by Isobel Chace
Sara watched him through the office window as he got into his car. He was not as tall as she had first thought, and yet there was something about him that made him always seem the biggest man in the room. She hoped that she would not see too much of him until she was thoroughly settled down in her new job, for he was the most disturbing person she had ever met.
Dr. Cengupta came back into his office and joined her at the window to watch the departing car vanish into the horizon and a cloud of red dust.
‘He is a very fine man,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It is a privilege to work with him.’
For a second longer they stood side by side gazing into space and then, as if by mutual consent, they became doctor and nurse again and seated themselves on either side of the desk.
‘Now, Nurse, we will get down to business,’ he said. ‘You must forgive me if I ask you a lot of questions, but I like to know as much as I can about my nurses. You also will want to know all about our hospital, and I think it best that we should spend the time now when we are not very busy.’
Sara nodded her agreement. She had no difficulty at all in telling him her qualifications. They were good ones, she knew, and she had no need to stress her worth to him, for he was quite overcome that he should have been given such an assistant.
‘We are very lucky to have you,’ he told her frankly. ‘I am surprised that you did not stay on in your hospital in London?’
‘I wanted to travel,’ she explained. ‘They offered me the Sistership of the Maternity Ward, because I had specialized in that side, but I refused. My aunt suggested that I should come out here and I was thrilled. I had no idea then, either, that you would have such a well-equipped hospital here. I’m afraid I only knew Africa from the films and I expected something very primitive!’ She smiled reminiscently as she remembered her picture of a mud and wattle hut, with herself battling with some awful disease armed with nothing better than a blunt scalpel.
‘We are exceptionally fortunate here at Kwaheri,’ Dr. Cengupta agreed. ‘Matt has always been determined that we should be adequately equipped. There was a very nasty accident here once, when he was still a small boy, and he never got over the idea that the man died because there were no facilities for him to be operated on. When he came of age, this hospital was one of the first things he built, much of it he oversaw himself. I was very lucky to be taken on as doctor here.’
He nodded with satisfaction.
‘Have you been here long?’ Sara asked, interested in the history of the place where she was to work.
‘Twelve years. Matt is thirty-four now.’ He smiled suddenly, his soft brown eyes twinkling at her. ‘And that reminds me, I have not asked your age?’
‘I’m twenty-five,’ Sara told him readily. ‘I’ve been nursing ever since I was eighteen, though, and I’ve loved every minute of it.’
‘Well, that, I think, completes my questions,’ the doctor said. ‘I shall try to tell you now just what your duties will be, though that is a little difficult, because naturally we are not so strictly organized as a hospital in England.
‘Mostly it is a question of one or other of us being here. We have a rota system, and it is not usually necessary to do night duty unless we have someone who is very ill. Nurse Lucy sleeps at the hospital and she sees to the odd glass of water that the normal patient needs. Otherwise it is largely as it comes. Sometimes we fly to the other estate to hand out injections and so on. There is usually something that has to be done, it is surprising. The estate employs a colossal number of workers one way and another, and there is always a possibility of one of them lopping off a portion of himself instead of the sisal plant!’ He paused, thinking proudly of his little domain. ‘Ah! And the best of all! Our clinic. Some of the local wives help us with that. We have babies in from miles around, and weigh them, just like in England. We are very proud of the clinic!’
It sounded fun to Sara. She remembered a little black infant she had had for a short while in Maternity in London. It had been a solid, healthy little baby and she had completely lost her heart to it.
‘I hope I shall attend that!’ she exclaimed. ‘Who started it up? You? Mrs. Halifax?’
Dr. Cengupta laughed.
‘It was another of Matt’s ideas,’ he said. ‘Though his mother helped, of course.’
He stood up, still smiling down at her.
‘And now I shall show you the hospital,’ he said grandly.
The one inmate of the hospital had already reached a convalescent stage. He was sitting up eagerly awaiting his first glimpse of the new nurse, though when she did come to the doorway of his ward he was overcome with shyness and could think of nothing whatever to say to her.
Sara greeted him pleasantly and asked what had been the matter with him, but he only wriggled and shook his head, his dark eyes pleading with Dr. Cengupta to come to his rescue.
‘Malaria,’ the doctor said briefly. ‘We’re always getting the occasional case of it, in spite of all the precautions we take. Still, it’s dying out slowly, and one day, we hope, it will just be something for the medical history books.’
When they had first entered the ward, Sara had wondered whether the doctor would insist on the same discipline that applied to all big hospitals, but he had smilingly shaken his head.
‘We are informal here,’ he had told her, ‘but that does not mean that we are less efficient.’
There followed a tour of the outpatients’ department, already crowded with Africans waiting for their needs to be attended to. It soon became apparent to Sara that it was here that their real work lay. One after the other they came, sometimes for themselves, sometimes for another member of their family who was too shy, or too ill, to come himself.
For the rest of the morning they worked unceasingly and gradually the flood became no more than a trickle, and then there were only those left who were waiting for the doctor to make up their prescriptions.
