Tread Softly, Nurse Read online

  Sister had gone swooping away to the female wards to be with him. Fenella finished packing the drums before she walked round the male side again. Mr. Parsley was asleep, clutching a pencil and paper in one hand. She took them away gently and covered him up. Both the big wards were dim and quiet, and she found Nurse Dennis in the bathroom, picking out dead flowers from the vases ranged along the wooden bath lid.

  “Everything all right, Nurse?”

  “Yes, thanks, Staff. I’ll go along and make the tea in a minute, when I’ve done these.”

  “Don’t the day people do them?”

  “They’re supposed to. But it’s a rush in the morning. I usually do them if I have time. We’re pretty slack just now.”

  “Don’t gloat too soon, Nurse! We’ve three empty beds, and two private ones, remember.”

  Nurse Dennis smiled and shrugged. “Not to worry tonight, Staff. Mr. Parsley says tomorrow is our busy night.” She began rolling long-stemmed roses in wet newspaper. “These ought to stiffen up by morning.”

  “Mr. Parsley!” Fenella laughed. “He says I shan’t stay here very long. Wishful thinking, perhaps.”

  “Don’t you believe it, Staff. When you’d gone he called me in and told me what he thought of you. You’ve made a conquest there.”

  “Then he’s easily pleased. Now, is there anything at all you’d like me to do?”

  “Not a thing.” Nurse Dennis gathered up the stalks and dead flowers and took them through the archway into the sluice-room. She joined Fenella walking down the ward, and they emerged together into the central corridor.

  Across on the female side a light shone brightly over one bed, glinting on the chromium of the dripstand. Above the flowered screen a well-set head was silhouetted against the cream wall. Sir David was still there.

  “Did Sister tell you about locking up, Staff?”

  “No. Do we?”

  “She does. Once she’s locked the side doors any casualties have to ring the front bell. So do people coming in from off duty. We’re supposed to watch the maids, actually, and report them in when they come in after eleven. Not that we do, unless they ask for it.”

  “Who answers the door—you?”

  “Whoever is nearest, Staff. That’s why I’m telling you. Matron sleeps right over the bell, and she gets simply furious if anybody rings more than once. So we rush to it the moment we hear it.” They paused outside the kitchen, both aware of a small sound. “I’ll go,” Fenella said. She took the three strides into the children’s ward. The tonsil child nearest the door was tossing restlessly, and she took his wrist in her fingers. His pulse was running. She felt for her pencil torch and opened his mouth gently, depressing his tongue with the wooden spatula from the locker, while she looked at his throat.

  When Nurse Minner came out of the shadows a moment later with a newly washed bowl in her hand, Fenella said sharply: “Nurse—this child’s bleeding. Did you know?”

  The junior nodded. “I was waiting to ask Sister about him, Staff. I’ve just emptied his bowl. There was a lot of bright blood.”

  “You should have kept it, Nurse, until someone had seen it. Get me the sponge forceps quickly, and then ask Sister or Dr. West to come here, will you?”

  The little boy was awake now, and his dark eyes stared up fearfully at her. “Feel sick, sonny?” she asked.

  He nodded, his mouth sagging open.

  “I expect you do. Never mind, we’ll get you some ice to suck. Then you’ll feel better, won’t you?” She noticed the sighing respiration with concern. He was losing blood rapidly. “Just lie still—I’m going to clean your mouth up a bit.”

  When the moonfaced Minner brought the forceps she cleared away the loose clot, only to find that the bleeding point was too high for her to reach or put pressure on. She went through to the kitchen and cracked up some ice cubes from the refrigerator into chips, and tipped them into a piece of gauze stretched over a bowl. Nurse Dennis, making a pot of tea, watched her.

  “A bleeder, Staff?”

  “Yes. I think he’ll have to have a post-nasal plug put in. I can’t reach it.”

  “Is it Peter Derricourt? In the first bed?”

  Fenella filled the ice-tray with fresh water arid slotted it back into the refrigerator. “That’s the one. Why?”

