Purposes of Love (40 page)

Doubling back the gaudy paper cover, she read doggedly on.

“‘So you figgered to frame me, Red.’ The Dude’s blue eyes were colder than the steel. With a sound that was half curse, half scream, Red Santander hurled forward; but the Dude’s guns had leaped to his lean fingers. ‘Waal,’ he drawled—”

At the beginning of next year she would be twenty-seven. In a few years more her pose, her tricks of manner, her clothes, all her assumptions would have become ridiculous. She had not acquired any resources against growing old. A few months ago she had believed that she had. She had acquired Valentine. Secure in her, she had begun to let her other securities slip imperceptibly away. Now, with her going, everything had gone. She was not the Dude any more, not a glittering outlaw, but a tired woman, a rather humdrum case, conforming to the textbooks.

It was not too late. It was never too late. She would buy a new suit, throw up her head, stop pleading with Valentine and begging her for this and that; find another girl, a prettier one, and make her jealous; leave her, forget her.

“‘Waal,’ he drawled, ‘I guess this is where you and me—’”

“Oh,
there
you are, Nurse Kimball. I’ve been looking for you
everywhere
.” Nurse Pratt, with her elbows sticking out at the angle characteristic of her, had come into the sluice. Colonna suppressed her instinctive movement to conceal the book, and tossed it casually aside. “I thought you might have heard the telephone.”

“Well, I didn’t. I was purging the mind with pity and terror, as a change from giving enemas. Anything coming in?”

“A patient is being admitted with a fractured spine, crushed pelvis and ruptured right kidney—”

“
Sacre bleu.
I thought tonight was too peaceful.”

“—and he’s to have a transfusion immediately.”

“A transfusion! That will be Rosenbaum, I suppose. I wish he’d cultivate a lower boiling-point. Getting a poor devil of a donor out of bed at midnight and bleeding a pint out of him for a man who won’t live twelve hours whatever happens. We’ll put him in the side-ward, of course?”

“Certainly,” said Pratt with dignity. Secretly she found her precedence even less comfortable than Colonna, but was determined not to let it appear. “Will you be getting on with it? Don’t forget the boards and the binder and the sandbags and the cradle. And put the transfusion things on to boil. I shall go down now and get a meal, so as to be ready when the case comes up. You’ll be sure to keep an eye on the ward, won’t you?”

“Of course not,” said Colonna, exasperated. “I shall bolt myself in the lavatory and sit there till you come back.”

Nurse Pratt stiffened her shoulders, tucked in her chin, and departed. Colonna tiptoed about the preparations, smiling sardonically. She guessed that Pratt was uncertain of the setting—a fairly complex one—for a blood-transfusion, and must be congratulating herself on passing the buck without loss of face.

The case had not arrived when Pratt came back, and Colonna left in her turn for the second meal. In the passage she met Vivian, on her way to the dining-room too. Suddenly she remembered that Vivian had been another of her failures. She had, till now, long ceased to regret this and, indeed, enjoyed the ease of their friendship, but tonight she forgot it and the pleasant recollections that went with it. Only the thought of defeat remained.

Vivian looked, as she generally did nowadays, deadly tired and devitalised. They greeted one another with indifferent smiles.

“Had good nights off?” asked Colonna, for the sake of saying something.

“Yes, thanks,” she answered listlessly. Awake all last night with the boy, Colonna thought, feeling a dull resentment directed she hardly knew where. “Been busy?” Vivian asked with the same perfunctoriness.

“Not yet, but by hell we’re going to be. What do you think we’ve got coming in?” She explained.

“Too bad,” said Vivian wearily.

“I wish,” Colonna remarked as they walked towards the dining-room, “that old Beth would tell Rosenbaum where he gets off. A transfusion, I ask you.”

Vivian said unemotionally, “I expect it’s a young man. Rosenbaum always panics when young people die. I suppose it seems to bring it nearer.”

The casual bitterness in her voice penetrated Colonna’s self-absorption, and shocked her a little.

“Are you taking iron, or anything?” she asked. “You ought to be. Most people need some sort of a tonic on nights. Your ward’s pretty full, too, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Extra beds in the middle. They tried to get us to take another case just now, but we hadn’t room. It was only a clavicle, or a dislocation or something.”

