Consulting Surgeon (8 page)

“So you have,” agreed Ursula. “But really all I can tell you is that he is a good deal younger than poor old Mr. Rabillies was; that I’d judge he’d despise funny stories, and he is certainly not ‘dumb’ in the way you mean. Anyway, time will show what he is like to work with. Meanwhile, where’s that treatment book, do you suppose? And what do you suggest the pros, should do first?”

“Well, they’d better be quick and do something,” said Nurse Freedom, beginning to bustle. “No one has done the flowers, and the sluice-room is squalid, no less. How on earth we’re to get done before ‘rounds’ I wouldn’t know.”

“Relax, Staff’, relax! It’s Sunday. No doctors’ rounds,” Ursula reminded her laughingly.

Nurse Freedom stared, then laughed too. “Idiot, aren’t I? That’s what comes of washing my hair last night instead of going out with my boy friend. You know, I thought this was Monday. Well, the pros could take one side each and do the patients’ lockers.”

“Good idea, as it’s visiting day and they’ll be getting a fresh influx of their precious goodies,” agreed Ursula. “I’ll just take another look at Night Sister’s report and then I’ll have a quick trot round to see them all. By the way, I see number four on the left is empty again?”

“Yes, but only just. We’ve had two simple fractures there since you went on leave. The last was discharged yesterday.”

“Then that woman...?”

“She died the following night. She left a family too—twins of about seven or so, sweet kids.”

“Poor babes.” Ursula’s tone was compassionate, but her own more poignant memory of that particular tragedy was of a man’s face, stricken and bewildered, in day-long vigil at that bedside. And in the end he had watched in vain, it seemed.

When you were nursing you had to learn a hard part—that of not allowing fruitless pity to sap your effort. But here and there the sad or happy playing-out of the individual human drama could catch at the imagination, rankle in the memory. You longed to
do
something, even though you might know full well that there was nothing you could do. And, for Ursula, such a case had been the one she had had to leave unfinished in bed number four. As she set aside the night report and prepared to go into the ward she reflected that little Sarah Caspar’s case was just such another.

Afterwards it was time for each of the staff to go in turn to the common room for a ten-minute break for coffee. She found it would be most convenient to go first herself, so she did so, leaving Nurse Freedom in charge.

When she returned, however, she was met at the outer door of the ward’s private corridor by her staff-nurse in a high state of panic—panic mingled with righteous wrath.

Nurse Freedom demanded: “Look, Sister, are we mad, or is he? It is Sunday, isn’t it? But he’s here, champing with impatience for you and wanting to go round the ward. I ask you—just as the pros, have disembowelled the lockers and have got everything from writing pads to jam pots on the locker-tops or on the floor!”

“But who wants to do a round? We haven’t got an ‘Urgent,’ have we?” asked Ursula, puzzled.

“Why, the new man, of course!
Your
surgeon, Sister! He just marched in, said: ‘My name is Lingard, you won’t have seen me before, where is the sister of your ward, how long will she be, well, I’ll wait,’ ” reported Nurse Freedom, her words coming without benefit of punctuation. “And there he is, waiting—in your office,” she finished dramatically.

“All right. I’ll go to him.” Long experience of her colleague had taught Ursula that the best antidote to her tendency to “flap” in emergencies was to adopt an appearance of complete calm herself. After all, a surgeon coming on to a ward on a Sunday morning was unusual, and not a little disconcerting if you weren’t prepared for him, but Freedom really must learn to take such things in her stride!

All the same, she was puzzled by Matthew Lingard’s premature and unexpected appearance. He had given her to understand that he was not taking up duty until his Clinic on Tuesday. And she could have wished that the ward
—her
ward—could have been in perfect trim for his first visit. After his criticisms she longed to offer him perfection, no less!

In her office he stood with his back turned to the door as she opened it to say quietly: “I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Mr. Lingard.”

“Ah, Sister!” He turned about, and the cool, appraising glance she was coming to know passed over her, revealing nothing of his reaction to his first sight of her in uniform. Though why should she expect it to? Femininity might crave approval, but pride stoutly denied the need.

He went on with faintly sarcastic emphasis: “On the contrary,
I
should apologize, perhaps, for the crisis I seem to have precipitated by my arrival. Or may I take it that your staff-nurse’s agitation was a private turmoil of her own?”