  “His father’s a haemophiliac.”

  Fenella stared. “How do you know? It isn’t on the case sheet. And it ought to be, if so.”

  “We all know everybody, here in Bishopsbury, Staff. I’m a local girl.”

  “Let’s hope he’s escaped it, then—or we’re in trouble. The sooner he’s plugged the better, if that’s the case.”

  She hurried back to the little boy, and slipped an ice chip into his dry mouth. “Suck that, Peter. It’ll make your mouth feel cleaner, won’t it?”

  Nurse Minner shuffled back in her outworn night duty slippers. “They can’t come, Staff, either of them. They’re busy with Sir David.”

  “Can’t they? Very well—we shall have to plug him ourselves. He can’t be left like this. Get me a post-nasal plug, and a fine catheter, will you? And I’ll go and get the keys for some adrenalin.”

  She went along, to the female ward and unobtrusively joined the group around the lit bed. Mair Lewis drew back between the beds and raised her black eyebrows, keeping half an eye on Sir David and Michael as they bent over the woman’s ankle, watching the flow of blood through the glass cannula from the bottle on the stand. Sister stood at the foot of the bed, her hands folded quietly in front of her, her eyes alert, checking the tube connection. “Keys,” Fenella whispered. “Adrenalin, for a bleeder.”

  Mair nodded and pursed her lips with the effort of not letting the keys rattle as she unpinned them from the bib of her apron. “Let me have them back—we may want them,” she mouthed. Sir David reached out his hand and she stepped forward to pass him the strapping she had, ready-cut, on the tray.

  Back in the children’s ward Nurse Minner, pale and tired, held Peter’s head steady while Fenella sat in front of him. She talked to him quietly as she threaded the fine oiled rubber tube into his nostril to bring through the tape of the plug from his throat. “Swallow, if it tickles,” she told him. “It won’t take a minute. Just keep breathing and swallowing. That’s right.” She brought the tape through deftly, and anchored the ends from his mouth and nose behind his ear with strapping. The adrenalin-soaked plug was firmly in position in his post-nasal cavity. “There, not so bad, was it?” She gave him some more ice. “Just you suck that. You won’t pull the tapes, will you?”

  Peter shook his head and swallowed obediently.

  “Bring him another pillow, Nurse Minner.” She gestured behind her back to the junior, and the pillow was laid on the cot rail at once. But the hand holding its corner was a good deal larger than Nurse Minner’s. It was long and strong, with spatulate finger tips.

  She looked up. Sir David was standing quietly at her elbow, and Sister was behind him.

  “Plugged it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tried everything else first? I don’t really like...”

  She looked up demurely into his faint frown. “I understand the father is a haemophiliac, sir.”

  He grunted incredulously, and then pushed past her to lay his hand gently on Peter’s forehead, tilting his head back. “Open up, laddie, will you?” Fenella flashed her torch for him, and he nodded, ruffling the little boy’s hair affectionately, and stood back. “If he is,” he said, “it’s almost certainly escaped this generation, Nurse.”

  “I thought I oughtn’t to take any risks, sir.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Nice work, Nurse Scott. Thank you.” He smiled down into her eyes briefly, and it seemed to her that for a fraction of a second they stood on the same ground, free and equal, somewhere where he was not Sir David Anderson, top-rank surgeon, and she was not a fledgling staff nurse, but where they were only a man and a woman with no barriers of medical etiquette between them. And then the moment was ov
er, and she was holding the ward door open for him, looking down at her feet again as he passed her with his long loping stride.

  Sister turned her head aside as she followed him. “Praise indeed,” she whispered. “Thank you, Nurse.”

  After that, the cooling tea Dennis had poured out in the kitchen tasted rather special. Fenella looked across at Mair, leaning against the draining board, sipping her own.

  “He’s nice,” she admitted.

