Seven Dials (11 page)

‘You still see some private patients here in Harley Street?’

He frowned sharply.

‘Some. But I still wouldn’t take your young man, even as a private patient. I saw the pictures, and I just don’t think his is a case for me. I can send you to other reasonable chaps, as I’ve already told you -’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, he wants you. So do I. I just thought, if it was a matter of money for a private case - that wouldn’t be a problem.’

‘It isn’t a problem with me either,’ he said, and now his voice was a good deal sharper. ‘I’m just not taking him. Now, four o’clock at East Grinstead? Or shall we leave it at that?’

‘I’ll be there,’ she said hastily. ‘Four o’clock sharp. Thank
you, Mr McIndoe. Goodbye till this afternoon.’ And she went hurrying down the thickly carpeted stairs into the lavishly appointed hall with its oil paintings and flowers in big bowls and out into the October bluster of Harley Street to stand on the kerb for a while, thinking.

She had been so sure it would work the way she had wanted it to. It had been silly to be so certain, perhaps; his letter in response to her first approach to him, when she had sent him Brin’s photographs, had been uncompromising enough in its refusal, but for all that, she had been sure that if she went to see him herself she’d be able to convince him.

And at first she’d been really hopeful as she’d sat in front of him and gone through Brin’s history, explaining, showing even more photographs, pleading for her patient. But though he’d listened courteously enough, he still had said no. Brin wasn’t a patient for him -

But then she cheered as at last she turned and set out to walk towards Cavendish Square in search of a little lunch before making her way to Victoria Station and a train that would take her south east out of London to the heart of Sussex. He may have refused so far, but he hadn’t slammed the door entirely. To be invited to look at his ward at East Grinstead was a considerable step in the right direction; and to go there was as good a way as any she could think of to spend her solitary day off. So her step was jaunty as she made her way along the august pavements of the most famous medical street in the world. She’d get her patient treated by this man, somehow, she was absolutely sure of it. Because it was what she wanted more than anything in the whole world.

But by the time she was back on the train in the darkness of the early evening, chugging her tedious way back to Victoria, her spirits were a great deal less elevated. She sat in the corner seat of her compartment, staring out at the blackness that slid past the windows, seeing not the absence of light nor the faint reflection of her own face that gleamed on the dirty windows, but the faces of the men she had seen that afternoon in Ward Three at the Queen Victoria Hospital.

At first it had promised to be a cheerful afternoon. She had managed to find a taxi at East Grinstead station to take her to the hospital and had stood in the road with her back to the trees
that fringed it with their amber and golden leaves, and the cheerful substantial houses warm with red brick and white paintwork and gardens alive with the vivid colours of Michaelmas daisies and late dahlias, staring at the place and liking what she was looking at. A handsome building, with lots of glass and a big central tower, it stood as a living memorial to the hopeful building boom of the 1930s when there was, in spite of the depression, money and time for the building of local hospitals like this. The fringe of temporary buildings and Nissen huts which had sprung up around it didn’t detract from its self-assurance and it stood there, benign and calm in the afternoon glow of a sun that had at last managed to break through the overcast of the cloud, and seemed to promise the fulfilment of her hopes for Brin. McIndoe would never have brought her here if he hadn’t meant to relent and accept him as a patient, she told herself as she made her way up the drive towards the main entrance. He couldn’t be so unkind as to drag her so far for no purpose.

He hadn’t; but it had been for his own purpose and staring out of the train window now she felt herself fill with a moment of fury at the way he had manipulated her. But there was admiration in her too; he had the sort of determined driving pushiness she had always found rather engaging, and whatever he did to get his own way, it was clear to her, even after so short an acquaintance, that there was no malice in him.

‘Ah, Miss Lucas,’ he had said, giving her that owlish stare through the heavy glasses as she was shown into his small cluttered office by a starched rustling nurse. ‘Come to see my Ward Three, hmm? I can’t show you myself - got a couple of cases to get to the theatres this afternoon, but one of Blackie’s people will take you round. Good chap, Blackie -’ And he had nodded at her and gone pushing past her on his way out of the office, clearly dismissing her from his mind, and she had remained standing there, uncertain what to do and with a slow tide of anger rising in her, when a head was put round the door. It had a round amiable face adorned with a broad smile.

