Consulting Surgeon

C
HAPTER ONE

THERE HAD been a heat-wave all the week.

It had begun on Monday with the sun rising behind a blanket of sea mist. On Tuesday there had been no mist, and the nine o’clock temperature was higher than that of an average summer noonday. During the short night the air cooled only slightly; on Wednesday it was hotter still. And by Friday night even the promenade shelters of Sheremouth were filled with optimists who believed that at least the weather would hold over the weekend.

At the Easterbrook Trust, the big modern hospital set against the skyline of the Downs above the town, the sudden onslaught of the heat had had a mixed reception.

The convalescent patients had welcomed it when they were allowed to bask all day upon the outside balconies and even to take their meals there. The bedridden had hated it for the impossibility of keeping cool beneath bedclothes seemingly on fire. The kitchen staff had almost rebelled at Matron’s edict that roast beef and boiled cabbage menus must be switched to salad and milk jelly—and had still managed to provide salads and jellies in the end. The night staff had worked minor miracles in soothing the restless, fractious little people in their charge. Doctors and house-surgeons had been in shirt sleeves beneath their white coats while doing their ward rounds. And nurses and ward-maids alike had counted the very minutes towards the blessed faraway promise of “off-duty”—baths, rest, cool mufti and even, perhaps, ice-cream for dessert.

On Christian Shere ward, Sister Ursula Craig was the only person who appeared not to have noticed the heat. But she had noticed it. In fact, through the week she had been watching the ward thermometer with a special private satisfaction. For she loved the sun and had learned every little knack of grooming and toilet which served to increase her pleasure in it. And on Saturday she was to go on leave, which promised her greater freedom to enjoy it.

It was true she was only going to London, to her step-mother’s flat. But even London gathers beauty to itself in sunlight that is like a benison. And there would be things to do to which she had looked forward to for a long time.

She would be extravagant enough to hire a hack from the livery stables near by and ride in the park before breakfast; she would catch up on a lot of reading; if the weather held she would persuade her stepsister Coralie to go out with her into the country to find somewhere to picnic and to swim. Coralie did not care much for picnics, but surely, in this weather...! There would be the unwonted luxury of leisurely meals, with time for a cigarette afterwards. Perhaps she and Coralie and Ned Primrose, an old friend who had been a colleague of her father’s, would make up a theatre party or two. They would be coming home from those in London’s deepening summer nights, the thought of which still held magic for her and no longer any pain.

So, on that hot Friday, she had shared the hopes of the shelter-campers that the weather was going to hold. And indeed, except for a line of low cloud on the western horizon, Saturday morning offered no hint that it would not. But by the time she arrived on the main departure platform of Sheremouth’s central station, the line of cloud had become a piling mass; a leaden, yellow light was gathering, and there seemed no air to breathe.

From the main ticket-hall she looked out in dismay at the milling crowds on the platforms and round the indicators, and in a burst of holiday extravagance decided to travel First instead of Third.

On the platform she found herself swept into a sea of people and had difficulty even in keeping hold of her dressing-case. Fortunately, however, she was able to struggle towards the door of the corridor coach and to find a compartment occupied only by a tweed-clad lady reading
The Church Times
and two men travelling together. And as she took her seat the loudspeaker boomed out that, since a relief, train was following on, there need be no crowding of the London train.

That meant that the journey would be reasonably comfortable after all, thought Ursula. She was glad, for the crowds and the heavy airlessness which had taken the place of the sharp, stimulating sunshine had had a depressing effect, making her head ache. And as the train drew out the rain began, striking in long slanting dagger-points across the windows. “So much for hot-weather holiday plans!” she thought ruefully. “Oh, well...!”

The two men had settled opposite to her, the elder man in the corner, the younger next to him. Both had newspapers but made desultory comments to each other now and again. Once she caught the younger man’s eyes full upon herself, and when he returned to his paper she looked at him, wondering about him, trying to fit him into a pattern.

Oddly enough she could not readily find one for him. He was dressed in a lightweight suit not often to be seen in the treacherous English climate; his face was tanned and thin, but its bone-structure broadened at the temples, so that his eyes, politely impersonal as they had looked at her, were set in a wide, intelligent brow. His hair was brown; he appeared to be about thirty-six; his mouth had a onesided lift at the corner; she liked his hands. Also, she decided critically, his choice in ties.

She tried him with several patterns of occupation or profession, but her imagination rejected them one by one. He looked neither definitely “black-coated” nor ruggedly, aggressively “out-of-doors” nor “overseas.” A soldier? Somehow she thought not. Navy? N-no. With a little shrug she had to abandon him, turning instead to consider his companion, who might be anything stolidly professional—anything from the Law to Civil Service.

The lady in tweeds alighted at the junction a few miles out of Sheremouth. No one else came to share the compartment, and the other three settled back once more into their own reserves. From behind his newspaper Matthew Lingard began to make an idle appraisal of the girl opposite. She was slim and well groomed in a linen suit that was—his mind groped for the colors of women’s clothes—neither natural nor brown, but a sort of oatmeal-cum-honey of which her hat and her shoes were a deeper shade and which suited her perfectly.

Her eyes were grey and level, and she was fair with short, shining hair of which one deep wave met the edge of her hat—no more than a honey-colored cap with a little straw wing standing up at each side. And though he had not been out of England long enough to forget that English girls frequently “came” as fair as that, he was still, on his return, unused enough to such clean-cut fairness as Ursula’s to want to stare at it and to be grateful for it—even in a stranger.

