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He looked surprised. ‘She asked my opinion, and I gave it. You weren’t related, were you? And you’d only just gone away.’
‘I’d worked closely with him for years!’ She spoke in an unnaturally high voice.
He chose to ignore that. ‘I’d already spoken to some of your staff. They told me how devoted you were to your work, how you worked unpaid overtime if the ward was short-staffed, which it frequently was. One doesn’t meet with that kind of dedication much these days, and I rather liked the sound of you. And I certainly didn’t imagine that you’d look the way you do.’
There was a murmur of appreciativeness in his voice and she was furious. ‘Just stick to the point,’ she hissed at him.
He shrugged. ‘You may or may not agree with me, but I’ve always tended to think that all nurses need their hard-earned holidays. They feel better and then they do their jobs better. Weighing everything up, we thought it better for you to continue with your holiday. I can’t see what the problem is, unless you’re one of these super-women who feel that the ward simply can’t run without their presence. Indispensable is the word, I think.’
‘How dare you speak to me like that?’
He remained unperturbed. ‘Oh, I dare all right. You asked me a question, and I’m giving you an honest answer. I’m just sorry you don’t agree with me. You may be sister of the ward—but I certainly don’t come under your professional jurisdiction.’
She bit her lip. ‘And Staff Nurse Collins? What did she say? She knows me almost better than anyone. Did she recommend that I continue on my holiday, blithely unaware that the man who was almost—like a father to me——’ her voice broke a little at this ‘—was dead?’ she finished in a whisper.
He moved over to her side then, his face soft with sympathy. ‘Hey—I certainly didn’t mean to cause you this much pain. I’m sorry if you think the wrong decision was made. But you know yourself that attending a funeral doesn’t change anything. You still have to grieve. Don’t you think that perhaps you might be misdirecting your grief, and it’s coming out as anger against me?’
‘You can keep your cheap psychoanalysis,’ she said bitterly. ‘And please answer the question—did Staff Nurse Collins agree with you?’
‘Yes,’ he answered quietly. ‘She did.’
‘I don’t believe you!’
‘Then ask her.’
‘Oh, believe me—I shall. And I shall also ask her why she felt she had to leave so suddenly, but that will be academic, since I feel pretty sure I already know the answer to that one.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh?’
‘Because she realised that she wouldn’t be able to bear working for an arrogant, overbearing doctor like you, Dr Trentham!’
For one moment there was an answering flash in his eyes, and she thought that he was going to respond with an equally angry retort, but he evidently changed his mind, for he shook his head very slightly.
‘Why don’t you smash a plate or something?’ he enquired mildly. ‘It might make you feel better.’
‘Then I should get out if I were you,’ she said between gritted teeth, ‘because if I do choose to smash something it’s very likely to be over your head!’
‘I’m going, I’m going!’ he said, in mock alarm. ‘Women with green eyes and hot tempers have always terrified me—and, honey, you are one very angry young woman!’
Before she could screech at him ‘don’t ever call me “honey”,’ which she was intending to do, he had slipped quietly out of the door, leaving her sitting there, her cheeks flushed with rage, feeling ever so slightly a fool.
What on earth had made her over-react like that? Why hadn’t she been her normal calm, unflappable self, telling him that his behaviour had been out of order, and would he mind being a little less familiar in future?
In fact, what was it about the man which made her feel such a strong and genuine dislike for him? Apart from the fact that he was overbearing and quite disturbingly masculine. Something about the way he had looked at her when he had made the comment about women with green eyes and hot tempers, as if he would like to. . . She shuddered very slightly.
She had better stop wasting time thinking about him. Roll on Dr Marlow’s replacement, please—the sooner they could get rid of this unconventional locum, the better.
She stood up to straighten her hair and her cap, and to do up the button of her dress. Calm down, Jenny, she urged herself. It was time to get on with the job in hand. She had better have a quick walk around the ward and say hello to all the patients before she gave the report.
Rose Ward, like all the other wards in the cottage hospital, was small compared to those in some large district general hospitals. The hospital itself was unusual in that it had survived its original small state—the current trend to centralise small units into large hospitals had passed Denbury Hospital by, partly because of the vociferous support of the local community, and partly because an extremely wealthy ex-patient had bequeathed his massive fortune to them. An added point in Denbury’s favour was that the surrounding countryside consisted of notoriously impassable hilly areas, which often became cut off during heavy falls of snow—and the powers that be had decreed that it was better to have a hospital which was accessible to all the farms and small villages around, rather than risk patients being marooned in transit to the nearest large DGH.
