A Weekend in The Garden (The Jason Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  ‘Of course not. This is a professional confidence. I will have to tell The Garden that Miss Dean’s his cousin. We haven’t yet been able to trace any relatives and you know we must. I needn’t say how I heard. I won’t mention you. If you like, you can ring me at The Garden tonight for the latest news.’

  ‘Please! Oh no ‒ I can’t ‒ Night Super won’t let us make personal phone calls on-duty ‒’

  ‘She won’t object to your ringing to give me a personal message from my husband. He’ll think of something for you to say and you ask for me, personally. Got that?’

  ‘Oh yes ‒ thank you ‒ thank you ‒ only ‒ should we tell Dr Jason? He’ll be so upset and Night Sister says upsets are bad for him.’

  Catherine looked at her hand steadying the bike. ‘Your Super’s right, but you won’t be able to stop yourself telling all. It’ll have to go on my list. She looked up, ‘He’ll be even more upset if he hears from someone else ‒ and he will. The grapevine between here and The Garden’s so good ‒ look how you’ve heard about Mr Hartley. I’ll tell him. It’s his lungs that aren’t too good, Nurse Ash,’ she said evenly, ‘not his brain. Leave it to me, go to bed and I hope have a good sleep. Okay?’

  ‘I will, Mrs Jason ‒ thanks awfully! I’m so glad I stopped you. I was watching for you as my friend Teresa said she was sure you wouldn’t mind.’

  Catherine watched the girl skipping off down the side lane behind the Sanatorium to the Nurses’ Home. And from his seat at the desk of his front office, Dr Skinner watched Catherine. For those moments her thoughts were in her face. She felt, she decided, like a piece of soggy blotting paper. She accepted that it was part of her job to act as an emotional blotter for her patients and the staff on-duty and that during working hours her own emotions and anxieties had to give place. But that something had to be done, didn’t automatically mean it could be done successfully. There were more occasions than she could bear to recall when she felt torn in two. This was another.

  She pushed on slowly to the bicycle rack just left of the wide grass-fronted main entrance, fixed in the bike, took a powder compact and comb from the bag in the basket, redid her face and hair. A minute afterwards with the canvas sling bag over one shoulder, instead of taking her usual short cut down the side passage between Villa 2 and the single wards, she went in the front way.

  Dr Skinner pushed his glasses on top of his head, sat back, closed his eyes and meditated on the unmeasurable force of human love.

  ‘May I use your lodge phone to ring The Garden, please, Mrs Gillon?’

  The elderly portress lowered her knitting. ‘Anytime, dear. Had quite a night of it, I hear ‒ but the doctor’s doing nicely they say. That’s nice.’

  ‘Isn’t it. Thanks.’ Catherine made the switch from her personal to her professional life before the Assistant Matron was on the line. The switch had not been easy. She just managed it.

  ‘You’re ringing about Mr Hartley, Bed 5 Men’s Surgical ‒ but we’ve got his next-of-kin, Mrs Jason. Miss Ruth Dean rang from London just after Sister came on-duty at eight. Some friend seems to have told her about her cousin’s accident, she’s driving straight down from London and hopes to be with us between ten and eleven …’

  Thirty miles to the north, at that moment, Ruth Dean changed her new Ford Popular into a lower gear to climb a steeper hill and the red-haired young motor cyclist in a garish yellow shirt and grey slacks streaking ahead suddenly swerved to a stop in a lay-by to make a mechanical adjustment. A little later he roared up behind her and drew abreast as they were stopped by the lights at the top of the hill. He smiled at her pleasant fresh face, calm brown eyes and smooth framing roll of brown hair. He had an engaging smile, he was going home for the weekend on his new bike, and always smiled at young women drivers. ‘Nice day for a trip to the sea, eh, miss?’

  ‘Very nice day,’ she replied with a placid smile. She wasn’t in a flap about David because she never flapped. Flapping never did anyone any good. Mack said he should do all right and she had never known Mack wrong about a patient though he was so wrong to resign ‒ but she mustn’t think about that now as the lights were changing.

  The red-haired young man gave her a friendly wave, roared on ahead and out of sight. He didn’t see another young woman driver on the downs, the bypass or on the hill down into Oakden. Ruth Dean was the last at whom he smiled.

