Authors: Mary Renault
“That depends. It’s difficult to say how long bones will take to unite. They’ll know better when they’ve X-rayed you a few times.”
His greenish eyes flicked up at her face. Defensively she added, “Really, only a surgeon could give you an opinion.”
“I did ask him. But he thought I was afraid.”
Colonna opened her mouth. The words she had expected to find in it were absent, and she closed it again.
He seemed to consider for a moment, then asked, curiously, “Or is that part of professional etiquette?”
She could think of nothing. Behind his almost motionless face another face seemed to stir, having a different and secret vitality of its own.
“It’s preferable, I think, to know.” He said it like a reflection rather than a request.
Colonna pulled herself together. “I don’t expect Mr. Rosenbaum knew himself. It’s very hard to tell exactly. Would you like a drink?”
“Thank you. I believe I am thirsty.”
She held the feeding-cup for him. He choked a little over it, and apologised. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just practice. You’ll soon get used to drinking on your back.”
“Thank you,” he said when she had wiped his mouth for him. “I’ll be able to do it myself next time. I can use my hands, you know, quite well.”
“You must keep very quiet just at first.”
“At first?” His pale lips twitched at the corners. Avoiding his eyes, she put the cup back on the locker and folded the napkin away.
“By the way, who gave me the blood for the transfusion?”
“A Miss Pomfret. One of our regular donors.”
“That round girl in blue who passed the door?”
“Yes, that would have been Miss Pomfret, I expect.”
“And how much of me is Miss Pomfret?”
“About a pint.”
“Mic would laugh at that.”
She did not contradict him.
Rousing himself—he had been abstracted for a moment—he said, “You might thank her from me. Tell her I—enjoyed her blood very much. Or what does one say?”
“I’ll tell her next time she comes.”
“Why do you suppose they gave it me?”
“To make you stronger.”
“God Almighty,” he murmured, and relapsed into silence.
Colonna settled herself in the chair, her notebook in her lap. What would he answer, she wondered, if she were to ask him, “What do you expect of death, behind all this reason?” All she was sure of was that the question would neither shock nor dismay him; that he would answer as simply as if she had asked him about the weather, would speak the truth and would tell her nothing. She would hear the words; they would beckon her like the sound of verse in an unknown language, magical and meaningless: solitude speaking to loneliness, a gulf too great for translation to bridge.
She hoped he would die easily. He would live longer than he supposed; for another night, perhaps for two. The transfusion had done wonders and, by the look of him, his constitution had been like iron. Thinking of him, she began for the first time to taste death with the senses of the imagination; the losing of touch and sight, knowledge and experience, the inexorably advancing dark. It had been in her mind till now a situation, never an experience. She sat silent, the footlights of her private theatre suddenly, chillingly extinguished.
He had turned his eyes away from her, silent with himself. For him, she thought, there was no imagining; it was now, and here. For him there was no afterthought, no compromise, no excuse.
The Night Sister, her torch and notebook in her hand, came gingerly round the door.
Colonna rose. The Sister was short and stout, pasty from her subterranean life, and had the air of always being oppressed with secrets too great to bear. She crooked a conspiratorial finger, and Colonna followed her out into the passage.
“How does he seem, Nurse?”
“His condition has improved a good deal, Sister.” She quoted his rates of pulse and respiration.
“That’s right, Nurse. Is he taking anything by mouth?”
“Taking fluids quite well, Sister.”
“
That’s
right, Nurse. I just wanted to make sure he was all ready before I sent Nurse Lingard to sit with him. You want to keep an eye on him, Nurse.” Her voice dropped a couple of tones. “Nurse Lingard’s only in her first year and there might be a change at any moment, you can’t never tell.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“We’ve sent for his father, but he lives up in the North of England. He can’t be here before tomorrow morning. I hope he won’t be gone before then. Poor boy; clever, too, from what I hear. Oh, and Mr. Rosenbaum particularly says, will you have him waked if his condition gets worse.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“It’s been a great shock to Nurse Lingard. About half an hour, I told her she could stay, but you don’t want to have her here too long, if it seems to be upsetting him. I shouldn’t like him to go before his father comes, not if we can help it.”