People often asked Jenny how she could bear to settle in such a God-forsaken part of the country, being so young and so well-qualified, but she simply couldn’t imagine life in a busy town or city. She loved the simple calm of country life—the predictability of seasons merging into the next, not obscured or deafened by the intrusion of inordinate amounts of cars and machines. She liked knowing which hen had laid the eggs she ate! She liked knowing people she had grown up with. And, above all else, she liked continuity and order.
Sometimes she questioned why it was that she never felt the burning desire to marry and settle down, and produce children of her own. There had been overtures, of course, two from young men she’d known all her life, and one from a doctor she had gone out with while she was training. But she had not felt deeply enough about them to want to disrupt the solitary peace of her existence. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that her mother had lived on her own all her life—perhaps she had liked that role-model so much that she was prepared to choose it for herself. And, when you’d spent your whole childhood hearing how awful men were, it tended to influence you a bit.
She was aware that, at twenty-six, she was considered by some of the younger nurses to be ‘on the shelf’, but it rarely bothered her. Indeed, she’d had to cope with so many red eyes and such morose behaviour when nurses’ love-affairs were not going so swimmingly that she often felt glad that that side of life seemed to have passed her by.
She put a new notebook into the pocket of her dress and walked briskly on to the ward, fixing a smile on her face, not wanting the patients to see her upset. She saw an answering lift in many of their faces. She could imagine that many of them had taken the news of Dr Marlow’s death badly, but, as well as that, patients on long-stay wards such as orthopaedics tended to miss Sister when she went away. A simple fact—the ship was without a captain!
‘Afternoon, Sister!’ called a couple of the men. ‘Good to have you back!’
She smiled her response, and went round to each patient in turn, perching on the side of the bed for a brief chat, and writing down in her notebook anything which she should mention to the doctor.
A wave of horror, quickly suppressed, washed over her as she realised that she was going to have to take every single problem to that man. As she patted Mr Walters’s hand and assured him that his fractured neck of femur was healing splendidly, before moving on to the next bed, she vowed that at no time would she let any of the patients or other staff know how much she disliked him. That would be extremely unprofessional, and might even undermine his authority. A clash of personalities was one thing. . .
Unless, of course, she thought with a grim kind of longing, unless he proved utterly useless as a doctor—then she would be perfectly in her rights to register a formal complaint about him.
When she eventually reached Mrs Jessop’s bed she was surprised to see her sitting up in bed knitting, her hair looking smart and newly set, and a brand new fluffy pink bed-jacket covering her thin shoulders.
‘Why, Mrs Jessop!’ exclaimed Jenny in surprise. ‘You look absolutely wonderful—and you’re knitting! I didn’t know you could knit!’
‘Hello, Sister,’ said the old lady fondly. ‘Lovely to see you—and you’re looking bonny yourself.’
‘Tell me what’s happened to you. Have you suddenly learned to knit?’
Mrs Jessop looked bashful. ‘Aw, no, Sister! Years ago, when we lived in Scotland, I used to turn out matinée jackets for every baby in the village. I’d kind of got lazy over the years, sitting in my chair and watching the box. That nice new doctor’s taken me in hand, like.’
Jenny felt her facial muscles freeze. ‘Oh?’
Mrs Jessop sighed happily. ‘Oh, yes. Brought an occupational therapist round to see me, he did.’
‘But we haven’t got an occupational therapist!’
‘Oh, yes, we have, Sister—now! Dr Trentham saw to that! Kicked up a terrible fuss, he did, according to the nurses. Said—what was it he said? Oh, yes—that it was “counter-productive” not to have one, that people got better more quickly with expert guidance. Said that, even if the hospital told him it couldn’t afford one, he knew a girl who would come in an afternoon a week and do it for nothing! Going to start in a few weeks’ time, she is—but she came round to see us all and then got me all this knitting wool. Lovely girl, she is, ever so athletic—used to play tennis at Wimbledon when she was a lassie! Imagine that, Sister!’
‘Imagine!’ echoed Jenny faintly, trying to force some enthusiasm into her voice. She put the bag of oranges into the old lady’s fruit bowl, and, brushing aside her effusive thanks, made her way back up the ward, trying to quell the unreasonable feeling of irritation which was growing inside her.
It all made sense, she knew that. Hadn’t she thought that they should have an OT for years? Hadn’t she politely spoken to Dr Marlow time after time, requesting one? But the kindly, and somewhat elderly doctor had not been in the least dynamic. He had gone into committee meetings and put his case so mildly that none of the board of governors—operating under such tight financial strain already—could believe his arguments that an OT was imperative.
