“You should be eating your meals downstairs,” I said to Archie the next night as we managed his soup. I’d dumped out his tea and transferred the soup into the cup. It wasn’t perfect, but it had a better success rate than the spoon.
“Do you think this”—he gestured to the setup, he and I at the little table, trying to get food into him—“would go over well with the others?”
It wouldn’t, of course. “I only meant that the infirmary is horrible, and you’ve nothing to do. You should at least be getting exercise with the other men.”
“I’m mas-master of the house here.” He gestured around the former master bedroom. “The finest—finest suite. And I have something to do now,” he said, taking a shaky sip of soup. “I can gossip about the others with you.”
“Is it so bad?” I said.
He shrugged. “Matron—Matron gives me extra time to eat my—meals in the dining room. I do—I do the best I can. The others like to have a go at me, especially Creeton, but I can—I can handle it.” He looked at me. “You’re wondering why I’m in the infirmary, aren’t you?”
“It crossed my mind.”
He scratched his forehead slowly, his hand juddering. “A few days ago I had a par—I had a par—” He took a breath. “I had a particularly difficult episode.”
That seemed to be all. I frowned at him. “What happened?”
Now he looked distressed. “I had a particularly difficult episode.”
“I’m sorry.”
He closed his eyes. “Is it Monday?”
“Yes.”
“The doctors will—will be here in two days, then. Wednesday is when they come. Matron said I’m to—to stay here until the doctors say I can leave. It’s safer here.”
What did “safer” mean? I looked at his gaunt arms, his sunken cheeks. “You said you could handle it.”
“You don’t—you don’t like it here, do you?” he said.
I crossed my arms. “You’re parrying me. Again.”
He smiled a little.
“Well,” I said, “perhaps it’s best if you do come down. It’s extra work to bring your meals, you know. You and the mysterious Patient Sixteen.”
A spark of interest crossed Archie’s eyes. “He hasn’t come down, then?”
“No.”
“I see.”
I pictured a man disfigured, his face part gone, or maybe burned away. Ally had seen men like that in London, their noses blasted off or their eyes seared shut, and she’d been quiet when she spoke of them, dragging painfully on her cigarette, her eyes looking old. “I don’t even know what he looks like,” I ventured, hoping for a warning. “The other nurses take him his meals. I haven’t seen him.”
“You won’t,” said Archie, the words slipping out softly as if he spoke to himself. “They won’t let you see him.”
I looked at him, stunned. “What do you mean, they won’t let me?”
He dropped his gaze and stirred his soup, the neck of the spoon chattering gently against the lip of the cup. “Ask them,” he said. “You’ll see.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Patient Sixteen,” said Boney as we cleared plates from the empty dinner tables, “is a special case. A confidential case.” She raised her chin. “The fact is, you don’t yet have clearance.”
“What does that mean?” I protested. I’d thought I had a handle on the politics here, but I could see that I’d been wrong. The idea panicked me a little. “How can I need clearance to give a man his supper?”
The inevitable words came from Boney’s mouth: “Matron’s orders. Nurses come and go here. Not all of them are trustworthy. The clearance to deal with Patient Sixteen is not given until a nurse has proven herself to Matron.”
With what Matron knew about me, the likelihood of her giving me clearance was almost nil. Not that I cared about it, of course. “Listen,” I said. “The doctors come on Wednesday. Nina told me that the patients have to attend the group sessions. So it mustn’t be so secret then.”
“Patient Sixteen is an exception.” Boney stared disapprovingly at my confusion. “The doctors see him in private. His door is allowed to be closed, but not locked. He is not to mix with the other patients. He does not attend group sessions, meals, or exercise. Paulus Vries and two other orderlies have clearance, as well as Nurse Beachcombe and Nurse Shouldice, myself and Matron. And no one else.”
“Why?” I asked, though I already knew it was futile to try to get Boney to spill anything. “What’s wrong with him?”
“That’s not for you to know. And only nurses with clearance can assist the doctors at all. You’ve only been here three days, and you’ve proven yourself sloppy and insolent. If you think you’ll get clearance, you’re sadly mistaken.”
