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  McLeod nodded. ‘All right, then. As you say, it won’t hurt them. The more you let them put on you, the more they do——’

  She pulled the plugs out of the switchboard, and turned the light off before following Dolly up the shallow polished staircase to the first floor where the sisters had their rooms.

  ‘I’ll get out of uniform if you don’t mind, East, first. I’m that tired, I could drop, and I’ll relax better once I’m undressed——’

  By the time Dolly had changed into her own nightdress and thick woollen dressing gown, and made the chocolate over the gas ring at the end of the corridor, McLeod had come out of her own room, also dressing gowned, her hair out of its bun and lying in a thin plait over one shoulder.

  She settled down into the armchair in Dolly’s room, and rubbed her hands together to warm them as she watched Dolly pour the hot drinks into the flowered china cups on her tray.

  ‘I do like the way you have your room, East. So homely, and still so nice and tidy——’

  Dolly looked round her room, at the embroidered pictures on the walls, the cretonne cushions piled on the folkweave bedspread, at her dressing table with its crocheted duchess set under the cut glass bowl and the silver hairbrushes that had belonged to her mother.

  ‘Well, I do my best to make it nice. I can’t stand a mess, and you need nice things around——’

  ‘Honestly, you should see some of the others. I mean, that Cooper—really, her room’s a disgrace to a trained nurse. If any of the students saw how she kept it, after the way I’m always on at them to keep their rooms decent, well, I don’t know what they’d think, or how I’d ever get them to listen to me at all——’

  Her voice dropped. ‘And she keeps drink there, you know. No shame about it. Got it on a little table at the bottom of her bed. Gin, and sherry, and orange squash, and if you ask me, she gets the orange squash from the hospital stores. It looks the same as that they send up for the sick bay, and the theatres get it for the surgeons, don’t they?’

  ‘It goes on all the time, that. The nurses make me sick—always trying to steal cotton wool to make S.T.s—you’d think they’d have more shame, but they don’t care. Does Cooper drink a lot?’

  McLeod took her chocolate and sipped it gratefully.

  ‘Well, I can’t say I think she does. She’s had the same bottles there a long time—I mean, I don’t find piles of empties or anything—but that’s not the point, is it? It’s the principle. Once one gets started on it, and who knows what can happen? And it’s a bad example—what the maids must think of it, I can’t bear to imagine but there’s nothing I can do. I can’t go tattling to Matron about a sister, can I? Though I would have to if it were anyone else, a staff nurse, or anyone.’

  ‘Even if you did, you wouldn’t get far with this matron, not the way you would have done with Miss Biggs. She’d have been very upset about it, but this one, with her lipstick and her powder—she probably keeps drinks in the flat herself.’ Dolly couldn’t bring herself to say ‘her flat’. ‘What do you think of her?’

  ‘The new matron?’ McLeod put her cup down, and sighed. ‘Well, honestly, East, I was so upset this afternoon, making us all report together like that. Dreadful, it was. I felt like a fool! I mean, I know people don’t think much of the work I do, but it’s important work, really, looking after this Home, and the nurses and everything—but when you read it out it doesn’t sound anything, does it? I could just feel that Cooper sneering behind me all the time. We can’t all be theatre sisters, can we? I’d like to see how they’d get on if I weren’t here, and there was no one to keep this place up to the mark. They’d complain soon enough then——’

  Dolly rode over this familiar theme.

  ‘This group discussion idea—what do you think of that?’

  McLeod sniffed. ‘I never heard such a lot of rubbish in my life. We’ve enough to worry about without all that sort of thing. As if it’d do any good—and it sounds a bit nasty to me——’

  ‘Nasty?’

  ‘Prying—what do we feel, what do we think? I mean, we may be nurses, but we’re entitled to our private lives, aren’t we? Why should we have to talk about what we do and what we think in front of everyone? It won’t do any good—just give people a chance to ask a lot of questions they’ve no right to ask—your feelings are your own, aren’t they? I don’t want to have to tell what I’m thinking——’

  She looked sharply at Dolly, and then sniggered softly. ‘Not that some wouldn’t enjoy it. I can just hear Arthur, can’t you? She’ll be on about the men the way she always is, and she’ll love it——’

  Dolly was sitting very straight on her bed, her cup held in both hands, her eyes hard and bright as she looked at the other woman.

