Sixteen months like this, I thought. All I could say was, “Archie.”
He dabbed the napkin to his chin with a shaking hand and looked me in the eye, speaking with perfect clarity. “You’re not much of a nurse, are you?”
I shook my head. “No. Actually, I’m the worst nurse you’ve ever seen.”
Suddenly we were both laughing. And that’s how I made friends with my first patient at Portis House.
? ? ?
“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?”