Return to Night (6 page)

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this. But without an immediate operation I don’t think your son has any hope of living through the day. There’s bleeding going on somewhere inside the skull. Until it’s found and stopped, the pressure on the brain will go on increasing. That means that sooner or later, the vital functions, such as breathing, will stop. I should expect that to happen within twelve hours, at most.” (In her own mind, she had given it six.) “You understand?”

“Yes. Yes, I understand.” The voice suddenly changed; it grew febrile and desperate; and yet, it seemed to Hilary, the fear and distrust below it remained the same. “I’ll come just as I am. I’ll get a coat and come straight over, so that I can go with you. I can be there in just over half an hour.”

“I’m terribly sorry.” (Was that the bell of the ambulance, far along the road? She could see herself as this woman must be seeing her, a callous automaton. As if the image possessed her, she struggled to feel, and could feel nothing.) “I do so wish we could. But the ambulance is due any moment now. That half-hour might mean everything. A car will get you there almost as soon. Sooner, perhaps.”

“I see,” said the thin voice. Through the open window, Hilary heard the ambulance drive in. “Very well, Dr. Mansell. You leave me no choice. I find it hard to believe that things couldn’t have been managed differently.” The receiver clicked at the other end.

She went into the hall, where the men from the ambulance were bringing in their stretcher. As she went with them, to supervise the lifting, she thought,
If he dies, as he well may, and if this woman has local influence, as no doubt she has, I can put my practice up for sale. The sooner the better.
But the thought was as unreal to her as a dinner engagement for next week. She could only see the still face on the cotton pillow, darkened and shadowed, since yesterday, with a faint growth of beard that made it look, curiously, more boyish than before; and the unseeing eyes which, as she watched, closed again heavily as if sleep were pressing them down. When the stretcher had been settled on its racks, and she sat down beside him to feel his pulse again, his fingers closed vaguely on hers. It would be as well to know, she said to herself, when the reflex was obliterated. She took the pulse with her other hand.

T
HE ANESTHETIC-ROOM WAS STILL EMPTY
. Reaching from the familiar places the mask, cap, and gown, Hilary almost expected to see Sanderson’s head lean out of the men’s changing-room and say, “You’d better scrub up, I think, Miss Mansell. Collett’s tapping a ventricle downstairs.” Familiar smells of warm ether and Dettol wafted in from the anteroom door. A bitter nostalgia filled her. She forgot, for a moment, why she was here, and felt only that she had been a fool to come.

The other door, the door behind her, opened, and the trolley came in.

He lay quite still under the thick scarlet blanket, his face composed. She stood watching him, while the ward nurse who had brought him picked up the band of the blood-pressure gauge and bared his arm to fasten it on. His lips parted in a long, slow, shallow breath. She realized that during all the previous interval he had not breathed at all. About four to the minute, she thought.

“Excuse me a moment, nurse.” She picked up part of his biceps muscle and gave it a sharp, vicious twist. His face, immobile in another pause of breathing, was wholly passive; she might as well have been using her strength on a fold of the blanket. The nurse said. “He did respond, very faintly, in the ward. I had to do it pretty hard then.” Hilary nodded, and held up the arm for her to fix the strap.

The porter came in. wheeling in front of him a little trolley with soap and brushes and razors on a tray, and knocked on the door of the changing-room.

“How much do you want taken off, sir?”

Sanderson came out, in the kit he wore under his theater gown; a sleeveless shirt and blue jeans under a clear oilskin apron. He had a fine carriage and physique, and this bleak costume displayed it well. He looked down at the trolley.

“His pulse, nurse?”

“Forty-six, sir. And respirations three.”

Sanderson said to the porter, “Half head. Frontal. And be quick.”

The porter slid a rubber sheet under the quiet head as the nurse lifted it. Whistling faintly between his teeth, he picked up a pair of clippers from the tray and nibbled them in a broad arc. A deep soft swath of black hair slid down onto the mackintosh; the balance and composition of the face were instantly changed. Sanderson said thoughtfully, “I think we can keep the flap clear of the forehead,” and went on into the theater. The porter, clipping away, remarked, “S’right. Shame to spoil ’im for the girls,” and winked at the nurse, who, conscious of Hilary’s presence, ignored him. Hilary took the blood pressure.