‘Miss Lucas?’ it said and as she nodded and the face came further into the room and showed itself to be attached to a body as round as itself, and which was wrapped in a white coat. ‘I’m Davey. One of the people who help Blackie - he’d come himself but he’s tied up this afternoon and the Boss said
that you’re to be shown round Ward Three. So I’m here to show you.’ He had grinned then at the look of doubt on her face. ‘I know I’m just an orderly, and you can see that and you’re asking yourself what does an orderly know to be showing me, a lady doctor and all, round the ward? Well, I’ll tell you, Miss Lucas, I know better than most. Not as much as the Boss or Blackie, I grant you, or Sister, but a lot. Been on Ward Three I have since it all started, back in ’41 - five years hard I’ll have done -’ And he laughed cheerfully, and beamed at her and she couldn’t help but smile back.

He had led her along wide clear corridors, talking all the time, pointing out to her with great pride various features of the hospital as they passed, and she went on smiling because his enthusiasm was infectious; and she nodded with all due expressions of admiration as he showed her where the pathological labs were, and where the theatres were and the corridor which led to the pharmacy and the other wards as though Nellie’s weren’t pretty much the same, albeit in a much older building and with less Vita glass about.

‘And here we are,’ he said with great pride as he led her out of the main building and through a covered walkway to a large hut. ‘Ward Three, in all its gory -’ And laughing delightedly at his own joke, he had pushed open the door.

She had stood and looked down the ward; a long room with tall windows on each side, and with beds ranked under them in the usual way, rather closer together than they were at Nellie’s, but otherwise much the same. A good deal of dark green paint, enlivened in places with cream, and a ceiling that was a tracery of metal girders, bolted together. There was a coke stove with chairs set round it and there were a few trolleys and screens about, none of which was surprising. But still, it didn’t feel like an ordinary hospital ward and she looked closer and saw the battered grand piano in the corner and the long table with what looked remarkably like a barrel of beer on it, with tankards alongside, and explicit pin-up pictures of the sort that she knew were commonplace in barrack rooms but which would have caused an uproar if they had appeared in Nellie’s chaste wards, and blinked at the sight.

The patients too seemed to be very different. None of the neatly arranged bodies in beds that were so marked a feature of Spruce where she spent so much of her working days. Here
they sprawled on their beds in postures which would have made Sister Spruce go white with horror and then scarlet with fury. They sat in groups playing cards or board games and in one corner someone was clearly working hard on a project that involved the use of cane and board and glue in great quantities and had spread it around lavishly. Some men were playing darts with a board pinned upon a screen, and another was tapping at a typewriter at a central table. There was a radio playing ‘Music While You Work’ very loudly, competing with a lot of laughter coming from a group who were clearly gambling - a totally forbidden activity in any hospital she had ever worked in - and altogether the place looked rather more like a private club room than the sort of hospital ward she knew. She turned to look at Davey and opened her mouth to say as much, and then closed it as she saw the great beam of delight that illuminated his face.

‘Every doctor that comes here from outside starts off looking like you do right now,’ he said with vast satisfaction. ‘Dead dumbfounded, that’s what. Really easy-going here, isn’t it? None of your usual sit-up-and-do-as-you’re-told stuff for our chaps, eh? But there, look at them - you wouldn’t expect it, would you? Not with what they’ve got to put up with, and the time they have to spend here. Not that they’re here all the time, of course. Pop out into the town, they do, when they want to, go on the occasional bender - though if they get too boozed up the Boss gives ’em the rough side of his tongue, I can tell you!’

‘I imagine he does,’ Charlie said weakly and turned back to look at the ward. ‘I - can you tell me about these patients? About their treatment, that is?’

‘Of course I can!’ he said, almost indignant. ‘Knows ’em all like the back of my hand, I do. Treated most of ’em in the bath unit, haven’t I? Course I can tell you -’

And tell her he had, walking between the beds, introducing her to man after man, and she had somehow pinned a smile on her face and kept it there, not knowing how she did it. Because with all her experience of the disagreeable sights that parade each day in every hospital - and she had her fair share of them - she had never seen anything like this.