  Chapter Four

  And again, thought Joe Rolls getting off the bench against the wall opposite the lodge in Casualty. Come to the Fair, lasses and lads. Come to the Garden of England and spend your weekends picking bits of the bloody bypass out of stiffs’ heads to get them into something approaching human shape to stop their poor bloody parents from fainting all over the morgue. If one’s going out cold ‒ always the father. Women are realists. What in hell does it matter how it’s happened, after it’s happened?

  He looked at the waiting ambulance stretcher-trolley, leant an elbow on the lodge window shelf and waited for the Head Porter to finish talking to the Path. Lab. on the attic floor. Fifteen minutes ago Dr Edgehurst and the pathologist-on-call had gone up there for coffee when Casualty had emptied for the first time since nine-thirty and MacDonald had left for his belated follow-up clinic in Wilverden Hospital. The clinic was held there on Saturday mornings partially for the convenience of ex-general surgical patients from The Garden living in the out-lying villages, and partially as there was seldom room for it in The Garden. In the pre-bypass past, surgical clinics were held in the plaster-theatre temporarily converted into a clinic room, and the follow-up patients waited on the two benches in Casualty. The second smooth bench was against an inner wall opposite the sterilizing and stock alcoves. ‘Now tell Wilverden, please, Mr Burt. Tell them to hand it on soon as Mr MacDonald shows up.’

  Mr Burt nodded impatiently. He was a slight, dapper, youngish man who prided himself, not unreasonably, that there wasn’t much any doctor had to teach him about his job. He had had four war years in the RAMC and ended up as a Staff-Sergeant, and three years as deputy Head Porter in Arumchester General before taking over The Garden from Henry. He’d been glad of the promotion. The wife had just had her third. He hadn’t cared for the move to the sticks. Mr Burt was an Arumchester man. ‘Wilverden, sharp, please, Doreen,’ he snapped into the receiver, then jammed the mouthpiece under his chin. ‘If Mr MacDonald turns his car round and comes straight back it’ll still be a surprise to me if he’s here in time, Mr Rolls.’

  ‘It’ll be a bloody miracle if he is, Mr Burt,’ retorted Joe, ‘but he’s got to know.’

  The staff nurse in charge of Casualty during the day for that weekend, propped her knuckles on her wide hips. ‘It’s being so cheerful that keeps you blokes going,’ she announced.

  Both men smiled perfunctorily, and not at each other. Had any other nurse in The Garden addressed Mr Burt as a ‘bloke’ she’d have had a piece of his mind. Neither Mr Burt, nor any other man after one look, contemplated giving Staff Nurse Agnes Martin a piece of his mind and not merely because she was a very comely buxom peroxide blonde of twenty-three. She was the most senior and by far the most efficient staff nurse in The Garden and arguably, in the Arumchester Group, and didn’t just give as good as she got. Aggie Martin returned it with interest.

  Joe liked Aggie Martin and thanked God when she was in Cas. ‘What chances do you give him, Staff?’

  She winked without humour. ‘From the cops’ message ‒ same as an icicle’s in hell, Mr R.’

  Aggie Martin was a Londoner trained in one of the great LCC hospitals, who had come to work in Oakden because her favourite and eldest sister with whom she lodged, had been a Land Girl and had married a local man. Aggie’s uniform was always as impeccable as the rows of tight yellow curls that made her American-style cap invisible from the front. She was the only nurse in The Garden who dared visible traces of lipstick on her wide full-lipped mouth. She was in the second half of her year’s contract, and fond as she was of her eldest sister, had no intention of accepting
another in the U.K. From nursing friends now overseas she had heard how much better were the conditions and pay in Australia and Canada. In reply to the only three letters of purely tentative enquiry she had written, she had received firm offers of a sister’s post in large hospitals in Sydney, Perth, and Toronto. She had not yet decided which to accept. There was no hurry. British trained nurses were as much in demand around the world as in their own country and since, in her frequently expressed view, the entire something British nursing profession existed in a state several degrees below slave labour, she was taking her something lamp elsewhere. She loved England, and she loved nursing, but love, as her sister agreed, didn’t buy the baby a new frock. Their youngest sister, a shorthand typist of eighteen, was earning £8.10s a week in London. Aggie, in the most senior grade for NHS staff nurses, took home £24 a month.