‘Lunch, I think,’ said Dr. Cengupta, straightening his back. ‘I expect you could do with some, eh?’
Nurse Lucy giggled softly. Sara looked down thoughtfully at her feet. Not since her very first days on the ward had they ached with such alarming intensity. Lunch, she thought, was not in the least necessary to her, but the opportunity to bathe those burning members filled her with delighted anticipation.
For the first time she went into her own office. It was not so large as the doctor’s, but immediately she preferred it. It was completely sheltered from the sun, because it shared an extra piece of roofing with the porch, and it was therefore a little cooler. It had been decorated too in a very pale aquamarine, instead of the uniform cream of the rest of the rooms, with a basin in one corner and a small painted desk for her papers.
Wearily she sank into a chair, glad that no one had made a fuss because she was missing lunch.
‘You make tea,’ Lucy had advised. ‘Kenya tea in cupboard.’
And that, thought Sara, was exactly what she was going to do!
Kenya tea was something new as far as she was concerned. She sniffed it with interest, wondering whether to equate it with China or Indian. She found that it was somewhere between the two; more fragrant than Indian, but with more body than China. It was hot and very refreshing.
A little restored, she went to the window and gazed out at the sisal plants that almost completely surrounded the hospital. Standing with spiky stiffness, they looked like giant pineapples stretching away into the distance. Sara hoped that she would have the opportunity to see all the work that went into the ultimate product. It would be interesting to know how it was cut and dried and shredded into strands, so that the factories could turn it into mats, rope or string.
She was still dreaming that the plant just outside her window was going to become part of a rope that would rescue some sinking yacht, just off her own coastline at home in England, when she was interrupted by a knock on the door.
‘What goes on around here?’ a female voice asked querulously. ‘Siesta?’
Sara hurried to the door and flung it open.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked quickly.
The girl’s eyes flickered over her impersonally.
‘It’s all right, James, I’ve found someone, so you can call off the hunt.’
A younger, weaker edition of Matt came hurrying down the corridor. He blinked nervously at the two girls and smiled at Sara.
‘This is Matt’s girl, Julia Davids,’ he said, in quick hurried tones, so hurried that they very nearly made him stammer. ‘She’s got a headache.’
Sara smiled at her sympathetically and asked her if she would like to sit down for a moment.
‘I’m new here,’ she explained, ‘but I’m sure I can find you something. Dr. Cengupta and Nurse Lucy are just having their lunch, but they’ll be back in a moment.’
‘Don’t you get any lunch?’ Julia drawled languidly.
‘I didn’t want any,’ Sara confessed. ‘I’m not used to working in this heat, so I wasn’t very hungry.’
‘But if you had been hungry, there wouldn’t have been anyone here at all? I told you, James, this place is frantically badly run! I’m really going to speak to Matt about it! He gives anyone a job, and then doesn’t expect them to do a hand’s turn for their wages!’
James flushed and looked thoroughly uncomfortable.
‘He runs it pretty well,’ he defended his brother awkwardly.
‘By employing Mrs. Wayne’s niece as a nurse, I suppose?’
It was Sara’s turn to redden.
‘If I had wanted lunch, Miss Davids, I should have had to have waited until the others came back before going to have mine. And as for my qualifications, they happen to be more than adequate. Would you like an aspirin, or something stronger?’
Miss Julia Davids, she reflected as she left the room for the dispensary, was not in the least the sort of girl she would have expected Matt to have chosen. She imagined that he would rate loyalty pretty highly, and Julia had as much loyalty as a rattlesnake! What business was it of hers anyway whom Matt employed? Or how he ran the estate? she asked herself indignantly. She hoped that the headache would really ache! — and was surprised by the intensity of her own indignation.
‘He hasn’t even got her out of the house!’ Julia was saying as she returned. Sara knew that they were still talking about her — and about her aunt. She was just in time to see James shrug his shoulders and wondered what he really thought about his brother. She suspected that as long as he was paid his cheque he really didn’t care what difficulties Matt had. Once again she wondered why Matt wouldn’t let him go to England to write his books if that was what he wanted. She knew from experience that it was no good expecting good work from a reluctant employee, not that James came under that heading precisely, but the principle was still the same.
‘Will you take the tablets with water? Or would you like a cup of tea?’ Sara asked the older girl as pleasantly as she could.
To her surprise, Julia smiled.
‘I’ll have tea,’ she said. ‘My throat feels like parchment after our drive up here, and we still have to go up to the house. I’m hoping to get Matt out on to the golf course this evening too before it gets dark, so I don’t suppose I shall have time for any later.’
‘Julia’s a great golfer,’ James said, his words still tripping each other up. ‘Handicap of next to nothing at all! Matt’s the only one of us that can hold her. He has — has determination, you see.’
Sara thought with pleasure of a remark she had once heard that golf was a game where you hit a little white ball, and then walked after it! She would have liked to have scorned it altogether, but the trouble was that she thoroughly enjoyed the occasional game herself!
She poured out three cups of tea and handed them round.
