The Hive (17 page)

The meal was unexciting, for Elizabeth did not include a gift for cooking among her accomplishments, and had left the choice of the menu and the preparation of it to the hospital kitchens. But the wine was good and the very ordinariness of the meal, combined with the effects of the wine, made Jennifer gay and relaxed. She felt that her own domestic gifts were shown in high relief, and that this dull party would increase her virtues in her husband’s eyes.

After dinner, as they went from the tiny dining room of the Matron’s flat to the pleasant little sitting room, Jennifer said to Elizabeth, ‘Miss Manton, may I ask an odd favour of you?’

‘Please do.’

‘I suppose it sounds silly, but you know, I’ve often wondered what a hospital is like at night. Oh, I’ve been here on special occasions, you know, but I’ve never really seen the place James spends so much time in, have I darling? I’d love to look round properly, now, when all the patients are asleep. I mean, during the day, it must all be too harrowing for words—all those poor ill people, suffering so——’ She shuddered prettily. ‘But now it must be rather different. May I?’

‘By all means.’ Elizabeth managed to sound only politely interested in Jennifer’s request.

‘I’ll ask Night Sister to do the honours, rather than take you myself, if you don’t mind. Margaret will tell you how jealous nurses can be of their privileges, won’t you, Margaret? And at night, the hospital is very much Night Sister’s domain. I would be rather foolish to step on her toes! Would you too be interested to see the Royal, Margaret? It’s rather different to the old Central. We trained together there, Mrs. French.’

‘Love to,’ Margaret said heartily. ‘Nothing like nosing about other people’s corners, eh, Liz? I’ll let you know if I spot anything wrong, I promise you that!’

When Elizabeth had returned from Night Sister’s office, to which she had taken her guests to meet their guide, she offered James brandy.

‘I helped myself.’ He watched her fill her own glass, and come to sit opposite him.

‘Jennifer did that rather well, don’t you think?’

She frowned sharply. ‘You surely didn’t ask her to, did you?’

‘Oh, yes. She knows that you can help me in the matter of the bed allocations, and she rather thinks you need to be buttered up in order to persuade you to do so. So——’

‘And she doesn’t mind? She sees no possible—hazard in your application of butter?’

‘I’m very much afraid she doesn’t, Elizabeth. Does that hurt you? She’s a simple soul, my Jennifer. The only feminine charms she might fear would be the obvious ones. She regards her own as rather more obvious than yours.’

‘She’s justified.’ Elizabeth spoke almost absently. While she was prepared to enjoy the seeking for advantage, the jockeying for position, the careful verbal fencing that was involved in the effort she was making to gain this man as a lover as part of a game, enjoyable in itself, the pleasure in the game was lost if he played it according to private rules of his own, as he was clearly doing.

What
is
he trying to do? she wondered, watching him over the rim of her glass. Force me into a position where I must assure him of my help in the committee next month, and then
withdraw from me as a person? But he must surely be more farsighted than that. He must know that there will be other times in the future when I will be able to help him. Is he pushing me into making some sort of declaration, direct declaration, in order to set me down again?

He was looking at her now, waiting for her to make the next move, his eyebrows slightly raised, and with some acerbity she set her glass down beside her and said crisply, ‘Well, James, interested as I am in this discussion of your marital relationship, we really mustn’t waste this opportunity Jennifer has so carefully given us. Now, shall I tell you my opinion of the nursing response to a psychiatric unit here first, or will you tell me a little more about your plans for such a unit? If you get it.’

‘Have you sampled opinion already, then?’

‘Not directly. But we have had the first of our group discussions and on the basis of that, I might be able to make an inspired guess.’

‘Even though you refused to do that at the committee meeting?’

‘What I tell you privately is not necessarily for committee consumption. If you feel it should be, then perhaps I had better say nothing.’

‘No, of course you can tell me, in camera. I won’t tell a soul without your permission.’

‘Well, then. The first discussion was—interesting. I nearly scuttled the whole thing, because I jumped in with both feet when I should have been more patient. I was afraid I’d gone too far, but as it happened, I was lucky. I think it worked very well, and that some of the sisters at least have an inkling of what I’d like to do, and approve of it——’

She told him about the discussion, and the effect it had had on Sister Cramm, and he laughed with genuine amusement when she sketched a graphic picture of Sister Cramm’s newfound devotion for Elizabeth herself.