Sanderson had the reputation of being able to turn an osteoplastic flap quicker than anyone in two continents. This time, having nothing else to do, Hilary watched the clock. The lid of bone was lifted in just seventeen and a half minutes. As far as she knew, it was a record. As she stood under the great frosted window, out of the track of those who had work to do, she fell back into the old impersonality. There was, indeed, nothing personal to see. The shape on the table was only a coffin-like oblong, a stand placed across the chest supporting a long green drape so that not even a human outline was recognizable below. All the varied activity in the room was focused on a six-inch oval; already even the bone flap, with its fringe of artery forceps, had been swathed with sterile gauze. There was only one reminder of the incidental presence under the green cloth: the anesthetist on his low stool, the stethoscope in his ears connected to something unseen, making at intervals a tiny point on the chart beside him. This vigil over the hidden life was his only function. Nature had done his work for him; he could have added nothing, except death.

The theater had an oppressive, greenhouse heat; with no activity to stir her, and drowsy from the ether fumes still hanging after the last case, Hilary felt drugged and suspended in time. Over Sanderson’s shoulder she stared into the neat red oval between the towels, seeing scarcely the hands that made tiny precise movements about it; only the fingers, the direction of the slender forceps, and the long glass irrigator with which the assistant washed their orbit clear. Once something went awry and she heard Sanderson swallow a word. He never permitted himself to swear in the presence of women, and it delighted him when occasion served to get the place clear of them. Hilary smiled into her mask and thought,
Well, in any case the Sister’s there. … Hullo. He’s got it.

The thin steel had found its objective. Finely, delicately it was removing the blood clot it had been seeking. Hilary watched, single-minded; in her mind a tactile imagination reproduced the movements and stored them against a future which she had forgotten was already the past.

Her trance was interrupted. A voice spoke, curiously out of key with the tone of the proceedings; bewildered, angry, blurred as if with drink or sleep.

“For God’s sake, let go of my head.”

There passed through the theater an unseen flash, an inaudible breath. The Sister took a quick, motiveless step forward; the anesthetist, his eyes narrowed in something that was not quite a smile, reached up his hand into the green catafalque. Sanderson and the assistant met one another’s eyes in a quick inexpressive glance. Hilary was entirely still. With such economies, they acknowledged the passing incident of a homemade resurrection. A man who, in all but the last failing mechanisms of the body, had been two hours dead, abused them from his pall. So far, so good. The forceps began their quiet precise movements again. The anesthetist peered under the drape and remarked conversationally, “Don’t worry, we shan’t be long now.” A resentful grunt answered him.

“Diathermy,” said Sanderson. A faint electrical fizzing began and ended.

The hidden voice said, with a tipsy kind of violence, “Take this sheet off my face. Damn you, I can’t see.”

At the far end of the table, the green twill was stirred by the movement of a foot below. The anesthetist looked toward Hilary, and jerked his head.

She came forward, and, stooping, slid her hand under the cloth. It found another hand, gripping exploringly, seeking a leverage. A strained leather strap creaked.

“Let me get up. I can’t—”

“Keep still,” said Hilary. “It’s all right. The doctor’s dressing your head.”

There was a pause. Then, “Is that you?”

“Yes. Keep quiet now. We’ve nearly finished.”

“Sorry. I was asleep.” She heard him grumble under his breath, “They didn’t have to tie me down.”

Sanderson’s deep voice said, with apocalyptic finality, “I want you perfectly still, please.” Stillness followed; the operation proceeded.

Hilary kept her station, confident of more trouble; for though the tissue layer they were working on was insensitive to pain, as a rule the irritation of the almost exposed brain would find vent in a rambling petulance and a breakdown, more or less complete, in the normal controls. But he only asked later, quite meekly, for a drink, and thanked her when she guided it to him under the drape. When it came to suturing the scalp, which really hurt him, he began to swear in a helpless, schoolboy way.