“No doubt Nurse Freedom realized that the ward wasn’t as ready for you as she would have liked. You see, the consulting surgeons do not often visit their patients on Sunday mornings, except for urgent cases. But your patients should be ready now, if you would like to come through?” Ursula spoke with a studied calm which refused to betray that Christian Shere ward had ever been upset by surprise tactics of this sort.

Matthew Lingard was already consulting a sheaf of record cards which he held. He said: “Well, at the risk of appearing over-zealous or eccentric I decided that I should like to make a preliminary check on the patients I am taking over. You have several of mine in your ward, I think?”

“The majority were Mr. Rabillies’ patients, the rest were Mr. Chaddesleigh’s.”

“Then shall we go?”

He stood aside for her at the door and they went through into the ward together.

As they went from bed to bed, Ursula was amused by the ward’s reaction to his assertion of its importance to its new consulting surgeon. Without actually overhearing the whispered comments which rustled up and down the line of beds, she sensed that the collective opinion was that, in giving up time to visiting on a Sunday morning, this new broom was sweeping most satisfactorily clean!

Only Miss Calcum’s disdain of the care she was getting and Grannie Mottram’s ever-recurring grumble remained unimpressed.

Miss Calcum did not attempt to lower her voice as she commented to her neighbor: “Of course, nobody here really
understands
my case. I don’t suppose this one will, either...” And at Grannie’s bed it was she who attacked first.

Indicating her discarded hot-water bottle and fixing Matthew with a steely eye she protested: “Young man, you should tell them t’ take that thing away. Sich new-fangled notions I never heard! Might as well expect a person t’ go t’ bed with a gurt slabby
toad
!”

“Dear me.” The corner of Matthew’s mouth lifted characteristically as he turned to Ursula. “Wouldn’t it be possible to slacken the red tape enough to give the patient a stone bottle if she prefers it?” he asked. “After all, a toad as bedfellow must be very disconcerting, wouldn’t you say?”

Behind the gravity of his voice lurked the hint of an amusement he seemed to be inviting her to share with him, and Ursula smiled back as she retrieved the despised rubber bag and passed it to a probationer for refilling. “We’ve tried everything,” she told him. “But Grannie’s preferences hark back even further than earthenware—at least as far as hot bricks or flat-irons wrapped in flannel and probably as far as warming pans!”

As they went round the ward she knew that she was longing for her companion to come to sixteen-year-old Sarah Caspar—Sarah of the piquant, heart-shaped face between the long dark plaits of hair brought forward over her shoulders, Sarah of the slim, vibrant body that had danced and now danced no more.

They reached her bed at last, and Ursula laid a reassuring hand upon the girl’s thin wrist as Matthew consulted his records, glanced at her chart. Then he put some questions, Ursula beckoned for a screen and there began yet another of the examinations of which Sarah had already suffered so many.

Matthew looked up at last, signalling Ursula to the foot of the bed. “Spontaneous fusion hasn’t been tried?” His voice was crisp.

“No. Mr. Rabillies considered it was not yet time, though he had the preparatory X-rays taken.”

“Well, subject to the plates I shall have taken for myself being satisfactory, I shall try fusion at once. I’ll give you a chit for her to be taken in for X-ray tomorrow, and we may be able to get her into the Theatre this week.”

He spoke in the lowest possible tone, but for all that, Sarah, acute with long-deferred hope, sensed everything that she could not hear. Unaided, she struggled upward on her pillows, oblivious of the darting, jagged pain that struck familiarly from hip to knee. Her hands clasped and unclasped in an agony of entreaty as she breathed: “Doctor—I mean Mr.—Mr. Surgeon—are you telling Sister that you can really
do
something—something that will cure my hip? Shall I—
shall
I
dance again
?”

“Sarah!” There was a warning note in Ursula’s voice as she stepped forward to press her back against her pillows and to draw the covers over the nervously twisting hands.

The girl fell obediently silent, but her questioning eyes remained fixed upon Matthew’s face as he came to face Ursula across the bed. There was rebuke in his tone as he said: “Sister, perhaps you would allow the patient to question me if she wishes to.”

Sarah, shy now, murmured: “It’s nothing, really. Only—
is
there anything you can do that will make me well,
really
well enough to dance?”

His answering smile was of a rare sweetness. “Does it matter so much that you should dance?” he asked gently. “Won’t it do if we can promise to try to make you walk quite well?”

“No—no, I must dance! Sister knows...!” As she turned in appeal to Ursula a tell-tale flush whose warning was to be dreaded was already rising in her cheeks.

