Authors: Mary Renault
Colonna took her patient’s pulse—she had a good deal of difficulty in counting it—and marked up the chart.
“Well,” said Jan, “I think that’s everything.” He shut his eyes. She thought his consciousness was slipping; but realised, after a time, that he was asleep.
Colonna sat with her hands folded over the notebook in front of her, absorbed in the newness of her own thoughts.
At four o’clock the probationer brought her in a tray of tea. She managed the crockery without noise, but suddenly, his voice quite wakeful, he said, “Wouldn’t you rather be having it with the others? This is very dull for you. Have you been sitting here all this time?”
“Yes, but it’s all right. Just routine.”
“I don’t like to think I’m wasting your time like this. Can you sleep if you want to?”
“Well, no, hardly. Would you like a cup of tea? I’ve lots here.”
She filled the feeding-up and helped him to drink. When she had finished her own meal he said, more diffidently than he had spoken before, “I wonder if you’d mind doing something for me?”
Mistaking the reason for his hesitation, she said, “Of course not. That’s what I’m here for.”
“You’ve been awfully good. But I feel, now, that I’d rather like to be by myself for a little while. Do you mind?”
“But I—” As she spoke he turned his face a little to look at her. She could see that he was wondering whether she would think him discourteous, not whether she would refuse. That had not occurred to him. She was suddenly unable to finish what she had begun to say.
He added, as an afterthought, “You can tell the Sister that I said it would be all right.”
She rose to her feet, still silent. She could have found an answer to most things, but not to this native unnoticed arrogance. It unnerved her to see the security of a lifetime poised so carelessly within reach of her overturning hand. “Well,” she said, slowly, “you see—”
“It isn’t for that. That wouldn’t be fair to you.”
She had no idea what he meant, but could not say so. There was a silence.
“There’s something I want to remember. So would you—as there isn’t much time? You’ve been so sweet about everything.” He smiled deliberately, into her eyes.
Suddenly she thought, with unbearable certainty, this is the first time he has needed to coax a woman. “Yes,” she said; “of course, that’s perfectly …” Unable to finish, she went outside and hid herself in the darkness of the next ward. It was a good many years, it occurred to her, since she had cried about anything except her own disappointments and desires.
She had ceased for a little while to listen to the sounds that went on round her, even the instinctive watchfulness of her work suspended. The arrival of Pratt, on her next round, took her entirely by surprise. The first thing she was aware of was the dazzle of a torch across her eyes. She jumped up from the stool she had been sitting on, out of its range.
“Nurse
Kimball
!” The convalescent was still asleep; Pratt’s sense of outrage could only vent itself in a hiss, like compressed steam. “Whatever are you doing here? Why aren’t you with your patient?”
“I know perfectly well what I’m doing, thank you, Pratt. I specialled cases long before you.” Attack was the only form of defence in which Colonna was practised. She was wondering if her face showed, and if Pratt had noticed it. “I went out because he asked me to. I can hear him quite well from here.”
“
Hear
him!” It took Pratt a moment or two to recover even such voice as the situation allowed. “You can hear if he haemorrhages, I suppose! Are you absolutely out of your senses, Kimball? To leave a patient because he
asks
you to—a patient in that condition!”
“He knows his condition. That’s why he asked to be left alone.”
“What did you say to him?” The increased pressure behind Pratt’s whisper raised it nearly an octave.
“Nothing, you fool!” The blindness of mounting anger was, on the whole, a relief. Against the dim light of the doorway Pratt’s cap, shoulders and elbows stuck out at rigid angles. Colonna added, viciously, “If you’re incapable of following adult mental processes I’m sorry; but there’s nothing I can do about it.”
The outline of Pratt’s cap quivered. “Next time Sister comes round,” she said, “I shall tell her I can’t be responsible for running this ward unless she sends me someone more competent.”
Colonna drew a long breath. The tears were drying quickly on her flushed face. “You’ve got a bloody nerve, Pratt, to think you can speak to me like that.” Her voice rose from a whisper to an undertone. The sleeping man grunted and turned over noisily in bed. She moved out towards the doorway, pouring a shrill sibilance as she went. “Competent my foot. You’re as much use on a ward yourself as a hen with its head cut off, and you know damned well it’s only a fluke you’re not doing second to me.”