So why did it irk her so much that Leo Trentham had achieved in less than two weeks what she had been coveting for years? She should be glad for the ward’s sake. And yet she felt as though her position as leader was being usurped. What else had he changed while she had been away?
She called one of the student nurses over to her, a happy hard-worker called Daisy Galloway, who was on secondment from Denbury’s sister hospital—the large St Martin’s. Jenny liked her very much.
‘Hello, Sister,’ grinned the girl. ‘You look great! Did you have a good time?’
‘I certainly did!’ Until I became acquainted with our new surgeon, she thought. ‘Will you do the two o’clock drug-round with me?’
‘Yes, Sister.’
They unlocked the trolley from the wall, then unlocked the first section, then the section within which contained the Schedule ‘B’ drugs. Jenny flinched a little when she saw how disordered the latter drugs appeared—bottles dumped haphazardly into the small space, not into the neat alphabetical lines which she favoured. She wondered who was responsible, but she suppressed a small click of disapproval, not wanting to seem overly critical of her staff. There might have been a perfectly good reason for such oversight—an emergency taking place during the drug-round, for example—when all the bottles might have had to be put back quickly and locked, so that the staff could run to the aid of a patient.
With experienced fingers she swiftly realigned the bottles, then glanced up at the student nurse.
‘Do you know why hospitals are so obsessed with neatness and order, Nurse Galloway?’
Nurse Galloway cleared her throat. ‘Er—I think so, Sister.’
‘Yes?’
‘Er—it’s because hospitals are run a bit like the military.’
Jenny laughed. ‘And why do you say that?’
Daisy looked less shy. ‘My dad used to be in the marines, and he told me.’
Jenny nodded. ‘Well, you’re right! Like the services, we tend to have lots of rules, but there are reasons for those rules—we don’t devise them just because we want to make more work for the students, or to be awkward.’
‘Yes, Sister?’ asked Daisy interestedly. She loved Sister Hughes—even though she was a ward sister, you felt you could ask her anything.
‘Well, if I shouted for you to get me something urgently—a drug, for example, and we always kept our drugs in alphabetical order, you’d be able to find it immediately, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes, Sister.’
‘Alternatively, if a patient was having a cardiac arrest and I wanted the defibrillator, it would be of no use to us if the last person to use it had left it lying at the bottom of their ward instead of returning it to the corridor between Rose and Daffodil, now, would it?’
‘No, it certainly wouldn’t, Sister!’
‘There is “a place for everything, and everything in its place”, to quote the old saying, because the most orderly way of doing things is also the most efficient, and we need hospitals to be efficient. Not, of course,’ here she paused and smiled at the junior nurse, ‘that we must ever forget that we are dealing with people first and foremost, and therefore if a patient was depressed or worried about something then I’d expect you to find the time to sit down and talk to them. I wouldn’t bite your head off just because you’d missed a bit of ward-cleaning!’
‘No, Sister,’ said Daisy Galloway, and she tipped two ampicillin capsules into the top of the bottle and showed them to Jenny.
‘And why don’t we tip the tablets on to the palm of our hand,’ queried Jenny, ‘which would be the most natural thing to do?’
‘Because the patient’s drugs don’t want to be covered in the sweat from our hands,’ answered Daisy.
‘Even though, as a nurse, you should make sure your hands are thoroughly clean at all times?’ teased Jenny, and the junior laughed.
Jenny stood and watched while the patient took the tablets before neatly signing the drug chart. They moved along to the next bed, a new admission—a woman of fifty who had come in to have a hip replacement. Her operation was scheduled for the following morning, and she would probably only be written up for routine pre- and post-operative drugs, but Jenny pulled out the drug chart to check.
She bit her lip in annoyance to see that Leo Trentham’s large, untidy signature was scrawled all over it, but what was worse was the fact that he had chosen to write up the drugs in the most lurid shade of violet that she had ever seen.
Nurse Galloway noticed her frown and peered at the chart. ‘That’s certainly unconventional, Sister!’ she exclaimed.
‘It’s an eyesore,’ said Jenny curtly before shutting it swiftly. Why couldn’t he behave a little more responsibly? That kind of behaviour was more typical of a medical student than a qualified surgeon!
As they moved down the ward, Jenny discovered that Dr Trentham also had a penchant for writing in emerald green and turquoise—anything, in fact, other than the usual black or blue. Unconventional? He was that all right.
After the drug round the morning staff returned, and Jenny was given the report by the agency staff nurse.
The girl’s pale eyes glanced at her slyly. ‘Are you feeling better now, Sister?’
‘I’m fine, thanks, Staff,’ said Jenny briskly and smiled, her eyes on the Kardex, showing that she wished to proceed.