  ‘Do you think that’s how it’ll be? People talking of really—personal things?’

  ‘That’s what Sister Harris said.’

  ‘Harris—you talked to her about it?’

  ‘She was over about one of the P.T.S. girls this afternoon, and I asked her what she thought. Very cagey, she was—but then, she always is. But she gave me an article about this group discussion technique, as they call it, one from the Lancet. And as far as I can see, it’s all personal—people talk about their really private feelings—rather nasty.’

  ‘It mightn’t be a bad thing at that——’ Dolly spoke almost to herself.

  ‘Are you going to join in, then? I wouldn’t have thought you would, East. I mean, you’re not the sort, are you? Not like Cooper or Arthur or that lot——’

  ‘I’m interested. You wouldn’t have to talk a lot yourself, would you? Someone’s got to listen. And it might be good to really find out about one or two people, people we’d be better off without——’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, exactly——’ McLeod looked faintly surprised. ‘What good would it do?’

  Dolly became brisk. ‘Well, the best way to find out about it is to join in. I’m going to. You do too, McLeod. Why should you be left out?’

  ‘I’ll think about it——’ McLeod said doubtfully. ‘But I’m not sure——’

  When McLeod had gone, and Dolly had washed her cups and put them carefully into her little curtained cupboard, she climbed into bed and lay thinking.

  Personal things. Feelings. That’s what would come out of the group discussions. Personal things.

  Dolly had been nursing long enough to know quite well that the only thing that could make a member of the nursing staff leave before she really wanted to was scandal. Inefficiency, stupidity, laziness, could be passed over, and she had never known anyone forced to leave for these reasons. But there was that business of the home sister before McLeod took the job, when one of the nurses got pregnant, and it turned out her boy friend had been getting into the Home over the back fence, and everyone had sworn the home sister had known about it, even condoned it. She had had to go, because of the way the scandal spread. Miss Biggs had asked her to resign, and she’d had to.

  And there are people like Arthur, and Cooper and Phillips, she thought. Cooper and Phillips. If something like that came out about one of them in Miss Manton’s precious group discussions, whose fault would it be? Miss Manton’s? It was a possibility.

  Dolly lay and listened to the faint clatter and sound of voices from Cooper’s room next door as they returned from their evening out, and for once she didn’t bang on the wall to remind them that she needed her sleep if they didn’t. She just lay quiet and listened and thought. She was beginning to feel a little better.

  Daphne and Susan always went to the cinema on Monday night. If there was something on at the local Odeon they fancied, they would go there, but often they would travel far across London.

  Everything about the outing was fun, the choosing of the film, the journey there, the small meal in a coffee house afterwards, the discussion of the evening in Daphne’s room once they got back to the hospital.

  They chose to see a reissue of ‘On the Town’ this Monday, and went out to th
e car park behind the pathological laboratories at six o’clock, as soon as they were both off duty and had changed.

  Daphne owned a small elderly Ford, and was more deeply attached to it than she would admit. It was always rather dirty, for Daphne felt obscurely that only inexperienced drivers cared about polishing coachwork and chrome; the sort of people she scornfully labelled ‘dolly danglers’, who filled their cars with toys and vases of imitation flowers, who put labels from seaside towns on the back, they were the sort who had clean cars.

  She held the passenger door open for Susan, and settled her before going round to get in herself.

  ‘Now, are you going to be warm enough? You should have worn your heavy coat, you silly ass—you’ll freeze in that suit. Do you want the rug? I can get it out of the boot if you do——’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Susan said, smiling up at her. ‘I’m as warm as toast, and once you get the heater going, I’ll be warmer still. Stop coming the auntie.’

  They enjoyed the film enormously, enjoyed the annoyed shushes of the people in front of them when they talked during it, giggled when Susan dropped a piece of ice cream inside her suit jacket, and generally behaved as they always did. It was not until they were settled in the coffee house and had selected, with much discussion, their open sandwiches and frothy white coffee, that they got round to talking of the afternoon.

