The Hive (6 page)

‘Hello, East. Bitter tonight, isn’t it? I’d give all I’ve got to go to bed, but the receptionist went off sick with a cold, and I’ve got to cover the switchboard till nine. Honestly, some of these people—no consideration. It wasn’t that much of a cold, and she could have stayed on that bit longer, but, no——’

Her voice was petulant as it always was, her face screwed up into an expression of weary anxiety, an indication of the hardness of her lot, of the way people put upon her, for Sister McLeod was convinced that anything difficult that happened in the nurses’ home was a direct piece of unkindness aimed at her specifically.

‘They’re all the same——’ Dolly spoke almost automatically. ‘No sense of responsibility these days——’

Then, with an uncharacteristic urgency, she said, ‘Close the switchboard early, McLeod. Why should you sit here in a draught just to take messages for the nurses? Let ’em do without for once. It won’t hurt them. I’ll make some hot chocolate and you can relax a bit before bed——’

‘I ought to keep it open till nine, really——’ Sister McLeod blinked up at her. ‘But I
am
tired, and if I don’t get some rest—well, I might get a cold, and who’d let me off early then? But I shouldn’t really——’

‘Oh, come on. I want to talk to you about this afternoon, anyway—come on——’

Dolly needed to talk, suddenly, couldn’t face the thought of a lonely evening in her room, and McLeod, herself Royal trained, would be a comforting listener.

McLeod nodded. ‘All right, then. As you say, it won’t hurt them. The more you let them put on you, the more they do——’

She pulled the plugs out of the switchboard, and turned the light off before following Dolly up the shallow polished staircase to the first floor where the sisters had their rooms.

‘I’ll get out of uniform if you don’t mind, East, first. I’m that tired, I could drop, and I’ll relax better once I’m undressed——’

By the time Dolly had changed into her own nightdress and thick woollen dressing gown, and made the chocolate over the gas ring at the end of the corridor, McLeod had come out of her own room, also dressing gowned, her hair out of its bun and lying in a thin plait over one shoulder.

She settled down into the armchair in Dolly’s room, and rubbed her hands together to warm them as she watched Dolly pour the hot drinks into the flowered china cups on her tray.

‘I do like the way you have your room, East. So homely, and still so nice and tidy——’

Dolly looked round her room, at the embroidered pictures on the walls, the cretonne cushions piled on the folkweave bedspread, at her dressing table with its crocheted duchess set under the cut glass bowl and the silver hairbrushes that had belonged to her mother.

‘Well, I do my best to make it nice. I can’t stand a mess, and you need nice things around——’

‘Honestly, you should see some of the others. I mean, that Cooper—really, her room’s a disgrace to a trained nurse. If any of the students saw how she kept it, after the way I’m always on at them to keep their rooms decent, well, I don’t know what they’d think, or how I’d ever get them to listen to me at all——’

Her voice dropped. ‘And she keeps drink there, you know. No shame about it. Got it on a little table at the bottom of her bed. Gin, and sherry, and orange squash, and if you ask me, she gets the orange squash from the hospital stores. It looks the same as that they send up for the sick bay, and the theatres get it for the surgeons, don’t they?’

‘It goes on all the time, that. The nurses make me sick—always trying to steal cotton wool to make S.T.s—you’d think they’d have more shame, but they don’t care. Does Cooper drink a lot?’

McLeod took her chocolate and sipped it gratefully.

‘Well, I can’t say I think she does. She’s had the same bottles there a long time—I mean, I don’t find piles of empties or anything—but that’s not the point, is it? It’s the principle. Once one gets started on it, and who knows what can happen? And it’s a bad example—what the maids must think of it, I can’t bear to imagine but there’s nothing I can do. I can’t go tattling to Matron about a sister, can I? Though I would have to if it were anyone else, a staff nurse, or anyone.’

‘Even if you did, you wouldn’t get far with this matron, not the way you would have done with Miss Biggs. She’d have been very upset about it, but this one, with her lipstick and her powder—she probably keeps drinks in the flat herself.’ Dolly couldn’t bring herself to say ‘her flat’. ‘What do you think of her?’

