A Weekend in The Garden (The Jason Trilogy Book 2) Page 3

  The night senior was back with a steaming mug. ‘Three spoons of sugar.’

  ‘That’ll not help the rations. Ta.’ Mr Parsons drank thirstily. ‘Can’t be too warm for me when it comes to a drop of char.’ Sufficiently revived, he jerked his head at Bed 5. ‘What’s he done then?’

  ‘Hit a telegraph pole. No one else hurt.’

  ‘More than some can say. Where’d he get it? Up top the Down?’ She nodded. ‘Bound to, this weather. We’ll pay for it. Won’t surprise me if we’ve a good storm tomorrow ‒ and that’ll not please the farmers,’ he added with grim satisfaction.

  ‘I expect you’re right,’ she whispered with real conviction. A storm meant rain; rain meant her boyfriend would be off his hay-bailer all weekend; and it seldom took her more than a few seconds to convince herself of anything she wanted to believe.

  The air was cooler on the rolling crest of the ridge known locally but on no map as Oakden Down. In certain lights the long arm of the hill looked almost close enough to touch from the front windows of the old house of The Garden, in other lights the hill seemed miles back. In reality, the foot of Oakden Down was half-a-mile from the new roundabout at the northern entrance to Oakden high street.

  In the clarity of that navy blue summer night the old London road running up from the roundabout was a narrow grey arrow against the long, high, dark shadow crowned to the right of the disappearing arrow by a sparse line of lights. The old road had first been hewn out of the turf and the chalky soil by the Romans who had come and conquered and gone, leaving behind their road and their Mithraic altar stone with the still visible crumbling carved ox’s head on which Mr Parsons and his fellow ringers draped their overcoats and jackets before pulling the heavy ropes of the bells in the tall, square, grey Norman tower of St Matilda’s, Oakden’s parish church. The lights on the right crest had first appeared in the early 1920s and were the lights of Oakden Sanatorium.

  The Sanatorium was a long, lowish, widely-spaced and windowed accumulation of villa and single-wards that had been built when tuberculosis remained the greatest killing disease of young British adults. It was not until the very late 1940s that owing to the new drugs, methods of treatment, better living conditions and arguably the orange juice and cod liver oil available to all growing children during and since the second world war, for the first time in recorded British medical history the fatal throttle of the disease had begun to lessen. For the first time Oakden Sanatorium had a few empty beds and more up-patients than bed-patients. It had been designed with care and imagination to cater for bed-patients. All the wards overlooked the falling hillside, Oakden and the miles of fertile land that as in the middle ages, swept right up to the narrow outskirts of the town. Outspread below was an exquisite mosaic of apple and cherry blossom, young green hops climbing the forests of poles, acres of corn, hay, barley, clover, all sloping imperceptibly down to the broad green stretch of marsh slit with topaz dykes and alive with sheep that edged that part of the coast. On fine days the Sanatorium patients could see the English Channel. When they could see the French coast, the old hands told the new there’d be no beds outside tomorrow. ‘See over to the Frogs and it’s a sure sign rain’s coming.’

  Most of the patients on the hilltop were asleep that night, but one single-ward patient was wide awake. He lay propped up by many pillows, untroubled by heat and insects as his room was in darkness and had only three permanent walls. The fourth that faced the view, was made of glass panels now folded right back to flood the little room with cool, clean night air. He lay very still, with his glasses and binoculars hidden under his top sheet, and listened to the footsteps fading down the corridor. The steps belonged to the young night nurse he and his wife privately nicknamed Sugar Plum. Sugar Plum was his favourite nurse, but when she put her head round his corridor door a few minutes ago, he pretended sleep. There were times when he enjoyed their nocturnal chats but this wasn’t one of them.

  He smiled wearily and rather guiltily. Poor little Sugar Plum. With any luck, by his morning wash, her adrenalin would have recovered from the discovery that men were deceivers ever. It was a bloody wonder she’d managed to avoid having to repel a boarder till last night. She was an extremely pretty, curvaceous kid with lovely auburn hair and wide innocent amber eyes, but solid wood between the ears. The wood had never bothered him until tonight because she was very kind-hearted. After two years in hospital and San beds he had long understood why every patient he ever encountered in his years on the other side of the bed rated kindness as the most important qualification any doctor or nurse could possess. The wood worried him now as he’d been responsible for introducing Sugar Plum ‒ whose name was Nurse Ash ‒ to the chap who had sent her adrenalin soaring. This had happened about five weeks ago when the young man had driven his cousin ‒ an old friend of Mark’s ‒ to the sanatorium. Mark had been amused to see the alacrity with which David Hartley had suggested Sugar Plum show him the garden, but was now equally dismayed at the girl’s distress.