‘I’m sorry I can’t offer you a biscuit or anything,’ she apologized. ‘I’m afraid I’m not that settled in yet.’
And although from then on Julia did everything that she could to be charming, it was still a relief when they decided to go, and she was once more alone in the hospital.
Dr. Cengupta spent the afternoon visiting those patients who were too ill to come to the outpatients’ department, but not ill enough to be brought in to the hospital, and Nurse Lucy had her time off, because she would be on again that evening. Sara spent the time becoming thoroughly acclimatized to her new surroundings, not satisfied until she could lay her hands on anything that she might need for an emergency.
In a cupboard in her room she found a bag, completely equipped with everything that she would need out on the estate. She checked the contents and substituted one kind of antiseptic for another, having a preference for the second brand. Then she settled down to the paper work to find out just what kind of cases she might expect in the future.
Dr. Cengupta had kept all the records up to date. His was a neat, careful hand, that was almost too good for a doctor, and his notes were easy to follow.
There were very few European patients, only the nearby farmers and their wives and children. Germans, Greeks and British side by side in the file as they were on the land. Sara remembered that Tanganyika had once been a German colony, which explained the large numbers of German settlers and the fleets of Volkswagen cars that are to be seen everywhere all over the Territory, for since Independence they had renewed their economic interest in Tanzania.
The Indian patients were a little more numerous. Those who had been in hospital each had their sect carefully marked after their name so that their religious idiosyncrasies could be catered for. No beef or steak, or any other part of a cow, for the Hindus. And properly killed sheep for the Sikhs. There seemed to be no end to the difficulties in catering for them and yet, apparently, this minute hospital not only could but did!
Lastly there were the African patients, forming the large bulk of the cards before her, and mostly bearing impossible names that she couldn’t possibly pronounce. Mostly, however, they had a Christian given name which they were happy to answer to.
It was tremendously exciting getting this glimpse of what her life was going to be in the future. All thought of Julia and the difficulties her aunt had created for her paled into nothingness against the kind of work she would be doing. It would be completely satisfactory. She would be important to the community because of her skill and also, a little, in her own right as a person, and that was what made it so different from any other hospital life she had ever known. This was too small for anyone to ever become a cog in a giant machine, and this was what she wanted.
She was still hard at it when Nurse Lucy came on duty again. The African nurse was a very happy person, hardly ever without a beaming smile on her flee.
‘My, you work hard!’ she said admiringly, as though such a thing would never cross her own mind. ‘But now you work harder still,’ she added.
Sara had a vision of some casualty being brought into the hospital and jumped to her feet.
Lucy giggled delightedly. ‘Mr. Matt, he wait for you with that jeep. You hurry, yes?’
Sara tore off her veil and hung it in her cupboard, her tiredness falling off her as though it had never been.
‘Why should I scurry round just because he’s waiting?’ she asked herself.
But she was almost running as she left the hospital.
CHAPTER THREE
Once outside the door, Sara remembered that she had not called in to say good-bye to their one solitary patient. She had promised him that she would when she had taken him his lunch, so now she hurried back to stick her head round the door and wave to him, before leaving. And all the time the thought ran round her brain: ‘So he isn't playing golf with Julia!’
Instead he was standing leaning against the jeep, waiting for her.
‘That you, nurse?’ he called out. ‘I went down to the town this morning and I got your provisional licence, so hop in and we’ll see what you can do!’
Obediently Sara climbed into the driver’s seat and frowned down at the multitude of gear le
vers at her disposal. One was considerably longer than either of the other two and she concluded that this was the one she would be using.
Matt sat nonchalantly beside her and watched her.
‘I’ll show them to you once and then you’re on your own,’ he said tersely.
Sara nodded. His instructions were short and easy to follow and she was sure that she had grasped the fundamentals when he had finished. But it was quite another matter, she discovered, to translate those orders into action. Again and again she stalled the engine, while he sat and waited.
‘What am I doing wrong?’ she demanded impatiently at last. ‘Why doesn’t the beastly thing go?’
‘You treat the clutch as though it was burning the sole of your foot,’ he replied quietly. ‘And it isn’t in the least use losing your temper with it, it’s you who are wrong! A common mistake with women!’ he added dryly.
‘Women make excellent drivers!’ she retorted angrily, and such was her annoyance that she completely forgot about her difficulties with the result that the clutch operated beautifully and the jeep slid slowly forward.
‘I’ve done it!’ she cried out triumphantly.
‘Well, stop and do it again,’ he suggested. ‘And again,’ he went on inexorably until she really had mastered the technique.
It was an hour that on the whole Sara would have liked to forget. He was for the most part completely silent, waiting for her to do something wrong, until her trembling hands barely seemed to be part of her at all, but of some stranger she was watching from a great distance.
‘You’re getting tired,’ he said at last, ‘but you haven’t done too badly. Move over and I’ll drive you home.’
They changed seats with something like relief. Home, Sara thought. It was funny that it should be so, but already the manager’s house, standing on its bleak, unfertile little hill, was home to her.
