The New Sister Theatre

by Lucilla Andrews

  I closed my eyes. ‘Oh, no, Mr Swan,’ I said weakly.

  He said if I would forgive his saying so I was the answer to a hard-working surgical registrar’s prayer. ‘The ward sisters are all raising hell and Partridge is furious! Heaven will reward you, Sister, even if I don’t.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Swan. Sir Robert is teaching as previously arranged?’

  ‘He is. You can put up the “House Full” notices right now, Sister. The gallery’ll be packed with any of our top brass who can make it, apart from the student men, as my boss will have four V.I.P.s watching from the floor with him. They are all flying over together this afternoon.’ He reeled off the names of three surgical Knights Bachelor and one plain Mister, all of whom were household names in any English-speaking theatre. ‘Useful to know who’s behind the mask, eh, Sister?’

  ‘Very, Mr Swan, very. Thanks for the tip-off.’

  He rang off. I put down the receiver and thought, Good God! I had let my two best staff nurses go off. I rang their Home instantly to get them back. If Sandra objected it was just too bad. I had never felt so much like a Sister Theatre. I wanted my trained nurses back. If they could be reached I was going to have them.

  They could not be reached. The portress said they had left the Home in mufti a few minutes before, and she had just seen them driving by in Nurse Brown’s car.

  ‘Never mind, Mrs Jason. Thank you.’

  I stayed momentarily by the telephone, thinking fast. I had previously arranged to be the sole instrument nurse needed for the gynae list, with Cotton, our third-year, as my ‘dirty’. Dolly Bachelor had been down to take charge of the department generally and anaesthetic-room in particular while I was tied up with the list. The two juniors on that morning, Alcott and Jones, were expecting to double up with Cotton and Bachelor, watching and learning all they did.

  That would all have to be scrapped. As there was no alternative, Bachelor would have to be second instrument nurse for that first complicated job. Cotton would have to ‘dirty’ for her, as she was good and Bachelor would need all the help an efficient ‘dirty’ could give her. Jones, being senior to Alcott, would just have to preside over the anaesthetic-room ‒ I could ask Mark to keep an eye on her ‒ and run the outside for me. Little Alcott would have to ‘dirty’ for me ‒ and Heaven help both of us if she was in one of her absent-minded moods.

  ‘Here’s a sweet prospect.’ Mark had come in. ‘Why so pensive, angel?’

  ‘Not pensive. Plain worried.’ I explained, and asked him to look after Jones.

  He said there was nothing he would not do for me ‒ when he wasn’t doing for old Robbie. ‘A full-time job that! And which is Jones? The skinny bird? Why can’t I have the doll with the big blue eyes?’

  I said tersely, ‘Because Jones is more senior and more use.’

  ‘Careful, sweet! You’re sounding like a sister!’

  ‘Unfortunately, that’s what I happen to be here this morning.’

  He was amused. ‘You are worked up! Relax. Surely you knew Robbie was throwing this demonstration?’

  ‘Not until Bill Swan told me.’

  ‘Sandra didn’t hand it on? When I myself whispered the rumour that the lists were going to be switched into her shell-like ear when you were at breakfast? When I came in to take a gander at your off-duty rota. I wanted to be sure you had a free evening to-morrow. There’s a fine party we mustn’t miss, and you owe me a date. How about it?’

  ‘No dates now, Mark.’

  ‘And why not? You’re free, as Sandra herself pointed out when I told her about this party.’

  ‘You told her?’

  He read my mind and began to laugh. ‘So she held out on you about old Robbie? Well, well, well!’

  ‘Mark,’ I said quietly, ‘don’t be so bloody silly. It’s not well at all ‒ and I haven’t time for more nonsense. Do you want anything?’

  ‘Do we have this date?’

  I would have agreed to anything to get rid of him. He said I would never regret it and strolled off chatting to himself about young women who were going to grow old before their time through taking their careers too seriously.

  I called Bachelor from the theatre.

  She was openly horrified. ‘Sister, do I have to? I’m even slower than Garret. Sir Robert’ll eat me alive!’

  ‘You’ll be taking for the S.S.O., not Sir Robert.’

  ‘But he’s just as quick.’

