Flowers on the Grass (33 page)

“Bone,” she said. “Everybody uses wire nowadays, but Mr. Pennyfeather has his reasons, I suppose.”

“What kind of bone?”

“A boiled beef bone usually.”

“No!” He struggled to sit up. “How horrible—I won’t-” But Dr. Mooney had plunged the syringe into his arm and he was out like a light between one word and the next.

Mr. Brett was low for several days after his operation, but as he picked up he began to annoy Nurse Fitt again. Coming back from lunch one day, she saw him making Nurse Potter pull the ropes of his extension about, and bustled down the ward.

“Nurse Potter!” she cried. “You know you’re not allowed to interfere with the Balkan beams.”

“I thought I was supposed to do what the patients want,” said Nurse Potter, who was very young, very small and very cheeky.

“It’s a pity you don’t remember that more often. There’s old Daddy Ledward been wanting his toenails cut for days. You can go and do that now.”

“Oh, must I? I can’t bear it. It makes me reach.”

“Then you’ll never make a nurse.”

“Don’t want to if it means getting like you,” retorted Nurse Potter.

After this interchange, Nurse Fitt was out of humour when she turned to Mr. Brett. “Now what’s all the fuss about?” she asked. “Anyone would think you’d got every bone in your body broken instead of just an impacted extra-capsular fracture of the base of the femoral neck.” She liked the long names of things.

“I don’t care what you call it, it still hurts; more so now it’s got the remains of the week-end joint in it.”

“It wouldn’t if you didn’t fidget about so.”

“This damn machine’s strung up too tight.”

“Nonsense. I fixed it myself this morning.”

She was going away, but Sonny called across the ward: “It is too tight, you know. That rope is caught up at the top, look.”

He was right, of course. He always was. Sonny was a terrible know-all, and Nurse Fitt, who liked to have a monopoly of being right, thought he had got impossibly spoiled from being so long in the ward. She did not approve of the licence that Sister allowed him. However, he was useful for things like cutting swabs and rolling bandages. She gave him some to do now.

As Mr. Brett’s condition improved, his manners deteriorated. Although he did not make so much fuss now, he was growing very saucy and even encouraged his visitors to give
sauce to Nurse Fitt. If Sister were off duty, she was very conscious of her position on visitors’ days, sitting at the desk ostentatiously writing in ledgers, or looking through X-rays, as if she could understand them, raising her head to answer relatives’ anxious questions with grave reticence. She felt that the visitors all looked at her and thought to themselves: “That’s the staff nurse,” and envied and admired her. There was a lady, however, who came quite often to see Mr. Brett—chic, Nurse Fitt supposed you’d call her, though she herself preferred more colour and trimming. She thought perhaps that this was Mr. Brett’s girl-friend, for they seemed to have a lot to say to each other and giggled in a juvenile way, and Mr. Brett would always try and keep her there overtime after the bell had rung. It would be just like him to be carrying on with a married woman, which she proved herself to be one day when she brought her small son into the ward, strictly against rules.

Nurse Fitt caught him wandering round the ward, eating the men’s sweets, listening in to their earphones and reading everybody’s charts.

Nurse Fitt went to Mr. Brett’s bed, looking across it at the boy’s mother who sat quite at her ease and so perfectly groomed that it made you involuntarily put up a hand to your hair and glance down at your apron. Mr. Brett looked from one woman to the other, as if he found it amusing.

“I’m afraid I must ask you to take that child out of the ward,” Nurse Fitt said. “They are not allowed in under twelve.”

“But he is twelve,” said Mr. Brett’s friend. “He’s small for his age. I’m really very worried about him.” Nurse Fitt did not believe this, especially as she saw Mr. Brett’s visitor give him a wink which she did not even trouble to hide properly.

“Even so,” said Nurse Fitt, “they are only allowed in to see their fathers.”

“Well, how do you know-” began Mr. Brett, and his friend said: “Dan—really!” and put her hand up to stifle a giggle.

“Short of having a blood specimen taken for a paternity test,” he said pompously, “I don’t see that you’re justified in turning the poor kid out.”

