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  She stopped, and laughed. ‘Oh, I do run on, don’t I? You must forgive me—the others know me, don’t you? Chatterbox Cotton, that’s me——’

  ‘My dear Sister, there is no need to apologise for talking! In a way, it’s talk I want to encourage. Half the battle is being able to articulate one’s ideas and feelings.’

  ‘Well, I must say, Matron, if you want us to get the nurses talking all the time, I can’t see us getting anything done on the wards.’ Josephine’s worries were beginning to mount again. ‘It’s all I can do to get through the work as it is, without having them waste good time chattering——’

  ‘Look, we are rather at cross purposes here. Let me tell you exactly what I have in mind, and we can go on to discuss it later.’ Josephine subsided at the rebuke, and Elizabeth went on smoothly.

  ‘I want us to employ a particular technique known as group—discussion.’ For a moment the word therapy had trembled on her lips, but she rejected it, relising in time that the word could carry implications that the sisters were in need of psychiatric treatment.

  ‘Each fortnight, we meet somewhere pleasant in our free time, and over coffee—or perhaps sherry, to make the whole thing more sociable and relaxed—we talk about our feelings and attitude towards our work. We do this in a positive way, by appointing for each session a chairwoman, and selecting a subject. Then, in talking about the selected subject, we learn to talk of ourselves, about our reactions to each other, what makes us upset and why, what causes us to have hostile feelings, and why, and so on. You will find that though this may be difficult at first, in time you will be more and more able to verbalise your personal feelings, and you will come to a new understanding of yourselves, your relationships with each other, your juniors, your seniors and your patients. I hope, once this has become established with us, you will be able to start similar discussion groups among your staff, so that the benefits of the technique spread right through the hospital——’

  ‘I was always taught that talking shop in off duty time was no way to be a good nurse. I can’t say I see any point in encouraging people to stay in and talk about their work when they’d be better off getting some real recreation outside the hospital.’ Dolly seemed to be talking to the room at large, but it was clear to everyone that she was trying to goad Miss Manton into a direct clash.

  ‘Oh, this wouldn’t be shop talk—not directly. And as for interfering with recreation—well, a fortnightly hour or two shouldn’t make too much difference to your opportunities for going out. I agree with you, Sister East—it is quite essential that we all have plenty of diversion outside working hours. I’ve been thinking about that too—perhaps we could form some sort of social club for ourselves and the medical staff—though that is something I must discuss with them first.’

  Ruth brightened and looked across at Sylvia Swinton with a turned down mouth and raised eyebrows that indicated her surprise and approval simultaneously.

  Miss Manton saw this, and laughed. ‘You like that idea, Sister Arthur?’

  ‘Very much indeed, Matron,’ Ruth said promptly. ‘There’s been far too little social life about this place—Miss Biggs didn’t approve of it.’

  Mary, embarrassed by this mention of the departed Miss Biggs, and assuming that Miss Manton would be too, jumped in very quickly.

  ‘Well, I must say, this idea about group discussion is very nice—and if it does all you say it can, well, I’m all for it. When would you want to start, Matron?’

  ‘That’s up to you, all of you. Of course, you must realise there is absolutely no compulsion to take part in this idea. It will be in your off duty time, and anyway, I would not attempt to force this on you even if it were not. You are professional women, and if you are able to run your wards as you do, then clearly you are able to decide whether this technique would be of value to you, both in your professional lives and perhaps, ultimately, in your private lives.’

  She let her gaze travel slowly round the room. ‘I hope, most sincerely, that you will see how useful it can be, how it can help you in your jobs, and will therefore choose to join in. I’m sure you’re open-minded enough to try it, anyway. Shall we leave it like this? Give it some thought, let me know by—say next Monday when you present your weekly reports as usual at ten o’clock—whether you want to do this or not, and then I will make the necessary arrangements. I shall look forward to hearing your views next Monday with great interest. And now I really mustn’t keep you from your wards any longer. I will see you all when I do my ward round tomorrow—at about eleven—and if any of you have any matters you would like to discuss with me in the meantime, just ask Miss Baker to give you a time. Thank you all very much for your co-operation. I am sure we will all work together most amicably.’

  She watched them get up, smoothing their aprons, settling their silver buckled belts round their waists, and smiled at each of them as they murmured ‘Good afternoon, Matron’ before following each other from the room. They were still a little ruffled but, she felt, somewhat less uneasy than they had been, now she had assured them she would not directly interfere—yet—with their ward routines. And she had given them plenty to talk about, and that might be an extremely good thing. While talking about the group discussion idea, they would have less time in which to talk of Miss Manton as an individual, and she was woman enough to want to prevent such talk as much as she could.