  I said, ‘I know, my dear. You’ll just have to manage. I think you can.’ I sounded far more sanguine than I felt, but the poor girl needed all the encouragement I could give her. ‘Cotton’ll be a great help.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, Sister, though I don’t honestly think my best is anything like good enough. Could you ‒ would you mind ‒ perhaps asking the S.S.O. not to mind too much about my being slow?’

  In the past I would have done that already. ‘I may not get a chance, but if I can ‒’

  ‘Sister! Here he is!’ Her eyes lit up with relief above her mask. ‘Shall I see about the resetting, and telling the others?’

  ‘Please.’ I waited as Joe came quickly down the theatre corridor, the skirt of his white coat floating out behind him. ‘Morning, Mr de Winter. Mr Swan has just rung about the changes.’

  ‘I know. Can you spare me a moment, Sister?’ He held open the duty-room door. ‘If you please.’

  He was our S.S.O. I had no alternative but to make time for him. I went into the duty-room. He shut the door. ‘Maggie, do you realize what Robbie’s going to do this morning?’ I nodded. ‘Then what the hell were Sandra Brown and Rose Garret doing driving out of Casualty yard in outdoor clothes just now? Aren’t they your two best seniors? You’ll need at least one of them for Robbie’s list.’

  ‘I know that now. I didn’t when I let them go.’ I sat down. ‘I rang over directly Bill rang me. It was too late. Bachelor’ll have to take the second instrument trolley.’

  ‘Which one is Bachelor?’ He came over to the desk. ‘That chubby one outside just now? With the brown eyes? The new acting?’

  ‘Yes. Fourth year. She’s very good, but too inexperienced to have her speed up yet. She’s convinced Robbie’s going to eat her alive.’

  ‘Poor little thing.’ He sat by me. ‘Will I have her then? She afraid I’ll eat her?’

  ‘She’s not so much frightened of you as your speed. Will you guide her along without Robbie catching on?’

  ‘Sure. She should be all right. She doesn’t dither.’ He picked up the list of cases on my blotter. ‘And what about your “dirties”? They up to this V.I.P. show?’

  ‘One’s good, one’s hopeless.’ Slowly we smiled at each other and the clock turned back. ‘It’s not the poor child’s fault. She’s just too junior as yet. She’s very willing, which is what worries me this morning. She’s perfectly capable of rushing in helpfully to pick up a dropped sponge or pair of forks and then laying either on the table or my trolley. You tell her something one moment, she says, ‘Yes, Sister, of course, Sister!’ and forgets all about it the next. Did you by chance hear about our lights failing momentarily during the urological list on Tuesday? Between ourselves, that was our Alcott. You know the main switches are all outside? She was supposed to be writing up a lecture, had finished, and thought she would help out by doing some extra dusting. So she turned off all the switches before wet-dusting them. She said she knew it was dangerous to wet-dust with the switches down. She had forgotten they controlled the theatre lights.’

  ‘My God, Maggie! Can’t you send her off duty or something?’

  ‘Not without leaving myself ‘dirty’-less. Besides, I feel safer when I can see her. I’m just hoping the good angel of all theatre sisters will be on the job with me.’

  ‘You and me, both. Now, back to business. This third chap’ll need the portable boys along. Rung X-ray?’ He waited while I dealt with that at once.

  ‘This fourth chap with the chest aneurysm,’ he went on, ‘is bound to leak. The ward have got three spare pints
of his group. Get them to send the lot down with him.’ I made that telephone call. ‘As for the girl at the end, I’ve a notion Robbie’ll finish her off by slapping on a plaster.’

  ‘On that? Why? I thought he was agin slapping hands in plaster?’

  ‘He is, on the whole. But when he saw her yesterday ‒ her proximal and middle phalanges are the two crushed ‒ he said he thought he would have her in plaster for a few days until the fracture line gets sticky. The old routine.’

  ‘We’ll have a plaster trolley ready. Thanks.’

  ‘Not at all. By the way, Robbie is back from France tomorrow. He’ll be doing that hole-in-the-heart girl from Christian on the morning after.’ He paused. ‘Possibly my last day.’

  The clock shot forward again. I said, ‘I’ll get my end organized.’

  He nodded and stood up quickly. Or, rather, he tried to stand up quickly, and stuck half-way. He leaned both hands flat on the desk top, grimaced involuntarily, then heaved himself upright.