‘A matron with a vengeance!’ he said. ‘With an elderly child, but clearly one who will adore you as much as any natural mother could hope! So. Because of this one sister, and her response you think you could persuade your senior
staff to accept a pyschiatric unit here?’

‘It could be,’ she said easily. ‘It would depend very much on how later discussions go, of course. And their progress, I think I can say without undue self-aggrandisement, depends very much on how I handle them.’

She looked across at him very directly, and smiled slowly.

‘I am an economical woman, James. I would need to feel, in this area as in any other, that the results of my efforts would justify the hard work and thought I put into them. Do you think they would?’

‘It’s hard to say, without knowing what you would consider a satisfactory result.’

Quite suddenly, her patience snapped.

‘Look, James, this is getting boring. You know damned well what I want from you. I told you pretty clearly when I dined with you. I want a satisfying job—and I have the roots of that in this post—and I also want a satisfying private life. You could play a large part in that. I make no bones about it—I want you to.’

She was sitting very erect, her colour slightly higher than it usually was, looking directly at him.

‘I know you fairly well, you know, James. You’re a chilly creature, on an emotional level—and that is one of the things I like about you. The last thing I want is an over-heated emotional relationship with anyone—I just want a civilised arrangement which will satisfy me, and I hope, satisfy you. We—we’re cut out of the same piece of cloth, you and I. But you persist in this pretence of yours—that you don’t know what I’m getting at, that you don’t know what I want in return for providing you with the help
you
want. Well, if you’re enjoying the game of pretence, well and good. But don’t overestimate my patience. I’m not a pretender, and I don’t really enjoy all this devious——’

The door behind them swung open, and Jennifer and Margaret came in, Jennifer looking rather pale.

‘This poor wife of yours didn’t really bargain for what she might see, Dr. French!’ Margaret said with professional heartiness. ‘There was a casualty arriving just as we got to the department—very nice set-up you’ve got there, Liz, by the
way—and he was bleeding rather, and chose the moment we arrived to vomit all over the floor——’ Jennifer went even more white. ‘And Mrs. French feels rather under the weather as a result, I’m afraid——’

Immediately, James was all solicitude.

‘My poor girl! I am sorry—I should have realised something like that might happen. Look, Elizabeth will forgive us, I’m sure, if I take you home—you do look rather green—doesn’t she, Elizabeth? Will you forgive us——?’

Elizabeth escorted them down to their car, and when James had settled Jennifer under a rug in the front seat, and came round the car to get into it himself, he said quickly, in a low voice, ‘I’ll talk to you in a few days or so, Elizabeth. I’m a bit pushed this week—with my registrar on holiday, I’ll have to handle more myself—but we’ll talk again soon. And—er——’ He opened the door of the car. ‘I’ll remember what you said. Goodnight, and thank you. Sorry we’ve got to hurry like this.’

She watched them go, and then went back to her flat and the loquacious Margaret, feeling a little ruffled but still with an underlying satisfaction. She had managed to take another step forward, even if not as big a step as she had hoped her dinner party would provide.

The second sisters’ discussion group meeting began in an atmosphere of general excitement underlaid with a faint embarrassment on the part of Mary Cotton. She had tried very hard to find an excuse to miss this evening, but when at supper, she had murmured that Matty was really so busy, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get away in time, Dolly had pounced immediately.

‘Come on now, Cotton. You aren’t indispensable any more than anyone else is. I’m busy on Cas. too, but I’m going. You make an effort, now. The Night people can manage——’ And Mary had given in as she always did to Dolly’s hectoring tones.

Elizabeth looked round at them all, and said briskly, ‘Well, now. We need a chairman for tonight, and a subject. Any ideas about that?’

Dolly opened her mouth, but Daphne was too swift for her. ‘I think I’d like to have a go, if no one else wants to. I’ve got an idea for a subject that won’t involve me personally, so I think I’d be best for it—as chairwoman I mean.’

‘Good.’ Elizabeth raised her eyebrows at the others. ‘Unless someone else wants to try?’

‘I’ll take the next,’ Dolly said. ‘I’ve an idea, too, but it will keep. If Cooper is so anxious to try, let her. I can wait. I’m used to that,’ and she smiled cryptically, an effort that was lost on Elizabeth, who was now looking curiously at Daphne.

