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  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.

  TEN

  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 aimi
ng 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——’

  ‘Not a bit of it!’ Daphne opened her eyes wide. ‘Any more than Miss Manton chose last time to get at Jo. Did you, Matron?’

  Elizabeth frowned sharply. ‘Look, you really must try to see that these discussions are not designed to get at anyone. If this is all you think they are, all of you, then we’ll abandon the scheme here and now. I didn’t propose the discussions in order to give people a chance to score off old disagreements. They’re meant to be constructive. Any—personal disclosures are incidental to that.’

  ‘Then let’s have an incidental,’ Daphne said at once. ‘I think this is important. Ruth here thinks her patients have—unpleasant relatives. Well, doesn’t this affect her relationship with her patients? It must do. That’s why I think she should tell us how they’re so—unpleasant.’

  ‘You know quite well what I mean,’ Ruth said sulkily. ‘Why ask me to tell you all again? Do you just enjoy getting second-hand thrills.’

  ‘Charming!’ Daphne said, ‘Is that why you usually tell us all the details of your nights out, then? To give us second-hand thrills? What does that make you?’

  ‘It makes me normal!’ Ruth said with reckless anger. ‘That’s what! I like men, I like going out with them, and if a patient’s husband fancies me, why the hell shouldn’t I go out with him? The trouble with you lot is you’re scared of men—that’s all——’

  ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks——’ Swinton said softly.

  ‘And what the hell does that mean?’ Ruth said sharply.

  Swinton shrugged. ‘Just that. You know what they say about suicides. The ones who talk about it never do it.’

  Ruth went a fiery red, and leaned forward to stare at Swinton with her eyes screwed up into tight slits.

  ‘Do you know what I think about you? I think you’re jealous. No one ever asks you out, and you know they ask me, and you’re jealous.’

  ‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake!’ Swinton moved sharply and looked at Ruth with an expression of irritable boredom on her face. ‘Can’t you understand something obvious? We’re bored, bored stiff by the way you go on and on about this marvellous time you’re supposed to have. If you have it, fine, enjoy yourself. But why do you have to talk about it so much?’

  ‘You do, don’t you, Ruth?’ Daphne said maliciously. ‘If there’s ever been a breakfast when we haven’t had to listen to you talking about your night out, I can’t remember it——’

  ‘Well, why shouldn’t I? And if you’re all so bored, why haven’t you said so before?’

  ‘Because you enjoy it all so much, I suppose. I would have thought you’d have seen before now that we aren’t very interested in your fancy tales——’ Swinton said.

  ‘What do you mean, fancy tales? It’s true, every word of it!’ Ruth said, her voice high with anger. ‘It’s easier to say it’s lies than to admit the facts—you’re just jealous!’

  ‘I didn’t say it was lies!’ Swinton said. ‘Why should you think I did?’ She smiled gently. ‘Because it is?’

  ‘It is not!’ Ruth almost shouted. ‘It’s just——’

  ‘Whether it is or not, I hardly feel that this has any part in our discussion tonight,’ Elizabeth cut in. ‘I’m sorry to abrogate your position as chairwoman, Sister Cooper, but I really feel we must get on to the point again. Now, Sister Phillips. We haven’t heard from you yet this evening. You deal with patients who are not in bed. Does this have an effect on your attitude to them?’

  Obediently, Susan produced a few trite comments about the differences between out patients and in patients, and gradually the room settled down again, Ruth sitting in sulky silence for the rest of the evening, and Daphne paying only lip service to her chairwoman functions, leaving the control of the subject to Elizabeth, rather to Elizabeth’s irritation.

  The evening ended when the discussion petered out, and Elizabeth, a little wearily, called a halt.

  ‘I hope that you all feel this has been constructive,’ she said, as she stood up to leave the sitting room. ‘And I must warn you all again—we really mustn’t use these meetings to—make personal attacks. I’m sure it won’t happen again. Goodnight, sisters, and thank you.’

  Only McLeod and Mary Cotton followed Elizabeth out, and there was a sharp silence in the big room after the door had closed behind them.