She said those words—“the doctors”—with such righteous awe it was obvious she had her precious clearance. I thumped a stack of plates on the cart. Of course I was sloppy—I had no idea how to nurse. And as for the insolence, well, this was my attempt to be nice. Boney had no idea what thoughts I clamped my jaw on daily.
“Just keep trying,” said Boney with a superior smirk as she pulled the cart into the hall. “It takes time. The last girl wasn’t here long enough to get clearance before she left. Improve your attitude and perhaps Matron will consider you. Now—please go see Paulus. He’s to give you some work to do.”
Paulus Vries wore the orderly’s uniform of shirt and trousers of white canvas, and sported a thick mat of pale, springy hair on his forearms past the short sleeves of his shirt. He wiped his large hands on a towel as he spoke to me, regarding me with indifferent eyes. “It’s the lav,” he said without preamble. “All that knocking in the pipes, and the toilet won’t stop gurgling. Do you have the same problem in the nurses’?”
I shook my head. The nurses had their own lavatory on the third floor, near the old nursery where we slept. The patients shared a lavatory on the second floor, on the east side of the house that contained their rooms. The infirmary was the only room with a separate bathroom.
“Well, it’s a problem,” Paulus told me. “The fellows have been complaining about the noise, and it isn’t just in their barmy minds, either. There are sounds, and a smell, too. Probably an animal in the walls chewing the pipes, or something’s died in there. It’s driving some of them more out of their minds than they already are.”
I frowned. We were standing in the downstairs hallway, just outside the kitchen, and orderlies brushed past us back and forth. “That’s all very interesting. Why is it to do with me?”
“Because two of my men did a bit of exploring in the drains with a length of rubber hose, and something in there was backed up nasty. Caused a bit of a mess.” He tucked the towel into the waistband of his trousers.
I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “I’m to clean it?” I asked. “Is that what you mean?”
He shrugged. “I’ll carry the mop and pail up for you if you like.”
“A nurse?” I said. “A nurse is supposed to mop the patients’ lav? That’s orderly work.”
“Not today, it isn’t. Matron’s orders.”
I watched him, feeling sick, as he pulled a heavy metal bucket and thick mop from the closet. She’s testing me, I thought as I followed him up the east staircase. Of course she is. She wants to see if I’ll quit, like the others.
The smell hit me before we even approached the lavatory door. It was a dank, horrible miasma, not a smell of bodily fluids, but of something rotting. It seemed to creep from the crack under the closed door like a living thing. My stomach turned.
Paulus seemed not to notice, or perhaps he’d smelled worse. As he approached the door, a voice came from the hall behind us. “Sister!”
Creeton stood in the open doorway to his room, watching us. He put his hands in his pockets and leaned on the doorframe, taking in the bucket and mop and starting to grin. I turned away.
“What a good little nurse you are,” Creeton called after me. “Cleaning up like this. We’re a bunch of brutes here, I’m afraid. It looks like someone left a nice present in the lav just for you.”
“Shut up,” I said.
“Sweet scented and something to remember us by.” He laughed. “Has any man ever given you a present quite so nice?”
“Leave off,” said Paulus. “You’re supposed to be downstairs in the common room.”
“I forgot something. I’m glad I did now. This is much better than watching Somersham giggle or Mabry mop his bloody nose.”
I found I was gripping the mop handle, my hold so tight my knuckles were white. I’d been heckled before, plenty of times, but there was something about being heckled by Creeton that made my skin crawl.
“You go,” Paulus said over my head to Creeton, “or I’ll carry you down there myself.”
But Creeton’s steps left the doorway and came toward us. “I want to watch. Will she be on her knees scrubbing, Vries? I’d like to see that.”
“You go,” said Paulus again, as I stared at the door and smelled the unspeakable smell, “or I get angry.”
There was a long pause, as if Creeton was weighing his chances; then his steps turned away with the same slow, deliberate insolence he’d used on Matron. I brushed a forearm over my eyes.
Paulus was watching me. There was no mockery in his expression, but there was no pity, either. “You have to,” he said simply. “It’s her way. You either do this now, or you do something else later. Something worse.”
I nodded.