  “I told you. But heaven help you if you ever get on the wrong side of him. You won’t forget it in a hurry, I promise you.” She dropped her cup into the hot water in the sink and began to roll up her sleeves again. “He has a sharp tongue in his head, has our David. But then I’ve a soft spot for him myself, I must admit. I do like a man who knows his own mind.”

  When she had gone and the juniors were prowling round the wards again, Fenella stayed to wash the cups and saucers, smiling to herself. Michael found her there on his way through to his quarters at the front of the building. “Any tea left, Fenny?”

  “No. But I’ll make you some.” She turned up the boiler and reached for a pot. “I’ll just go and look at that bleeder again. Did Sister tell you?”

  He put his hand on her arm. “No, don’t. I’ve just been. He’s all right. Nice of you to plug him for me. If there’s a job I hate it’s that. I always manage to make the poor little beggars sick.”

  “It’s difficult not to, usually. But he was awfully good.”

  “Where’s Mair?”

  She shrugged. “Don’t know. In the females, I expect. You want her?”

  “Do I?” Michael smiled wryly. “That’s putting it mildly.” And then his boyish face was serious. “But she just can’t see me at all, Fenny. Not while Anderson’s about, anyway. Unfair to housemen, isn’t it? The competition’s too fierce for a humble bloke like me.”

  “I shouldn’t worry, Micky. Here’s your tea.” She passed him a fresh cup and pushed the sugar over to him. “She admires his work, I expect. That’s all.”

  And the little stab somewhere inside told her she was blushing. Mair was tiny and perfect in her dark Welsh beauty. She was not the kind to be noisy or clumsy or any of the things Sir David disliked.

  Micky sighed. “No, compared with him she sees me as a brash, importunate youth. And that’s what I am.”

  “Rubbish. You’re very sweet. And she’s a lucky girl—you can tell her I said so.”

  “I heard you say so, Scott, if it’s me you’re talking about.” Mair slipped into the kitchen and slid Michael a dark look. “Tea again? You don’t deserve to sleep, do you?”

  Fenella went out and left them together, and she could hear them amicably wrangling as she went along to the wards. Was Michael just unreasoningly jealous, she wondered, or was there anything in what he said?

  CHAPTER II

  IN HER handbag Fenella had a list of magazines and one of Bernard Parsley’s pound notes. She was happy in a new green suit, and her raw-silk pageboy hair flew in the breeze as she went down the front steps of the hospital. She passed a big grey saloon car in the car park, just drawing up, and was aware that behind her the door had been opened and slammed before she was arrested by the voice of the unofficial R.S.O.

  “Good morning, F. Scott,” it said.

  She swung round. He was standing, very relaxed, with one hand resting on the roof of the car, and an envelope of X-ray films dangling in the other, with the light behind him. As she stood, half-turned, he put the envelope on top of the car and beckoned to her with one finger. She went across to him slowly and stood in front of him, trying to place the tie; he was wearing, intent on the tiny gold shields on the black silk, sooner than meet his look. “Good morning, sir.”

  “Not ‘sir’ this morning. You’re off parade just now. I only wanted to tell you—you were wrong about that child last night.” She flicked up a glance at his face. He was wearing the ghost of a smile, and the laughter lines round his eyes were faintly contracted. “Wrong?”

  “Yes. To begin with, the boy’s father isn’t a haemophiliac. He’s an adopted child. You couldn’t have known that, of course. I thought you’d be interested, though. And secondly, it would have had to be his maternal grandfather, wouldn’t it, to have been of real significance?”

  “Granted. Normally transmitted from male to male via the female, however.” She looked down at her green court shoes. “I’m sorry.”

  “You needn't be. I merely mention it. You did quite the right thing according to, your lights. I’m not complaining. When I do have a complaint you’ll hear it. From me. I don’t usually run to Matron with my annoyances. Where’s the point?”

  “It’s—usual.”

  “Perhaps. I incline to the view that offenders should be corrected on the spot if possible—last night it wasn’t possible since we weren’t along—but certainly in person.”

  “Yes.” A glimmer of mischief lit her brown eyes. “So I am led to understand, sir. And...”

