No Escape (3 page)

“I'm not late, am I?”

She glanced at the clock on the wall of the department. She was not late. Apparently the others were all early.

“No. But you're the last. You usually are.”

“I stayed late yesterday. Nearly two hours.”

She wanted to add, ‘and no overtime', but held her tongue. Miss Gleaning was the dedicated type, the kind that made progress in the profession impossible. A single woman, in her forties, with no interests outside her work. Nothing would make her understand that the younger generation were just as interested, just as committed, but not prepared to give up a private life and a wider experience outside the job, not prepared to be exploited, overworked and underpaid, simply because their consciences would not let them neglect patients with real diseases, would never, in fact, allow them to strike.

So she waited, hoping the unprofitable, veiled rebuke, that had no real substance, was over. Miss Gleaning understood the girl's antagonism and sighed. When she herself was young she would not have dared to say even as little as Jane had done. She would have found herself standing before Matron at the end of the day, listening to a sermon that ended in her dismissal for insubordination, knowing the competition was fierce and she must plead for her job. Now it was the other way round. Radiographers were worth their weight in gold, but the gold was not there.

She handed Jane a paper.

“This girl came in last night. Nightingale Ward. Emergency. Some kind of accident. Query fractured ribs, left side. Very vague. She should be down from the ward by now. They don't seem to have her name. Miss Query. Will you see what you can make of her before you start and let me know?”

“Yes, Miss Gleaning.”

She went through the department to the room where stretcher cases from the wards or casualty arrived. She recognised a nurse from Nightingale standing beside a trolley and went up to her. The nurse stood aside. A white face framed in a mop of untidy white-dyed hair stared up at her.

“Sheila!” Jane exclaimed. In spite of the hair, which had been light brown, and the eyes, fixed, hard, full of an unaccountable resistance, she was sure of the recognition.

But the girl continued to stare and said nothing. It was the nurse who said, brightly, “Well, you never expected to see a friend of yours so soon, did you, Miss—?”

“Burgess,” said Jane. “You
are
Sheila Burgess, aren't you?” She was puzzled, uncertain how to go on, with a response so entirely negative.

Then the girl spoke, using a hard voice, as unlike her former self as the unnatural pinkish-white hair and the hard eyes.

“Yes. I'm Sheila Burgess and you're Jane Wheelan. You stayed in this racket, did you?”

Jane, suddenly angry, looked at the paper in her hand.

“You've hurt your ribs? Left side? Is that right?”

“Haven't you got it down? Doesn't it say?”

“It says. But what about you? Where d'you feel it? Incidentally, how did it happen?”

Jane was aware of the nurse opening and shutting her mouth, trying to gain her attention. But before she could turn aside from the trolley to speak to her out of hearing of the patient, the latter shot out a thin arm to clutch her sleeve.

“Jane! Oh Jane, let me tell you myself! Let me,
please
!”

Tears had begun to run down the white cheeks, sobs shook the blanket.

“Of course, tell me anything Sheila, don't! You're ill. You'll hurt yourself.”

Jane took hold of the trolley, nodding to the nurse, who stood aside. She wheeled the girl into a corner of the room, then bent to listen to a story confused enough, incomplete, but startling in its implications. At the end of it, Jane said, soothingly, “Did you actually bump anything? I mean, those ribs—”

“I think I bumped the bridge—the stone under the arch in the water—it sticks out—I couldn't avoid it.”

“You mean as the current took you through?”

“Yes. I can swim, you know. I was swimming on my back. I didn't see how near the stone I was. The water rushed me through!”

“Have you any pain this morning?”

“On my left side, yes. But I think it's only stiffness. They put a strapping on.”

“We'll have a look.”

Jane beckoned the nurse back and went in search of Miss Gleaning. The latter listened to her report impatiently. She was very busy that morning.

“You actually
know
the girl?”

“Slightly. I haven't seen her for years. Five years, I suppose. We did a photography course together. She's changed a lot—”

“Has she any bone injury? Where?”