‘And what is your subject, Sister Cooper?’

‘Nurse-patient relationships,’ Daphne announced, and grinned at Susan, who shook her head very slightly. But Daphne for once took no notice.

‘I think the way nurses get on with the patients as people is important. I never talk to any, of course—they’re always flat out when I see them—but the rest of you do, so you can chat away, and I’ll jump like mad if any of you slide off, you see if I don’t.’

‘A good chairwoman doesn’t jump, as you put it, unless she feels she must,’ Elizabeth said mildly. ‘It’s a good subject. Who’ll start?’

There was a silence.

‘I’m sitting back on this one,’ Elizabeth said. ‘My contact at the moment with patients is at remove—I make it through you. I’ll gladly join in later, but someone else ought to start, I think.’

Josephine sat up very straight, and coughed primly. ‘Shall I start then, Matron? If you want me to——’

Elizabeth shook her head.

‘Sister Cooper’s in the chair.’

‘Start away,’ Daphne said. ‘We’re ready——’

‘Well, then,’ Josephine said, looking eagerly at Elizabeth as she spoke. ‘I think the patients are in a very—difficult position. We’re the bosses, and this is all right if they’re younger than we are—I mean, in a children’s ward, the patients are used to doing what they’re told, because they’re children. But with grown up people, they don’t always like being in charge of someone younger than they are. It makes it very difficult sometimes, doesn’t it?’

‘Well done,’ Elizabeth murmured, and Josephine went scarlet with pleasure.

‘Surely we all know this?’ Swinton said from her window seat. Although she was not in fact sitting far apart from the group as a whole, she managed to convey a sense of being separate in a physical way, so that the others seemed a little surprised when she spoke. ‘Nurses are jumped up nannies. A ward is no more than an oversized nursery, full of oversized and sometimes smelly babies——’

‘It’s interesting, isn’t it, the way the angle at which you look at people affects your approach to them?’ Elizabeth said. ‘If you’re standing higher than someone else, you
feel
superior. If you have to actually look up to someone, you feel emotionally and intellectually inferior, as well as being so in a physical way.’

‘Not always,’ Dolly said immediately. ‘If I want to reprimand a nurse in my office, I sit down, and make her stand up in front of me. She doesn’t feel superior to me then.’

‘Who could ever feel superior to you, Dolly?’ Ruth murmured. ‘I wouldn’t dare!’

‘Because you are inferior, I suppose,’ Dolly said swiftly.

Daphne was getting bored. She had chosen to chair tonight’s session and had chosen her subject in a spirit of sheer mischief, despite Susan’s attempts to dissuade her, and she wanted the discussion to move towards Ruth, the person she was aiming at.

‘I don’t care what you say, Pip,’ she had said. ‘I want to hear old Manton’s opinion of Ruth’s tomcattery——’

‘What about the patient’s relatives?’ Daphne looked directly at Ruth. ‘How about relationships with them? Do they come into the nurse—patient relationship at all?’

‘Oh, yes!’ Mary said suddenly. ‘At least, it does for me. I mean, in Matty—well, the mums, they’re so sweet with their new babies, when their husbands come, it’s lovely to see it. It makes it all so worthwhile.’

‘Oh, Mary, for God’s sake! You’re so bloody sentimental!’ Ruth said. ‘The way you go on, you’d think people were all—I don’t know—like those sick-making magazine covers. Pretty little mother, adoring husband, darling little stranger—honestly, if you really knew, half the time, what sort of lives some of these people really lead, you’d be—ah, I give up! You think everyone’s like you—nice and sweet, and gentle. Believe me, they’re not! Spend a few weeks with my lot, and you’d get an eye opener.’

‘What would she discover, Ruth?’ Daphne asked innocently.

‘That married men are bastards,’ Ruth replied promptly. ‘Ooh, sorry, Matron——’

‘Don’t mind me,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Why do you think your patients’ husbands are—bastards, as you put it?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ruth spoke shortly.

‘Why, Ruth, whatever has come over you?’ And Daphne laughed. ‘This isn’t like you, is it? I’ve never known you miss a chance to Tell All about your patients’ husbands!’

‘Shut up!’ Ruth said in sudden anger. ‘You’re being a complete bitch, Cooper. You chose this subject just to get at me——’