Flowers on the Grass (32 page)

Sometimes people came up to the ward wanting to see him. He had forbidden her, on pain of setting fire to his bed, to let any strangers in to him, so when a wealthy-looking couple came enquiring for him, she took them into her office to find out who they were.

The lady was tall and elegant and looked rather like the Duchess of Windsor. She did most of the talking. Her husband, who looked well-fed and easy going, stood jingling his money and looking nervously at a collection of splints and cradles in a corner of the office, and backed up everything his wife said.

Their name was Ruelle. “Oh, you must be the parents of the child who was involved in the accident with him,” Sister said. She was not going to speak of him saving the child’s life. She was cross with him today about the carrots at lunch and was not going to soften into consideration of him as a hero.

“Foster
parents,” Mrs. Ruelle corrected her. “We make no bones about her adoption. The other is so foolishly escapist, don’t you think?”

“Quite,” said Mr. Ruelle.

“But of course she’s just like our own child to us,” Mrs. Ruelle went on, “so naturally we want to offer her rescuer our gratitude, even though it was his fault in the first place. Oh, not the accident,” she explained, as Sister looked surprised, “I mean their being in London at all, though no doubt
something similar would have happened wherever they had been. The intrinsic causation of these things is always more psychological than functional.”

“Clearly,” said Mr. Ruelle, although Sister could not agree with him.

She went into the ward to ask Mr. Brett if he would see them. “All right, all right,” she said. “There’s no need to be violent about it. Just say No and have done.” She hated to tell untruths, but she had to tell the Ruelles that he was not well enough for visitors, hoping that they would not look through the glass doors on the way out and see him sitting up, as far as his splint allowed, drawing a picture on the plaster cast on Mr. Foley’s arm.

“He’s asking about Pamela though,” she said. “He’d like to see her some time.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said Mrs. Ruelle in her high, enunciating voice. “We’ve sent her away to a farm in Cornwall. She was in a terrible state, and not only because of the accident; all our careful guidance of her development abrogated. The whole thing was most unsatisfactory, you know. I won’t impose on your time with the details, Sister, but she must not see him again. It would be the worst thing for a child of her irregular nature.”

“He’ll be disappointed,” Sister said. “He talks about her quite a lot. He told me once that he’d been in a madhouse and she was the only sane thing in it, though I’m sure I don’t know what he meant.”

“You see, Henry?” Mrs. Ruelle turned to her husband, generating a slight disturbance of perfume on the air. “Just what we thought. A mésalliance.”

“Of the first degree,” he said.

Mrs. Ruelle asked Sister if she would convey to Mr. Brett what they had come to say themselves: that they wished to make him a present of a hundred pounds for his service to their foster daughter.

“Guineas, dear,” amended her husband.

“All right, Henry. My husband is very profligate.” She smiled at Sister. “Pamela said that Mr. Brett seemed to be very poor, so we thought this would be the best thing to do.”

When they had gone, Sister went back to the ward, not liking her errand. Mr. Brett was a gentleman and you did not buy gentlemen off with a hundred pounds—guineas—just
because you did not approve of their influence on your daughter. Although Mr. Brett was always on about something for nothing out of the Government, he did not look or behave like someone who was very poor. What tale had he been pitching the child? It sounded uncomfortably to Sister as if he might be a scrounger, knowing that she came of wealthy parents.

“You should be in bed by now, Mr. Foley,” she said and sent him away with the drawing on his cast half finished. Sister would not look at it, for from what she could see at a glance it was going to be some kind of pin-up girl.

“You’re lucky,” she told Mr. Brett. “I’ve got some good news for you.”

“The only good news you can bring me,” he said, “is when you come and tell me I can get up and go.” That was the way he spoke to her. She was getting used to it.

When she told him about the money, to her surprise, he said: “Oh Gosh, / don’t want it,” and then she was sorry she had thought of him as a scrounger. The Ruelles had hurt his pride.

“I didn’t think you’d accept it,” she said, liking him better, but he spoiled it by saying: “Well, it’s no use now, as I can’t go to Italy. Not for ages, anyway. When d’you think I’ll get out of here?”

“Not for some time yet, I’m afraid. Mr. Pennyfeather’s still undecided about putting in that peg.”