  ‘You’re not to blame yourself, Dr Jason,’ Sugar Plum insisted tearfully. ‘You’d never met him before. How were you to know he’s a wolf? And how was I to know that ‒ that ‒ was what he meant when he said why didn’t we go back to his friends’ flat for a coffee after the flicks? I was jolly thirsty. It was jolly hot in Arumchester last night and I knew he’s got these friends and I thought they’d be there and it’s not as if he said anything about seeing his etchings! I’m not wet! I’d have known what that meant! But, coffee ‒’

  ‘Coffee, tea, fizzy lemonade or a nice refreshing glass of cold water. If it’s “back at my place”, nurse, bung your shirt on the lot and start running.’

  ‘I wish I’d understood! You always understand everything, Dr Jason. I suppose it’s because you’re a doctor.’

  Mark Jason flicked back his long heavy pale brown forelock, looked at her over his glasses and grinned. She was too preoccupied by her boyfriend’s perfidy to notice the grin didn’t reach Jason’s eyes. She said sadly, ‘I thought him such a dream-boat. My friend Teresa says the dreamboats are always the worst wolves.’ She looked at him sadly. ‘I’m sure you were never a wolf, Dr Jason.’

  He grinned properly. ‘No oil painting, nurse. Just a fascinating monster.’

  She giggled. ‘You always make me laugh. I wish you’d been there last night. We had an awful row. I don’t know why he had to get so angry. I told him, if anyone has a right to be angry it’s me. Then I rushed out and he rushed after me and had to drive me back as there’s no bus that late and Home Sister would’ve reported me to Matron if I hadn’t come back as I hadn’t got leave to stay out all night though I was on nights off. He didn’t say one word from Arumchester to our Home and just slammed the door when I got out, turned the car round and drove back to Arumchester. He’d said earlier he was down all weekend. I ‒ I ‒ thought he might ring this evening or something to say he was sorry. He didn’t.’ She blinked her wide eyes pathetically. ‘My friend Teresa says good riddance. Oh goodness ‒ that’s 4 ringing and I haven’t done your pillows or anything ‒’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks. You’ll deal with Miss Whatsit in 4. And don’t take it too hard, nurse. Only next time, stick to a shandy in the nearest pub.’

  She blushed. ‘Dr Jason, I’ve never been into a pub in my life! My mother would never forgive me if I set foot ‒ oh, she’s ringing again ‒ sure you’re all right? Bye-bye for now!’

  ‘Cheers, nurse.’

  Saved by the bell, he reflected, as her steps died away. He had been grateful to the demanding female in 4 as, much as he liked Sugar Plum, emotional scenes drained his depleted energies. Very slowly he replaced his glasses, and raised the binoculars. He had trained himself to move slowly and not resent the necessity, since resentment used up emotional energy. Being so short-sighted, even with his glasses and the aged binoculars his father had used in the trenches of the first world war, Jason generally had difficulty focusing on distant objects, especially at night. After a year’s prac
tice he could easily pick out the pinpoints of light outlining the tiny L behind The Garden. When that L was lit-up he never wanted to talk.

  He knew no lights were visible from the windowless theatre proper; that those on the left came from the surgeons’ and anaesthetic rooms; those on the right, from Sister Theatre’s office, the nurses’ changing room, glove, linen and stockrooms. The brightest light at the east end marked the ramp entrance to the department’s corridor and the dimmest was the one from the window at the far end of the corridor. He had never been inside The Garden but knew its geography better than that of the San, having been a bedpatient since admission. On warm, dry, spring and autumn days, and cool dry summer days his bed was pushed out onto the broad, built-up concrete ramp that ran the length of the buildings on the hillside. He hadn’t been out since Sunday as the sun had been too hot.