  “And?” He picked up the films and put them under his arm, ready to go into the building, and waited, his dark eyebrows lifted.

  “And I’m sorry I thought you came from the chemist’s, with the syringes.”

  “But you were quite correct, F. Scott. I had no right to crumple the nice clean sheet. Or to smoke in the corridors.” He looked her up and down, slowly, and suddenly he seemed tired. “I’m going inside now, to be ‘sir’ for an hour. And you—where are you off to?”

  “I promised to get some things for Mr. Parsley. And I thought I’d have some coffee in the town.”

  “Old Moore?” He laughed, a deep infectious chuckle. “Don’t believe all he tells you, will you?”

  “I won’t.” She laughed, too, and once again their eyes met for that infinitesimal moment of equality. And then he braced himself, stopped smiling, and nodded to her almost curtly as he turned away. “Enjoy your coffee,” he said abruptly. He ran up the steps into the hall without looking back.

  Coming out of the newsagents she ran into Mair Lewis with an armful of library books.

  “So that’s what you do in bed?”

  Mair shook her head, making her long red earrings dance. “Not me. I’m a regular dormouse. These are for some of my women. Honestly—in this place they seem to think the night nurses’ one mission in life is to do their shopping for them. I’d like to see them trying it on at the Manchester Royal, where I was brought up.”

  “You know you enjoy it. Let.me carry some of them for you.” Fenella took a handful of the books and glanced at their spines. “Murder in Hospital, Death of a Doctor. Who are those for?”

  “Wouldn’t you know? An old love of nearly eighty. ‘Get me a couple of nice murders,’ she said. ‘And see that the print’s nice and big.’ And the two about the Royal Family are for my little mastoid. She’s only twelve, but she’s miles too big for the bed in the children’s ward. Honestly, these modern kids are twice my size.”

  They were walking slowly past a cafe as they talked, and Fenella looked inside. “Could you use some coffee?”

  “Not for me, thanks. I wouldn’t sleep. Tea’s my drink. Do you want some?” She eyed Fenella’s face curiously. “Come to think, you look a bit overstimulated yourself. What have you been up to? There’s a light on inside you this morning.”

  It would have been a relief to tell someone, to say like a child, “Sir David spoke to me in the car park.” But Mair was not the sort of person you could say that kind of thing to. So she only smiled, and tried not to look as incandescent as she felt, and when they were in the cafe sharing a pot of tea she talked about Bernard Parsley.

  On the way back Mair said suddenly, “So you knew Mick West before?” It sounded as though she had been saving it up for a long time.

  “Yes—he was H.S. on my ward at the General last year. He’s a pet.”

  “That’s the trouble.”

  “What?”

  “Just that he’s a pet. You can trample on him, and he still comes up smiling, ready for
more. If only he’d fight back, or play hard to get sometimes.”

  “Maybe he thinks one person doing that is enough?” They turned into the car park. Sir David’s car had gone. “I mean, that’s more your line than his, I imagine?”

  “You imagine quite right! Give me credit for a little spirit—I’m not a clinging vine, and never was.” Mair stopped in the hall to give the books to the girl in the front office. When she followed Fenella up the stairs she went on: “That’s what I like about our surgical friend. His best pal couldn’t say he was an easy man to handle. He’s a living challenge.”

  Fenella was faintly depressed when she climbed into bed at last, and she slept restlessly.

  In the evening, at breakfast, she found it was Nurse Dennis’s night off. She would have both the big wards to do herself as well as Mr. Parsley and Casualty, with what half-hearted help the flaccid Nurse Minner could give her.

  She hurried round making her list of supper drink orders as soon as she got on duty. By the time Sister Barclay came to find her she had done most of the backs in the medical ward, and only three beds were still lit.

  “Are you managing, Nurse?” Sister appeared silently on the other side of the bed with her sleeves rolled up and automatically tucked in the blankets with Fenella.

  “Yes, thank you, Sister. So long as we don’t have an influx of casualties.”