  ‘Just what was the point of that piece of bitchery, Cooper?’ Ruth said at last, leaning back in a pose that was meant to show insouciance but that had more of tension in it than relaxation. ‘Just for the fun of it? Do you want to show Manton I’m a Big Bad Woman, or something? What did you expect to get out of it?’

  Daphne shrugged, and stood up. Susan followed suit.

  ‘I thought it would be interesting to get a thumb-nail sketch from her about you, that’s all. You put Cramm on the hotplate last time, so I put you there. Why not? You ask for it, don’t you? You have done for years——’

  ‘Ah, balls!’ Ruth said, with a return to her usual manner. ‘You just wanted to stir it up generally that’s all, and I didn’t feel in the mood to play it your way——’

  ‘Is that why you got so angry?’ Swinton said lazily. ‘Because you weren’t in the mood? And I could have sworn you were really bothered——’

  ‘You’re worse than Cooper. She just felt like a bit of bitchery for the hell of it, but you—you’re a bitch all the time, because you’re made that way. You let on you’re so bored by me, make a big show of it, but you listen when I talk, Christ, but you listen! I wasn’t wrong, was I? You’re eaten up with jealousy. You’re just a sour old virgin, and you want——’

  ‘That’s enough, Arthur.’ Dolly’s voice cut across sharply. ‘This is a sisters’ sitting room, not a public house. Remember where you are, and keep your foul talk for your filthy friends——’

  ‘And you’re just the same! Frustrated as hell, tying yourself in knots because you can’t get what you want, because Manton got your job! What you need is a good poke, that’s what you need—that’s what you all need—maybe that’d cure you of your——’

  ‘Maybe it’s what you need, Arthur,’ Swinton said softly, and got up and walked to the door. ‘Hmm? Maybe you wouldn’t have to spin your breakfast time tales then. Goodnight, everybody. Interesting evening, wasn’t it?’

  One by one, the others followed her, not
looking at Ruth sitting very still in her armchair, only Susan looking back with some distress at the silent figure.

  ‘It wasn’t fair, Daph,’ she whispered as she closed the door. ‘I know she’s a bit much, but honestly, it wasn’t fair. And Swinton was so nasty. What do you suppose she meant—what she said before she went out?’

  ‘What it sounded like,’ Daphne said, and giggled. ‘I hadn’t thought about it, really, but she may be right at that. Maybe old Arthur isn’t what she cracks herself up to be. I’ve never seen any of these men of hers waiting at the Home for her, have you?’

  ‘She meets them in town,’ Susan said.

  ‘Well, if Swinton’s right, she doesn’t meet them anywhere, does she? Lumme, but this group thing’s turning out better than I thought! Who’ll get their knuckles rapped next time? Dolly wants a go—Manton, bet you anything you like. She’ll put Manton in a corner, and stick pins in her—and it’ll be a giggle.’

  Alone in the big sitting room, Ruth stared at the fire, and her thoughts pleated themselves into words, chasing each other round her head.

  ‘She’s followed me, that’s what it is, followed me. Watched—she couldn’t, could she? Watch? She did, she must have—how else could she? Unless it’s what she said. Maybe she’s a—that’s it. She does it herself, and she can tell the difference.

  She doesn’t. She couldn’t—I’d know, wouldn’t I? How could I know? I never—not really—Christ, she must have followed and watched—but even if she did, how would she know? She’s never been—does she? She must. Does she like it? Cow, she’s a cow. I’ll have to do it. I’ll have to. Why not? I won’t if I don’t want to, why should I? I’ll have to. Someone good. I always meant to, but it was more fun not to, wasn’t it? Or would it be more fun if I did? How will I know if I don’t? I must. I’ll give myself some penicillin, then nothing’ll happen. Nurses know how to take care of themselves, they all say that. Nurses know how. Penicillin. Christ, suppose I get caught all the same? I could use some ergot, I suppose. It might hurt. Oh, hell, why should I? But I’ll have to—and when I tell her, she’ll know, won’t she? If she has herself. Lousy stinking bitch, lousy stinking bitch, she’s a lousy——’