  ‘Joe, are you all right?’ I watched him anxiously. ‘You stuck.’

  ‘I know. My back’s stiff. Probably a touch of lumbago.’

  ‘If it was, then you’d still be stuck.’

  ‘Then it’s just as well if it isn’t,’ he retorted shortly, ‘as I still have two more ward-rounds to do before Robbie’s party begins.’

  That should have warned me off, but I could not stop being anxious about him just because he had stopped loving me. And again, as in his room, I thought: I’ve seen someone do just this before. Again, I could not place whom or where. ‘Have you talked to the S.M.O., Joe?’

  ‘Because I get the odd twinge of rheumatism? Don’t be absurd, Maggie. Half the country suffers from it, the other half’s getting it. Our own fault for living in a perpetually damp climate.’ He opened the door. ‘I’ve got to get moving. See you later.’

  ‘Yes. And Joe ‒ thank you very much.’

  ‘That’s all right. My theatre too. I told you I was fond of it.’

  ‘Yes, you did. Thanks all the same.’

  Sir Robert was still working on the girl with the crushed hand when Sandra and Rose Garret returned to duty. When the operation was over and the surgeons had retired to their room the two staff nurses came in to report back to me and help with the clearing. Sandra’s eyes above her mask were defiant and wary. Rose Garret was openly upset. ‘Sister, was there a change? You’ve had Sir Robert?’

  ‘We have indeed. And a most interesting and pleasant morning.’ I smiled across at Dolly Bachelor, who still looked two feet above ground with relief and pleasure and her own success. ‘Nurse Bachelor managed splendidly, and so did Nurses Cotton, Jones, and Alcott. It’s too bad you girls missed it all.’ I named the V.I.P.s. ‘Sir Robert was at his best. Now, I’m afraid we are going to leave you to clean up while we go to lunch.’

  Rose said, ‘Then it didn’t matter our being off, Sister?’

  ‘We missed you,’ I said truthfully, ‘but everything went very well, so the switch-round really did not matter. Come along, Nurses. Get changed and off to lunch. Mr Partridge wants to start at two.’

  Sandra, for the first time since I had known her, was speechless. I did not comment on that, or on Mark’s unofficial message which she had failed to hand on. There was now no point, and her action had quite fortuitously shown me that in Dolly Bachelor I had another staff nurse with a talent for rising to theatre occasions, and that young Alcott under pressure and a sister’s eye had the makings of a very good theatre nurse. It had also shown me the one person I needed to keep a constant eye on was my senior staff nurse. I had made the mistake of underestimating how far her dislike of me would take her. After this morning, rightly or wrongly, the mystery of those size-eight glove-tins was no longer a mystery to me. I did not like mysteries anywhere. I was determined there would be no more in the theatre ‒ my theatre.

  That made me smile faintly to myself. I was beginning to think like a sister. It was only a question of time before I began saying the modern nurses were not what nurses had been in my young day. And then I remembered I was a sister. For the first time, as I walked in to lunch that day, I genuinely felt like one.

  The mood was still on me when I returned to the theatre. I decided not to waste it, called Sandra into the duty-room, asked her to close the door, and then told her how pleased I was with the juniors in general and Bachelor in particular. ‘We have the makings of a really good team, now. And in no place is teamwork more essential than in the theatre. A patient’s life may quite literally depend on that. But you know that. So I won’t keep you any longer. Will you take for Mr Partridge? Garret can see to the comings and goings in the anaesthetic-room, and Jones can “dirty”.’

  ‘Yes, Sister.’ She stared at the floor. ‘Was that all?’

  ‘Yes, Nurse Brown.’

  She went out without meeting my eyes.

  I would have preferred not to have gone to that party with Mark, but when the next evening came the theatre was quiet, and I was not on call, and had no excuse for staying on duty in my free time.

  Mark was uncharacteristically punctual. In the taxi he said it was time I caught up on how the other half lived. ‘There are more things in life, my cherished Sister Theatre, than are found within the green walls of your elegant department.’

  He had booked a table for dinner at a very expensive restaurant. I asked if he had won the Pools.

  ‘Indeed I have not! But I said we’d live it up, and that’s what we’re doing. Now, no more talk about money. Sordid, my sweet, sordid.’