“Well really, Mr. Brett!” Nurse Fitt was very shocked, and walked away, feeling in her spine that they were giggling about it together. She thought them disgraceful and retired
to the desk, where she dealt haughtily with old Daddy Led-ward’s daughter, who wanted to know why Dad was breathing so funny, although she could not have understood if Nurse Fitt had told her.

Nurse Fitt got her own back, however. Next week, when Mr. Brett’s friend had the colossal nerve to bring the child again, she intercepted them in the corridor outside the ward and told them that Mr. Brett was not well enough to have visitors today. “Just a slight reaction to sulphonamides,” she said, “nothing serious,” for she did not want her ringing up Sister and making trouble.

“What’s he having M. & B. for?” the small boy asked, as if he knew something about it. Children were fiends. Nurse Fitt had always thought so. They invariably asked the one awkward question.

“You wouldn’t understand, dear,” she said, faking a smile for him and putting a hand on his hair, from which he jerked away as if she were contagious.

“Oh, come on, Pip,” his mother said. “Don’t make a pest of yourself. We’re obviously not wanted here. Poor old Dan.” She looked towards the ward doors and then took the child away.

Nurse Fitt went back into the ward, stepping on the balls of her feet with triumph. Mr. Brett called out to her: “Fitt! Here a moment. Fitt!” She pretended not to hear. She would not answer to that in front of the visitors. He would have to call her Nurse if he wanted her.

When he did, she went to him, in her own time, and he asked her if Mrs. March had rung up. “I can’t understand it,” he said. “She said she was coming at two, and she’s never late. She’s not that sort of woman.”

Nurse Fitt implied by her manner that she was not interested in what sort of woman Mrs. March was. “I’m afraid you’re not to have any visitors today,” she said. “It’s too tiring.”

“What on earth—who’s damfool idea is that?”

“Sister said so. She thinks you need more rest.” She could make it right with Sister afterwards, if he complained. She would pretend to her that she had said that, and old Fergie, who was getting forgetful in her old age, and self-conscious about it, would not dare to contradict.

Mr. Brett flopped back on his pillow and sulked. Nurse Fitt sat at the desk and kept an eye on the door to intercept any more of Mr. Brett’s visitors. A few more people came, but certainly no one for him. There was only George’s mother and Daddy Ledward’s crooked-looking brother, a few more of Sonny’s interminable family, and an enormously fat old Jewish woman in a flowered hat, who waddled down the ward weighted down on both sides with loaded bags. She was obviously bound for Joe Levi at the end, who had a locker full of stuff already.

But when Nurse Fitt went round with the ward Christmas box, she saw to her astonishment that the fat old woman was sitting by Mr. Brett’s bed, leaning on it with a doting expression and feeding him with little sugary cakes out of a paper bag, as if he were something at the zoo.

Daniel laughed. “Beaten you this time, Fitt,” he said. “‘I’m afraid you’re not to have any visitors today’,” he mimicked. “But this one got by you, didn’t you, Momma?”

“So thin, I was,” said the fat woman and chuckled, overflowing the chair. “It is necessary that I come, to keep my poor Daniel alive at all.” She took bars of chocolate and cakes out of her bag and began to put them into Mr. Brett’s locker.

“The patients are not allowed to have food brought in from outside,” said Nurse Fitt feebly, making a last attempt at mastery, but Mr. Brett said: “Now that’s a lie, Fitt, and you know it.”

“Never mind, my dear,” said the fat woman. “Here is something for you.” She put sixpence into the slot of the Christmas box, and Nurse Fitt went away and rang the bell for the end of visiting hours five minutes too soon.

When Jacky Saunders was going round tidying up after the visitors had gone, she asked Daniel what he was grinning at.

“I’ve just scored off old Fitt,” he said.

“Oh, good. Damn—I shouldn’t say that. Where is your loyalty, Nurse?” She looked over her shoulder as if she expected to have been heard. She never got away with anything. She was in trouble all the time—had been ever since she started nursing, and before that in the typing pool at the Bank of England. Other people got away with far worse things, but she was always found out. It was her fate whenever possible to
run headlong into trouble like a runaway horse into barbed wire.

When she had tidied Daniel’s locker, he reached over and untidied it again, looking for chocolate to give her. He asked her to adjust the padding under his splint, and she said: “I can’t for a sec. I’ve got masses to do. I’ll come back. Oh no, look, I’ll do it now. Come on.”