When it was over, and they lifted him from the table to the bed which had been wheeled up ready from the ward, he glanced for a moment wonderingly about the theater, but seemed at once to slip into acquiescence. Hilary, deflecting the hand with which he was trying to explore the bandages, walked beside the bed toward the door, a couple of half-remembered lines tagging in her mind:

At the raising of Lazarus, someone said, “What was it like, in the dark with the dead?”

She was in the corridor outside the ward when she saw Sanderson standing with his back to her and talking to Mrs. Fleming. It was her eyes that Hilary’s met. Sanderson followed their direction, turned and smiled, then stepped back a little.

Mrs. Fleming came forward. Hilary felt a chilling discomfort, a causeless feeling like guilt, making her want to escape as if from an accuser.

“Dr. Mansell, Mr. Sanderson has just been telling me that if you had not acted so promptly in sending Julian here, he—we should have lost him. I want to say how grateful I am for everything you’ve done.”

“You must thank Mr. Sanderson; the diagnosis wouldn’t have been much use without him.” Hilary smiled, and took the outstretched, perfectly gloved hand. It felt brittle and, even as it grasped, aloof. She looked into the light-gray eyes, and it occurred to her for the first time that Mrs. Fleming had been beautiful, and possessed, in skin and feature, the materials of beauty still. Not the form was lacking, but its acceptance and adventure and inward light.

“I shall be staying here, of course, for the present. Later on, I hope perhaps you will be able to spare an evening for dinner with me.”

Hilary expressed happy anticipation. Curiosity, interest, and a habit of facing uncomfortable things, kept her gaze straight and direct on the face that smiled at her; and suddenly, like a strained surface cracking, the smile wavered, the gray eyes looked aside. But in them Hilary had seen the look of someone placed, by cruel luck, under obligation to an enemy.

M
AY TURNED TO JUNE
. Influenza and measles died down; road accidents doubled. People discussed whether they should go abroad this summer; decided that nothing would come to a head about Czechoslovakia yet, and went. Hilary, who suspected that next summer decisions would go the other way, put in a locum and spent more than she could afford on a holiday to Scandinavia.

In sulky clouded weather she got back travel-weary, and dispirited by the general and personal shape of things to come. As always, Lisa Clare’s welcome was soothing and reviving; but Hilary thought that the recent heat must have tried her. Her eyelids looked blue and transparent, and she had a kind of lassitude which seemed, curiously, to have left her vitality undimmed. She had just come back, she said, from town.

“My husband had a week in England. He couldn’t leave town, he had too much to do. We stayed—somewhere in Lancaster Gate. I’ve forgotten the name already. We’ve stayed in so many places.”

Not for the first time, Hilary stayed herself from a leading question. It was too bad, she said, that he couldn’t have managed Gloucestershire before the summer got stale.

“He meant to. But he had to start for the Sudetenland a week sooner than he’d planned. Things seemed to be moving rather fast.”

Hilary’s speculations were suddenly illuminated. “How stupid I am. Why didn’t it occur to me before that he was Rupert Clare?”

Lisa smiled, briefly. It was as if for a moment she allowed the hidden glow to reach the surface.

Hilary had always admired Rupert Clare’s journalism. She told Lisa so, with sincerity and warmth. Lisa said, as usual, very little; but though she changed the conversation almost at once to the subject of tea, Hilary had a pleasant feeling that the quiet progress of their friendship had advanced a little.

It was over the tea that Lisa said, “How tiresome of Pound’s not to send your new suitcase till after you’d gone.”

Hilary, who had ordered nothing, went up to investigate as soon as the meal was over. The package was behind the door, where she had overlooked it. Stripping off layers of board and shaving she found, preciously guarded in a fine canvas jacket, a dressing-case of pale pigskin, with
H.M.
stamped in gilt across the corner. Inside, it was fitted with everything imaginable in cream enamel and gold. It was the kind of thing which might have been possessed by a film star with exceptionally good taste. An envelope was stuck inside one of the dove-gray silk bands in the tray. She opened it.

DEAR DR. MANSELL
:

I hope this very inadequate token of gratitude from my son and myself will be in time to go with you on your well-deserved holiday this year.