The New Sister Theatre

by Lucilla Andrews

  Sandra was off that afternoon. She took over a quiet theatre from me that evening. As I was on call from nine for the night and had a sisters’ meeting at eight, I told her I would not be going out.

  Etiquette forced her to escort me to the outer door. ‘So Joe de Winter has left us?’

  ‘Yes. He has. Good night. Hope it stays quiet.’ I had to get away fast, or crack. I raced down the block stairs as if the roof was falling in.

  I wished I was free to get right away ‒ to a movie ‒ anything outside. The thought of my room, with its view of the Doctors’ House, was intolerable. Once on the ground floor I walked the full length of the bottom corridor to kill time.

  That was a mistake. There were too many white coats about, too many tall, dark-haired men. I went out on the terrace. That was even worse. Joe and I had spent hours on that terrace; every corner of the stone flags, every bit of the balustrade dividing Barny’s from the embankment, jeered and jarred.

  My feet had taken me in a circle and back to the theatre block. I knew I was being stupid and childish, that it was useless to try to run away from my thoughts, but I still could not face my room. I went up in the lift to the Obstetric Theatre on the top floor, and went up the remaining stairs to the roof.

  In summer that roof was the pride and joy of the whole block. It was ornamented with coloured sunshades standing in painted tubs, straw mats, lounging theatre staffs and dressers off duty, enjoying the sun and one of the finest views in London.

  On that cold evening it was deserted, but the view was better than ever. The river was a black silk ribbon, and the thousands of lights on the far bank sparkled in the cold air with a gaiety that jarred. I hugged my cloak more tightly round me, leaned against the balustrade, and found I was staring at the tiers of lights that was Martha’s. I thought back to that conversation with Bill, and then again to Homer’s remark. I had been very het up. Maybe I had misheard. Maybe. And then I thought: does it matter? Joe’s gone.

  Some time later, as I was thinking of moving, I heard men’s voices on the fire-escape bridge that connected the theatre and surgical blocks. My eyes had long grown accustomed to the darkness up there above my own hospital’s lights. I recognized Mark and George Ellis, and backed quickly. I thought the men had not seen me, then I heard Mark tell George to go on in and get cracking on suffering humanity. ‘Seeing I’m off the hook until eleven, I’m going up there to enjoy the view with Maggie Lindsay.’

  I waited until his broad shoulders loomed up the top flight of the fire-escape. ‘You see well in the dark, Mark.’

  ‘The result of being raised on all those home-grown carrots.’ He leaned on the balustrade beside me. ‘My old man may never have had much of a talent for raising the lolly, but he has no equal at raising vegetables.’ He put an arm round my shoulder. ‘I don’t see why you have to weep on that cold stone when I’m at your disposal, angel. And it’s far too beautiful a night for weeping alone.’

  That finished me. ‘Mark, I’m sorry,’ I sniffed, and wept into his jacket.

  I had done with weeping, but was still leaning against him when we heard the roof door behind us creak. He looked round as I moved away fast, and muttered, ‘Wouldn’t you know it?’

  Sandra had come out on to the roof. She was bristling with such obvious indignation that on any other evening I would have been amused.

  ‘I’m sorry to intrude, Sister,’ she said icily, ‘but when Mr Ellis told me just now you were up here I thought I ought to tell you Mr de Winter has been trying to contact you. He’s rung the theatre twice since you left. He said he had tried the Sisters’ Home. I couldn’t suggest where you might be. When he rang last he said he wouldn’t have time to try again. He didn’t say why not, or leave any message.’

  I could have wept all over again. When she removed herself I asked Mark if he had known Joe was still in Barny’s up to a short time ago, and why he might have wanted to reach me. ‘I had the impression he left this afternoon.’

  ‘The man had to pack.’ He knocked out his pipe against the stonework. ‘He’d no time for that while still on the job. I expect he was ringing about his radiogram and records. He said he was going to ask you to take them off his hands. Like his piano. Old Bill’s got that.’