“Yes, Sister.”
The Sister put her hand on the knob of the side-ward door; and, as if the action had pressed a switch in her face, its expression changed to a soothing, solicitous cheerfulness. Colonna followed her in. He had got an arm out of bed, and was reaching it cautiously towards the cup on the locker. The Sister, her starched skirts rustling, bustled across the ward and forestalled him. Over the cup she darted at Colonna her routine look which said, “You must have been neglecting him to make him do that.” During this momentary pre-occupation she tipped the cup too sharply, and he choked again.
“I’m so sorry,” he said as if he were getting used to the sound of it. “I was trying to practise.”
“Now you mustn’t go trying anything like that, there’s a good boy.” She wagged her finger at him. “You’ve got Nurse here to do everything for you.”
“I know. Thank you. But I’ve always been used to doing things for myself. I’d rather, really, as it doesn’t make any difference.”
“Well, I never, difference indeed. You’ve got to save up every bit of strength to mend that back of yours. Hasn’t he, Nurse?”
Colonna formed her face into a conventional pattern.
“It’s very good of you”—he formed the words rather slowly and carefully, as if to be sure of getting himself understood—“to take such care of me. But I’m sure you’ll understand that I don’t want to make this a needlessly long business. It takes up your time. And I don’t care for loose ends. Besides, I think it’s—probably an experience you should come to with your perceptions still awake. So you see—?”
His voice had struggled a little unevenly with so long a speech, but he finished with a faint sound of satisfaction, like one who knows he has succeeded in making himself clear.
The Night Sister clicked her tongue against her upper plate; a gently reproving, encouraging sound.
“Now, you don’t want to
worry.
We’re all out to get you better just as quick as ever we can. And the way you can help us best is by lying quiet and doing just what Nurse here tells you, and not trying to move or worrying or anything like that. I’m sending your sister to sit with you for a little while; but you mustn’t go talking or getting excited. Now you
do
see, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I see. Thank you. Good night.”
The Sister went out, beckoning Colonna with an eyebrow.
“You want to watch him, Nurse. He’s not a good patient, not a good patient at all. These clever men, they’re often the worst. They worry about themselves, and they won’t be
told
anything. You be careful and keep that binder very firm. Matron would never forgive me if anything was to happen, particularly before his father comes.”
“Yes, Sister.”
Colonna went back into the side-ward. He greeted her with the kind of look which shares a joke too obvious to need underlining with a smile.
“I’m just going to turn back the clothes a bit,” she said, “and see if your sandbags are all right.”
When a spinal case could not be plastered, it was kept splinted with a strong roller towel, the ends of which were made fast under narrow sandbags laid closely against the patient’s sides. Colonna saw that everything was firmly in place and that the haemorrhage had, for the moment, stopped.
“What’s that arrangement for?” he asked her, interested.
“To keep you from moving your back.”
“What would happen if I did?”
“You’d be likely to damage your spinal cord.”
“More than now?”
“Probably a good deal more.”
“You mean it would?”
Colonna hesitated, suddenly cautious. “It would be pretty serious. So we must be careful, as Sister said.” She picked up the cup. “Would you like to hold this, if I just steady it?”
He took it, managing very well. “Thank you. You remind me, do you know, of a man at Cambridge.”
“What sort of man?” asked Colonna, automatically pleased.
“Terrible. But very good-looking.”
She laughed; then, remembering, said, “You’re talking too much. You really must rest now.”
“Yes.” He was quiet for a little while; and she saw, when the false vitality of motion had left his face, that he looked more exhausted than before. Suddenly he said, in a stronger voice, “The Sister seems to hold you responsible for my—behaviour.”
“They do, in hospital, you know.”
“It’s hard,” he said, “to get used to that kind of thing.”
“Yes, I can imagine that.” She saw that it was time to take| his pulse again. It was weaker and more rapid than before. “You must keep quieter,” she said, and sat down with her notebook in front of her.
She thought that he was dozing, till he said, slowly, “You set an almost mystical value on life here, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. It’s just our job.”