  THREE

  James French drove home from the hospital in a thoughtful mood. Elizabeth’s appearance as the new matron had quite genuinely surprised him; when he had told her he had wondered when he heard the name, but had decided that this Elizabeth Manton could not be the one he had known, he had spoken the truth. Until he actually saw her again, he had indeed forgotten about her, but the sight of her face and the familiar carriage of her head had brought back vivid memories of their old relationship.

  It had been a fairly ardent friendship, but had stopped short of any frankly sexual expression, partly because French himself had left the hospital where they had both worked before that stage became inevitable, and partly because he had no desire to get more deeply involved with her. He had never been a man with a strong interest in sex, regarding it as a pleasant adjunct to life rather than as an urgent need. His friendship with Elizabeth had started because she had shown a definite interest in him as an intelligent man. She had made a refreshing change from the nurses who had sighed after his handsome face.

  Such vanity as French had was about his mind, rather than his looks, and he had often found his own physical attractiveness a boring nuisance, impatient when people tended to pay more attention to his appearance than to anything else about him. So, he had taken Elizabeth to theatres and hospital parties, finding her good company and also very useful. While he was taking her out, he was protected from the attentions of other nurses at the hospital.

  He had realised, of course, that she cared for him a great deal more than he had for her. For all her own intelligence and appreciation of his, she succumbed to his beauty quite early in their friendship but she had controlled her feelings, had never embarrassed him with any physical overtures. She had never attempted to use her own body to push him into love-making, though she had made verbal overtures, embarking on elliptical conversations that could have been interpreted, had he so wished to interpret them, as invitations to go to bed with her.

  He had enjoyed those conversations, he thought now, as he put the car into the garage of the small suburban house his wife’s parents had given them as a wedding present. It had been amusing to fence with her, to seem to misunderstand what she was driving at so that she would abandon her efforts, only to be brought back to them by a twist he himself put into their talk. To discuss in an apparently abstract way a play they had seen while in fact exchanging verbal titillation had been extremely stimulating.

  He remained sitting in the car for a while, still thinking about Elizabeth, and what her appointment might mean to him. Despite her assurance that she had not sought the app
ointment in order to re-establish their friendship, he knew quite well that the wish to do so must have played a very large part in her motives. He also knew that she was not a woman to embarrass him; if he made it clear to her at the outset that he was not prepared to pick up where they had left off, she would accept his decision. She had been, and no doubt still was, a philosophical woman, able to cut her losses and accept them. But, at the same time, she was there, and as matron had a certain amount of power in the hospital, power that could well be used to his benefit.

  He came to a decision suddenly. Elizabeth could be of use to him, and was going to be. He would pick up their friendship again where it had left off, and lead her the way he wanted to go. And quite apart from the use he could make of her in furthering his current ambitions, it would be amusing. Their friendship could provide a pleasant astringency that would cut some of the occasionally cloying sweetness he found in his marriage.

  Jennifer was in the kitchen, decorating slices of melon with strips of angelica and glacé cherries, wearing a frilly apron over a full-skirted dress, her blonde hair carefully arranged in girlish sweeps on each side of her soft round face. She came running out, as he closed the front door behind him, to put her arms round his neck, one foot thrown up behind her in a pretty pose of wifely affection.

  ‘Hello, darling!’ she said, nuzzling her nose into his neck. ‘Are you terribly tired, sweetheart? I’ve got a lovely dinner for you—I’ve been cooking all the afternoon—and I was so silly!’ She made a face, wrinkled her nose into an expression of little girl pathos. ‘I burnt the first casserole—burnt it to a cinder! It’s that silly old stove—all those dials and all! I can’t manage to understand the horrid thing no matter how I try! But I got the butcher to send me some more veal in a hurry, and it’s lovely this time——’

  James let her lead him into the small drawing room, sinking into the soft armchair set invitingly by the fire, allowing her to pull off his shoes and replace them with slippers, letting her chatter gaily as she mixed him a drink.

  He didn’t really want a drink, any more than he wanted to change his shoes, but Jennifer had created a pattern in which a sweet loving wife welcomed a weary husband home with these attentions, and he saw no reason to block her attempts to live up to this image of their marriage, if that was the way she wanted it.

  They ate their meal in the pretty dining room, with Jennifer asking him anxiously for his approval of each dish, approval he gave willingly (for she was an excellent cook, working very hard to produce food fit for a weary husband). It was after dinner, while they drank coffee before the drawing room fire, that he broached the problem.