  Susan sat with her elbows on the table, delicately nibbling round the slice of pickled cucumber that embellished her sandwich, the frilled sleeve of her blouse framing her birdlike wrists prettily.

  ‘What do you think of the Manton’s bombshell?’

  ‘Not much of a bombshell, really. Now, if she’d said a rota——’

  Susan giggled at once. ‘Oh, Lor’, that was fun! The way Cramm fell for it! I’ll never forget the way she looked—as though her chin would drop off——’

  ‘She wouldn’t have missed it if it had. She’s got three more where that one came from.’ Daphne picked up her own slice of cucumber and gave it to Susan. ‘Here, you have this——’

  ‘Ooh, can I? I do adore pickled cucumbers—you are a darling. But honestly, Daph, what do you think about it?’

  ‘To put it elegantly, lovey, I think it’s a load of old cod’s wallop—amateur psychiatry. That’s the trouble with these wallahs who’ve been mental trained. They’re all a bit touched, and they think everyone else is.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Susan looked serious. ‘P’raps there’s something in it. I mean, I don’t give a good goddam about staff relationships and all that. My nurses are fine and happy, because I leave them alone. If I started to go around building positive relationships they’d have a fit.’

  ‘She does like that word, doesn’t she? Positive, positive, whose got the positive?’

  ‘No, I mean it. I’m all for leaving the nurses alone. They do a better job if you do——’

  ‘You’re just lazy, monkey.’

  ‘I’m not!’ Susan protested. ‘Really I’m not. It’s just that—well, it’s always so noisy in O.P.—the only reason I stay there is the off duty. But listen, Daph, what she was saying about self understanding—wouldn’t that be interesting?’

  ‘Don’t you understand yourself then, Pip? Never mind, lovey, I do. If you want to know what makes you tick, come and ask your Auntie Daphne——’

  ‘Will you be serious for a moment?’

  ‘You do look funny when you’re being severe—like a little girl playing mummies and daddies—all right, I’ll be serious. What do you think about the idea?’

  ‘I think it might be worth doing—for ourselves. Never mind the business about staff relationships—what about our own?’

  ‘Our own?’

  ‘Mmm. Take us, for example. We’re friends—real friends, aren’t we?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Well, of course we are. But why? Had you ever thought about that?’

  Daphne looked at her sharply, but Susan was licking the last crumbs of grated cheese from her plate with a wet finger.

  ‘Why should we think about it? If you’re friends, you are—there’s no need to think about it.’

  ‘Oh, I do sometimes. I’ve always been rather lonely, really. I mean, I had friends of a sort when I was training, but never anyone I could really get close to, not like I am to you——’

  ‘We like the same things. We laugh at the same jokes, I suppose. Do you think there’s any more to it than that?’

  ‘Don’t you? I do—I mean, you really understand me, and I’m so—grateful for that——’

  ‘Oh, Pip, you are funny, lovey, really you are! So I understand you! So what? You don’t have to be grateful.’

  ‘Well, I am. And I’m interested, in an abstract sort of way. Why is it some people are able to understand others? Why do some people have friends and others don’t? Take old East, now——’

  ‘You take her. I don’t want her,’ Daphne said promptly.

  Susan laughed. ‘Nor do I. But haven’t you ever wondered why? Why she’s the sort of person she is? I’d love to know about things like that, as well as about myself, and about you——’

  Daphne sat silent for a moment, then she said slowly, ‘I suppose you could be right. It might be interesting. Mind you, you mightn’t like what you find out—about me, for example.’

  ‘Ooh, have you got a fearful secret? Will it all come out if we join in this group discussion? Marvellous! That settles it, then. I’m all for it!’

  ‘No, I’m being serious now. I’m a bit dubious about stirring things up. Sometimes it’s better just to accept things as they are. It could be that really knowing too much about yourself could be a bad thing. If you don’t like what you find out?’

