she sits beside his bed and listens to him twittering on. “Funny how it’s going to be Guy Fawkes night, soon. I never thought I’d be spared to see another firework. I remember when I had that turn on the Summer Bank Holiday. I said to myself, Ernest, I said—”
“I’ll bring your suit in on Monday morning.” The woman’s voice does not contain a hint of enthusiasm. I think she believes, like the rest of us, that Mr Buchanan is going to live for ever.
Whether he does or not I never begin to find out because he is discharged on Monday as planned. He insists on shaking hands with everyone and winces at every squeeze. “Never thought I’d go out of here on my pins,” he says. “Still, I expect they need the beds. When you get to my age you can’t expect people to have a lot of time for you. It’s all youth these days, isn’t it? I just hope I won’t be back here too soon, getting under everyone’s feet.”
“So do I,” mutters Staff Wood. “He won’t last long if he gets under mine.” Staff Wood has very large feet and I know what she means.
My month’s probation is up almost before I have realised it and when I am told that Matron wants to see me, I wonder what she can want.
“Well, Nixon,” she says when I knock timidly and obey her bark to go in. “Reports I have received suggest that you are a willing gel. Not exactly one of the brightest stars in the infirmament—” she pauses and looks at me hopefully. What does she expect me to do? “—but no matter, there’s plenty of time. Sign here.”
She pushes a piece of paper towards me and I suddenly realise that I am on the permanent staff. Now it is a month’s notice on either side. I am so chuffed at having been accepted that I sign without seriously considering whether or not I want to continue.
“I believe you share a room with my niece,” says Matron as I turn to go out. “Delightfully high spirited gel.”
“Yes.” I nod briefly and go out. So that was how Penny got into Queen Adelaide’s. I did not think that daddy’s insistence could have been enough and I had often wondered what Penny said at her interview. “Delightfully high spirited gel”, yes, that just about sums it up.
“Don’t tell anyone else. They’ll lynch me,” begs Penny when I report my conversation with Matron. “It was stupid of the old bag to tell you. She must have had some ulterior motive. She probably wanted everyone to lynch me. I expect my father put her up to it. He’s been wanting to get rid of me for years. Oh, Sphincters! !”
Penny has been developing a strong line in medical exasperation and abuse. Sly, devious G.B.H. who scuttles in and out of his office like a hermit crab, she calls a Lateral Epicondyle while anyone who annoys her—e.g. most Sisters—is a Pyloric Sphincter.
“Don’t worry,” I tell her. “Your secret is safe with me. I’m only illegitimate myself.”
Penny has been a bit down in the dumps lately which I think is due to not seeing Mark. Apparently he went up to Scotland for the weekend and she is pretty certain that he has met someone else.
“Quantity is no substitute for quality,” she says. “Still, I suppose one must try and keep one’s end up—or, more realistically, somebody else’s end up.”
She is so coarse sometimes that I don’t know where to put my face.
I am not feeling very happy on the man front either because, although Doctor Fishlock winks at me like a lighthouse he makes no move to invite me out. I think that what Penny said about him is true. He obviously preys on young, innocent nurses. Thank goodness he did not get anywhere with me.
Geoffrey writes me a letter saying that he got to the semi-finals of the Buckhurst Hill Tennis Tournament and I am quite glad to hear his news. Of course, what he did with Natalie was unforgivable but one can’t bear a grudge for ever. I am on the point of writing back and suggesting that we meet up in town on one of my evenings off when Jake Fletcher comes in to my life.
I get a shock when I come on duty and see him sitting up in bed because he looks just like one of the doctors on Emergency Ward Ten —I used to love that when I was a kid. I later find out that he is an actor and was on the programme although he didn’t play any of the doctors. Quite what he did do he does not say, but there were so many characters in the series, weren’t there?
Jake has a great craggy face with bushy eyebrows and piercing blue eyes that are always glinting from behind half closed lids. He looks like one of those dishy men in the cigarette advertisements and I am not surprised to learn that he has starred in the Elsinore cigar ads on the telly, “Denmark’s favourite whiff.” He also swam ashore with the dog biscuits in his mouth in the “Doggies, say goodbye to soggies” commercial and dived through the sheet glass window in the “Because the lady was crackers about Quackers” ad. Quackers are “the duck flavoured cocktail snacks you can eat with a cup of tea and a wad” in case you had forgotten. It was during the shooting of the last film that the release mechanism on his belt did not work and the helicopter pulled him out of the window and off over the rooftops carrying a chimney stack.
As he himself says, he was lucky to get away with a couple of badly broken ribs and a strained groin. He is being kept in for observation as much as anything else and there are an awful lot of female eyes observing him.
I do what I can to make him more comfortable and I think he takes a fancy to me. “I hope you’ll come out with me when I get this plaster off,” he says one day when I am giving him a blanket bath.
“We’ll see,” I say, thinking that he has probably invited out all the nurses on the ward. “Can you turn over on your other side?”
“If my screams won’t disturb you too much. There, is that better?”
One of the things you can’t help noticing about the man is that he has the most enormous “thing”, tonk, love truncheon—whatever you like to call it. With most patients you can calm their embarrassment by saying “Don’t worry Mr Trubshawe, we’ve seen it all before” but with Jake this just would not be true. Even Staff Wood comments on it. “I didn’t think he was going to get it into the bottle,” she says.
“He told me he couldn’t get it out,” sniffs Nurse Wilson.
“Like a rock python,” says Nurse Martin wistfully.
“I didn’t know you were interested in snakes, Nurse,” says Staff Wood.
“I’m not,” sighs Nurse Martin and goes off to change a drip.
Jake himself is not shy about discussing his equipment.
“Watch out for the old purple headed bed snake,” he says. “He’s feeling a bit snappy today. Hasn’t been out for walkies for a long time.”
“Can you turn over on your side?” I say, trying to look over his shoulder into space while I perform the necessary manoeuvres at crutch level—mind you, there are a lot of men on the ward to whom I would be much less willing to give a blanket bath. I would not touch Mr Arkwright with a sponge on the end of a barge pole.
“It’s the curse of my life, actually,” sighs Jake. “I’d give anything to be like other men.”
“What, you mean, your—”
“Yes. It’s a terrible impediment.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “I think it’s rather nice. I mean—”
“You’re very kind but you don’t know the half of it.”
If that is true, I think to myself, the possibilities are enormous. For some strange reason a slight thrill of excitement runs through my body and I take immediate steps to bring myself under control.
“Ouch!”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I should hope so. You’re not squeezing the last fag end out of a tube of toothpaste, you know. Just because it’s brutally large it doesn’t mean it has no feelings.”