I saw little of Nurse Plumtree that day, for the operating list ended in a string of hernias, varicose veins, lipomas, biopsies, and cystoscopies that kept Hatrick and myself in the theatre until eight at night. I threw a white coat over my blood-smudged theatre clothes and hurried down to the wards, which on operating evenings resembled the French lines after Agincourt. Outside Constancy I was surprised to run into Nurse Plumtree in her cloak.
‘I’ve got a strep. throat,’ she said gazing at me sadly. ‘I’ve got to go off duty.’
‘Oh, hard luck.’ I tried not to sound delighted. ‘At least, it’s nothing serious. I’ll go round the ward with Nurse Summers instead. I couldn’t have met you tonight anyway, not after that colossal list.’
‘Don’t give too much responsibility to that Nurse Macpherson,’ she warned me. ‘She’s quite unreliable. Only this morning she mixed up the castor oils with the blanket baths. And don’t stay up too late writing your notes. Promise?’
I nodded vigorously.
‘I must go off to the path. lab, for a swab,’ she ended softly. ‘Goodnight, Richard, dear.’
‘Goodnight. Hope you get better in no time, and all that.’
I went into the ward praying that her throat swab would reveal as sturdy a penicillin-resistant streptococcus as the bacteriologists had seen. It was a selfish thought, but at present complete isolation was the ideal state for Nurse Plumtree.
It was late before I left the ward with an armful of patients’ notes to complete in my room. I ate my cold supper alone in the gloomy dining-room, found a bottle of beer in Grimsdyke’s commode, and settled down at my small desk to reduce Mr Cambridge’s surgical bravura to black and white. After midnight I wrote for the last time, ‘Haemostasis secured and abdomen closed in layers,’ collected the folders, and began to think constructively about Nurse Macpherson. As I walked across the quadrangle to the entrance of the surgical block, I prepared my plan: I would get her cosily into the corner of the ward kitchen, kiss her against the bread-cutting machine, and ask her out next Friday. She would accept delightedly, and the news would seep into the innermost cell of the nurses’ isolation block by breakfast. I felt this was hardly the behaviour of a gentleman, but consoled myself by remembering that desperate ills need desperate remedies.
I was glad to find her in the ward kitchen as usual, alone.
‘My, my, you’re late!’ she greeted me. ‘Today’s victims are all doing splendidly, and old Muggsy’s sent up a couple of extras to help me cope. Hungry?’
‘Phew!’ I waved the air in front of my face. ‘Have you been fumigating the mattresses or something?’
‘Oh, that must be Jimmy Bingham’s tobacco. How many eggs?’
I stiffened. Now I recognized unmistakably the foul breath of Bingham’s pipe, which he lit with the air of a clumsy father on Guy Fawkes Night after every meal.
‘Bingham has been up here, has he?’
‘Been up! He’s eaten me out of house and home.’
My eyes caught the plate on the table, polished clean except for a rim of egg and a few forlorn rinds of bacon.
‘And what was he doing in my ward?’ I demanded.
She laughed. ‘Oh, Jimmy comes up every night after you’ve gone – didn’t you know? I was in the Professor’s ward before I was sent here on days. We got to know each other pretty well.’
‘Oh. I see.’
I had not allowed for a rival in my calculations and I felt outraged that this complication should take the form of Bingham. Deciding quickly that no sane woman could award him greater sex appeal than a fourth-form schoolboy, I continued my plan.
‘Here! What’s the idea?’ she demanded, as I wedged her into a corner.
‘I only wanted to kiss you.’
‘Oh, you did, did you? Well you can get that out of your mind to start with.’
‘But you let me yesterday,’ I said in surprise.
‘Well, I won’t today.’
‘Come out on Friday.’
‘No.’
‘Why.’
‘Because I’m going out with Jimmy Bingham. Now if you’d like the ward report, Mr Gordon, you may have it.’
I drew in my breath.
‘Thank you, Nurse Macpherson. I should.’
I rose the next morning a bitter man. Not only had Bingham condemned me to a lifetime of living with Nurse Plumtree, but his rivalry for the favours of Nurse Macpherson had the familiar psychological effect of making her wildly desirable. It also brought to an end the professional honeymoon that Bingham and I had enjoyed since my return to the hospital. My toleration was already stretched thin, because of his unendearing social habits. There was only one bathroom on our floor, where he came to shave every morning while I was taking my bath. On my first day in the Staff Quarters he had greeted me heartily with, ‘Good morning, old chap. While there’s life there’s soap, eh?’ which was passably funny as a before-breakfast pleasantry, but when he repeated it the next morning, the morning after that, and every morning for the following weeks, I was ready to slit his throat with his own razor.