Jane told her.

“Get on with it yourself, then Sounds like attempted suicide. That's not our concern. Only her ribs.”

Seeing Jane's face set in lines of contemptuous anger, she added, “I'm sorry. To me this is one patient among many. Most of them want to live and I'm here to do my part in helping that on. Suicides—”

“She's not a suicide,” Jane said and turning abruptly, went back to the other room.

After the photographs had been taken and the nurse had wheeled Sheila away, Jane remembered what she had said to Miss Gleaning and wondered why she was so sure of it. Then other work claimed her and she put the strange case out of her mind.

But later in the morning, when, with two of the other girls, she was having a quick cup of coffee the whole thing came up again in an even more interesting light.

“We haven't seen the hero of the hour yet. Or have we?” one of them said, smiling at Jane.

“I don't know what you mean.”

“You don't! I thought you had the jump-in-the-river girl to do yourself? Am I wrong?”

“I'm still not with you.”

“Really, Jane! You know there was a suicide emergency admitted last night?”

“I doubt if it was really attempted suicide. But go on. I know the girl you mean. I've just let her go back to the ward. I think her plate's negative. What about her?”

“Well, don't you know who pulled her out of the water?”

“It said something about the River Police on her notes. I didn't read it all.”

Another girl said, “You're hopeless, Jane. It was a front page splash this morning. Mystery girl in the Thames. Heroic rescue.”

“Not in my paper,” she answered, wishing at once that she had not said this, though it was perfectly true. She went on quickly, to cover it up, “Tell me. Please.”

“Our Timothy Long.”

“Beech-Thomas's registrar?”

Both the other girls nodded. Jane laughed. She remembered bumping into him only the afternoon before. She remembered his clever, not very good-looking face red with annoyance and confusion. Some muddle over a gallbladder series, wasn't it? Yes, the report. And Dr Milton at his most icy.

“You mean to say he actually went into the river after her?”

“That's right. Held her up till the police launch got there. Fixed a bed for her here, too. Can you imagine? She can't have been looking her best in the water, can she?”

“Perhaps he chased her on to Hammersmith Bridge and she jumped over to get away from him.”

“Not a hope, poor chick,” the other girl took it up, laughing. “Down he came after her and grabbed her and now he's got her right under his thumb!”

If it had been anyone else whose ribs she had just photographed and yes, anyone other than the baffled young man keeping his temper so bravely, remembering to apologise for colliding with her while no doubt wishing her in hell first, Jane might have laughed, too. As it was she shook her head, putting down her cup and turning away.

“I happen to know the girl you're making those cracks at,” she said, over her shoulder. “Her name's Sheila Burgess. We did photography together, once. There's nothing funny about what happened last night. Nor about Mr Long, either.”

By the end of the morning the West Kensington hospital was in a state of siege. From an hour or two before dawn the building had been infested with journalists all hunting for the hero and heroine of the ‘river story'. They had been frustrated because the night porters, old and experienced in the ways of the Press, had refused to give them the whereabouts of either protagonist and Night Sister, furious with the creeping, whispering groups she found in the corridors, had driven them away to the best of her ability.

But the journalists, equally experienced, more ingenious, practised various unsuspected methods of evasion. At first light they crept out from their places of hiding. Some had gathered stories from junior nurses, some had switched to fascinating tit-bits gleaned in Casualty. All these hurried away. The more persistent, intent on the original story, were winkled out and escorted to an outside door. The Hospital Secretary issued three orders; all doors were to be locked, except the Casualty entrance; notices were to be put on other doors to this effect; at Casualty a concentration of porters would admit journalists singly and escort them to his office where he would present each with a typed bulletin. The bulletin told them what they knew already and not a thing more.

So neither Sheila Burgess nor Tim Long were troubled with unwanted, impertinent questions. But the questions, for all that, existed and grew larger as the hours passed. For Sheila's X-ray pictures, as Jane had guessed, were declared totally negative. Dr Milton's report, very brief, noted ‘no bone injury.' The psychiatrist, also called in, reported, ‘no evidence of mental disease of any kind. The patient is suffering from shock after a very frightening experience'. This, like many psychiatric reports, merely confirmed the conclusions everyone else had arrived at without special training in that field.

