Silence, now, behind the stall door. Mrs. Garrett, if I might just check the pan before you flush…
(Dark matter would reveal internal bleeding.)
Don’t be disgusting!
Water roared from the overhead tank when she yanked the chain.
Delia Garrett seemed shaky as I led her back to the ward. I hoped an orderly might have happened by and mopped up the sick-spattered marble, but no. I steered her around it, reminding myself that a mess was less important than a patient. A sponge bath in your bed and a new nightie, I murmured, and you’ll feel more like yourself. I just need to see to Mrs. Noonan first.
The delirious woman was blank, unresisting; she let me move her off her wet bed to the chair at its foot and wipe her clean. I got a fresh nightdress over her head and used the cloth tapes to draw it closed all down her side.
Delia Garrett complained that she was freezing.
I pulled a folded blanket from the cupboard and handed it to her. I swathed Ita Noonan in a second one to keep her warm until I had a dry bed for her.
This reeks!
That means it’s safe, Mrs. Garrett. They hang them over racks in an empty room, and they burn sulphur in a bucket to make a gas strong enough to kill every last germ.
She murmured, Like the poor Tommies in the mud.
Every now and then this spoiled young woman surprised me.
At least my brother had never been gassed. Tim had twice collapsed from heatstroke in Turkey, and he’d caught trench fever, but he’d managed to get over it, whereas many soldiers carried it in them, a cup of embers that could flare up at any time. That was the joke of it—physically, my brother was still the man he’d been before the war, when he’d worked in a haberdashery firm (gone out of business now) and went to the roller rinks with his pal Liam Caffrey every chance he got.
The door swung open, and I jumped.
Dr. Prendergast, in his three-piece suit, on his rounds at last. I was glad to see him but mortified by the timing. Please let him not ask why both my patients are huddled on chairs. And could that be a spatter of Delia Garrett’s vomit on his polished shoe? If Sister Finnigan heard how things were falling apart on my first morning of holding the fort, she’d never entrust me with the responsibility again.
Prendergast was preoccupied with tying the strings of a mask at the back of his head. Oddly plentiful hair for a man of his age, a bog-cotton shock of white.
You heard we lost Mrs. Devine in the night, Doctor?
His voice was flat with fatigue. I certified the death, Nurse.
The man had been up since yesterday morning, then. He held on to the stethoscope around his neck with two hands as a swaying passenger on a tram might grip an overhead strap.
The cunning of this malady, he murmured. When a patient shows every sign of being on the mend, I’ve told the family not to worry, and then…
I nodded. But these days nurses had strict instructions not to waste a second of a physician’s time, and here we were fretting over a dead woman. So I grabbed Ita Noonan’s chart off the wall and handed it to him. Mrs. Noonan’s twenty-nine weeks on, Doctor.
Dr. Prendergast caught his yawn in his hand. Mildly cyanotic, I see. How’s her breathing?
Rather effortful. Delirious for two days now, temperature ranging up to a hundred and five.
Her blanket was trailing, I saw; I snatched it up and wound it around her. Let him not notice that she wet herself. I asked, Should she have more aspirin?
(Nurses weren’t supposed to have any views on medicine, but this man was so tired, I thought I’d nudge him along.)
Prendergast sighed. No, the high doses seem to be poisoning some patients, and quinine and calomel are just as bad. Try whiskey instead, as much as she can take.
Whiskey? I asked, confused. To reduce fever?
He shook his head. For soothing discomfort and anxiety and promoting sleep.
I wrote down the instruction in case another doctor were to query me about it later.
Now, how’s Mrs.…
His gaze was foggy.
Garrett, I reminded him as I handed over Delia Garrett’s chart. Recent emesis and diarrhea, and her pulse force, ah, still seems high.
I had to phrase that tactfully so he wouldn’t bristle at the implication that a midwife could tell with her fingers what a physician relied on fancy equipment to determine.
Prendergast hesitated, and I feared he was going to say he hadn’t time to take a reading. But he got the sphygmomanometer out of his bag.
I slid Delia Garrett’s pink hand through the cuff and tightened it around her upper arm, then he inflated the cuff with the hand pump. The process was little more complicated than tightening a rope; it occurred to me that any of us could be taught to use this thing.
Ow!
Just a minute more, Mrs. Garrett, I said.
She coughed discontentedly.
He fitted the yellowed tips of the stethoscope into his ears, pressed the flat disk against the soft crook of her elbow, let the cuff deflate, and listened.
After a minute, Prendergast dictated: Systolic blood pressure is one hundred and forty-two. A few moments later, he said: Diastolic is ninety-one, Nurse.
Diastolic BP 91, I added to the chart.
Prendergast didn’t seem that impressed by the figures. A bounding pulse is common in the last months of pregnancy, he murmured as I packed up the device for him. If she gets very agitated you could give her bromide.
Hadn’t the man heard me say Delia Garrett had just thrown up? A sedative was so hard on the stomach, I’d prefer not to inflict that on her…
But I’d been taught never to contradict a doctor; it was held that if the chain of command was broken, chaos would be unleashed.
Prendergast rubbed his eyes. I’m off home now.
While you’re gone, I asked, which obstetrician—
They’re bringing in a general practitioner to help out in the women’s wards.
A GP in private practice—so, not the specialist we needed. I asked uneasily: Is he at the hospital yet?
Prendergast shook his head. At the door he said, Dr. Lynn’s a lady, by the way.
I thought I heard a touch of disdain. There were a few female physicians these days, though I hadn’t yet served under one. What I needed to know was, till this substitute presented herself, who could I call on for my patients?
Delia Garrett jumped up. Nurse Julia, can you get me out of this filthy thing now?
Yes, the minute I’ve dosed Mrs. Noonan, but do stay off your feet, won’t you?
She subsided in the chair.
I made up a lidded cup of hot whiskey and water for Ita Noonan, sugared to be more palatable. After the first sip she sucked it down like mother’s milk. Then I went to fetch a clean nightdress from the press for Delia Garrett.
Uncovered, her belly was silvered with the snail trails of her previous two pregnancies as well as this one.
I hadn’t yet felt that broodiness older women had warned me I would. I’d specialised in midwifery because the drama of it drew me in, but I’d never imagined myself as the woman at the centre of the mystery, the full moon rounding, only as the watchful attendant.
Thirty tomorrow. That ring of being past one’s best.
But thirty wasn’t so very old, I told myself. By no means too late to marry and have children; only, on the balance of probabilities, unlikely. And even less likely, I supposed, now so many men had been lost in the war, either facedown in some foreign field or just not interested in finding their way back to this small island.