  ‘Why?’ Surprise shook me out of my disappointment. ‘It’s quite easy, if expensive, to take all that across the Atlantic. My father took his desk and a few other cherished pieces. Joe’s not rich, but he hasn’t had time to spend money for years, and, unlike yourself, hasn’t any family he has to help. His brothers and sisters are all comfortably off. He could afford the transport bill. And he loves that piano and the other things.’

  He said, ‘You’ll forgive my saying this, darling, but couldn’t it be that he doesn’t care to be cluttered up with old loves in his new life?’

  That would have hurt me far more if I had not known Joe so well.

  ‘His love of music isn’t part of me. It’s part of himself. I can’t understand his wanting to cut all that out. It makes no more sense than what Homer said.’

  ‘And what did my respected boss say?’

  ‘Of course, it was Bill I told, not you.’ I explained myself. ‘Bill obviously thought me daft.’

  ‘I should think so! And what in hell would a Barny’s man be doing in Martha’s? Don’t we have a fine hospital of our own?’

  ‘We do. But I heard him say ‒’

  ‘That Joe was going over to Martha’s! Maybe you did!’ he snapped. ‘And maybe he is! And why not? You’ll have heard it’s a hospital? And quite apart from the odd social attraction, you’ll have maybe heard the place has surgeons? I’m not saying they’re much good, but no doubt at all they do their best! And they have meetings ‒ get-togethers ‒ “let’s-all-have-a-ruddy-good-time-telling-each-other-what-fine-fellows-we-are” affairs! Have you never heard, my sweet, imaginative, thickheaded Sister Theatre,’ he demanded, ‘of a surgeon from one hospital in London visiting those in another in his off-time, to thrash out the latest technique of shoving in a knife?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said weakly. ‘Yes. I have. Of course. I never thought of that. Is there something on to-night?’

  ‘Sure there is. Joe was talking of it only this morning. There’s some man who’s thought up a new way of whipping out gallstones or something. I forget the details, being no surgeon. But talking of surgery, how many times did your heart skip the old lubb-dupp this morning?’

  We talked shop until we were both very cold and had to move. On the way back to my Home, Mark talked about his family. One of the things I liked most about him was his great affection for his parents and five brothers and sisters; another was the way he had helped his parents financially from the time he had qualified, and accepted his responsibilities as the reasonable consequences of his being the eldest son and only member of his family at present earning a living.

  His father was a retired schoolmaster who had never risen above being an assistant master in a minor English public school. He had married late, retired to Eire with his still very young family on a small pension. Fortunately all his children were clever and, I gathered from Mark, ambitious. Mark had never made any secret of his intentions to stay on the Barny’s medical ladder and get to the top rung. He had taken his present job when his first medical registrar’s year ended, solely as a means of staying in the hospital. He was a good anaesthetist, but he wanted above all to get back on the medical side in Dr Homer’s cardiac firm. He loved Barny’s, refused to contemplate working elsewhere. I had once thought Joe felt that way, too.

  I refused to think of Joe, so asked Mark about his second brother, Sean. ‘Hasn’t he nearly finished that catering course at his Technical College?’

  ‘He has. He’s doing fine. One of these fine days I’ve a notion Conrad Hilton’ll have a rival.’

  ‘I hope so. For your sake, as well as Sean’s and your parents. In a way your being such a good son ‒ no, you are ‒ has done you a good turn, professionally. Homer likes you. I noticed that this
morning, and it wasn’t for the first time. I’m pretty sure that when you finish your term as our R.A. you’ll be able to get into his firm.’

  ‘You think he’ll approve of my filial devotion to duty?’

  ‘I think he’ll approve of the fact that you’ve never been able to afford a wife. He doesn’t like women, unless they are patients or ward sisters. He’s even scared of nurses. I guess he sees them as potential dangers to his resident’s peace of mind. I don’t believe he’s ever taken on anyone who wasn’t a bachelor. Has he?’

  ‘He has not. And wouldn’t I like to tell that sex-starved bastard what he could do with his views on the celibate life,’ he retorted with rare bitterness, ‘if he wasn’t just about the best cardiologist in the business.’

  We had reached the steps of the Sisters’ Home. I faced him. ‘Does it worry you that much?’

  ‘You really want me to answer that?’