  She had just returned through the swing staff door to the old kitchen corridor, from re-calling the radiographer in person to save time. The X-ray Department was built into the old still-room; Casualty in the old kitchen; the plaster-theatre in the old scullery. (The ‘new’ hospital kitchen had been built on at the other side of the back of the house shortly after the outbreak of the first world war.) She hitched up the mask hanging round her neck, made a quick comprehensive check of the treatment alcove she had re-set immediately Casualty emptied, then moved to the open entrance, folded her strong bare arms and narrowed her eyes against the glare. Temporarily she was the only nurse in the department. The day junior was at first lunch; the third year off from ten-to-one. Aggie was off two-to-five, but she wouldn’t bet on it. Not with Sister Cas. off and in Bexhill for the weekend. The third-year was officially down to take over from her, and was, Aggie reckoned, bright enough to cope with the sunburns, mild heatstrokes, sprains and swallowed ice-cream sixpences and threepenny bits they’d get in from the Fair, but not with majors like that young bloke and his girlfriend on pillion they’d just dealt with. She grimaced under her mask. Not that anything any of ’em ‒ not even Mister-just-call-me-MacAlmighty ‒ had done, had helped though they’d done the lot. She’d had to pack the junior off to the plaster-room to get her head down between her legs for herself. ‘Oy oy!’ She tilted her curled head. ‘There’s the ambulance turning down from the High Street.’ She reached behind her for the ambulance trolley and whisked into the burning sunshine of the yard before Joe had time to steer the other end, Mr Burt shoot from his lodge, or the under-porter summoned from pushing electric lunch trolleys from the kitchen, had his white jacket off and blue on. The radiographer had joined the waiting quartet before the ambulance swept up to the entrance with the back doors open before the brake was on.

  Inside of a minute the unconscious young man so enveloped in the ambulance blankets that there was no sign his shirt had once been a garish yellow, was in the hastily screened shut treatment alcove, with the foot of his trolley fixed on the highest blocks, the already heating electric blanket over the others, Aggie holding the oxygen mask in place with one hand and his left radial pulse with the other, and Joe Rolls had tugged off his stethoscope and was giving the first vital injection.

  Dr Edgehurst and the pathologist arrived with the ambulance. The pathologist had under one arm the small wooden box of sterile glass slides and test-tubes without which pathologists felt undressed in the hospital when out of their Lab. He had taken from one cold limp finger the few drops of blood he needed for grouping before Mr Burt and the radiographer heaved forward the heavy portable X-ray machine. Those three men froze momentarily as Joe removed the last layer of the temporary head dressings that had been tied in place by a large white sling. No one could have said what colour the young man’s hair had been. The freckles on Joe’s forehead stood out sharply. Aggie Martin swallowed bile. Mr Burt compressed his mouth to a lipless line and the two ambulance men and the middle-aged police sergeant standing at the foot of the stretcher-trolley, with one gesture eased back their caps as if the exposure of the damp hair plastered to their brows helped them breathe more easily.

  Dr Edgehurst silently clicked his tongue against his upper plate and pumped up the blood-pressure bandage. He knew what the reading would be before he peered through his pince-nez at the mercury. He nodded to himself. Precisely.

  ‘What do we know about him, sergeant?’ Joe’s voice was curt and his hands were steady as he gave another injection.

  ‘Arumchester lad from his driving licence, doctor. No saying why he was coming down into Oakden. Fair, maybe.’ He read from his notebook. ‘Robert Stanley Bell, aged twenty, 15 Station Road, Arumchester. If that’s his parents or his wife’s address and not on the phone, one of our Arumchester lads’ll have knocked on the door by now.’

  ‘If he’s got a wife or parents, get ’em here fast.’ The sergeant had vanished before Joe glanced up. ‘His pulse feel that coramine, Staff?’

  ‘Barely. Only just perceptible now.’

  ‘Right.’ Joe removed the small needle from the metal nozzle of the glass hypodermic syringe, swiftly fitted on a long, strong needle, swabbed with spirit the rubber cap of the coramine bottle Dr Edgehurst held up for him, plunged in the needle, drew up, then held the syringe aloft for Dr Edgehurst to check the contents with him. A few months ago the thought of injecting straight into the heart muscle had terrified Joe. Gave it like a skilled physician, observed Dr Edgehurst. Understandably. The boy’d had enough practice.