They stopped, a little shaken. A preceding fortnight of underground hostilities made the surface explosion more, rather than less, devastating. They had said these things to one another by hints and implications a dozen times; so that open directness became shocking, like the sudden use of a prohibited weapon in war. The mattress behind creaked as the patient rolled over in search of the more comfortable position he had left. Pratt edged out after Colonna. Her starched apron-bib creaked audibly with the spasmodic rise and fall of her chest.
“Everyone knows Matron wouldn’t give you a ward because she thought you weren’t fit to look after one. And I’m not surprised.”
“Anyhow”—Colonna’s half-controlled voice slipped on and off the vocal tones—“I’d sooner have you as first than second. I have to run everything in any case, and at least the cleaning gets done.”
“How—how
dare
you speak to me like that when I’m in charge?” Pratt had reached the verge of hysteria, but the darkness supported her. “I shall go to Matron first thing in the morning. I shall give in my notice if you’re not moved. I’ve never been spoken to like it in my life and I—”
“Oh, shut it, you’s,” murmured the patient, imperfectly awake. The noise had made him dream of his domestic troubles. Still muttering, he lifted the top pillow and bumped it down over his ears.
Pratt backed out into the passage. “You’ll have the whole ward awake in a minute,” she whispered, very softly.
“
You
were talking,” breathed Colonna. They found they had neither of them, at the moment, anything else to say, and tried to conceal from one another their feelings of foolishness and dejection.
“Well,” said Pratt, by way of a rearguard action, “you’d better get back to your patient, Nurse. His father can’t be here till nearly midday tomorrow. And you know what Sister said.”
“Oh, anything,” said Colonna sullenly. There was a heaviness in her like a dull pain. She did not realise, till she turned to go in, how near they had both been, at the end, to the open door. He was looking at her as she closed it.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, “to have got you into trouble.” Afterwards the humour of this seemed to strike him, for he turned his head away and she saw him smile.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “for everything. I’m going to sit very quietly in that corner and soon you’ll forget I’m there.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She perceived, now, a flat gentleness in his voice that hurt her more than her own sensations. Something had gone out of it. “Nothing would come, anyway. I ought not to have expected it.”
“Perhaps if you were to sleep again.”
“There’ll be time for that.”
She took his pulse—more even, but weaker than before—entered it, and went over to her chair.
“There’s something else,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I shouldn’t have overheard. But was anything said about my father coming here?”
“Yes. He’s coming to see you tomorrow morning.”
“Vivian didn’t tell me she’d asked him to come.”
“It was the hospital. They—often do, you know. They’d have his address on her records, I expect.”
“Why haven’t I been told?”
“Well …” Her voice trailed away. She had become so used to his quiet that she took it for granted, thinking, if she thought at all, that his weakness enforced it. This clipped hardness seemed to belong to someone else; though, in fact, Jan in his travels had not always been able to rely on charm to get what he required.
“Tell them at once, please, that I don’t want the message sent.”
“I think it’s gone.” She knew that it had; but so effectively had he imposed his illusion of authority that it was fear, not kindness or caution, that kept her from saying so.
“Gone? Do you suppose these people realise that I’m of age?”
“You were too ill to be worried. They just assumed you’d want to see him, I suppose.”
“Why the hell should they assume anything of the kind?”
“Keep him quiet,” said Colonna’s two years of training. Not that he had spoken loudly; she knew that it would have used less effort if he had. Her voice, in habit-formed reaction, grew mild and maternal.
“Sister will be talking to him, you know, before he comes in here. Perhaps, if you’ve quarrelled, she could say something first that would help.”
“Quarrelled?” He said it with a kind of dubious astonishment, like someone savouring a new joke in very bad taste; and fell silent, either in weariness or in a hopelessness of getting himself understood. But in a few minutes he went on, forcing his voice a little, “We simply have nothing to say to each other. We never have had. How long is he going to be here?”