“Well,
we
haven’t anywhere.”

“I expect,” said Vivian without interest, “they put him up in Casualty somewhere. Or sent him home. After all, his wife could look after him with a little thing like that.”

The Night Sister came hurrying—she was always in a hurry—along the corridor towards them.

“She looks in a hell of a flap,” remarked Colonna idly. “Found someone’s room empty, I expect.”

“Nurse Lingard. Will you just come in here for a moment?”

Colonna walked on, wondering what Vivian could have done. She had obeyed with a harried vagueness unlike conscious guilt, but it must be something serious from Sister’s sickbed manner. Only the worst kind of trouble started with that. Perhaps the Matron had found out about young Freeborn. That—she felt unable to work up much feeling about it—would mean dismissal, for Vivian. He would get off, of course; the man always did.

One would miss Vivian, probably, more than one expected. She was self-centred but not self-blinkered; and she saw things, if not always straight, at least first-hand. That was rare enough, hereabouts, to be valued. This kind of training—

Her feet stopped; and her mind, checking too, said “This kind of training” over again, and clicked to a standstill. She had come to a junction with another corridor, and, a little way along it, Valentine and Macklin, the senior house physician, were saying good night. They were dressed for the evening and had evidently just come in. Macklin had his back half-turned, but Valentine stood facing one of the big corridor lights, and there was nothing in her face that Colonna missed.

Just round the corner was a small staircase, leading circuitously to the nurses’ home. Colonna turned up it, glancing mechanically at her watch to make sure that she did not outstay the half-hour allotted for the meal. When she reached her room she sat down on the edge of her bed, dry-eyed, dry-brained, everything in her hard and dry. There was no palliative for what had happened, nothing at all even to take the edge off it. Valentine had seen her that morning, and had not told her that she was going out. She had not even said anything about the new dress she was wearing.

Colonna’s was the simple emotional finality of a child, for whom the moment’s experience colours all the future and tinges even eternity.

This one instant seemed to contain the gradual losses of a decade: the loss of pride, the loss of youth, the dawning on the imagination of what loneliness can be in middle-age.

At the end of the half-hour she tidied her uniform, and went back to the ward again. The transfusion in the side-ward was still going on. In the Sister’s sitting-room the donor, a plump sleepy young woman with her lipstick put on in a hurry, was sipping tea, her function discharged. A first-year probationer, borrowed from elsewhere, was taking nervous charge of the main ward.

“You might as well be getting back now,” Colonna told her. “Tell Nurse Pratt on your way that I’ve come.”

“Please, Nurse, I think I was to stay and help in the ward and you were going to ‘special’ the case.
I think
that’s what Sister said.”

“Oh, very well. Have you had your meal yet?”

“Well, no, I hadn’t time really to go down.”

“Go now, then. And tell Nurse Pratt I’m here.”

“Yes, Nurse. Thank you.”

Colonna made a round of the ward, attending to a few obvious necessities overlooked by the probationer’s inexperience; then returned to the Sister’s desk and, in a blind craving for distraction, fiddled with the papers and oddments scattered over it. In a small tin box, among the nibs, drawing-pins, and odd bone buttons from the surgeons’ coats, the key of the poison-cupboard lived. She fingered it over, thinking of things she had said to Valentine; they had only been threats at the time, but after all, she thought, that emptiness was less to be feared which destroyed even the consciousness of itself. Into Leslie, too, it would burn her final and ineluctable seal. Pratt came out for a moment in search of something, and she slipped the key quickly into her pocket. But they were still hard at it in the side-ward; she could see their shadows crossing and recrossing the lighted door. It seemed a pity that, instead of an ineffectual pint of blood, she could not hand them in a waxed phial the life she was weighing so distastefully in her hand. The imagination of it pleased her; in spite of all she had seen in hospital, death, to Colonna, was still essentially the supreme dramatic climax.