At meals, Bingham made a point of sitting next to me to emphasize our new chumminess, and though he was too careful about money to let slip a technicality and incur a fine he found it difficult to keep his thoughts away from his work while eating. ‘Perirenal fat, hylum, medulla, and pelvis,’ he murmured during supper one evening.
‘Look out,’ I whispered. ‘If the Senior Resident hears you, you’ll be down half a crown.’
‘But I’m not talking shop, old chap,’ he said, wide-eyed. ‘See this–’ He stuck his fork into the middle of his steak-and-kidney pie. ‘Nicest piece of dissected kidney I’ve seen for a long time. Young, too – look at those lobulations.’
Shortly afterwards I pointedly offered him the bananas, and I was glad to find he took the rest of his meals on the other side of the table.
I wondered at first if I was hypersensitive, but Bingham had already established his unpopularity with the rest of the Residency by taking all the magazines up to his bedroom, reading the
Lancet
at breakfast, and being unable to glance through a paper without leaving it fit only for wrapping chips. Although he glared furiously at anyone who talked in the common room while he was listening to the Third Programme, he was unable to afford similar respect to his companions’ ideas of evening entertainment. The brewer who had given the new surgical wing to the hospital had admirably topped off his donation with a supply of free beer to the resident doctors, so we never found ourselves short of an excuse for a party. These generally brought Bingham down in his dressing-gown, complaining, ‘I say, let a chap sleep, won’t you?’ until one noisy evening he wrote to the hospital Secretary saying that he would be obliged for a room elsewhere as his colleagues were apparently tearing up the common room immediately below. The Secretary hurried round the next morning to find the room looking as though it had been charged by a rhinoceros, locked the door, pocketed the key, and angrily strode off to find the Dean. We had an hour of dangerous climbing round the fire escape and hard work with pails and brushes, but when the Secretary indignantly threw open the door the Dean found the room as neat as a barracks, with an aspidistra drooping from a brass pot on the piano and an open Bible on the table. But this did nothing to increase Bingham’s likeability.
The crisis came the morning after my frustration by Nurse Macpherson, when I strode into the ward after breakfast and found five strange faces in the beds.
‘Where did those patients come from?’ I demanded from Nurse Summers in astonishment. ‘They weren’t here last night.’
‘They’re Mr Bingham’s.’
‘Bingham’s? But damn it, they were my only empty beds! I’ve got five gastrectomies coming in this morning. What right has he got to put his patients in my beds?’
‘They were the duty firm last night. They’re allowed to board out patients if they’re swamped with emergencies.’
‘What’s wrong with them, anyway?’
She picked up the diagnosis board from the Sister’s desk. ‘They’re all in for observation.’
‘Observation!’
After examining all five, I concluded that one was suffering from severe constipation and the rest had nothing wrong with them at all.
‘Bingham!’ I called, as I spotted him in the corridor, ‘what the devil do you mean by cluttering up my ward with your cases?’
He stiffened. ‘I’ve a perfect right to, old chap.’
‘Perfect right my foot! There’s nothing wrong with any of them. I bet you only admitted them because you couldn’t decide if they had acute abdomens. You were scared stiff of chucking them into the street.’
‘That is a very unprofessional remark,’ Bingham hissed. He stepped into the lift and slammed the gates. Unfortunately, this time it worked.
‘It’s so damnably irritating,’ I told Grimsdyke in his room that evening. ‘Here’s this blasted Bingham, who’s a walking disgrace to the medical profession, and here’s this first-rate girl squandering her precious nights off duty at his feet. I can’t believe it.’
‘No accounting for the taste of women, old lad.’ He stretched himself thoughtfully on his bed. ‘Frightful gargoyles and crooks they fall for sometimes. You’ve only got to look through the wedding photos in the
Tatler.
’
‘But this – this Caliban, Bingham. What on earth can she see in him?’
Grimsdyke screwed his monocle into his eye and stared at the ceiling. ‘Let us not lose sight of the object of the treatment. You wish to purge yourself of the hookworm Plumtree. Right? You intend to administer Macpherson for this purpose. But why not try some other anthelmintic? The hospital’s full of nurses ready to quiver at a houseman’s smile.’
