A Surgical Affair (13 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Autumn arrived. The trees in the hospital garden turned to brown, the radiators were switched on and Diana packed away her summer dresses.
She and Mark were no longer happy and carefree. A strain, a different tension had grown up between them; so that meeting in the corridor they no longer smiled at each other, and sitting together at breakfast they hardly spoke.

Diana often spent her free evenings playing records, alone in Mark’s room. Looking through his window at the Great Bar, bright and defiant in the clear, cold sky, or sitting in his armchair in the glow of the firelight, music filling the
room
, she felt near to him, she could almost hear his voice.

Tired of the sight of sickness and suffering, Diana would escape into this other world, Mark’s world. She felt she belonged in that room, which was his home, so far from the land where he grew up. Her love for him gave her a right to be there; the right to look at his books, or to touch his sweater, thrown carelessly onto a chair.

She was content for the moment to know and love Mark, to remember their jokes, their embraces, the hours of working together. Diana was not thinking of the future; the present was enough.

It was after one of these evening ‘record orgies,’ as she thought of them, that Diana went down to the common-room.

“We’re starting to think about the Christmas show,” Mike Simons told her. “Do you sing, swallow swords or do acrobatics?”

“Juggle, cut women in half or produce white mice out of a tram driver’s sock?” asked Dr. David Slater. He was a pathologist; a small, thin man, with a ginger moustache, who produced the show every year. Before starting as a medical student, he was a professional actor for years.

“Well, as a matter of fact,” said Diana, smiling as she dropped into the nearest armchair, “I play the double bass.”

“Really? Rather unfeminine.”

“Where on earth do you keep it?”

When the general consternation had died down, Diana went on, “I started playing at school, in the orchestra and did a bit at Oxford afterward.”

“Oh dear, only classical stuff,” said David Slater, disappointed.

“I can play swing, too. At least, I did for the revue at school.”

And so Diana was
e
agerly enlisted for at least three items in the hospital show. She managed to hire a double bass from the local music shop, and during the next few weeks practised for hours in the store room above the pathology laboratory, where the hospital piano was kept.

A few of the doctors and nurses were rehearsing there after lunch one day; noisily, argumentatively, but as enthusiastically as any professional group.

“Sister Baker has a good contralto voice,” Mark reminded them. “I hear she sings in the show ever year.”

“Let’s have her singing Jerusalem or Land of Hope and Glory, draped in a Union Jack!” Tony Spring suggested, grinning.

“What about some Ivor Novello tunes, with the rest of us providing the chorus?” said
Diana, and the
y
all agreed.

Mark, wearing a cloth cap, gave his monologue about the man who was taken up to the operating theater by mistake, having just
d
ropped off to sleep for five minutes on one of the trolleys in Charity Ward.

The hospital chaplain did a sketch about a short-sighted gardener and sang some Gilbert and Sullivan. Both acts were well received by the
audience, because normally Father O’Shanahan was such a serious, dignified figure.

David Slater, who was to emcee the show, tried out a few of his jokes on them all.

Those weeks were happier ones for Diana. She threw herself into the life of the hospital and was too busy to worry about her own troubles.

At one of the evening rehearsals Mark told Diana he was not seeing Denise any more.

“I met her at the airport when she returned from France. We drove to her apartment and I told her it was all over,” he said quietly.

They were sitting on the floor in a corner of the room, while a group of nurses practised their “Scene in Matron’s Office.”

“That must have given her a shock,” said Diana, because although she had never met Denise, she felt a sympathy and understanding for her.
Diana had imagined the same thing happening to herself so often; the complete despair she would feel if Mark told her they would never meet again.

He shrugged. “At first she cried, said how cruel and ungrateful I
was, but she knew it would happen one day. I’d always warned her not to get too used to me being around, that I didn’t love her, and never would.
After a while the tears stopped, and she was her usual bright self. Don’t worry. I bet you, in a few months she’ll have another man firmly in tow.”

“Did she ask why it was all so sudden? Why didn’t you tell her in France?”

“No, but she probably guessed. Anyway, in France I didn’t
know I was in love with you, at least I didn’t admit it to myself.”

Slowly, Diana repeated to herself the words Mark had just said.
In France I
didn’t know I was in love with, you
. She realized that, at last, in that simple, unexpected phrase, he had told her he loved her.

No great announcement, no passionate speech; just a casual remark, which she had waited to hear for so long. How Like Mark!

“I think I knew for sure that I loved you,” he went on, gazing straight ahead, “when we were up on the roof, that hot afternoon,
do you remember? It was such a glorious feeling of contentment, of peace. I didn’t tell you that evening, though. I was so bewildered
by it all.”

Diana smiled. “I knew I loved you long before that. It was after the car accident. You looked so pale and helpless. I wanted so much
to help you, to make you strong and active again.”

She sat in contented, happy silence for a moment, then Mark grinned at her. “This is a fine setting for a love scene—a draughty
room above the path lab, surrounded by worn-out mattresses and packing cases.”

“
Mmm. We should be on a moonlit balcony—in evening dress, or by a fountain in Rome.”

He shook his head. “This is better.”

“Why?”

“Because Sister Baker knows I’m here, if she wants me in her ward urgently,” and they laughed.

“You can’t use the Cadillac any more,” said Diana, looking at him.

“Nope. I’ve had to get used to walking again. But I couldn’t go on seeing Denise, when all the time it’s you I want to be with. Rather like taking tablets, instead of eating proper meals.”

“What else did you tell her?”

“I said I’d be going back to Australia soon, and it’s best we should end it calmly now, no scene at the dockside, cables sent out to the ship, that sort of thing.”