‘Fancy fainting at the sight of Leo, although I can’t say that I blame you—he’s bloody gorgeous, isn’t he?’
Jenny was not standing for that. ‘I did not faint at the sight of Dr Trentham; I had received some very bad news, and I would prefer it if you refrained from using first-name terms with the medical staff—it confuses the students.’ Her voice was not unkind, but the firmness of it indicated that she meant what she said.
‘Yes, Sister,’ answered the girl sulkily, the emphasis on her title steeped in sarcasm, and Jenny’s heart sank. What was happening today? She seemed to be falling out with everyone. She knew a moment’s longing for the days before her holiday, for the easy camaraderie with Judy Collins and Dr Marlow. But she stifled her sigh. Those days were gone now, and she was going to have to work with these new people, like it or not. She attempted to inject a note of friendliness into her voice.
‘Of course, we can use first names in the office.’
‘Of course.’ The sarcastic reply was one of thinly veiled insolence, but Jenny decided to let it pass.
‘And what is your name, Staff? Doesn’t your agency provide you with a name-badge?’
The pale eyes lacked any warmth. ‘All they provide me with is a cheque at the end of each week—and that’s the way I like it.’
Jenny’s heart sank once more. She hoped that this girl was going to fit in. Most agency staff nurses she had worked with were fine, but she had known of one or two who had very odd personalities, girls who were interested only in the higher rates of pay which agencies provided. Girls who had been unable to find a permanent job elsewhere, for one reason or another. Some had been lazy so that she had had to chivvy them into doing work; they had never found work for themselves—and there was always something to do on a ward—but had had to be asked to do it.
Yet what choice did they have but to employ agency nurses? Nurses were in great shortage and the conditions were to blame. The pay was still appalling compared to many other jobs which required a fraction of the skill which nursing demanded. No wonder that nurses were leaving the health service in droves, to take on boring but highly paid office jobs, their professional qualifications wasted. And other dedicated nurses, such as Ella, Mary and Kingsley—fine nurses she had trained with—had been forced to seek work in Australia, where nurses were respected and highly rewarded, as they were in America and most other countries in the world. Only in Britain were they treated like paupers and second-class citizens, unable for the most part to even manage to buy houses on their meagre salaries.
Jenny smiled again at the moody-looking girl on the other side of the desk. Perhaps she had been a little abrupt—there was nothing wrong with the girl admiring one of the doctors, after all, though ‘bloody gorgeous’ was hardly the way she would have chosen to describe him!
‘So what is your name?’ she asked.
‘It’s India,’ answered the girl reluctantly. ‘India Westwood.’
‘India! What a pretty name! And so unusual.’
There was a slight hesitation. ‘I hate it!’
Jenny gave up. ‘Well, at least it’s not boring, like Jennifer!’ She glanced at the Kardex. ‘Now, then. What’s been happening to the ward while I’ve been away?’
Staff Nurse Westwood gave the report competently enough, although her voice lacked any real warmth when talking about the patients. But then she hadn’t been working there very long, and perhaps it was difficult to become involved when you were doing agency work since you never knew how long you were going to stay in one particular job. She could, in principle, be moved to another ward tomorrow, though Jenny knew that Sonia Walker would avoid this unless absolutely necessary—she attempted to provide some degree of continuity by sending agency staff to the same ward.
When the report was finished Jenny took the Kardex. ‘Thanks very much indeed, Staff. I wonder if you’d like to send the evening staff in to me, and I’ll tell them what’s going on?’ The phone on her desk rang and she picked it up. ‘Hello?’ She listened for a moment or two. ‘Right. I’ll do that. Thanks.’
She looked at Staff Nurse Westwood. ‘Mrs Curran is ready to be collected from Theatre—she’s had a bit of a nasty reaction to the anaesthetic, so I’d like a trained member of staff to collect her. Could you go—and ask two of the staff to move the beds round so that she’s right next to the office? I noticed that it hadn’t been done on my way round.’
‘I didn’t have time to do it,’ answered the blonde defensively.
No, but you had time to stand in the office in close cahoots with Leo Trentham, thought Jenny, but she said nothing. ‘I was just stating a fact, Staff—it wasn’t intended as a criticism. By the way—just before you go could you tell me what’s happened to my red ward-book? It seems to have disappeared.’
‘Oh, that!’ India’s voice was triumphant. ‘We don’t use it any more.’
Jenny had difficulty in keeping her voice calm. ‘Oh? Don’t we? Says who?’
‘Leo—I mean Dr Trentham. He says that those books went out with the ark. He hasn’t thrown it away, though—he’s put it in the top cupboard by the door.’