I was silent for a second. ‘As a matter of fact, I’m rather fond of Nan Macpherson.’
‘Balderdash! Simple psychology – you wish to assert your superiority over Bingham by nabbing his mate. It’s happening to chaps all the time.’
‘You don’t understand. She’s a terrific girl, really. Tremendous vitality and good looks, with a wonderful sense of humour.’
‘Delusions, delusions, delusions,’ Grimsdyke murmured, putting his fingertips together.
‘Anyway, what do you know about psychology? All your patients are asleep.’
‘If you don’t believe me, try the experiment in reverse. Dangle Plumtree in front of Macpherson. Make her think she’s wrecking the home. I guarantee she’ll act like a thirsty cat with a saucer of milk.’
Although I had no faith in Grimsdyke’s ability as a psychiatrist, I decided to take his advice because he was a more experienced man of the world than myself. Unfortunately the next day was Friday, and Nurse Macpherson was placed beyond reach by her official three nights off duty. She had clearly hinted to Bingham of my rejection in his favour, because he met me in the quadrangle at lunch-time with a broad grin, slapped me on the back, and said, ‘By the way, old chap. Do you think you’ll need me for anything tomorrow night? I mean to give you a hand with a drip for a perf. or something?’
‘Why should I?’ I asked coldly. ‘I never have done.’
‘No, but just in case. I mean to say, Duckworth’s HS is standing in for me. I’m going out,’ he added, as though announcing he was about to swim the Channel.
‘I hope you enjoy yourself.’
He giggled. ‘I shall, old chap. Don’t go out much you know, but this is something special.’ He slapped his thigh, grinned again, and winked. ‘Eh, old chap?’
‘If you make your intentions as obvious to Nurse Macpherson as you do to me,’ I said sourly. ‘You won’t get her out of the Nurses’ Home. Good afternoon.’
I strode angrily into the nearest doorway, feeling sick.
My determination to win Nurse Macpherson was fanned by Bingham’s grinning at me, rubbing his hands, and declaring, ‘Lovely life, eh?’ every time I met him the next day. Meanwhile, I was glad to hear from the Junior Pathology Demonstrator that Nurse Plumtree was richly infected with
streptococcus pyogenes
, and would be off duty for at least a week. I sent her a letter of sympathy and a bunch of flowers, and patiently waited for the return of her rival.
The campaign was easier than I had expected. I apologized for my behaviour at our last meeting, and explained that her overwhelming attraction had swept me away from Nurse Plumtree, where my thoughts must henceforward dutifully repose. I murmured that, of course, Nurse Plumtree was a delightful girl, but if only Nurse Macpherson had been the staff nurse instead… I passed on all the remarks that Nurse Plumtree had made about her, and prepared to sit in the ward kitchen every night and wait.
That was on Monday. By Wednesday she had agreed to come out to dinner on her night off – as long as I breathed not a word to Bingham – and by Friday she was inviting me to help her look for lost teacloths in the small, dark, cosy linen cupboard behind the ward. On Sunday I decided that I was in love with her; and on Monday more exciting ideas began to take shape in my mind.
‘You know, I’ve been getting on damn well with Nurse Macpherson, thanks to your advice,’ I said to Grimsdyke. ‘Do you think that – I mean, what would you say the chances were of her – well, being as co-operative on a grander scale, as it were?’
‘Pretty good, I should think,’ he replied thoughtfully. ‘She has what the nurses call “a reputation.” Though that might merely mean she paints her toenails red and uses mascara.’
‘Do you think I dare ask?’
‘Why not? At the worst, she can only kick your teeth in.’
After a brief and breathless spell in the linen cupboard that night, I began, ‘Nan, about next week. Instead of just dinner, how about–’ I swallowed. I had dismissed the fire escape as impracticable, because of Bingham. ‘How about nipping out to the country somewhere, you know, and, well, you know?’
There was a surprised pause. ‘Doctor, Doctor!’ she said playfully. ‘Is that an indecent proposal?’
‘It’s a pretty decent one, as far as I can see,’ I said brightly. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be funny about it. But if you’d feel inclined–’
‘You’ll have to go. Night sister’ll be here in a minute.’
‘But about next week–’
‘I’ll see,’ she said, laying her finger on my lips.
‘I promise I wouldn’t tell a soul. Especially Bingham. He hasn’t done the same sort of thing, has he?’ I asked, with sudden horror.