  The party was being given by some friends of his. Their name was Smithe-Grey. They lived in a penthouse on top of a new block of flats overlooking the river. On the way up in their private lift I asked Mark how he came to know them. ‘I don’t remember your mentioning their name?’

  ‘And how long is it since we have been out together?’ he demanded severely. ‘Too damned long. So is it any wonder there are whole pages in my life that are a closed book to you? But if you must know all my secrets, Hubert Smithe-Grey was carried into our Private Wing one night last year with a busted varicose vein. He may be a tycoon, but he bleeds good red blood like the rest of us!’

  ‘Good red? From a vein?’

  ‘Will you stop being a theatre sister, darlin’? Have it your own way. But he bled ‒ like a stuck pig, if that suits you better. So there was no time for waiting around for the top brass. I gave him gas. Joe stitched him up. He asked us both to look him up. I don’t believe Joe took him up on that?’ I shook my head. ‘Not as far as you know either? Well, now, it’s fine to scorn money. But I love the stuff. So I came along to say hallo, and have been coming along from time to time ever since.’

  Mr Smithe-Grey was a small, neat man with a tired, young-old face. Mark murmured, ‘He’ll be into Barny’s again. Ulcers, no less. Did you ever see a more classic gastric?’

  Mrs Smithe-Grey had pale pink hair and a pink spangled dress. She said we were her precious lambkins, warned me she was just crazy about my adorable boy-friend, and vanished as hostesses do at parties.

  Mark said he must find us the necessary. ‘Wait just here like the sweet girl you are.’

  I waited and waited. The room was full of smoke, people, and noise. My eyes began to sting. My face felt ready to crack with my fixed smile. I backed against a wall as the crowd grew thicker and noisier, wishing Mark would return and rescue me. Through the smoke faces drifted by, disembodied, then one stopped directly in front of me. The face of a very good-looking young woman with fair hair dressed in a high chignon and with really beautiful green eyes.

  ‘Hallo. You look as lost as I feel. Don’t you know anyone here beyond our hosts either?’

  ‘Not apart from the man who brought me. He’s disappeared. I don’t know how, as he’s so huge. I wish he’d come back, as I can’t honestly claim to know even our hosts.’

  She edged herself against the wall beside me. ‘The Smithe-Greys are sweet, but whenever I get to any kind of a party like
this, I start wondering what on earth persuaded me to come. I usually try not to come alone, but the date I had fixed for tonight fell through at the last moment.’

  ‘That’s tough luck.’ I looked her over, covertly. That look amused me. She was exactly Mark’s type. Her left hand was bare. Her missing escort ‒ and how any man could back out of a date with a girl with her looks was beyond me ‒ might well find he had made a big mistake letting her come to this party alone.

  We talked fashions. We were discussing skirt lengths, when she suddenly broke off the conversation. ‘Mark Delaney! Hallo!’

  Mark had returned, balancing two glasses, a dish of olives, another of nuts. I thought the lot were going down. Then he recovered his grip in more ways than one. ‘Hallo there! And why wasn’t I told you two girls know each other?’

  My companion said, ‘We’ve covered a great deal of ground, but not names.’ She held out a hand to me. ‘Frances Durant.’

  I glanced at Mark. He was looking at her with something close to awe. Since the reason for that was plain to anyone who knew his taste in women, I had no way of knowing whether he suspected how I felt. I said I was Margaret Lindsay.

  Her expression did not alter. ‘Anything to do with Barny’s? Like Mark?’

  Mark took over. ‘Is she not! A Sister Theatre, no less! And Frances here, I would have you know, Maggie, is one Big Doctor from Martha’s. She works for my old pal Hugo O’Brien.’

  I had been prepared to detest her. I could not do that now we had met. She was the kind of woman women would like nearly as much as men. Dolly Bachelor was right. Frances Durant was a nice person ‒ and that fact was maddening.

  Chapter Five

  SWAN-SONG FOR JOE

  On the way home I asked Mark if he had known Frances was going to be at that party.

  ‘The Smithe-Greys ask her round often. They’ve taken quite a shine to her.’

  ‘And not only the Smithe-Greys,’ I said drily. ‘Joe. Or didn’t you know that?’

  ‘These things get around.’

  ‘Was that why you were so determined to drag me to the party?’