Neames, who had been in a bank in civil life and was dignified, said, “From what I hear, Nurse, there’s been a good deal of mismanagement over staff conditions here.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” said Nurse Adrian correctly. She hurried on. Everyone in earshot, except Charlot, settled down to a solid army grouse.
“Quiet, everyone, please,” said the Charge Nurse. A clump of white coats had appeared in the doorway.
Laurie stubbed out his cigarette, moistened his lips, and waited. They would start on the other side and take more than half an hour to reach him. The thing was to be prepared for the worst; and at once he imagined Major Ferguson saying, “Well, Odell, I think we can get you back the full use of that leg. A few exercises and some massage …” The scene presented itself to him with vivid clearness, like a landscape before a storm.
He had no entertainment to pass the time, except the slow procession across the ward. There was a different lot of students. They came out from the large City Hospital at Bridstow. The pink young man at the end was a new one. Crowded out from the case under discussion, he was running his eye idly along the opposite line of beds. His glance lingered on Laurie; slid away with a flick of his light eyelashes; slid back and lingered again, cautiously, as a fly settles. Laurie, whose nerves were strained, began to be irritated. In heaven’s name, he thought, why so shy? Every second man in this room, on a modest estimate, must have wiped out at least one of his fellow creatures; with the gunners it might run into scores for all they know. That poor little devil with the white eyelashes, with any luck at all, will probably save enough lives to balance the book. But because something holds him back from reproducing himself in time for the next holocaust, here he is peering out at us from under a flat stone. Cheer up, darling, after all you might have invented a bigger and better bomb and got a bloody knighthood. … At this point the young man looked his way again. Rapidly, Laurie caught his eye before he could disengage it, and gave him a deliberately dazzling smile. As he had confidently expected, the young man went crimson, and merged himself deeply in the throng. I do hope, thought Laurie he won’t decide later to write me a little note. But no, I don’t think he puts much in writing. To a nunnery go, why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?
From long practice on mornings like this, he and Reg had perfected an almost soundless speech like that of convicts at exercise. Beg said, “Know that guy?”
“No. Made a mistake.”
“I’ll say. Proper sissy.” But the Sister had turned. He pretended he had only leaned over for a drink from the locker-top.
The clump of white coats moved sluggishly on, clotting around each bed like ants around lumps of sugar.
“Morning, Odell.”
Laurie sat at attention, a little lopsidedly because of the cushions under his leg. “Good morning, sir.”
“Leg more comfortable now?”
“Yes, thank you, sir.”
“Much drainage still, Sister?”
“Very little now, sir.”
“I’ll see it, please.”
The Sister folded back the clothes, snipped the bandage, and lifted the dressing off with forceps. Major Ferguson peered down with simple pleasure, like a gardener at a choice rose. Laurie got his question ready; his hands felt rather cold.
“I think you saw this man after his first operation, sir.”
The question died on Laurie’s lips. He had noticed for the first time, on the visiting surgeon’s shoulders, the tabs of a brigadier.
“… and comminuted patella,” Major Ferguson was saying. “The fractured ends of the femur were extensively exposed and penetrated with gravel and so on. The osteomyelitis responded remarkably well to sulphonamides, but, as you see, we had to open four times in all to remove various sequestra, and about a month ago we began to feel he’d probably be better off without it. However, the callus started to look more promising, and the question then was whether amputation would be justified by the increased mobility he’d get from an artificial limb.”
“The knee’s completely ankylosed, is it?” The brigadier sounded like an intelligent player discussing a chess problem.
“No, sir, we managed to give him a flexion of about twenty degrees, and that decided us to leave it, combined with the fact that we’ve reduced the shortening to just about an inch. The repair of the quadriceps …”
Laurie sat at attention, eyes front. After the blow had reached him through the swathes of technical jargon, he had suddenly remembered the pink young man lurking somewhere at the back. It stiffened his pride, which the two specialists had made to seem nugatory, a trivial reflex like a knee-jerk. Laurie schooled his face, for the necessary minutes, to a wooden noncomprehension; and soon he was alone again, half hearing the exchange of Charlot’s patois and the surgeon’s public-school French. Then he slipped down in bed with the caution of a criminal, lest the counterpane should be disturbed and some nurse come to straighten it. Luckily this fear was a kind of distraction; soon he was able to blot his eyes on the sheet and come to the surface again.
Reg was maneuvering a book in front of his face, signal of a wish to talk. Suddenly Laurie felt a great craving for simple, platitudinous sympathy. He turned around, and held a paper up too.
Reg said, “Had a letter from me dad today.”
“M-m?” The doctors had worked over the next few beds quickly; they were nearing the door. Laurie realized a delayed impression which his tension had excluded before, that all day Reg had been rather like an actor gagging to cover up. “Your dad all right?”
“Dad’s okay. Me better half’s gone off the rails, that’s all.”
Laurie remembered the letter coming and the long silence after. An awful sense of inadequacy appeared ahead of him, like a gulf into which he would have to step. He murmured, “Things get garbled. Gossip and so on.”
“Gossip?” Reg’s coarse-grained forehead puckered down the middle, so that the reddish hairs of his eyebrows met. “She’s gone to live with the mucker, and she’s took our boy.”
“Bloody shame,” said Laurie, desperately trying to make emphasis do the work of sense. Madge Barker was a dumpy, bosomy girl with a dusty, mouse-colored parting in her platinum hair, which she wore shoulder-length, emphasizing the shortness of her neck. Her real-good-sort façade was not so much false as slovenly, like a cover flung over an unmade bed. She looked at every man she met as if there were only one thing she wanted to know about him, but her speech was terrifyingly genteel. Laurie detested her.
“Boy’s turned six now,” Reg was saying. “Kids that age understand.”
“They’ll give you custody.” Thankfully Laurie accepted the side issue.
“Who’d I get to look after him? ’S not just the kid.”
“No, of course. It’s hell.”
“You’re right,” said Reg, and fell silent. But Laurie felt a heavy certainty that he was waiting; for sympathy, for fellow feeling. He felt like a man who has strolled empty-handed into a famine area.
“She can’t be worth it. Treating you like that.” But, he thought immediately after, perhaps she was, perhaps he ought to be urging Reg to understand, to win her back.
“Too true she’s not. But it’s one thing to know you been a mucking fool, it’s another to learn sense.” His face reddened. A shiny rim began to form along his lower lids.
“You know, my father wasn’t faithful to my mother. She minded a lot at the time, but she’s all right now.”
“It’s not the same for a woman. That’s their lot, and nature made them to stand it. But a man’s nature’s different.”
“Is it? It’s bloody hell, Reg, I know. I’m terribly sorry.”