‘The new matron?’ McLeod put her cup down, and sighed. ‘Well, honestly, East, I was so upset this afternoon, making us all report together like that. Dreadful, it was. I felt like a fool! I mean, I know people don’t think much of the work I do, but it’s important work, really, looking after this Home, and the nurses and everything—but when you read it out it doesn’t sound anything, does it? I could just
feel
that Cooper sneering behind me all the time. We can’t all be theatre sisters, can we? I’d like to see how they’d get on if I weren’t here, and there was no one to keep this place up to the mark. They’d complain soon enough then——’

Dolly rode over this familiar theme.

‘This group discussion idea—what do you think of that?’

McLeod sniffed. ‘I never heard such a lot of rubbish in my life. We’ve enough to worry about without all that sort of thing. As if it’d do any good—and it sounds a bit nasty to me——’

‘Nasty?’

‘Prying—what do we feel, what do we think? I mean, we may be nurses, but we’re entitled to our private lives, aren’t we? Why should we have to talk about what we do and what we think in front of everyone? It won’t do any good—just give people a chance to ask a lot of questions they’ve no right to ask—your feelings are your own, aren’t they? I don’t want to
have to tell what I’m thinking——’

She looked sharply at Dolly, and then sniggered softly. ‘Not that some wouldn’t enjoy it. I can just hear Arthur, can’t you? She’ll be on about the men the way she always is, and she’ll love it——’

Dolly was sitting very straight on her bed, her cup held in both hands, her eyes hard and bright as she looked at the other woman.

‘Do you think that’s how it’ll be? People talking of really—personal things?’

‘That’s what Sister Harris said.’

‘Harris—you talked to her about it?’

‘She was over about one of the P.T.S. girls this afternoon, and I asked her what she thought. Very cagey, she was—but then, she always is. But she gave me an article about this group discussion technique, as they call it, one from the
Lancet
. And as far as I can see, it’s all personal—people talk about their really private feelings—rather nasty.’

‘It mightn’t be a bad thing at that——’ Dolly spoke almost to herself.

‘Are you going to join in, then? I wouldn’t have thought
you
would, East. I mean, you’re not the sort, are you? Not like Cooper or Arthur or that lot——’

‘I’m interested. You wouldn’t have to talk a lot yourself, would you? Someone’s got to listen. And it might be good to really find out about one or two people, people we’d be better off without——’

‘I don’t know what you mean, exactly——’ McLeod looked faintly surprised. ‘What good would it do?’

Dolly became brisk. ‘Well, the best way to find out about it is to join in. I’m going to. You do too, McLeod. Why should you be left out?’

‘I’ll think about it——’ McLeod said doubtfully. ‘But I’m not sure——’

When McLeod had gone, and Dolly had washed her cups and put them carefully into her little curtained cupboard, she climbed into bed and lay thinking.

Personal things. Feelings. That’s what would come out of the group discussions. Personal things.

Dolly had been nursing long enough to know quite well that the only thing that could make a member of the nursing staff leave before she really wanted to was scandal. Inefficiency, stupidity, laziness, could be passed over, and she had never known anyone forced to leave for these reasons. But there was that business of the home sister before McLeod took the job, when one of the nurses got pregnant, and it turned out her boy friend had been getting into the Home over the back fence, and everyone had sworn the home sister had known about it, even condoned it. She had had to go, because of the way the scandal spread. Miss Biggs had asked her to resign, and she’d had to.

And there are people like Arthur, and Cooper and Phillips, she thought. Cooper and Phillips. If something like that came out about one of them in Miss Manton’s precious group discussions, whose fault would it be? Miss Manton’s? It was a possibility.

Dolly lay and listened to the faint clatter and sound of voices from Cooper’s room next door as they returned from their evening out, and for once she didn’t bang on the wall to remind them that she needed her sleep if they didn’t. She just lay quiet and listened and thought. She was beginning to feel a little better.

Daphne and Susan always went to the cinema on Monday night. If there was something on at the local Odeon they fancied, they would go there, but often they would travel far across London.

Everything about the outing was fun, the choosing of the film, the journey there, the small meal in a coffee house afterwards, the discussion of the evening in Daphne’s room once they got back to the hospital.

They chose to see a reissue of ‘On the Town’ this Monday, and went out to the car park behind the pathological laboratories at six o’clock, as soon as they were both off duty and had changed.

