Sister Brumfett said: ‘To obey orders implicitly and be loyal to their superiors. Obedience and loyalty. Teach the students those and you’ve got a good nurse.“
She sliced a potato in two with such viciousness that the knife rasped the plate. Sister Gearing laughed.
“You’re twenty years out of date, Brumfett That was good enough for our generation, but these kids ask whether the orders are reasonable before they start obeying and what their superiors have done to deserve their respect A good thing too on the whole. How on earth do you expect to attract intelligent girls into nursing if you treat them like morons? We ought to encourage them to question established procedures, even to answer back occasionally.”
Sister Brumfett looked as if she, for one, would willingly dispense with intelligence if its manifestations were so disagreeable.
“Intelligence isn’t the only thing. That’s the trouble nowadays. People think it is.”
Sister Rolfe said: “Give me an intelligent girl and I’ll make a good nurse of her whether she thinks she has a vocation or not You can have the stupid ones. They may minister to your ego but they’ll never make good professional women.” She looked at Sister Brumfett as she spoke and the undertone of contempt was unmistakable. Dalgliesh dropped his eyes to his plate and pretended more interest than he could feel in the careful separation of meat from fat and gristle. Sister Brumfett reacted predictably:
“Professional women! We’re talking about nurses. A good nurse thinks of himself as a nurse first and last Of course she’s a professional woman! I thought we’d all accepted that by now. But there’s too much thinking and talking of status nowadays. The important thing is to get on with the job.”
“But what job exactly? Isn’t that precisely what we’re asking ourselves?”
“You may be. I’m perfectly clear what I’m doing. Which, at the moment is coping with a very sick ward.”
She pushed her plate to one side, flicked her cloak around her shoulders with brisk expertise, gave them a valedictory nod which was as much a warning as a good-bye, and strutted out of the dining-room with her brisk ploughman’s waddle, the tapestry bag swinging at her side. Sister Gearing laughed and watched her go.
“Poor old Brum! According to her, she’s always got a very sick ward.”
Sister Rolfe said drily: “She invariably has.”
III
They finished the meal almost in silence. Then Sister Gearing left, first murmuring something about a clinical teaching session on the E.N.T. ward. Dalgliesh found himself walking back to Nightingale House with Sister Rolfe. They left the dining-room together and he retrieved his coat from the rack. They men passed down a long corridor and through the outpatients’ department It had obviously only recently been opened and the furniture and decoration were still bright and new. The large waiting-hall with its groups of Formica-topped tables and easy chairs, its troughs of pot plants and unremarkable pictures was cheerful enough, but Dalgliesh had no wish to linger. He had the healthy man’s dislike and disgust of hospitals, founded partly on fear and partly on repugnance, and he found this atmosphere of determined cheerfulness and spurious normality unconvincing and frightening. The smell of disinfectant, which to Miss Beale was the elixir of life, infected him with the gloomier intimations of mortality. He did not think that he feared death. He had come close to it once or twice in his career and it had not unduly dismayed him. But he did grievously fear old age, mortal illness and disablement He dreaded the loss of independence, the indignities of senility, the yielding up of privacy, the abomination of pain, the glimpses of patient compassion in the faces of friends who knew that their indulgences would not be claimed for long. These things might have to be faced in time unless death took him quickly and easily. Well, be would face them. He was not arrogant enough to suppose himself secure from the lot of other men. But in the meantime, he preferred not to be reminded.
The out-patients’ department was next to the casualty department entrance and as they passed it a stretcher was wheeled in. The patient was an emaciated old man; his moist lips spewed feebly above the rim of a vomit bowl, his immense eyes rolled uncomprehendingly in the skull-like head. Dalgliesh became aware that Sister Rolfe was looking at him. He turned his head in time to catch her glance of speculation and, he thought, contempt.
“You don’t like this place, do you?” she asked.
“I’m not very happy in it, certainly.”
“Neither am I at present, but I suspect for very different reasons.”
They walked on for a minute in silence. Then Dalgliesh asked if Leonard Morris lunched in the staff dining-room when he was in the hospital.
“Not often. I believe he brings sandwiches and eats them in the pharmacy office. He prefers his own company.”
“Or that of Sister Gearing?”
She laughed contemptuously.
“Oh, you’ve got on to that have you? But of course! She was entertaining him last night, I hear. Either the food or the subsequent activity seems to have been rather more than the little man could take. What thorough little scavengers the police are! It must be a strange job, sniffing around for evil like a dog round trees.”
“Isn’t evil a strong word for Leonard Morris’s sexual preoccupations?”
“Of course. I was just being clever. But I shouldn’t let the Morris-Gearing affair worry you. It’s been hiccupping on for so long now that it’s become almost respectable. It isn’t even good for a gossip. She’s the kind of woman who must have someone in tow, and he likes someone to confide in about the awfulness of his family and the beastliness of the hospital medical staff. They don’t exactly take him at his own evaluation as an equal professional man. He’s got four children, by the way. I imagine that if his wife decided to divorce him and he and Gearing were free to marry nothing would disconcert them more. Gearing would like a husband no doubt, but I don’t think she’s cast poor little Morris for the role. It’s more likely…”
She broke off. Dalgliesh asked:
“You think she has a more eligible candidate in mind?”
“Why not try asking her? She doesn’t confide in me.”
“But you are responsible for her work? The clinical instructor comes under the senior nurse tutor?”
“I’m responsible for her work not her morals.”
They had reached the far door of the casualty department and as Sister Rolfe put out her hand to push it open Mr. Courtney-Briggs swept in. He was followed by a half-dozen chattering junior staff, white-coated and with stethoscopes slung round their necks. The two on each side of him were nodding in deferential attention as the great man spoke. Dalgliesh thought that he had the conceit, the patina of vulgarity and the slightly coarse savoir-faire which he associated with one type of successful professional man. As if reading his thoughts, Miss Rolfe said:
“They’re not all alike, you know. Take Mr. Molravey, our ophthalmic surgeon. He reminds me of a dormouse. Every Tuesday morning he patters in and stands for five hours in the theatre without speaking an unnecessary word, whiskers twitching and picking away with fastidious little paws at a succession of patients’ eyes. Then he thanks everyone formally down to the most junior theatre nurse, peels off his gloves and patters away again to play with his collection of butterflies.”