Coronation Wives (31 page)

The roundabout went round and Edna watched, thinking how unfair it was that her mother was enjoying a child’s ride. It should be Susan sitting there.

Her father scuffed to her side. He was still wearing his slippers. ‘Thank God we’ve found her!’

Edna sank onto a park seat, unable to bear the pain she felt
inside. It was as if her stomach was filled with lead, too heavy for either her heart or her legs to cope with.

‘Will you tell him?’ Colin asked as they watched her father give Peter a hand with pushing the roundabout.

‘I …’ Her mouth was dry. If only she’d accepted the tea Colin’s mother had offered.

With a relieved though tired expression, her father made his way back and sat beside her on the bench. Colin remained standing, his gaze fixed on a plume of steam gushing like a great white feather from the funnel of an engine pulling trucks out of the station.

‘Dad!’ said Edna. She turned to him and took one of his hands in both of hers. ‘Susan’s in hospital. She’s got polio.’

The loose cheeks, the lapsed jowls seemed to grow longer as her father took in the news. At a loss for words, he blinked and shook his head.

The silence lingered and the wind turned cold. Each absorbed in their own thoughts, they watched Peter and his grandmother on the roundabout. We’re all searching for the right thing to say, thought Edna. But there is no right thing.

The impulse to talk about things to her mother had disappeared. Weary from lack of sleep and too much worry, she left the possibility – for that was all her mother’s understanding could ever be – of telling her to her father.

She saw her father’s jaw move as though about to say something. His eyes stayed fixed on her mother. ‘I’ll tell her. Just as well she won’t understand. Unfair though, innit?’

Edna understood, but said nothing. Her mother had lived a full life and now had the mind of a child. Susan
was
a child and deserved to live and play on the roundabout with her brother.

Charlotte understood, but appeared sceptical when Janet told her about Susan falling into the pool, and her decision to move out, and take the job and the accommodation at Saltmead Sanatorium.

‘You don’t have to do this.’

Janet hung her head over the packing of a suitcase, her hands slowing as she gathered a pile of white underwear. ‘Oh yes I do.’

Charlotte took hold of her shoulders. ‘I know you’re doing this for Susan’s sake. It wasn’t your fault, Janet.’

It was too easy to say it wasn’t her fault. Janet couldn’t stop thinking that it was.

‘I can’t help feeling responsible. Everyone knows that swimming pools are a breeding ground for the disease. I should have known better.’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t stop seeing Susan’s cheery little face and the way she could run and play. I have to do something. I have to be near her.’

Dorothea had bawled like a three-year-old when she’d left the hospital, hanging onto her arm, dripping tears over her shoulder. Eventually Janet had promised to go to the pictures with her at least once a month.

Dorothea had dried her tears. ‘As long as I’m not seeing Henry that night,’ she said, then added coyly, ‘or anyone else.’

‘Of course.’

‘Or Geoffrey.’

How Dorothea had the nerve to be engaged to one man and dallying with another, Janet didn’t know. If the present situation with Susan hadn’t been so dire, she would have found it amusing. As it was, she merely considered it sad, even a little sleazy.

Dorothea dabbed at her eyes and slipped her arm through that of Janet. ‘So tell me all about your new boss. Is he good-looking too?’

Janet shook her head. ‘No.’

Professor Pritchard was a very precise man of around the same age as her father, but without the piercing eyes and the dark, swept back hair. In fact he had little hair, his pate being freckled like a large, rather pink egg. His nose was his most prominent feature because of its colour, a by-product of his predilection for port, if the rumours she’d heard from the medical staff were anything to go by.

He was also a stickler for discipline. If she’d expected to wander the wards as she had at the Royal Infirmary, she was very much mistaken. It was put to her in no uncertain terms that such antics were out of the question.

‘Polio is a very contagious disease,’ he told her. ‘Any infringement of Saltmead rules will be dealt with very seriously. Visitors, including parents, are not allowed. These rules are based on accepted medical thinking that emotional upsets are not conducive to patient recovery,
not
because the staff are nasty, insensitive people. Is this clear to you?’

