Sister Langtry knew that she could survive the very worst ward X could ever offer her, where she would never have survived neuro. Sister Dawkin felt the opposite. Which was just as well. Their values and skills were alike excellent, but their preferences were quite different.
‘Tea’s fresh—well, not bad,’ said Sister Dawkin, looking up and beaming. ‘Good to see you, Honour.’
Sister Langtry sat down at the small cane table and reached for a clean cup and saucer. She added milk to the cup first, poured in a dark and aromatic stream of tea not quite to the revoltingly stewed stage, then sat back and lit a cigarette.
‘You’re late, Sally,’ she said.
Sister Dawkin grunted. ‘I’m like Moses, always late. You know what the Lord said: Come forth, and Moses came fifth and lost his job.’
‘You’d have to have half a brain missing to appreciate that joke fully,’ said Sister Langtry, smiling.
‘I know. What can you expect? It’s the company I keep.’ Sister Dawkin bent to unlace her shoes, then hauled her uniform dress up and unhitched her suspenders from her stocking tops. Sister Langtry got a good glimpse of the army-issue bloomers everyone called ‘passion-killers’ before the stockings were peeled off and thrown onto a vacant chair.
‘Most of the time, Honour my pet, when I think of you stuck right down at the end of the compound with half a dozen loonies for company and no help, I don’t envy you one bit. I much prefer my thirty-odd neuros and a few female cohorts. But today is one of the days when I’d gladly change places with you.’
There was an ugly galvanized iron bucket full of water on the floor between Sister Dawkin’s feet, which were bare now and revealed as being short, broad, bunioned and minus anything in the way of an instep arch. While Sister Langtry watched, amused and touched, Sister Dawkin plonked both feet into the bucket and slopped and splashed luxuriously.
‘Ohhhhhhhhhh, that’s so beeeeeee-yew-tiful! Truly, I could not have gone another flipping step on them.’
‘You’ve got heat oedema, Sally. Better take some pot cit before it gets any worse,’ observed Sister Langtry.
‘What I need is about eighteen hours flat out in bed with my legs elevated,’ said the sufferer, and chuckled. ‘Sounds good when you put it that way, doesn’t it?’ She withdrew a foot from the bucket and probed with merciless fingers at the puffy red ankle above it. ‘You’re right, they’re up like a bishop at a girlie show. I’m not getting any younger, that’s my real trouble.’ The chuckle came again. ‘Oh, well, it was the bishop’s trouble, too.’
A solid, well-known tread sounded at the door; in sailed Matron, her starched white veil perfectly formed into a lozenge down her back, her impossibly starched uniform not showing a crease, the glitter from her shoes quite blinding. When she saw the two at the table she smiled frostily and decided to come over.
‘Sisters, good afternoon,’ she boomed.
‘Good afternoon, Matron!’ they chorused like obedient schoolgirls, Sister Langtry not rising to her feet out of consideration for Sister Dawkin, who could not.
Matron spotted the bucket, and recoiled. ‘Do you think, Sister Dawkin, that soaking your feet in a public room is quite seemly?’
‘I think it all depends on the room and the feet, ma’am. You’ll have to forgive me, I came from Moresby to Base Fifteen, and we didn’t have many niceties at Moresby.’ Sister Dawkin hauled one foot out of the bucket and regarded it clinically. ‘I must agree, it’s not a very seemly foot. Got bent out of shape in the service of good old Florence Nightingale. But then again,’ Sister Dawkin went on in exactly the same tone of voice, foot back in the water and splashing merrily, ‘nor is a grossly understaffed neuro ward quite seemly.’
Matron stiffened alarmingly, thought better of what she had been about to say because Sister Langtry was there as a witness; she turned sharply on her heel and marched out of the room.
‘Old bitch!’ said Sister Dawkin. ‘I’ll give her seemly! She’s been down on me like a ton of bricks all week because I had the temerity to ask her for extra staff in front of a visiting American surgeon general. Well, I’d been asking her in private for days without getting anywhere, so what did I have to lose? I’ve got four quads, six paras, nine hemis and three comas as well as the rest of the rabble. I tell you, Honour, if it wasn’t for the three or four blokes who are compos enough and fit enough to lend us a hand, my ship would have sunk to the bottom a fortnight ago.’ She blew a very rude-sounding raspberry. ‘Flipping mosquito nets! I’m just waiting for her to tell me D ward’s nets aren’t quite seemly, because the minute she does, I’m going to wrap one of her precious nets around her neck and strangle her with it!’
‘I agree she deserves a lot of things, but strangling? Really, Sally!’ said Sister Langtry, enjoying the sparks.
‘The old cow! She couldn’t hit a bull on the bum with a handful of wheat!’
But the very promising display of Dawkin fireworks fizzled damply the moment Sister Sue Pedder walked through the door. Any further eruptions became impossible. It was one thing to blow one’s top comfortably to Honour Langtry, who was if not in the same age group at least a topflight nurse of many years’ experience; to Sister Dawkin they were peers. Besides, they had served together from New Guinea to Morotai, and they were friends. Where Sister Pedder was a kid, no older than the AAMWAs who had worked for something like forty-eight hours at a stretch in Moresby. And that was the rub, perhaps. No one could imagine Sister Pedder working for forty-eight hours at a stretch anywhere.
Barely twenty-two, extremely pretty and extremely vivacious, she was in theatres, and had not been on the Base Fifteen staff for very long. It was a current joke that even old Carstairs the urinary surgeon had whinnied and pawed the ground when Sister Pedder waltzed through his theatre door. Several nurses and patients had lost money at that moment, having laid bets that Major Carstairs was really dead but didn’t have the grace to lie down.
The nurses left to man Base Fifteen until its extinction were all senior in age and experience, all veterans of jungle warfare and jungle nursing. Except for Sister Pedder, who was not generally regarded as part of the group, and was eyed by some with a great deal of resentment.
‘Hello, girls!’ said Sister Pedder brightly, coming over. ‘I must say I don’t see much of the ward stars these days. How is life on the wards?’
‘A darned sight harder than life in theatres making goo-goo eyes at the surgeons,’ said Sister Dawkin. ‘But enjoy it while you can. If I have anything to say about it, you’ll be off theatres and on neuro.’
‘Oh, no!’ squeaked Sister Pedder, looking utterly terrified. ‘I can’t stand neuro!’
‘Too bloody bad,’ said Sister Dawkin unsympathetically.
‘I can’t stand neuro either,’ said Sister Langtry, trying to make the poor girl feel more at ease. ‘It takes a strong back, a strong stomach, and a strong mind. I dip out on all three counts myself.’
‘So do I!’ agreed Sister Pedder fervently. She gulped a mouthful of tea, discovered it was tepid and horribly stewed, but swallowed it because there was nothing else to do save swallow it. A rather awkward silence fell, which frightened her almost as much as the thought of being transferred from theatres to neuro.
In desperation she turned to Sister Langtry, who was always very pleasant but standoffish, she thought. ‘By the way, Honour, I met a patient of yours from X a couple of weeks ago, and discovered I went to school with him. Isn’t that amazing?’
Sister Langtry sat up straight and bent a far more searching gaze on Sister Pedder than Sister Pedder considered her statement warranted.
‘The bank manager’s daughter from Woop-Woop!’ she said slowly. ‘Saints be praised! I’ve been wondering for days which one of us he could possibly mean, but I forgot all about you.’