Matthew stooped to pat Sarah’s head and then began to move away. He said: “Well, we’ll see what we can do. But you are going to have to help with a lot of patience. Remember, we’re depending on you!”

He and Ursula returned to her office shortly afterwards, and as he stood at her table, turning over his record cards, she was aware of a springing sense of injustice. And when he spoke antagonism sparked between them.

Matthew said: “Perhaps I should mention at the outset that I prefer not to feel myself hampered by officiousness, Sister?”

Ursula flushed. Upon her fair skin it was a slow suffusion of color that mantled from throat to hair. As quietly as she could she said: “I am sorry. Of course, I realize where you consider I was officious.”

“Yes. In the past it may have been your policy to discourage patients from questioning their doctors about their cases. But it is one to which I don’t subscribe. If a patient needs reassurance, and can get it from the answer to a question put to me, he must have it. You should give me credit, at least, for being able to reserve anything I think should not be told. But perhaps I am being unjust to you, and you believed you were co-operating with me in checking that child just now? Perhaps you thought I expected it?”

Ursula scorned to tell him that his predecessor, Mr. Rabillies, had always been so preoccupied with his own
bonhomie
that he ignored any questions put to him by patients, and that Mr. Chaddesleigh definitely forbade them. Instead she said: “I suppose I could hide behind that as an excuse if I wished. But that wasn’t why I interfered. Actually it was because long experience of Sarah Caspar—the hopes and despairs she has been subjected to since she has been here—has taught me that to any new hope she has only one reaction—a physical one. Her temperature flares at once, and within a few hours she may be in a high fever.”

“Her temperature rises? That’s significant. But her chart didn’t show variation?” Matthew’s tone was sharp.

“Now that we know the effect of the slightest excitement upon her we keep her calm and can check it—if we are allowed to do so.” If she had not been so roused Ursula would have been aghast at her own audacity. It was with amazement that, as she stopped speaking, she saw Matthew’s hand outstretched to her across the table.

He said simply: “I’m sorry. That was a too-premature judgment, and I’m grateful to you for putting me right. And now—shall we go on with young Sarah’s case from here?”

Ursula glanced at him as their fingers met in the brief handclasp that she recognized as this man’s honorable amend for an injustice done. Nothing in her face betrayed her, though her pulses quickened involuntarily. Hitherto he had issued orders to her, and—in one moment that she must believe to have been unguarded—he had revealed a tenderness of gratitude of which she had not thought him capable. But only in that comradely offering of his hand had he seemed to draw her into an alliance of purpose with him, a fellowship that promised at least to speak the same language, however much the words should sometimes differ.

He was saying now: “What do we know of this child’s history? This matter of dancing, for instance?”

“She was training for ballet,” Ursula told him. “Her parents had made every possible sacrifice to send her to a ballet school; it seems that it was the passion of her whole life, and until she had this accident she was considered to have tremendous promise.”

“And what happened? She was run over, I understand?”

“Yes, she was run down by a car that didn’t stop.”

Matthew’s face darkened. “The old story—the awful holocaust of the roads that we seem either to tolerate or that we can’t summon enough social conscience to end. So she is just another victim of that? Well, I shall try fusion, as I said. If there is to be an answer to that disease of the hip joint, that’s the only one I know.”

“You consider that the grafting of new bone will do it?” murmured Ursula.

“The hip may never rotate in the free circle that it did. But it will rotate, and she will walk, which is more than she can do now.”

Through dry lips Ursula asked: “Will she ever be able to dance?”

He shook his head. “I can’t promise. We may have greater success than we expect. We may have less. But if we restore her independence of movement, does that matter so much?”

“To her, now, it matters everything.”

Matthew shrugged. “
Now,
yes. But ten years hence, how much? She may be in love, have married, be already living in her children—”

“Not all women can count on that sort of compensation,” Ursula reminded him quickly.

“You mean, rather, that some women deliberately turn their backs upon the chance? And since when, I wonder, has any woman’s true fulfilment come down to being a mere ‘compensation’ for her loss of a career?” he retorted, the words seared across with scorn.

And as Ursula, not trusting herself to reply, bent to square the corners of a pile of papers upon her table with fingers that trembled, he strode across to the door and was gone.

Deliberately she forced her thoughts to the next job in hand. She permitted herself only one wry mental glance backward at her hope that they would speak the same language from now on. In their work together it might indeed be so. But, man and woman, they were worlds apart.

She wanted not to care. And knew in every quivering mutinous nerve that she did.