His words sent a chill through Diana. She had always known the day would come when he would leave the hospital, and she would be alone, but she preferred not to think about it. But now Australia seemed very far away; a huge, empty country, across miles of ocean.

“It’s definite, then?” she asked, in a choked voice. “You’re going home?”

“I’ve been offered a good job at the hospital where I was a student, working under the Professor of Surgery. Just the sort of thing I want to do.”

“I’m glad,” Diana managed to say, softly but sincerely.

“What will you do when your job ends in January? Decided yet?” Mark asked casually.

“I might apply for a casualty job here, but I haven’t really thought. I feel I belong to Mansion House Hospital, I can’t imagine working anywhere else. Anyway, the first thing I’ll do is sleep for a week.”

David Salter called over to them. “Come on, you two! We’re going to run through the final chorus.”

A few weeks before Christmas, for three evenings, the show was performed; one end of the casualty department being converted into a stage. Hospital staff with their friends, and all patients fit enough to walk or to be wheeled in a chair, came along to see it. The show was one of the important social events of the hospital year, awaited with excitement for weeks beforehand and discussed for months afterward.

As usual it received tremendous applause, because the audience always enjoyed recognizing the performers, however lacking in theatrical talent. Sister Baker received repeated encores for her songs, and Father O’Shanahan was the star of the evening.

Diana stood between Sister Baker and Mark as they all joined in the final chorus on the last night of the show. It was a sad, sentimental tune about the hospital, written by David Slater and sung at every show.

Sister Baker knew the song by heart and had told Diana once that she could never stop her eyes watering as she sang it. She loved the hospital, despite the hard work, but Diana wondered if that show would be Sister’s last. Perhaps next Christmas she would be working in another hospital. It was good to have a change, to gain new experience. But in her heart Diana knew she would still be there, leading the singing; and after all, Mansion House had just saved her life. How could she leave and go somewhere else?

And Mark stood close to Diana; she knew that he too felt the sadness of the song. What would he be doing when Mansion House Hospital held its next Christmas show?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“S
he’s bleeding from a stomach ulcer,” Diana explained quietly, as they left one of the cubicles in Casualty. “You can see she looks as white as paper, she’s sweating, her hands are cold. Those are all signs of haemorrhage.”

“How much blood do you think she’s lost?” asked the junior nurse.

“I’ve no idea. When the daughter came home from the movies her mother was vomiting it up. Goodness knows how long it had been going on. The patient’s too confused and
w
eak to tell us.”

They walked quickly over to Sister’s desk. As they passed the rows of empty benches their footsteps echoed on the tiled floor. Casualty at night was the loneliest place in the hospital, but during the day it was the nerve center. It was nearly midnight. The only other sound was the bubbling of the sterilizing machine in the minor ops. room.

Diana picked up the phone and dialed her ward number. “Dr. Field here. We’ll have to admit a woman of 67, Mrs. Elizabeth Hardy, perforated gastric ulcer
...
One bed left? Good. She’s been in here twice in the last ten years for medical treatment of the ulcer. But this time it may be too late for that. We’ll take her first and hand her over to the surgeons if the worst comes to the worst. Will you arrange for a porter to collect her?”

Diana told the nurse, “I’ll take some of her blood now, so we can get it cross-matched, and drip more into her as soon as she’s in the ward. We must get the blood pressure up.”

“This is my first time on night duty, Dr. Field. It’s funny—I always thought it would be boring, with nothing to do.”

Diana nodded. “We all think that at first. But when you’ve been on nights, you find that the really exciting things happen then. It seems like that anyway. Perhaps it’s because it’s so quiet everywhere. It adds to the drama.”

The nurse hurried back to the cubicle, and Diana asked the switchboard for the resident pathologist. She hoped David Slater was on that night. He didn’t seem to mind getting out of his warm bed to go to the path lab, and he worked quickly.

It was two hours later when Diana had a chance to go along to Night Sister’s sitting room for a cup of coffee. Diana relaxed in the armchair by the fire.

Sister Raines was a large, kind woman with twinkling blue eyes. “Will you have to call the surgeons in, Dr. Field?” she asked. “It’s Dr. Royston on tonight, isn’t it?”

“It’s touch and go at the moment. If she can hold her own during the next hour, she should be all right.”

“But you mustn’t leave it too late, I suppose, or she’ll be too weak to stand the surgery.”

Diana rested her head back on the chair.

“I remember something Mr. Cole once said,” she mused. “A good surgeon isn’t always the person who cuts well with the scalpel and scissors. He must treat the patients properly after the operation so they recover quickly and aren’t left with any disability. But Mr. Cole said that maybe even more important than either of those things is the knowledge and judgment needed to decide—Is an operation necessary? And if so, when should it be done?”

“And that’s what you’re faced with tonight, isn’t it?” asked Sister, smiling sympathetically.

Diana nodded.

“I’ve been on the surgical side for seven years now,” Sister went on. “I must have seen lots of these cases of haemorrhaging from an ulcer, and yet they’re all different—the age of the patient, the way they stand up to it, that sort of thing. You can’t make rules about it.”

“You just have to watch them like a hawk,” Diana agreed. She went back to her ward, where the woman lay in a side room. The chart at the end of the bed, carefully filled in by a nurse, showed that the blood pressure had gone up.

Diana looked at the face asleep on the pillow.

“What sort of person is she?” Diana wondered. “Noisy or quiet? Happy or sad? Perhaps I’ll never know. She’ll get better and go home, and somebody else will be put in this bed.”