“Almost as if it were an end, instead of a means.”
“Well, it’s the only thing we’ve expert knowledge of, and that not much. Probably it’s better we shouldn’t meddle outside.”
“Mic Freeborn has ideas about life too—you know him?”
“A little.”
“My own are different, I think.”
Colonna missed the last sentence. She had been listening to a step approaching along the flagged passage between the wards.
“I think,” she said, “this is Vivian coming to see you.”
“Yes, I promised I’d see Vivian.”
“I’m afraid she mustn’t stay very long, tonight.”
“No. She’s on duty, isn’t she?”
“Well, yes, and—”
“Besides, she’s not very fit. People find these interviews upsetting.”
“How can you”—Colonna’s mental uniform suddenly fell from her—“talk like this, as if you were discussing someone else?”
“I am. This mess under the sheet, I can’t even feel it, you know.”
The outer door of the ward swung to, and closed again. Colonna slipped out, and met Vivian in the passage. She only said, “Will he know me?”
“Oh, yes. The transfusion made a lot of difference.”
She said, in a perfectly level voice, “Rosenbaum shouldn’t have done that to him.”
Colonna moved back towards the door, and stopped. “I’m supposed not to leave him,” she said. “I’m going into the other side-ward. Just see that he keeps still. I shall hear if you want me.”
“Thank you, Colonna.” She went in.
The man in the other side-ward was asleep. A convalescent, he needed no lamp at night, and would probably wake if she switched it on. She sat there in the dark, near the open door, where she could hear if Pratt or the Night Sister were coming.
The door of the next side-ward was ajar too, so she could hear, through it, the desultory murmur of their voices, broken with silences. The man in the bed beside her snored a little; the rhythmic sound wove itself into the pauses, becoming less and less audible as her accustomed ears ignored it. After five minutes or so he turned over on his side, and the noise stopped. The place was very quiet, so that once, when they raised their voices above a whisper, she heard what they said.
“Don’t, Jan. You know it was all through me, from the beginning.”
“You? No. We just lived it.”
“But if I hadn’t—”
“This didn’t happen; it was, always. Mic knows. Or he will, when he has time.”
“Time? Mic will never … I’ve taken everything from Mic now. Everything he ever had.”
“Oh, no. He isn’t a person to whom that can be done.”
I ought to turn her out, Colonna thought mechanically. Talking to an ill patient like that. She got to her feet without noticing, stood for a moment, and sat down again. Their voices sank lower, and she did not hear any more.
The half-hour was nearly over when she heard Pratt coming down the main ward. There was no sound from the other room. She slipped from her place and knocked softly. It was Jan who said “Come in.”
“I’m sorry. But nurse is doing a round.”
“She’ll tell me to go,” Vivian said. Colonna could tell from her voice that she had been weeping. There was a pressed-down place on the sheet where her face had been.
“Go by yourself,” he said. “It feels better. You’ll be all right when you start working again.”
It had taken a great deal out of him. Colonna wondered what Pratt would say.
Vivian got up. “Yes,” she said dully; then, recalling something, “Jan, Mic’s down in Casualty. Someone said he wanted to come and see you, but they wouldn’t let him.”
“Why on earth not?”
“He’s not a relative, you see.”
“But—” he was speaking with much more effort now,” no one told me. Wouldn’t they have—asked me if I wanted him?”
“You see,” Colonna explained, “it’s only relatives when—as a rule. But perhaps if I said you’d asked for him—”
“Would they?” His face altered for a moment, then, was quiet again. “No. Mic’s had enough. There’s no point, we’ve done all that. Tell them to—give him something to make him sleep.”
They heard Pratt’s footsteps passing from the ward into the passage.
“You’d better be going,” he said.
She stood, her will helpless, her hand on the black iron foot of the bed.
“Jan, I wish I could have”
“I’m glad you came. It was good to speak the truth for a minute. Everything’s all right, Vivian. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.” She turned away quickly and went out.
“That’s right, Nurse,” said Pratt in the corridor. “Better not stay too long tonight. You’ll be able to look in again tomorrow when you come off duty.”