stands on one leg and holds his penny farthing bicycle by the saddle. The other knee resting upon the bench upon which his aunt sits, he seems ready to demonstrate his skills to passersby. The bearded gentleman nods at Nurse Mills and her nephew as he and his partner pass. The young doctor is next. He can’t escape her notice now, even if he tried.
“I promised young Malcolm a walk by St. Paul’s on Sunday afternoon,” Nurse Mills said on Friday to the short, unsmiling Nurse Armstrong. The young doctor had been ghosting behind them in the dim corridor that joined the hospital clinic to the wards. It had been easy to remain unnoticed. A group of whispering nurses, all starched white linen and hard shoes, had drawn all the light from the high windows. A delegation of doctors approached from the opposite end, their coughs and mutterings echoing along the walls. Even if there had been danger, it wouldn’t have mattered. Buoyed by his new sense of faith that beneath Nurse Mills’s placid surface swirled emotions involving him directly, he had dared himself; he had foll
owed and eavesdropped just as the medieval warrior-knight spies upon enemy battalions in the forest. He was determined, duty-bound in fact, to dig deep into the dust of the forbidding and mundane and reach for the sparkling jewel he sensed must lie beyond. He had kissed his sword and sent up his prayers, and his mission seemed to give even the utilitarian spaces of the medical establishment the atmosphere of a Cathedral cloister. This sense of magic became tangible when the conversation he overheard gave him the day, the place, and hence the opportunity to “discover” Nurse Mills by accident. She must have known this. Women are aware, by some strange extra sense, whose ears lie within hearing.
Even if he was mistaken about this detail, the valour of the spy has still reaped rewards. He is within a whisker of meeting her for the very first time outside the confines of the hospital complex. He is mere breaths away from striking up a conversation that must undoubtedly go beyond “Hold this, Nurse.” He turns as nonchalantly as he can toward the high spire and the flapping pigeons. Wait, he tells himself; wait until the moment when it will look natural to glance left and find a familiar face. He does this now, his wink acknowledging the rather sullen-looking boy with the bicycle. Then he allows his eyes to fall upon the boy’s aunt, whose eyes are shadowed by the rim of her hat. He gives a start and raises his arms—a touch too theatrically, he fears. A thin smile reveals she has seen him coming and is not greatly surprised.
“It’s Nurse Mills!” he says and immediately wonders why, after taking the trouble to find out her location, after racing down from the dome three stone steps at a time, catching his breath at the bottom, then timing his “accidental” meeting, he has failed to think of anything more natural and interesting to say than this.
“Good afternoon,” he says and takes a step closer.
The nephew squints at him from under the visor of his hand. He pushes his penny farthing forwards and backwards in a motion that suggests he is getting ready to hurl the huge bicycle at his enemy.
“How pleasant to catch you away from the hospital.”
It seems rather more formal than he hoped, and he tries to see her expression through the shadow covering her eyes.
She doesn’t make any reply.
There can be something brazen about silence, he will think later, something both threatening and provocative. It can force a man into battle before he is ready. He takes another step forward. “And who is this young man?” he asks, arm twitching in the nephew’s direction.
Using the bench as a ladder, the boy leaps upon his saddle and begins wheeling down the path away from them.
“Malcolm, come back at once!” calls Nurse Mills.
He ignores her, and the young doctor gives what he hopes is a jovial laugh, slapping his hat against his palm and coming close enough to suggest he means to sit beside her. She looks up at him. The rim of shadow lifts from her eyes and he can see that her expression, while not exactly welcoming, is at least direct and inquiring. He motions toward the bench and she tilts her head in a kind of defeat. He sits. Malcolm, high in the saddle and wheeling great ungainly circles around a shimmering oak, has never quite left the scene. Technically they are chaperoned. Silence engulfs them—unexpected, awkward silence. The young doctor finds the thumbs of his clasped hands doing a nervous dance around each other.
“So,” he says, pushed by some unnameable urgency, “our doctor friend, Grenfell . . . what do you make of him?”
Instantly his face burns and he knows this was a mistake.
“Your colleague, Dr. Grenfell?” Her emphasis is studied. He feels like an officer in wartime caught defaming a comrade.
“I’m sure he’ll find his feet soon,” he says quickly.
“Find his feet?”
He turns to find her face intense, questioning. He follows the ragged flight of a crow around the Cathedral dome which rises into the blue like a great, ghostly egg.
“All residents make mistakes early on.”
Though he’s impressed by his subterfuge, pretending to defend the very man he would attack, his fingers are still an agitation of movement. He can hear the dangerous slap of loose rope in the passage of the breeze.
“Even you, for instance?”
But for the tone—steady and humourless—he might have believed she meant to flirt.
“Yes, I certainly made my share, Nurse Mills.”
“In the distant past, perhaps?”