  He fumbled under a pillow for his old throat torch, flicked it onto his watch face and frowned. They’d been at it too long even for a perforated appendix, strangulated hernia, or P.G.U. (Perforated Gastric Ulcer). Roads. And from the time, a bad one. Inevitable in this heat. There were now only occasional moving blurs of lights on the hill road, but most of today the down traffic had been nose-to-tail. Thank God this wasn’t a Bank Holiday weekend or it would be murder. At Whitsun and Easter the poor little joint had nearly burst at the seams. She’d said it kept reminding her of Martha’s in ’44. ‘Smashed up as badly as by the doodles.’

  He lowered the binoculars and blinked at the blurred lights below, but for more than a few minutes didn’t see them. He didn’t smell the clean dark air, nor hear the country quiet broken by the occasional engine of a car, hoot of an owl, or the uncanny whirring of the bats flitting by his open wall. For those minutes he was back in the hot stuffy atmosphere of a first floor wartime ward in St Martha’s, London. A ward with bricked-in windows, heavily battened balcony doors, that was lit by the red glow of the overhead nightlights and the pools of crimson radiating through the open red screens round the beds of the Dangerously Ill Patients and the dead. Two screens for DILs. Three for the dead. Twenty white beds down each side with always at least a couple behind open screens, and so often, a third emergency row down the middle filled with the newly injured air-raid victims with begrimed faces as grey as the grey Casualty blankets heaped over them. He could see those grey faces as clearly as he could hear in memory the banshee wailing of the long silent and forgotten air-raid sirens and the evil jerking roaring of the long silent and forgotten flying bombs that Londoners had called ‘doodle-bugs’.

  Wally’s, he thought, Wally’s. Officially, Walter Walters Ward, but to staff and patients, Wally’s, with a couple of exceptions. One had been the now retired Senior Night Sister, the other was the present Sister, Sister Walter Walters Ward ‒ and though he didn’t at the moment connect the fact, the young woman who was as indirectly responsible as himself for Sugar Plum’s tears, since she had been the visitor Sugar Plum’s erring boyfriend had called to collect. Jason was still in 1944 ‒ August, he remembered, late August, when he had limped up to Wally’s for his usual night round with his feet and varicose veins giving their usual hell and for the first time seen the new blonde night junior, Nurse Carter. Just one look and he’d gone down ‒ kerplop. For the next two months he had nightly been in and out of Wally’s ‒ he’d had to be ‒ Wally’s was one of MacDonald’s wards and he, Jason was old Mack’s house-surgeon. He had never had the time, or guts, to talk to Nurse Carter until the bloody hideous night when Mack’s wife was killed by a flying bomb and a few hours later one of the other Wally’s night nurses was killed by rocket blast. It was that night, because he was so upset, that he had blurted out his feelings to Nurse Carter before he even knew her Christian name. And she’d had to ask his, after she told him she loved him. They got engaged in thirty seconds flat on Wally’s balcony early that glorious morning after that bloody hideous night.

  God, it had been good. More than good. More than he ever dared dream or hope.

  He put his glasses on his locker, closed his eyes, and was back in the present. Must be hotter than hell in that theatre now. Bloody hell for her. But that wouldn’t stop her shoving her bike up the damned hill as soon as she’d had breakfast and changed. And at the thought of seeing his wife again in a few hours, he smiled instinctively. He had a very sweet smile and in the darkness his whole face was illuminated. He had a long, too pale, too thin, but very English face that was etched with humour, intelligence, and illness. He was a young man of thirty-one who loved life and whose love for his wife was the driving force of his life. ‘I never have to ask if your Catherine has been in, Mark,’ said Dr Skinner, the senior physician who insisted on using the old title Medical Superintendent, ‘I merely have to glance at your chart. If all my other patients’ spouses kept their temps. down so reliably, I’d have to contemplate joining the brain-drain.’

  Still smiling, Jason reached for the glass of water on his locker-top. He was so absorbed by the mental vision of his wife’s lovely face and spun-glass hair that she always wore floating just clear of her shoulders when visiting him, that for once he forgot to move slowly. He didn’t notice the glass of water seemed heavier than usual or that the slight extra exertion left him more breathless than usual. He dropped off, smiling, and after about an hour woke briefly, replaced his glasses, raised the binoculars and sighed thankfully. Off. He was asleep again inside of five minutes. Had he stayed awake for another five, he would have seen the theatre lights below going on again one by one and very swiftly.