  I shook my head. ‘Sorry. And, Mark ‒ thanks.’

  ‘You’ve not one bloody thing to thank me for, my love,’ he said, and walked back across the road with his shoulders hunched and hands in his pockets, ignoring the oncoming traffic. The driver of the double-decker bus coming towards him slowed his vehicle and waved the traffic behind to a crawl. It was typical of Mark, I thought, to cross a busy road with the carelessness of a thoughtless schoolboy, even though, like anyone who had worked in a Casualty department, he knew precisely what the consequences could be. In his work, and to his family, he acted like a responsible adult, yet off duty he could ‒ and often did ‒ behave like an irresponsible ten-year-old. In spite of all he had told me about loving Barny’s and his plans for his future, I would never have been surprised if one of his sudden crazy impulses had caused him to chuck the lot for a better job, or some woman ‒ and then, inevitably, regret it. I had been half expecting that all the time he had been doing anaesthetics, since he did not really care for the job. Yet he had made, was making, an excellent R.A. And, particularly lately, he seemed to have at last outgrown his previous need to boost his ego with a series of girl-friends, and was showing a new stability of purpose in his work and general attitude to life that must have impressed his colleagues as well as myself ‒ with the obvious exception of Sandra. But then, I decided, she saw people as she was, not as they were. And then I thought: only Sandra? What about me? With Joe. And Mark.

  Home Sister came out of her office on the ground floor. ‘Ah, Sister General Theatre! Good. I hoped I would catch you on your way in. The radiogram and record cabinet are safely in your room. Mr de Winter asked me to say he was so sorry to miss you when he came over to say good-bye to me. I was very sad to see him go. We are losing so many of our good men to the Americans. But one cannot blame the young men for going where the opportunities are brightest.’

  Up in my room there was an envelope addressed to me in Joe’s writing on the lid of his radiogram. I had to sit down before opening it.

  The letter inside was written on Barny’s writing paper. There was no forwarding address. It was not meant to be answered.

  Joe wrote:

  I am sorry to dump my things on you without your permission. I had hoped to ask you first, but thought there was plenty of time, then found it had run out. I have tried to reach you this evening, without success.

  Would you mind my leaving the radiogram and records with you? I hope not, as I had to tell Home Sister you were expecting them. If you have strong feelings, give or chuck them away. I don’t want them back. Transporting them won’t do them any good ‒ and think of the fortune they’d cost as excess luggage by air!

  Again, sorry to be so high-handed, and thank you for everything.

  Yours,

  Joe

  I lowered the letter, stared at the radiogram as if it was the first one I had ever seen. Then I went over to the record cabinet, slid back the doors. The many records were listed and numbered. I took one out, checked with the list. As I would have expected, it was in its appointed place. Joe was a methodical man ‒ most surgeons were. It was not like him to leave either his packing, or these arrangements about his possessions, to the last minute. Why this sudden rush? Was it just an act to avoid the embarrassment of asking me to my face? That was possible, and yet would not explain his last-minute packing. Mark explained that as ‘no time’. Joe, being a perpetually busy man, had always known how to make time. Busy people always did.

  I looked at his letter again. Why had he written it? Even if he had been in a hurry to get over to this meeting at Martha’s, he had to be staying somewhere to-night. In some hotel? All hotels had telephones. Why not ring me later?

  I went back to the cabinet. There were records there he had had since he was a student. They were not part of his life with me, as I had told Mark. They were part of himself, important to him, yet he had left them with me. Why? Because he wanted me to have them? As a placebo, in exchange for my engagement ring? Or because, being a surgeon, he knew there were occasions when it was necessary to cut away good tissue as well as bad, to ensure a complete cure?

  Chapter Six

  A PUNDIT SHARES A PROBLEM

  Someone knocked on my door. I opened it to Sister Henry Carter Ward.

  ‘I saw your light on, Sister Theatre. Coming over for our meeting?’

  I asked if she would mind waiting while I put on a clean apron. She came in, admired the radiogram. ‘I never knew you had one in here.’

  ‘It’s only just arrived.’ And I explained, knowing she would hear the story from Home Sister.