Pratt had pushed the trolley of instruments out from the side-ward into the passage. In a few minutes they would be ready to leave the patient to her. His case-sheet was lying on the desk; she picked it up, and stared at it vaguely, her eye lighting first on the age at the top corner. Twenty-nine. Only two years older than herself. For a man, at the beginning of things. That was another part of the injustice she had always resented. Her mind encountered the strongly-planted, confident shape of Macklin: she recoiled with a small physical movement which made the key in her pocket jingle against a couple of loose coppers. She picked up the case-sheet again.

Dully questioning what had arrested her, she read the name over twice before she took it in. She was still staring at it, wondering if a coincidence was possible, when Pratt trotted up to the table to give her her instructions. Colonna asked no questions; if she had been down to the dining-room she would know all about it and more, and had no wish to be asked by Pratt where she had spent the time.

“Nurse Lingard will be here to sit with him for a little while,” Pratt said, her whisper husky with chastened importance. “But I don’t think you ought to
leave
him at all. He’s a very difficult patient. He practically refused to have the transfusion; kept saying it was a waste or something like that. Mr. Rosenbaum was very good with him. Explained everything almost as if he were talking to another doctor. (He’s still in there now; you’d better hurry along as soon as he comes out.) In the end we told him the blood had been taken from the donor already, and that seemed to quieten him down.”

“And had it?”

“Oh, yes. I don’t think Mr. Rosenbaum would have said so if it hadn’t: he seemed to take it all quite seriously—a bit silly I thought, considering how collapsed he was. You expect them to wander a bit, I mean. I don’t like having these private patients in a general ward, it makes things awkward, really.”

“Well,” said Colonna, picking up a pulse chart, “you’re very unlikely to have him after tonight.”

Pratt pursed her lips. One did not make these observations about the relatives of members of the staff. “They won’t be able to plaster him, of course,” she said. “So be sure, won’t you, not to let him
move
?”

“I put you a binder and sandbags ready. Didn’t you fix them properly?” Colonna picked up her pen and notebook and went out.

Rosenbaum was just leaving when she got to the sideward door. He had been washing his hands, and was still holding the towel and screwing it absently into a ball. He stood in the doorway with a kind of discomposed look, like an actor who has been given the wrong cue. Colonna heard a voice say, with a quiet not so much suggestive of weakness as of a careful courtesy, “You mustn’t worry.” This was a favourite valediction of Rosenbaum’s; but it was not Rosenbaum who had spoken.

He left without looking at Colonna; in any case, they had always disliked one another cordially.

There was still a good deal of litter left in the room from the transfusion, and Colonna set about clearing it up. The red shade had been taken from the light over the bed, and thrown over a chair; she collected and replaced it—easily, for she was tall enough to reach the bracket without a chair. A gap at the bottom of the shade dropped a pool of yellow light on the face of the white-lipped young man lying, pillowless, on the bed. He had shut his eyes, probably because the glare worried him. She pinned the shade together and closed the chink.

So this is Vivian’s brother, she thought; her mind partly rousing itself from the daze of misery which had, for a moment, obscured everything but the routine task lying next her hand. Surely Vivian had said that they were alike. How vague people were about their own appearances. Poor Vivian, she was very fond of him. Colonna repeated this to herself, trying to make it mean something; but it was only words in her mind. She could not believe in her heart that after what had happened Vivian, the hospital, the universe itself could remain real and unchanged.

Routine, however, remained, distantly connecting with sanity. She pushed the trolley into the main ward for the probationer to clean, tidied up, filled a feeding-cup with lemon water, made out a half-hourly pulse chart, and slipped her hand under the clothes to take his pulse. He opened his eyes. She saw that they were nearly the same colour as Vivian’s, but with less brown in them and more green.

“Again?” he said.

“Just every half-hour.” Mechanically Colonna assumed her professional voice. She picked up the chart and marked the first point of the graph.

“Does that give them a line on the next case?” His voice had got a little stronger, and sounded faintly interested.

“No, it’s just to see how you’re getting along.”

“I shouldn’t worry, then. You’re busy, aren’t you?”

“Not really. I’m just here to look after you.”

“I see.” He was silent while she put the chart away, and then said, “I hope I shan’t need to keep you very long. About how long does it take, as a rule?”

Colonna selected the correct response, mechanically, as she would have put her hand in her pocket for her surgical scissors. Situations like this were always having to be met.