“That butcher,” said Mr. Brett disgustedly. “If you don’t have a compound fracture, he has to make it one. He’s not happy unless he can see torn and tortured wounds.”

“I won’t have you saying such things, Mr. Brett, in my ward.”

“I won’t be his guinea-pig,” Mr. Brett groused on in the grumbling monotone he fell into when he was fed up. “I’ll get up and crawl out of here—you wait. You can’t keep me here against my will. I’ve got a life to live like everyone else, but not here, strung up to this blasted thing.” He kicked his sound leg towards the beam. The jerk hurt his bad one and he yelled once and then was quiet, turning his head to one side with his eyes closed, looking pale.

Sister Ferguson stood looking down at him for a moment and then went off duty and back to her room at the hostel, where she had her many photographs and her own bedspread and cushions and doilies, to make it quite like home. It was
her home really, for her other one was in Liverpool, and she only went there once a year and then felt out of place, because her sister didn’t want to talk about hospital all the time, and she could talk of very little else.

She took off her cap and smoothed down her slate-coloured hair and thought about Mr. Brett having a life of his own outside here, and was unable to imagine what it was like. She could never think of her patients as having any existence outside the hospital, for her only contact with their lives was here. When they went home to pick up lives she knew nothing about, she did not like it, not only because she grudged them their independence, but because she had usually grown a little fond of them.

Willy-nilly, although she disguised it, she had a feeling for everyone who was entrusted to her, even Mr. Brett. She wanted them all to like her, but if they teased her, affectionately as they sometimes did, something tightened up inside her and she could not respond. She suspected that they had more fun on her day off.

Sister Ferguson’s day off was Staff Nurse Fitt’s favourite day of the week. Not that Sister bothered her much when she was there, for Nurse Fitt had her own ways and was not one to be dictated to by anybody, even Ferocious Fanny, who was the bossiest sister in the hospital. If Sister told her to do something she did not want to, she would either pretend to be deaf in both ears, instead of only the mastoid one, or say: “Of course, I don’t know about you, Sister, but I always think the modern method is the best.” That made the old girl hopping mad, because half the modern methods she had not even heard of, and was too pig-headed to learn.

On Sister’s day off Nurse Fitt sailed into the ward with more bombast than usual, and started right away ordering the juniors about, chivvying the men and catechising the night nurse. She sat straight down at the desk and didn’t take off her cuffs, because she was in charge today and she was blowed if she was going to make beds. If the nurses were pushed, Winnie could help them.

When Mr. Pennyfeather pottered in to do his round, with his white hair in a fluff, although she privately thought him a doddering old back number, she put on a full show for him.

She led the parade from bed to bed, with herself in a clean apron carrying nothing, Nurse Saunders trying to hide her dirty apron, carrying the case history folders, Nurse Barnes with the X-rays, and Nurse Potter, scuttling away just in time to fetch her cuffs, bringing up the rear with the sphygmomanometer and patella hammer.

Nurse Fitt tried to do the same thing for Matron’s round, but Matron would not have it. “Let the nurses get on with their work, Nurse,” she said. “What are you about? You need not trouble to come round with me either. You’ve plenty to do. Your dressing-trolley looks as if it could do with a good clean.”

Nurse Fitt retired and jerked the dressing-trolley out to the annexe in a dudgeon, which she vented on Nurse Potter for leaving a bottle of Lysol about. Nurse Fitt always suspected the men of suicidal intentions. Drinking Lysol would be just the kind of thing they would do to be awkward, and then Matron would have an even bigger down on her than the one she had already. Nurse Fitt declared she would give in her notice tomorrow if the hospital were not so short of staff.

Mr. Brett’s leg was not uniting properly. He took this as a personal insult. “It would have to be me. Look at those others—George, Knocker, Old Jonesey-” he waved a hand down the line. “Lying there smug as you like with their bones joining away like mad. But me—oh no, mine couldn’t, just because I’m in a hurry to get out.”

Nurse Fitt was rubbing his back. She had very strong hands and made him wince occasionally. “What for?” she asked, not because she really wanted to know. After six years’ nursing, she had come to the conclusion that the patients were more interesting as cases than as people.