Young men, all of them, some very young - there were boys of little more than twenty or so, as well as more settled
ones in their thirties, but generally youthful - they sat there and showed her faces so appallingly damaged that it was all she could do not to show her horror. Faces twisted with fire, with eyelids vanished and lips lifted in perpetual snarls and skins that looked like scratched and torn fabric that had about as much similarity to normal human skin as the tough boarded wooden floor on which she was walking.

And it wasn’t only that; there were men in the process of having special pedicle grafts made. She could remember reading articles in her
Lancet
and in other medical journals of the technique; or the way in which flaps of skin and soft tissue were raised from bellies to be sewn to chests and then, once the new circulation had established itself, as it usually eventually did, were severed from their original site and lifted to be sewn on to an upper arm. And then when the slow development of a new blood supply there was complete, lifted once again to be attached to areas of the face which had been burned away.

So, there were men here with their arms raised in what seemed like absurd perpetual salutes, the weight of their limbs held in plaster cradles that stuck out at awkward angles yet which allowed the lumps of flesh attached to their faces to make an incongruous bridge between upper arms and cheeks. There were men for whom the pedicle end attached to the upper arm had been severed, so that the arm could be left to heal, leaving the pedicle dangling from the face like some obscene sausage, waiting to be removed in the operating theatres and tidied up once it was clear that a good union had formed. There were men with pedicles that had been grafted to noses which were still at the stage where the pedicle hung down like a human elephant’s trunk. There were men who were without noses at all, with just gaping holes where they had been, and men with no lower jaws, and tubes emerging, snakelike and hideous, from the vast gaping spaces which were their mouths. There were men in bandages, so all-enveloping that they looked like mummies, and men who stared from perpetually open watering lidless red eyes at the world which had treated them so appallingly.

It smelled odd too, this ward. There was the usual scent of lysol and carbolic and ether but something more besides, a strange kitcheny sort of smell, and she realized after a while it was the scent of burned flesh; and still there was something
more besides. Flowers, of course, and - she thought, trying to concentrate on the messages from her nose in an effort to keep her pity for these desperately damaged young men from boiling over into tears - and something else. And suddenly she was a child again, out at Tiger Point at home, smelling the sea. Salt water. A disconcerting smell to find so strongly represented in the cocktail of odours that was the Ward Three atmosphere of Queen Victoria Hospital at East Grinstead in the middle of green Sussex.

And all the while as she and Davey walked along the long room he talked. He told her of how the men had suffered their injuries, and he told their stories in simple direct language that was more chilling than the most hyperbolic descriptions could have been.

‘Flying a Hurricane, this chap was. Over the Thames estuary. Got hit by a Messerschmitt 109, baled out, but before he could get out of the cockpit, petrol tank went. Blew up, like, ate him up with fire. He’d taken off his goggles, ‘cos he couldn’t see proper with ’em - lots of the boys did that - and his gloves, so’s he could hold the controls better, ’cos the gloves got in the way, so there wasn’t much of what you might call protection. He says he could see his own flesh floating away from him when he was in the water waiting to be picked up. And the place they took him - usual sort of army hospital, you know, all done by the bleedin’ book, shoved on tons of bloody tannic acid. Turned him into a right tortoise, that did. The Boss has been trying to clean him up ever since. Five years it’s been and he’s still in and out of here like the bishop’s in and out of the actress. Sorry miss, didn’t mean to be rude, but all the chaps talks easy here. You know how it is.’

‘I know,’ she said, and was proud of the steadiness of her voice. ‘No need to apologize.’

‘And this chap here - he got burned up inside his plane on the way down. Got out in his para eventually, and just as well he was in it. I mean, he was burned everywhere except where his harness covered him. Legs, arms, belly and all, skinned like a bloody rabbit. But his necessaries were all right, on account of the fit of the harness. When we got him here he was in a right state. They’d wrapped him in dressings at the first aid unit and they’d gone septic. He stank - my Gawd how he stank! We used to soak him for hours on end. The only way he
felt good that was, having his bandages floated off. He’s been coming back for surgery for - oh, I forget how long. He’s had about thirty-five operations now. Not the record but it’s a respectable total.’