  ‘I can’t imagine that! I don’t see you or me—or any of us come to that—as Jekylls and Hydes. It’s just interesting——’

  ‘I don’t suppose anything much will come of it, anyway,’ Daphne said with a return of cheerfulness. ‘Short of giving us all a shot of pentothal and making us reveal what happened when we were two years old, how could it? Mind, it’s always possible that Manton’s a dab hand at hypnosis. She’ll fix us all with a basilisk eye, and we’ll go into trances and confess to pinching brandy from the dispensary baskets, and coming on duty late every morning, and then she’ll give us all the push, and fill the Royal up with a bunch of wild eyed psychiatric sisters from Colston. She’s got it all planned, see? She’s going to infiltrate the place with them, and then turn it into a more obvious nut house than it is, and spend the rest of her life peacefully locking up the patients and psycho-analysing herself—it’s a fragrant picture——’

  And they both laughed, and went back to the hospital, to sit and talk about the film and about their plans for the rest of the week until gone midnight.

  FOUR

  Dolly and McLeod and Daphne and Susan were not the only sisters who found an opportunity to discuss the group discussion plan that Monday evening. Josephine Cramm and Ruth Arthur came off duty together, and when they met Sylvia Swinton at the door of the Home, it was inevitable that Josephine should ask them both to come and have a hot drink in her room to talk about it all.

  ‘I’ve only got a little time to spare,’ Ruth said cheerfully. ‘I’ve got a date at eight o’clock. Honestly, you should have heard what this bloke said about that wife of his! I mean, dammit, I said to him, she’s a patient of mine, but he just—well,’ she laughed and looked sideways at Josephine. ‘You know what men are——’

  ‘Well, it’s only six o’clock,’ Josephine said, not particularly interested in Ruth’s plans for the evening. ‘And I do want to talk about this group thing—come on.’

  ‘All right——’ Ruth followed her up the stairs, Sylvia climbing up behind her.

  ‘Eight o’clock? That’s pretty late, isn’t it?’ Sylvia said, a sardonic note in her voice. ‘Won’t give you much time for the great seduction scene, will it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ Ruth said immediately. ‘Time for a fe
w drinks, and then, who knows? Me, I like starting an evening late. Won’t end too early then—and there’s no point in getting on the tiles when they’re too crowded!’ And she laughed fatly, pleased with herself. For Ruth, the best part of an evening out was the time before she went, when she could make sure that as many as possible of the other sisters knew she was going, and the next morning, when she could present a worn and weary face at breakfast, reminding them yet again of the richness and variety of her private life.

  Josephine bustled about her neat room, plugging her electric kettle into the bedside light, putting shortcake biscuits on her tray and producing instant coffee and a bottle of milk from a cupboard.

  ‘Well, what do you think of this fancy plan?’ she asked as she spooned coffee into the cups. ‘Sounds all rather odd to me——’

  ‘Oh, I think it’ll be a great giggle,’ Ruth said, curling up on Josephine’s eiderdown. ‘We’ll all confess our secret thoughts and feel purged and ready to start thinking them all over again.’

  From her seat by the window, Sylvia laughed shortly.

  ‘And won’t you love it, Arthur. You’ll sit there, and you’ll tell everyone about this man, and that man, and what this one said, and what that one did, and Mary Cotton’ll go every colour under the sun, and you’ll have a whale of a time——’

  ‘Well, why not? There’s no sense in being mealy mouthed about things, is there? As for Mary—I swear she thinks babies come from spontaneous combustion. I’m not kidding—do you know what happened the other day? I must tell you—I was up on Matty, getting the notes of a woman they had to send to me for a big repair, and one of the pupils came in to the office in a great old flap. Mary had sent her to get the temp, chart from the woman’s bed, you see, and she—the woman—was in a single room. Infection or something. Mary’s got a great thing about that. If their temps, go up point one of a degree she’s got them in isolation before you can say knife. Anyway, as I was saying, this pupil came in in a great old to-do. “Ooh, Sister Cotton” she says, “I don’t know what to do. I was just going into the room, and I just looked through the little window on the door, and well Sister, it’s visiting time, you see——” So Mary says, all innocent. “Well, Nurse, what has that got to do with it? Go and get that chart.” “Ooh, Sister,” says the pupil, “I can’t really——” “Why not?” says Mary, a bit peeved. “It’s her husband, Sister,” says the pupil, red as a beetroot. “He—ooh, Sister, he’s got on to the bed, and I can’t.” So you know what Mary said?’