Yes, it was. Any attempts to see Susan would have to be done in secret.

Her office was little more than a cupboard stuffed with filing cabinets, an oak desk on which sat her typewriter, a large stapler and a tier of wire filing trays. A battered tea trolley
filled the gap between her chair and the window. On it were a gas ring, a kettle and the usual accoutrements for making tea, along with a biscuit tin and a bag of sugar cubes. Professor Pritchard’s office, which she only entered when summoned by him, was the next one along. The Professor kept his door firmly shut. He was obsessive about his work and did not appreciate interruptions.

The chance to find her way around and to get some idea of where Susan was came a lot quicker than she’d anticipated.

Jonathan, who had been pressurizing her into going for a drink with him to the village pub, came along to her office with a pile of old files.

‘Could you drop these down to records? They’re dead files – patients who are no longer patients, for one reason or another.’

He looked pleased with himself. His eyes were bright and his clothes seemed crisp, as though they were new and had not yet been washed and ironed. She should have wondered about his demeanour and questioned whether the slick presentation was for her benefit. Instead she eyed the files and wondered how long it wodld be before Susan’s notes were on their way to the archives, hopefully because she was cured and had gone home.

Jonathan rested his hands palms down on her desk and leaned forward. Janet was only vaguely aware that his nose was almost in her hair.

‘You smell wonderful.’

Janet didn’t register what he’d said. Her mind was occupied. ‘How many die?’

She didn’t see Jonathan’s wavering smile or the disappointment in his eyes. He straightened and said, ‘Not too many.’

‘How many are crippled?’

He frowned as though all his thoughts were concentrated on the question. ‘More than we’d like. It depends on whether the nerves of the limbs and the motor area of the brain have been affected. Cells die. Some recover and, as I’ve already told you, the physiotherapists do a wonderful job.’

Janet continued to stare silently at the files. Please, she prayed, let Susan pull through. Crippled if she has to be, but not dead. Please, not dead.

‘Is something wrong?’

When it came to bedside manner, Jonathan had to be one of the best. He was looking at her as if waiting to be told where it was hurting. First as last, Jonathan loved his job and cared for his patients. She had to trust him.

‘Susan’s here,’ she blurted and waited for his reaction.

First there was puzzlement as he tried to remember where he’d heard that name before.

‘Susan. She fell into the pool at Clevedon. Remember?’

He threw his head back and ran his hands through his hair. ‘I’m sorry. I must seem a heel.’

She didn’t contradict his comment but said, ‘That’s why I changed my mind.’

He looked embarrassed as if considering himself stupid that he hadn’t guessed at the reason, though it would not have been possible.

‘But you were so prepared that day at the flat …’ He paused and shifted from one foot to another.

‘The condoms really were Dorothea’s idea. She misconstrued – just like you did.’

‘Ah!’

‘Now you know.’

‘Yes.’

Nonplussed was the only way to describe him at present – or was it? How about approachable?

‘I want to see her,’ she blurted, looking at him intently as if willpower alone could force him into agreement.

‘You can’t.’ He cleared his throat anxiously. ‘Look, Jan, I recommended you for this job. Don’t drop me into it with the old man. I’ve got a career to think of.’

‘Among other things! So it was all tosh about me getting more interested in medicine. All you really wanted was a little something to warm your bed on certain nights of the week. Who warms it on other nights, Jonathan? A little nurse? Someone from the village? You owe me a favour.’

‘Now come on.’ His smile irritated. She felt like slapping it from his face. He went on, ‘I never promised you a serious relationship. You’re a modern woman who—’

‘You wouldn’t want upsetting your relationship with your mother!’ Janet snapped. To her great satisfaction, he really did look as if she had slapped him in the face.

‘I see you’re in no mood to talk sensibly.’ Indicating the files he’d left on her desk, he added, ‘I want those dealt with immediately.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you know where it is?’

Janet bundled the files into a tidy heap. ‘I think so.’