“Nothing particular. I just want to get
out
. This place is worse than being in prison camp. At least that was all male.” Holding himself clear of the bed by the handle fixed to his beam, he looked back over his shoulder to see how she liked that.

Nurse Fitt pretended not to hear. She had one for him, anyway.

Rubbing spirit in at a speed which nearly set his flesh on fire from friction, she said: “Mr. Pennyfeather is not at all pleased with your X-rays. He’s definitely decided on artificial fixation.”

“Oh no!” Mr. Brett let his body sag and she smacked him to make him lift it up again while she applied the powder. “He can’t do it yet,” he said. “I don’t know that I want it done. I’ll have to think about it.” Then, in a few moments: “Fitt,” he said suspiciously, “what are you doing to my foot?”

“Taking off the splint. He’s going to put a peg in this evening. Theatre can just fit you in.”

Sister would be hopping mad. She did not like to miss Penny’s cases. Mr. Brett was hopping mad, too, as far as he could be with that leg. Socked and gowned and capped and snowed under with blankets, he was still grumbling while they waited in the anaesthetic room for the case before his to finish.

“Pegs!” He had been on like this ever since she told him. “Just experimenting on me. It’s a scandal. This is the only time I’ve ever wanted to have a large outraged family, so they could write to
The Times
and get questions asked in the House.”

“It happens,” said Nurse Fitt smoothly, seeing herself in a glass-fronted cupboard and pulling forward a curl from under her white theatre turban, “to be necessary—always presuming you want to walk properly again.”

She did not like Mr. Brett. From the first morning that she had come on duty and found him full of morphia, but muzzily anti-everything, he had shown her no respect at all. He did not seem to appreciate his luck in getting a good staff nurse. Some of the other S.R.N.s—even some of the sisters— were not fit to hold a syringe, let alone wear the key of the dangerous drug cupboard. How they had passed their exams was a mystery to her. Some of them were quite common. Nurse Fitt was very careful about grammar and pronunciation and never called the patients Dear.

The men were not familiar with her, as they were with some of the nurses. Disgracefully so, she thought, although people like Saunders did not seem to mind not getting the respect due to them. With her Roman nose, imperious bust and massive swoops of bronze hair, Nurse Fitt, queening it round the ward, was a figure to command respect. But not from Mr. Brett. He mocked her. When she came round with what was called the Cocktail Tray, handing out her special concoction of cascara and paraffin, he said: “Go away. I don’t want to have a Fitt,” an elementary form of humour from which she had suffered all her school and nursing career and was not disposed to enjoy now.

They had to wait a long time in the anaesthetic room. “I wish they’d hurry. I’ve got a date at half-past eight,” Nurse Fitt said meaningly, for everyone knew about her boy-friend, who owned a chain of milk bars and provided ice-cream for the hospital parties. They did not know that he was middle-aged and rather coarse-looking and not really her boy-friend. He just liked to have someone to take to shows, but she had hinted so long at a romantic affair that she almost believed in it herself.

“I could get married and leave here any day I want,” she would say when affronted, but Stewart had never asked her, and she would not accept him if he did. She had a cushy enough job here. Why should she give it up to be some man’s slave— an aproned nobody, instead of a staff nurse who wore a special cap and belt and made the juniors scuttle like ants before a treading foot?

From behind the sliding doors of the theatre came clinks and murmurs and a roaring, snoring noise. “This is hell,” Mr. Brett said. “Why did they send for me if they weren’t ready? If this is nationalisation, they can have it.”

“The case before you is taking longer than they expected. You’re not the only patient in the hospital, you know.”

“That’s all too obvious-” he began, when at last the sliding doors parted and Dr. Mooney, the anaesthetist, breezed nervously in, rubbing his hands.

“Hullo there, my boy! Ah yes, Nurse. Mr. Pennyfeather’s case. Let’s see now. What’s he for?” He fumbled about with a list.

“Insertion of peg in right femur,” said Nurse Fitt, stand-offishly. She had never cared for Dr. Mooney since he had had the cheek to try and kiss her in a cupboard during Sardines at the Christmas party last year.

“What’s the peg made of, anyway?” asked Mr. Brett, swivelling his eyes to where Dr. Mooney was filling a syringe with Pentothal.