  Her name was Wendy Scutt. She was a tallish, sturdily built young woman somewhere in the late twenties or early thirties, which made her one of the younger sisters. I remembered her as a staff nurse in my first year, and later as my ward sister on my first spell of night-duty, in my second year. At Barny’s no first-years worked on nights. She used to bounce round Henry Carter in a manner that reminded me of the games mistresses at school, but I had been too much in awe of a sister’s uniform in those days to entertain the unlikely thought that the uniform housed a human being, and had had no idea of what she was like as a person. I had since had little opportunity of finding out, as I never worked in her ward again, and since my arrival in the Sisters’ Home she and I had discussed little more than the time of day.

  She must have known I had once been engaged to Joe. Nothing in her expression or manner showed that. ‘How very nice for you. May I look at the records?’ She ran a finger down the lists. ‘All these ‒ Chopin? You lucky girl!’

  ‘You like Chopin, Sister? Do you play?’

  ‘Yes.’ She slid the doors shut. ‘Not as well as Mr de Winter. What’s happened to his piano?’

  ‘I understand he has left it with Mr Swan.’

  She smiled placidly. ‘How very nice for Mr Swan! Ready? Then let us make our decorous way across the park. I believe we are in for a lively meeting. As I recollect’ ‒ she waited until I closed the lift-gates, then pressed the ground-floor button and kept her finger there ‒ ‘you have not yet attended one of our meetings?’

  ‘No. This is the first one since I moved up. Does one have to do anything?’

  ‘Unless you have violent feelings on some subject, I would advise you just to sit and look attentive. So much safer as, alas! so many of our respected seniors have the most violent feelings on every subject in the book. At our last meeting I was convinced that but for Matron’s presence blood would have been drawn. The subject under discussion was a new form of basic dressing setting for use throughout the hospital. Senior Sister Tutor wants three not four pairs of dissecting forceps, and no Spencer Wells. Sister Private Wing nearly broke a blood vessel in defence of those forceps, and the row split the Sisters’ Home down the middle for days after!’

  Sister Private Wing, the most senior sister in the hospital, had worn her first lace bow under her chin when Sir Robert was still a student. I had worked three weeks on loan to her department in my first few months of training.

  I mentioned this now. ‘I still only have
to see Sister P.W. to feel I’m just out of the P.T.S.’

  ‘My dear, she affects most of us that way, including, it has been whispered, Matron. She’ll be retiring soon, and we’ll certainly miss her when she goes, even if we do breathe a long sigh of relief. She keeps us all up to the mark. Did you know she actually knew Florence Nightingale when she was a small girl and Miss Nightingale a very old lady?’

  ‘I ‒ yes!’ I snapped my fingers. ‘Of course! Some man in the Wing ‒ I think he was one of our own men ‒ told me that when I was there. I didn’t really believe him. What was his name ‒ Harper? Potter? Something like that. He was in with a back. I forget what was wrong, if I ever knew it, being so junior then.’ Then my mind gave one of those mental clicks. ‘That’s who it was!’

  She looked at me curiously. ‘Who what was?’

  ‘I ‒ er ‒ saw someone recently with certain mild symptoms that seemed to me familiar, yet I could not place why. I’ve just realized where I saw those symptoms before.’

  She said that kind of thing frequently happened to her. ‘I have found that when one strikes a chord like that it’s generally the right one. One’s conscious may make mistakes, but seldom one’s subconscious.’

  I turned this over and over in my mind during the meeting. It was as lively as Sister Henry Carter had anticipated. Sister Private Wing again did battle over the basic setting for a surgical-dressing trolley; admitted herself appalled at the suggestion of disposable masks being used in future. ‘Disposable this, disposable that! And when do we get disposable nurses?’ She then changed from red to purple when Sister Casualty suggested the eight-hour-shift system should be used throughout the hospital and not just in certain departments. ‘Let me inform you, Sisters,’ she stormed, ‘that when I was a junior probationer I began work at 7 a.m. and finished at 9 p.m., with never more than three hours off, and that had to include a meal and a lecture! And we had only one day off a month!’