The other nurses seemed to get through their work fairly calmly, but Jacky lived in a perpetual state of being always behind, undecided what to do next when there were so impossibly many things to do, knowing she had no hope of getting finished. Scrambling through somehow and getting off duty only half an hour late, she would remember, when she got across the road to the hostel, that she had forgotten someone’s medicine or left a glass syringe boiling in the steriliser, and rush back to the ward again before Night Sister caught her.

“Don’t you ever get tired of us?” the men would call out. “What’s it this time?” Whenever there was a crash in the kitchen or annexe, someone would sing out: “What you bust, Nurse Saunders?” and when Sister discovered some abomination, she would stand at the top of the ward and rap out:
“Nurse
Saunders!” before she investigated further.

Jacky believed that the men were fond of her. They said that she was the finest nurse in the hospital, but she knew that was not true, so it must be just their instinctive championing the underdog. Daniel said she was a rotten nurse. He and she got on very well. He annoyed the others, but he was all right with her. They talked the same language and it was fun having him in the ward.

She had been asleep in her off-duty today, and woke to find she had only five minutes to put on her uniform and dash across the road to the hospital.

“And you look it,” Daniel said. “It’s a pity you’re such a mess, Jacky. You could be quite pretty with those grey eyes and that long, soft mouth.”

“Oh, shut up, Daniel,” she said.

“Nurse Saunders!”
Sister had come up behind her. People were always surprising Jacky from the rear. She lacked that instinct that makes you turn and see them just in time.

Sister drew her aside, for she never criticised a nurse before a patient. “Nurse, you are
not
to call the patients by their
christian names. Nor the nurses either,” she said. “I’ve heard you ever so often, calling out to each other like schoolgirls.”

At that moment Daniel chose to shout: “Hi, Betty! Any chance of another cup?” to Nurse Barnes going round with the tea-trolley.

“There, you see,” said Sister. “That’s what happens. You can’t expect respect from anyone else if you don’t give it to each other.”

“But who wants respect, Sister? I mean—I’m sorry—I mean it seems so silly when we call each other by our christian names off duty.”

“It’s a question of etiquette. If you can’t understand that, I’m afraid you’ll never make a nurse, Nurse. You must root out this slapdash streak in yourself, and you’d better start by cleaning that blood transfusion set. You forgot it before you went off this morning. Now Nurse Fitt is going off duty, and I am going to the plaster room with that Hip. Can I trust you on your own?”

“Oh, Sister, of
course”

Sister Ferguson treated her like a child. Matron, too, was always giving her homey talks and telling her she must mature, which was so absurd, when she was one of the oldest nurses in the hospital. Most of them had started their training at eighteen or twenty, but it was not until she was thirty-three that Jacky’s desire to nurse had overcome everything else— family, job, prospects, and her half-hearted attachment to Paul.

Perhaps it was because she had come later to hospital life that it had not chastened her. The others came to it when they were still suggestible and accepted the system, but Jacky had to sift it for herself and reject what she could not stomach, and be called a rebel about once a month, although she was really more passionately heart and soul for the hospital than anyone. But in her own way. The others had come with their characters still malleable, and by a too early contact with the unadorned issues of life and death had grown up too quickly, like flowers in a forcing-house. But Jacky could not change now. She was too old, although when she saw people like Fitt, joyless at twenty-five, she felt very young indeed.

When the staff nurse had gone and Sister was safely in the plaster room for at least an hour, the men all got out of bed again, Winnie put the kettle on for tea and came in to play
cards, and one of the walking patients went into the kitchen to fry chips for supper. The two probationers sang different tunes at the same time as they made beds and whisked through their evening duties, careful, however, to leave one job until the end, for if you finished before time Sister might find you something to do that would keep you late on the ward.

Jacky spun hectically round, taking temperatures, giving medicines, starting one thing before she had finished another, leaving Mr. Foster to soak his septic finger while she tried to pacify a doctor about a missing X-ray, and chasing all over the hospital for it, so that poor Mr. Foster’s finger was like a washerwoman’s when she remembered him.

Daniel and Sonny Burgess, who had long been conducting a game of chess on two boards by calling the moves across the ward, wanted her to move their beds together so that they could play properly.