Daphne owned a small elderly Ford, and was more deeply attached to it than she would admit. It was always rather dirty, for Daphne felt obscurely that only inexperienced drivers
cared about polishing coachwork and chrome; the sort of people she scornfully labelled ‘dolly danglers’, who filled their cars with toys and vases of imitation flowers, who put labels from seaside towns on the back, they were the sort who had clean cars.

She held the passenger door open for Susan, and settled her before going round to get in herself.

‘Now, are you going to be warm enough? You should have worn your heavy coat, you silly ass—you’ll freeze in that suit. Do you want the rug? I can get it out of the boot if you do——’

‘Don’t
worry
,’ Susan said, smiling up at her. ‘I’m as warm as toast, and once you get the heater going, I’ll be warmer still. Stop coming the auntie.’

They enjoyed the film enormously, enjoyed the annoyed shushes of the people in front of them when they talked during it, giggled when Susan dropped a piece of ice cream inside her suit jacket, and generally behaved as they always did. It was not until they were settled in the coffee house and had selected, with much discussion, their open sandwiches and frothy white coffee, that they got round to talking of the afternoon.

Susan sat with her elbows on the table, delicately nibbling round the slice of pickled cucumber that embellished her sandwich, the frilled sleeve of her blouse framing her birdlike wrists prettily.

‘What do you think of the Manton’s bombshell?’

‘Not much of a bombshell, really. Now, if she’d said a rota——’

Susan giggled at once. ‘Oh, Lor’, that was fun! The way Cramm fell for it! I’ll never forget the way she looked—as though her chin would drop off——’

‘She wouldn’t have missed it if it had. She’s got three more where that one came from.’ Daphne picked up her own slice of cucumber and gave it to Susan. ‘Here, you have this——’

‘Ooh, can I? I do adore pickled cucumbers—you are a darling. But honestly, Daph, what do
you
think about it?’

‘To put it elegantly, lovey, I think it’s a load of old cod’s wallop—amateur psychiatry. That’s the trouble with these
wallahs who’ve been mental trained. They’re all a bit touched, and they think everyone else is.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Susan looked serious. ‘P’raps there’s something in it. I mean, I don’t give a good goddam about staff relationships and all that. My nurses are fine and happy, because I leave them alone. If I started to go around building positive relationships they’d have a fit.’

‘She does like that word, doesn’t she? Positive, positive, whose got the positive?’

‘No, I mean it. I’m all for leaving the nurses alone. They do a better job if you do——’

‘You’re just lazy, monkey.’

‘I’m not!’ Susan protested. ‘Really I’m not. It’s just that—well, it’s always so noisy in O.P.—the only reason I stay there is the off duty. But listen, Daph, what she was saying about self understanding—wouldn’t that be interesting?’

‘Don’t you understand yourself then, Pip? Never mind, lovey, I do. If you want to know what makes you tick, come and ask your Auntie Daphne——’

‘Will you be serious for a moment?’

‘You do look funny when you’re being severe—like a little girl playing mummies and daddies—all right, I’ll be serious. What do you think about the idea?’

‘I think it might be worth doing—for ourselves. Never mind the business about staff relationships—what about our own?’

‘Our own?’

‘Mmm. Take us, for example. We’re friends—real friends, aren’t we?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Well, of course we are. But why? Had you ever thought about that?’

Daphne looked at her sharply, but Susan was licking the last crumbs of grated cheese from her plate with a wet finger.

‘Why should we think about it? If you’re friends, you are—there’s no need to think about it.’

‘Oh, I do sometimes. I’ve always been rather lonely, really. I mean, I had friends of a sort when I was training, but never anyone I could really get close to, not like I am to you——’

‘We like the same things. We laugh at the same jokes, I suppose. Do you think there’s any more to it than that?’

‘Don’t you? I do—I mean, you really
understand
me, and I’m so—grateful for that——’

‘Oh, Pip, you are funny, lovey, really you are! So I understand you! So what? You don’t have to be
grateful
.’

‘Well, I am. And I’m interested, in an abstract sort of way. Why is it some people are able to understand others? Why do some people have friends and others don’t? Take old East, now——’

‘You take her. I don’t want her,’ Daphne said promptly.