He wondered why she had been holidaying alone—if that was what she had been doing at Sheremouth. Why, indeed, anyone so fastidious-looking should choose Sheremouth anyway. For at this time of year it was crowded, noisy and rather vulgarly fashionable. He himself would never have chosen to spend part of his brief vacation there if he had not had to visit his aunt at her house on the Downs. For she had been pathetically eager to have direct, word-of-mouth news from Egypt about Foster and Averil, her son and daughter-in-law—news which he, Matthew, had been able to bring her.

He thought briefly about his cousin’s wife, contrasting her critically with the girl opposite. Surely no two women could appear more different?

He remembered Averil’s haggard, restless beauty—her wide, deeply scarlet mouth, her high cheekbones with the skin seemingly dragged over them to emphasize the hollows below; her hair, dark, smooth and without a wave, and her figure which was reed-thin, almost breakable. She lived—dangerously, as he had often told her—on stimulants, cigarettes and her own poor reserves of nervous energy. And Foster adored her.

At this point Matthew’s thoughts were interrupted by a sudden ejaculation from his companion. He was tapping the folded sheets of his newspaper with the back of his knuckles and he frowned at Matthew as he announced: “
That
’
s
where the whole system is in danger, of course.”

“What system? And where?” asked Matthew. Old Charles was apt to get so testy about what he read in
The Times!

“Why, the hospital system in this country. Shortage of beds—my foot! It’s the shortage of nurses really. The utterly inadequate number of girls entering the training schools...”

Ursula began to listen intently. The subject was one she knew something about. She waited for the younger man’s reply.

Matthew Lingard said: “There I’d be inclined to quibble with you, Charles. I’ve always understood that the registers of the training hospitals are fairly cluttered with applicants—perhaps the teenagers see a kind of vocational glamor about nursing, especially if they’ve been crossed in love or something—and it is the number of girls coming
out
of the schools that is totally inadequate. Aren’t the figures of wastage in the first year far too high?”

“Frightful, I believe. The girls don’t stay the course. No stamina. No determination.”

Ursula bristled with silent protest as the younger man said: “Yes, well—I should think there’s an explanation of that too. What about the sort of things they have to put up with from crotchety or self-important ward sisters? All right, all right, Charles! I haven’t a doubt that they really are a lot of noble women. But surely a good many of ‘em have either forgotten their own training days, or they’re intent on taking it out of someone else because they
haven
’
t
forgotten them?”

By this time Ursula was inwardly seething. Of all the commonplace, prejudiced nonsense! She was surprised that any man who looked so intelligent could bring himself to make such sweeping, misinformed statements about something of which he obviously knew nothing!

The older man murmured in agreement: “M’m! Embittered career-fiends, a lot of them, I dare say. And yet, you know, against that you’ve got to set the figures of marriage-wastage. More of ‘em marrying from the nursing profession than from any other profession open to women, I understand?”

“We were talking about the shortage of suitable trainees, not about the ultimate realization of their sentimental ambitions,” his companion reminded him dryly.

“M’m. Yes. So we were—”

But Ursula could hold her tongue no longer. Mortified that her voice should sound high and unnatural she said: “Forgive me, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. And I do assure you that nurses in training are very rarely hampered or antagonized by their seniors. Because the senior nurses know—no one better!— that a ward must work in harmony or it can’t work at all. There is wastage, of course, but though the ones who really
mean
to make nursing their career may grumble quite a lot, they are still prepared to accept any discipline and any responsibility that’s asked of them. And. strange as it may seem, there are nurses who are, quite simply, happy in their work, without being either sentimentally ambitious
or
becoming embittered. You see”—she spoke to them both, but her faint smile of scorn was for Matthew Lingard—“I happen to be a ward sister myself.”

There was a moment’s appalled silence. A glance which she could not interpret flashed from the younger man to the older, who said in some embarrassment: “You should forgive
us,
Sister! It seems that we were indeed talking without our books. But you’ll agree that the nursing shortage is both serious
and
a matter of public interest?”

“Of course. But it still isn’t helped by out-of-date prejudice about ‘tyrannical’ sisters and ‘intolerable’ conditions. We are in the nineteen-fifties, after all. And surely it is a little late in the day to pretend that women still can’t work together?” commented Ursula coolly.

His smile was conciliatory. “You have us there, Sister! Obviously we were babbling.”

“It was obvious to me that you must know very little of the conditions you were criticizing,” she retorted.

“Equally obvious too that we have, neither of us, hitherto made as pleasant contacts with your profession as we have today, eh, Matthew?”

There was a little pause. Then:

“
Hitherto,
no,” said Matthew Lingard.

Ursula raged inwardly. She found nothing of his companion’s rather heavy gallantry as offensive as that sarcastic emphasis on “hitherto.” He was laughing at her, she felt sure. She did not know whether to wish she had said nothing—or a good deal more!

The older man went on to ask her where she was nursing, and when she told him, made some conventionally pleasant remarks about the fine situation of the Easterbrook Trust and of the modernity of its buildings. The younger man said nothing, but sat watching her with a look which she read as derisory.

Presently he suggested to his companion that they should go along to the dining car for luncheon. They bowed formally to Ursula and left the compartment.

As the door slid-to behind them she gave vent to a little sigh of exasperation. How dared that man despise her for putting him right on a matter on which she had always felt strongly? She reflected that nursing and nurses always made “news” in the daily papers, but what a pity that people didn’t get their facts right before discussing them. Six years of nursing had taught her that they seldom did.

She stared out of the window at the flying countryside. Six years! Daddy had remarried about a year before that and had died just over six years ago. And it was at that point that, nearly crazed with grief and longing for Daddy which neither her stepmother nor Coralie could understand, she had met Denis.