He turns to her once more and attempts a smile, but a twitch of his lips distorts it into something else.
“What mistake, in your esteemed judgment, do you suppose Dr. Grenfell has made, by the way?”
Under her steady gaze, his head drops. He watches an ant disappear into a crack in a stone. Then he rallies. “The mistake of trying to preach to a patient twice his age.” He’s surprised at the strength of his reply. He meets her eyes with the warmth of defiance.
“He was trying to save the man’s life.”
He gives a short laugh.
“Why would a young man, or woman for that matter, enter the healing profession if not to heal?”
The anger—so open, so sudden—takes him quite unawares. All his delicately interlaid hopes and faiths—that she has been trying to make him jealous through her intimacy with Grenfell; that she has deliberately let him overhear her plans to visit St. Paul’s—vanish in the breeze. But her hostility has restored his tongue and his energies, too. He is ready for a different kind of battle now.
“I suppose I must be more distrustful than you. How many years of back-breaking work has the sailor in question undertaken for the lowest of pay? Surely such danger and hardship at least gives him the right to his own philosophy.”
“And the right also to know about the dangers into which his choices might lead,” she says.
The young doctor coughs and shifts a little on the bench. “When a young man takes such moral authority upon himself, I find it suspicious and unseemly.”
“Why is that, Doctor? Are you perhaps so far from having moral authority yourself?”
A burning sensation now creeps upon his skin, together with a trembling that seems not so much trepidation as incipient rage.
“I believe myself to be a modest man, it’s true, not prone to playing the judge or imposing my values in surgery.”
“What would you have us do, then, Doctor? Lance boils, dress wounds, and ignore the overall health and well-being—moral as well as physical—of our patients? When I decided to go into nursing, it was to help those who have been brought low. Dr. Grenfell feels the same way. It is a sacred mission.”
So they are in it together, he thinks, a sanctimonious little cluster. The city is full of their kind. Booth’s Salvation Army parades down the Whitechapel Road, crying war against the twin vices of sin and poverty.
“I am a doctor, Nurse Mills, not a priest. A good doctor knows the difference.”
“And does a good doctor stumble in late every Saturday, smelling of last night’s gin?”
A pigeon flaps its wings close to the young doctor’s head, then turns in silhouette against the sun before heading for the dome. A muffled, dizzy feeling descends upon him, together with an odd daydream that Nurse Mills has opened up his skull and is rifling with invisible hands through the contents of his brain. He should have been more careful. He should have remembered to wash away all traces of alcohol before coming in to work. Still, he was no more than four or five minutes late, a tad dishevelled, perhaps, but hardly stumbling. Yet her tone is so hard, her eyes so unforgiving. And here lies the knot of his confusion. Given the views she has just expressed, isn’t it her duty to have compassion, rather than scorn, for the wayward? If he isn’t one of the admirable ones like herself, like Grenfell, who saves others, then he surely must be one of the pitiful creatures to be salvaged. Yet he sees no helping hand, no soft and beckoning gaze. How did he fall betwee
n the cracks?
“You think I was drunk?”
She merely stares back at him.
“Come on, Auntie,” calls the boy, stationary in his saddle, holding himself up against a tree trunk.
“I was experimenting with surgical spirit before I came to work. Some spilt on me and I hadn’t time to wash it all away. That’s why I was late.”
“You don’t drink, then?”
“Most certainly not.”
The hint of a smile creeps into the corner of her lips, and hope—beaten, bruised, and more than half buried—begins to stir afresh. “It was a Friday evening,” he sighs. “What kind of young man of any spirit would not wish to celebrate the near end of the week?”
“The kind of young man,” she says with a tilt of her head, “who is serious about his work, perhaps.”
“Come on, Auntie,” calls Malcolm, “we’ve got to meet your doctor friend, Glenfield, and his cousin.”
“Dr. Grenfell is his name, Malcolm,” she says, rather too deliberately. She picks up the parasol by her side and stands, smoothing down her dress in a manner that draws attention to its Sunday frills.
“Good day, Doctor,” she says with barely a backward glance as she walks off into the sun, boy and bicycle by her side. He watches them as they merge into a line of pleasure seekers and tourists on the other side of the road. Nurse Mills’s parasol becomes one of many; some of them spin in one direction, some in the other, but none of them are still—together they twirl, like the many wheels inside the young doctor, churning the simultaneous emotions of hope and despair, a baffling, disorienting series of movements.
Should he simply feel crushed, or is he right to feel the odd, nudging sense of encouragement? The answer has never been less clear. She’s going to meet Grenfell and he’s astonished at the speed. Two days’ acquaintanceship and they are already meeting beyond the confines of the hospital. Their respective families—her nephew and his cousin—are already mingling. They didn’t know each other before he arrived at the surgery on Friday. He is certain of that.