  Chapter Two

  ‘If you’re wanting a short-cut back to Mr Gordon’s house, sir, just you step starboard off the ramp after the theatre, set course up through Casualty yard and the new ambulance road to the high street, cross over and you’re at anchor. Save you losing your bearings going down all them turnings in the house.’

  ‘Indeed. Thanks, porter.’ MacDonald studied the stubby, greying head, stolid face and stance of the night porter, in the ramp lights. ‘When did you leave the Navy?’

  Henry, the porter, grinned appreciatively. ‘November of ’45, sir.’ He noted every detail of MacDonald’s elegant professional suit, angular, long-jawed face and spruce black hair. During Henry’s six years in the Royal Navy he had spent twenty-three days in an open boat in the South Atlantic. It had been in that open boat that he had properly learnt to know his fellow men. He didn’t enquire after MacDonald’s war service. He went on, ‘I come back as deputy Head Porter after me demob.’

  MacDonald’s keen dark gaze had moved to the shadowed, sweet-scented flower-beds, the greyish stretches of lawn, then up to the dimmed lights of the old house, then still higher to the distant sparse row of lights against the north-eastern sky. ‘Here before the war?’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir. Started as a lad as under-porter in ’33, sir.’ He jerked a thumb at the surgical wards. ‘We’d none of this lot then nor the new theatre and new side road. Just the forty odd beds up the house and the old theatre in the old butler’s pantry and a proper tight berth it were.’

  MacDonald withdrew his gaze from the distant lights and studied his feet whilst he collected his thoughts. ‘I believe you.’ He looked up. ‘How long’ve you been on nights?’

  ‘October, ’48, sir. Well, they’d made me Head Porter just afore The Change, but I couldn’t be doing with that on days, sir. So the wife she says, you wants to ask to step down on nights ‒ you ask to step down. Best on nights on me own since The Change, sir.’

  ‘The ‒ change?’

  ‘Health Service, sir.’ From Henry’s tone the first two words were spelt with four letters.

  The habitual rigidity of MacDonald’s face was unaltered but briefly a small, empathetic smile lit his eyes. ‘And there’s just the one porter at night?’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir. Night Cas. porter, night theatre porter, night ward porter, night boilerman, night switchboard operator ‒ that’s me ‒ unless I got to be out of me lodge then the Cas. night nurse or the Night Sisters goes on watc
h on me board. Leastways, it was always them till that orderly Mrs Ford come on nights last autumn. Proper handy she is seeing she’d the five years on the Arumchester Exchange afore she married.’

  For a few moments MacDonald looked at Henry in silence. ‘Only one hospital switchboard?’

  ‘Oh no, sir. The big main board just off the front hall and the tiddler night board in me lodge. The girls as work the main board shifts come on watch seven of a morning and pack up ten of a night. Night board only takes the outside and inside calls as come atween.’ MacDonald nodded non-committally. ‘Best be on me rounds and seeing to me boilers.’

  ‘Before you go, may I ask your name?’

  ‘Henry, sir. Well ‒ Jenner, H. S. ‒ but it’s been Henry since I come till The Change when they says it’s got to be Mister Jenner. Couldn’t be doing with that. Henry I am up The Garden, I says,’ he pronounced it Gardeen, ‘and Henry I stays.’

  ‘I appreciate your attitude. Goodnight, Henry.’

  ‘Goodnight, Mr MacDonald, sir.’

  Henry continued his unhurried tour of the ramp and garden and looked back over his shoulder as he stepped onto the narrow length of lawn between the two wards. Sharp, Henry reckoned, proper sharp and no messing about once he come aboard for all he seemed a pleasant quiet-spoken gentleman. Scotch same as Mr Gordon but a very different cut to his jib. No turning the other eye, times, with this one. And from the way he’d stopped to take a look at the theatre, someone was for it and since Henry reckoned that someone was most likely that nice lad Rolls, young Rolls was in luck. Maria Ward had rung for him just after Henry put through Mr MacDonald’s call to the old Super saying he was going off watch.