During the afternoon a collision between a lorry and a mini-van brought three serious orthopaedic emergencies to the hospital. They had to be admitted. Sheila was occupying an orthopaedic bed on no valid grounds. The orthopaedic registrar, the houseman and Sister in Nightingale wrangled mildly in Sister's room.

“She's not fit to be discharged,” Sister said. “She'd do it again tonight.”

“Not she,” the houseman said. “Properly got the wind up. Later, perhaps.”

“We must have that bed,” said the registrar. “I've got an old woman with both legs smashed I'm going to fix within the next half-hour. Three cases into two beds won't go. The other two are men.”

A knock on the door brought Tim into the room.

“Afternoon, Sister,” he said. “Can I speak to that girl?”

“Which girl, Mr Long?”

“Don't know her name yet. The one I admitted last night.”

“Nor did we know her name, for she wouldn't give it, until Miss Wheelan recognised her down in the X-ray.”

“Blimey, does someone actually
know
her?” the orthopaedic registrar exclaimed, seeing light ahead.

Sister explained the situation, adding a little bitterly. “If you'd made a better diagnosis, Mr Long, she wouldn't have been in my ward at all.”

“It had nothing to do with diagnosis, as well you know,” Tim grinned at her. “Your bed was the only one available in the whole hospital, so she had to have an orthopaedic complaint, didn't she?”

“I've a good mind to report you,” Sister told him, not meaning it. She knew him too well to be really angry. He was a lad after her own heart. It was the patient first every time and to hell with rules and regulations.

“Well, I'll be damned!” laid the houseman. “I call that the absolute bloody limit! Sorry, Sister!”

“If her ribs are whole, as you say,” Tim went on, disregarding him. “why not transfer her to the medical side?”

“Have we a bed, or will you now diagnose acute pneumonia?” the orthopaedic registrar asked.

“She may still get that; the Thames was pretty cold last night,” Tim said with perfect seriousness. “She'll have to be under observation for a few days yet.”

Sister held out her telephone to him.

“Would you like to arrange the transfer straight away?” she said and her voice held a note of menace none of the three young men would have dared to challenge.

A few minutes later Tim said, “O.K., Sister, that's fixed. Alexandra seems to have disgorged quite a packet this afternoon. And one on the waiting list to come in today has gone off to Bournemouth instead on her own. So my girl can have her bed.”

“Perhaps you'd like to go in and break it to
your girl
? Her name is Sheila Burgess. Bed Twelve.”

“Oh, I'd recognise her by the hair.”

“Would you? We've got three bleached that colour, besides her. The albinos, we call them.”

Tim went into the ward, suddenly feeling a shyness he had not expected. He was relieved, therefore, to see a girl in a white coat already seated beside Sheila and in earnest conversation with her.

He went up to the bed on the other side.

“Well, Sheila,” he said, gently. “How are you feeling today?”

She turned her head slowly. It was clear that she did not recognise him. Why should she, he told himself, feeling deflated and also strangely glad. They had not seen each other's faces in the water; after they were picked up neither had been fit to register much.

He went on looking at her, saying nothing. She was pretty, he decided, in a washed-out, rather haggard way. Washed-out, haggard? Naturally. What else could he expect at this moment? It was a weak face, though. A small personality, incapable of bearing strain. A small intelligence, too. What the hell—a very ordinary girl, millions of them. He was ashamed of his inner wish to have saved a prodigy.

“This is Dr Long.” Jane Wheelan touched Sheila's arm and the girl turned her languid gaze away to Tim, no curiosity nor even interest showing in her light blue eyes.

“Dr Long,” Jane repeated, “who saved your life last night.”

The blue eyes closed and tears began to fall from under the lids and run down to the pillow on either side of her head.