  The pathologist reappeared round the open white screens, his face red from his rush from the Lab, a vacolitre of blood under each arm and his box in his hands. The radiographer unplugging his machine, caught his eye and shook his head slowly from side to side.

  Joe glanced up. ‘Not required, thank you, doctor,’ he said mechanically and with a large white sterile towel covered the face and what remained of the head.

  Aggie Martin had removed the mask, and switched off the oxygen before she slowly removed her hand from the pulse that had been still for the last three minutes. She dropped the disconnected mask on the lower shelf of the unused blood-transfusion trolley for re-carbolization (sponging within and without with carbolic solution) before re-use. She removed and switched off the electric blanket before very gently straightening the uninjured arms and legs. No one spoke when the underporter returned and she went with him and the morgue trolley. ‘Sign here, please, Staff,’ he said, and she signed in silence then reached out instinctively and patted very lightly one shrouded shoulder before turning and walking quickly back to Casualty. In the yard, the ambulance men leant against their ambulance smoking Woodbines in silence. Joe and Dr Edgehurst washed their hands side by side at the sinks in the treatment alcove. Dr Edgehurst looked at Joe’s outstanding freckles and reflected sadly that youngsters would do these things. There it was. Third one this morning. Nothing on any of their heads to protect their skulls when they came off and hit the road at around sixty. Did all these youngsters on all these motorcycles now cramming the roads imagine the human skull was constructed of cast iron? Dr Edgehurst shouldn’t wonder if they did. There it was.

  Casualty was still empty when MacDonald’s car drew up outside. He didn’t jump out. He had rung from Wilverden Hospital and could see the sturdy figure in the limp white coat sitting alone on the bench opposite the lodge. Joe walked over as he got out. ‘Parents rung through yet, Rolls?’

  ‘Just after I spoke to you, sir. I rang back but you’d left for here.’ Joe’s voice remained mechanical but he had had time for thought and the pain lingered in his eyes. ‘They’re coming over later this afternoon.’

  ‘Let me know when they arrive. If I’m across the road get me back.’

  ‘Thanks, sir.’ Joe had addressed MacDonald’s tie. He looked up at the controlled face that in that bright light was black, white, and blueish round mouth and chin. ‘Sorry you weren’t here.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have made any difference had you had the entire Royal College of Surgeons here. You did all you could ‒’

  ‘Damn all good that did ‒’

  ‘Da
mn all good anyone can do when two-thirds of the skull and half the brain’s left on the road, laddie,’ retorted MacDonald sharply. ‘That’s what happened and will go on happening until someone can persuade these kids to wear skid-lids, and God knows how they’ll manage that unless they make it a law. All convinced ‒ can’t happen to me. The other chap, yes. Not me.’ He looked into Casualty and thought of his eighteen-mile round trip on country B roads unfitted for the traffic he had passed streaming to the coast. In another and purely conversational tone, he asked, ‘What’s the door-to-door from here to Arumchester General?’

  ‘Twenty-nine miles.’ Joe watched him more curiously. He had spotted the anger at the back of the dark eyes. Not quite the cold-blooded bastard he made out. ‘You can cut off just under two, if you know the short-cuts through Arumchester. The General’s in the town centre.’

  ‘Useful for Arumchester.’

  Joe agreed and briefly they fell silent. MacDonald saw the youth in Joe’s freckled, pugnacious face and the sandy hair that looked schoolboyish in the sunshine. He was the age of the average Martha’s house-surgeon, but every Martha’s house-surgeon had within a few minutes’ call a more experienced surgical registrar; every one of them had on constant hand the advice of the very experienced Senior Surgical Officer, who himself had instantly available the advice of a solid body of consultant surgeons. MacDonald remembered the many pre-war years in the undamaged Martha’s when as a junior resident at one end of the hospital and needed urgently at the other, he had regarded the half-mile ground floor corridor as a hell of a distance.

  ‘I gather from Mr Gordon that his views on The Garden’s need for a full-time registrar haven’t met with much sympathy.’

  Joe pulled a face like a schoolboy. ‘They say we haven’t enough beds and can always borrow a registrar from Arumchester if we have a crisis.’