“It depends, I suppose, on—on how you get on.”
“You mean he’s going to
wait
?”
“He’ll want to stay for the present, I expect.”
“But this is quite fantastic. You’ve sent for my father, without consulting me, in order to let him sit here on the edge of a chair waiting indefinitely for me to die?”
“It doesn’t mean that. People often come and—”
“You know perfectly well that’s what it means. Surely someone could have asked me whether I wanted to spend my last hours making conversation to an almost total stranger?” This left him a little out of breath. He added, when he had recovered it, “And they wouldn’t let Mic come in.”
“I’m sorry. You see most people—it’s just always done.”
“Presently I shan’t even be able to talk to him. What will he do all that time? Read the
Tatler
?”
“If you really don’t want to see him,” said Colonna at last,” perhaps Sister could send him away. But wouldn’t he feel rather—?”
“No. One can’t do that sort of thing.”
“He won’t be in here all the time.”
“What will they do if he isn’t at home? Broadcast, I—suppose?”
“He was at home. He’s on his way, I believe.”
“What, on the milk train? They got him up in the night? Really, this—this is too bad.”
“He would probably prefer it,” she suggested.
“Poor soul. I can see him sitting among the milk cans, wondering how long it will last and what he’d better talk about. You say they always do this?”
“In a place like this … a great many people, you know, aren’t equal to being alone.”
“I see. I hadn’t thought of that. … I’m sorry, I’ve been unreasonable.”
“No. Too reasonable, perhaps. But you ought to be resting now.”
“Why?”
“You’ll use yourself up.”
“That’s my own affair.”
“Not altogether, here.”
“I keep forgetting.” His mouth was dry, and she helped him to another drink. He thanked her and said, “I used to think sickness only meant pain, dirt—things that one knows about.”
“Most people seem to find those quite unexpected. What more can it be?”
“It’s not belonging to yourself.”
As if a light had been flashed in them, Colonna’s eyes contracted, and she turned them away.
“Is that such a bad thing?”
“Yes.” She heard the remnants of passion in his voice. “It’s—” He paused. She saw a look cross his face that might at first have been fear, but was changed to something more like wonder.
“It’s death, I suppose,” he said.
She wandered away to the uncurtained window and stared out, unseeing, at the few lights left burning in the town below. After an interval she did not measure, she looked at her watch and found that it was time to take his pulse again. If he was sleeping, she thought, she would let it go. It was a long time since he had stirred. But she found him awake, though he did not immediately notice her. She felt a longing to recall him, a craving for some contact, however slight, with his mind; not the hope of establishing a personal relationship, but the need to recapture an experience, as one longs for the repetition of music, or to climb a remembered hill again.
“Are you unhappy?” she said.
He stared at her for a moment as if he were bringing her into focus, then smiled.
“No. I was resting. You wanted me to rest.”
“You sound better.”
“Perhaps I am.”
But she saw, when she looked, that he was beginning to bleed again. Presently she would have to get Pratt to help her with the dressings. She straightened the clothes.
“You’ve never belonged to another person, have you?” She had not meant to say it; but some compulsion in her brought it out.
He did not answer at once. “I think,” he said at last, “that it’s better to take death in one piece.”
After that she left him undisturbed, and presently he slept again, more deeply than before. Opening her notebook, she added to what she had already written, “Has been somewhat restless, but has slept for short periods. Fluids taken well.”
The handle of the door turned softly, and the pink sleepy face of the probationer looked in.
“Please, Nurse, Nurse Pratt says we’re just going to do Barton, and could you come for a minute and help lift?”
Colonna raised her eyebrows. “Nurse Pratt was particularly anxious for me not to leave this patient.”
“She said it would only take a minute. He’s so heavy, you know, he really needs three. If you’re not too busy.” Her amateurishly-pleated cap disappeared again. She was in awe of Colonna.
Colonna straightened her long limbs, cramped from the chair, stretched, and looked under the cradle at the sandbags and drainage-tube. Everything was in order. She replaced the coverings softly, and looked up to find him awake, his eyes smiling at her.