I’m sorry, Mrs. Garrett, but only a doctor can discharge you.
Her mouth twisted into a knot.
Should I spell out the risks? Which would be worse for her thumping blood, the frustration of feeling confined for no good reason or the anxiety of knowing that there were grave reasons?
Listen, you’re doing yourself harm by getting worked up. It’s bad for you and the baby. Your pulse force—
How to explain hypertension to a woman with no more than a ladylike education?
—the force with which the blood rushes through the vessels, it’s considerably higher than we like it to be.
Her lower lip stuck out. Isn’t force a good thing?
Well. Think of turning a tap up too high.
(The Garretts would probably have hot water laid on day and night, whereas most of my patients had to lug babies down three or four flights to the cold trickle of the courtyard tap.)
She sobered. Oh.
So the best thing you can do to get home as soon as possible is keep as quiet and cheerful as you can.
Delia Garrett flopped back on the pillows.
All right?
When will I get some breakfast? I’ve been awake for hours and I’m weak.
Appetite is a splendid sign. They’re understaffed in the kitchens, but I’m sure the trolley will be up before long. For now, do you need the lavatory?
She shook her head. Sister Luke brought me already.
I scanned the chart for bowel movements. None yet; the flu often caused the pipes to seize up. I fetched the castor oil from the cupboard and poured a spoonful. To keep you regular, I told her.
Delia Garrett screwed up her face at the taste but swallowed it.
I turned to the other cot. Mrs. Noonan?
The befogged woman didn’t look up, even.
Would you care for the lavatory now?
Ita Noonan didn’t resist as I lifted the humid blanket and got her out of bed. Clutching my arm, she staggered to the door into the passage. Dizzy? I wondered. Along with the red face, that could mean dehydration. I reminded myself to check how much of her beef tea she’d managed to drink.
I felt a twinge in my side as Ita Noonan leaned harder. Any nurse who denied having a bit of a bad back after a few years on the job was a liar, though any nurse who griped about it had a poor chance of staying the course.
Once I had her sitting down on the lavatory, I left the stall and waited for the tinkle. Surely even when her mind was wandering, her body would remember what to do?
What a peculiar job nursing was. Strangers to our patients but—by necessity—on the most intimate terms for a while. Then unlikely ever to see them again.
I heard a rip of newsprint and the soft friction as Ita Noonan wiped herself.
I went back in. There now.
I pulled down her rucked nightdress to cover the winding rivers of veins on her one bloated leg in its elastic stocking and her skinny one in ordinary black.
Ita Noonan’s eyes in the mirror were vague as I washed her hands. Come here till I tell you, she murmured hoarsely.
Mm?
Acting the maggot something fierce.
I wondered who she could be thinking of.
Back in the ward, I got Ita Noonan into bed with the blankets pulled up to her chest. I wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, but she scraped it off. The lidded cup still felt half full as I set it to her lips. Drink up, Mrs. Noonan, it’ll do you good.
She slurped it.
Two breakfast trays sat side by side on the ward sister’s tiny desk, protruding over its edges. (My desk today.) I checked the kitchen’s paper slips and gave Delia Garrett her plate.
A wail went up when she lifted the tin lid. Not rice pudding and stewed apple again!
No caviar today, then?
That won half a smile.
And here’s yours, Mrs. Noonan…
If I could persuade her to take something, it might bolster her strength a little. I straightened her legs, the huge, swollen one (very carefully) and the ordinary one. I set the tray down in her lap. And some lovely hot tea, if you prefer that to the beef?
Though I could tell the tea was lukewarm already, and far from lovely; given the price of tea leaves these days, the cooks had to brew it as transparent as dishwater.
Ita Noonan leaned towards me and confided in a ragged whisper, The boss man’s out with the rossies.
Really?
She might be thinking of Mr. Noonan, I supposed. Though boss man seemed an odd epithet for a fellow pushing a barrel organ around town to support a sick wife and seven children. Was there almost a relish in delirium, I wondered, at getting to say exactly what floated through one’s head?
Delia Garrett leaned out of bed to ogle Ita Noonan’s tilted plate. Why can’t I have a fry-up?
Nothing fatty or salty, remember, because of your blood pressure.
She snorted at that.
I perched on Ita Noonan’s cot—there was no room to fit a chair between this one and the next—and cut one of the sausages into small bites. What would Sister Finnigan say if she could see me break her rule about sitting on a bed? She was gliding about upstairs, too busy catching babies to tell me the thousand things I needed to know and had never thought to ask.
Look, lovely scrambled eggs.
I put a forkful of the nasty yellow stuff—obviously powdered—to Ita Noonan’s lips.
She let it in. Once she realised this was a fork I was setting in her hand, she gripped it and went to work. Wheezing a little, pausing to strain for breath between bites.
I found my eyes brooding over the empty cot in the middle. The nail on which Eileen Devine’s chart had hung was loose, I remembered. I stood up now to ease it out of the wall. I pulled on the chain of my watch and weighed the warm metal disk in my palm. Turning away so neither woman would notice what I was doing, I set the point of the nail to my watch’s shiny back and scratched an only slightly misshapen full moon among the other marks, this one for the late Eileen Devine.
I’d formed this habit the first time a patient died on me. Swollen-eyed, at twenty-one, I’d needed to record what had happened in some private way. A newborn’s prospects were always uncertain, but in this hospital we prided ourselves on losing as few mothers as possible, so there really weren’t that many circles marked on my watch. Most of them were from this autumn.
I replaced the nail in the wall. Back to work. Every ward had intervals of peace between rushes; the key was to snatch these opportunities to catch up. I boiled rubber gloves and nailbrushes in a bag in a saucepan. I crossed to the opposite wall and studied the contents of the shallow ward cupboard, acting competent, if not feeling it. All these years, I’d been expected to set my judgement aside and obey my ward sister; such an odd sensation, today, to have no one telling me what to do. A measure of excitement to it, but a choking feeling too. I went to fill in requisitions at the desk. Since the war, one never knew what would be in short supply, so all one could do was ask politely. I didn’t bother requesting cotton pads and swabs, as they’d disappeared for the duration. Some supplies had been back-ordered for weeks already, I found from Sister Finnigan’s list.
When I finished my slips I remembered I had no runner to deliver them, and I couldn’t leave this room. I swallowed down my anxiety and tucked them in my bib pocket for now.
Ita Noonan was staring off into the corner of the room, egg on her chin. Most of the cut-up sausage was still on her plate, but the whole one was gone. Could Delia Garrett have knelt on the vacant cot and stolen food off her neighbour’s plate?