  ‘Would you like to give a dinner party, Jennifer? It will all be rather dreary for you, I’m afraid—mostly medical people. I want to ask one of the local G.P.’s and his wife, and I thought perhaps your cousin Peter—and there’s a woman too—Elizabeth Manton.’ He pulled her against him, and began to stroke her hair. ‘I must tell you about this woman. I used to take her out, years ago——’

  She sat up, and stared at him. ‘James! You naughty man! You never mentioned her before! Who is she? Is she pretty? How old is she? And why do you want to ask her here?’

  He laughed, and pulled her down again.

  ‘Jealous baby! Nothing to worry about! It’s just this. There’s a new matron at the Royal—she started today. And she turned out to be someone I knew at the Central Hospital, five years ago——’

  ‘Before you met me.’

  ‘Long before I met you. I never saw her again after I left here—and there was never anything to it, anyway. We were really just good friends——’

  She giggled. ‘You sound like an actor, saying that.’

  ‘That’s the trouble with things that are true. They often do sound phony. But we were—and I have a good deal of respect for her. She’s a good nurse, and she’ll make a good matron. She could be very useful to me.’

  ‘Useful?’

  ‘It’s something to do with bed allocations. I want to do some research—nothing that would interest you very much, sweetheart—and the Matron is on the committee that decides about bed allocations. I’m expecting a good deal of opposition from some of the other men, and I can use an ally. So, I want to ask Elizabeth here, so that you can butter her up a bit, and make her a friend to both of us. Once you’re on really good social terms with someone, they find it difficult not to be an ally when you meet professionally. Do you see what I mean?’

  She snuggled against him, and giggled. ‘You are awful, James. The poor woman’s probably head over heels in love with you, and you’re going to bring her here to meet me and rub salt in the wound——’

  Jennifer rather enjoyed thinking about the women she was sure had been part of her husband’s past, getting enormous pleasure from imagining them eating their hearts out for the man she had herself ensnared with her superior charms. It never occurred to her that her position as the only daughter of rich parents had anything to do with James’ choice of her as a wife, and to do him justice, he gave her no cause to think so. He wanted none of his parents-in-law’s money now, had jibbed a good deal at accepting their gift of a home (which had reassured them considerably) and flatly refused any further financial help. He had regarded them as insurance for the future when he had decided to marry Jennifer, quite content tent to wait until their death to share their wealth. That way, it would be more his, by right. He wanted no largesse from people who could remind him of any obligation.

  ‘You’re a wicked puss,’ he said now. ‘Of course she isn’t. And when you see her, you won’t be a bit jealous. She isn’t a quarter as pretty as you are, and much older.’

  Dolly East came off duty at half past eight feeling more tired than she had for a long time. The day had seemed interminable, the constant activity in the department and the strength of her feelings about the new matron combining to drain even her strong body of its normal vitality.

  She stopped in the wide courtyard as she went over towards the nurses’ home, and looked back at the tall buildings round three sides of it;

  The regular rectangles of light that were the ward windows threw their blurred reflections on to the dark concrete, and silhouettes of nurses passed the windows as they went along the wards finishing the day’s duties ready for the night staffs appearance. Even out here in the dark windy courtyard she could recognise the familiar smell, the faint hint of antiseptic and floor polish and soot that characterised the place, a smell that for her evoked all the years she had spent at the Royal. The smell, the heavy shape of the buildings, the distant clatter of lifts as the night porters collected drums for the big sterilisers, even the rumbling of traffic from the main road beyond the high railings that enclosed the courtyard, all these were part of the fabric of her life. It was all she had of home, all she wanted. It belonged to her almost as her own body did, and she cared for the place as strongly as if it were a living person.

  For Dolly, the Royal was a person, a living thing, more important than the people who worked in it, more important than the patients who used it, a calm reliable constant person who never let you down as people did. And it had been stolen from her, by someone from outside, someone who could not possibly care about it or know it as she did.

  ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if she were Royal trained,’ she thought bleakly, pulling her cape round her against the sharp wind as she stood and stared up at the main ward block. ‘If she really knew it like I do——’ and sudden tears rose in the back of her throat, filling her nose thickly, so that she sniffed and swallowed, angry at herself for allowing her fatigue to dissolve into tears, angrier still at the cause of her fatigue.

  Gladys McLeod was sitting at the small switchboard in the lobby of the nurses’ home, her grey head on its scrawny neck bent over a letter she was writing. She looked up as Dolly came in, and smiled thinly at her.

  ‘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.