After he’d left she flung her arms over the typewriter and rested her forehead on the coldness of the metal. This was a crazy situation. Deep down she knew she was placing Jonathan in a very difficult situation, but it couldn’t be helped. Susan needed her. She was sure of it and whether Jonathan assisted or not, she would succeed in seeing her. Something would turn up.

Tucking the files under one arm, she left the office, turned right outside the door and followed the direction painted on the wall that said ‘Archives’. Flimsy partitioning between offices and wards, relieved at intervals by panes of thickly frosted
glass, formed a seemingly endless corridor, loose in its frames and rattling every time a door opened and caused a cross draught.

Recalling the verbal information given to her on arrival, the archives were situated in a less frequented part of the sanatorium. Voices, footsteps and the sucking grind of rubber wheels against polished lino echoed in the emptiness against the cold, brittle glass.

The painted signs carried on, but she came to an abrupt halt at a place where a hospital trolley had been pulled across the corridor. Two men stood with a ladder, looking up at the overhead pipes which ran the length of the corridor. One of them spotted her.

‘You can’t go this way, luv. There’s been a water leak.’

She stopped. ‘Can I get there another way?’

The man stroked his chin, early beard growth rasping beneath callused fingers. He pointed. ‘Down there, first left, through the tunnel, take a right, then another left past the wards …’

‘Thank you.’

She headed the way he’d stipulated, then turned a corner out of their sight. Determination and downright curiosity made her follow a sign saying ‘Medical Staff Only’.
Dear me, I’m lost.
The words were on the tip of her tongue, just in case someone caught her.

Around another corner, a wider corridor, then a dead end. Her foot knocked against something and sent it scuttling across the floor. A pair of spectacles nestled against the wall. She picked them up and looked around her. There wasn’t a soul to ask if they’d dropped their spectacles, or for them to ask her awkward questions, so she put them in her pocket.

Immediately ahead of her was a pair of double doors. She swept forward, not really looking, unaware of her surroundings until she was standing in the middle of a ward.

Grey and ill-lit, the ward was sombre, like the inside of a tomb, except that a tomb is silent. In this place the air was filled with the sound of the heaviest breathing she’d ever heard, each breath evenly spaced from one to the next, devilishly loud and metallic. Yet these were no monsters of the imagination. The source of the sounds was there before her. Three on one side, three on the other, these huge, grey-green cylinders looked as if they should be holding fuel, but were in fact holding something much more precious. Out of the end of each one poked a human head and above that were a bank of mirrors.

‘Hello,’ said a small, thin voice.

Janet couldn’t tell who had spoken, though she was sure it wasn’t Susan. There was no moving of head, no interested gaze turned in her direction. So how could they see her?

The mirrors!

A rectangular world seen at second hand and back to front. What the mirror reflected was all they had.

These cylinders, these great breathing beasts were iron lungs, alternately providing air then a vacuum, aiding a damaged respiratory system to breathe. Without them, these children would probably die.

If she’d been less shocked she would have stood her ground, said hello back and perhaps held more of a conversation, but she couldn’t. One arm round the files, she reached behind her and pushed the door back with the other. Step by step she backed out, glad to get out of there, glad to regain a corridor that echoed to the sound of her footsteps where the air was still and not traversed by the sound of devilish breathing.

Once outside the doors swung back into place. Janet stood and stared at them. The round windows set at eye level swam like twin moons before her eyes. Until this moment she had never really visualized the full implications of the reports and letters she typed, the files she kept in meticulous order, or the
phone calls she fielded for Professor Pritchard or Dr Driver from orthopaedic specialists, neurologists and the doggedly determined physiotherapists.

She had entered one of the wards – yet not any ward – not one where the physiotherapists forcibly exercised withered limbs, but the ward from hell itself where children’s lungs were pressurized into working by the relentless persistence of machines resembling metal coffins. The experience left her nerves on edge and ill-prepared for what happened next.

‘What are you doing here, Miss Hennessey-White?’

Janet jumped and spun round so fast that she almost fell against Professor Pritchard.

‘I’m on my way to the archives,’ Janet blurted, the files clasped tightly against her bosom. ‘The other way was closed. A burst pipe apparently.’