Chapter 11 Sister Marchen

By the spring of 1932 Coline Marchen had been sister of Letham Ward for six years, and she had come to understand that the ward was not a room but a small town, with its own weather and its own laws, and that she was its mayor and its policeman and its parish priest. She was thirty-seven. She had refused two offers of marriage, the first at twenty-four and the second at thirty-one, and she had refused them for the plain reason that a married woman could not keep her post, and she had decided young that the work was worth more to her than the men, though there were mornings when she stood at the window of the ward and watched the city come awake and was not certain that she had decided anything at all, only drifted into a life the way a leaf drifts into a gutter. The ward held twelve women and, that week, thirteen patients. In the bed by the door was a woman of fifty with a cancer of the breast that had been operated on and had come back, and who had been in the ward three weeks and was not going to leave it except through the yard gate. In the bed by the window was a girl of nineteen from Brammoor with a hand that had been crushed in a mill, and the hand had gone bad and the surgeon was coming in the morning to take it off at the wrist, and the girl's mother sat by her all day and asked, every hour, whether it could not be saved. In the middle of the ward was a woman with a chest that would not clear, whom the medical officer had marked in the book for a transfer to Ostmere, which meant the fever ward, which meant that the women of the ward had begun to avoid her bed the way people avoid a house with a board on it. The probationer that spring was a girl of seventeen named Effa Ivaline, thin and quick and dark-eyed, who had come up from Craddon and whose mother had boiled the infirmary's linen for the last twenty-seven years. Coline had known she was coming, because Sorcha Ivaline had stopped her in the yard the month before and asked, in the flat voice of a woman who has decided not to ask for anything, whether the sister of Letham would keep an eye on the girl. Coline had said that she would, and had meant it, and had also meant to be careful, because a probationer who is the daughter of the laundry is watched twice as closely as any other, once by the ward and once by the yard. The mistake came on a Thursday. Effa was sent to the cupboard for the medicine for the woman at the end bed, and she brought back the bottle and poured the measure and gave it, and it was the wrong bottle; it was the mixture for the woman by the window, which was stronger, and the woman at the end bed took it, and Coline, who had been at the table writing, saw the colour of what was in the measure in the last instant and knocked it out of the girl's hand onto the floor, and the dose was lost and the woman was unhurt, and the girl stood in the middle of the ward with her hands at her sides and went the colour of the sheet. Coline did not raise her voice. She sent the girl into the little room off the ward and told her to sit down and not to move, and then she finished the round and took the report to the matron, and did not put the mistake in the report, because a mistake that hurt no one and was caught in time is a lesson and not a fault, and a ward sister who reports every lesson teaches her nurses to hide the ones that matter. She told the girl the truth instead, in the little room, at the end of the day. "You will do it again," Coline said. "You will do it again in a year and in five years, and one day no one will knock the glass out of your hand, and someone will be hurt, and it may be you. What saves you is not being careful. It is reading the label twice, every time, until the reading twice is a part of your hand and not a part of your thinking. I have done this for twenty years and I still read the label twice, and the reason I read it twice is that I once did not, and a woman was given a draught that was not hers, and she lived, and she never trusted a nurse again as long as she lived, and I have carried the look on her face for sixteen years." She sent Effa home at seven and stood in the doorway of the ward and watched her go down the corridor, and for a moment the girl's back was her own back, going down a corridor in 1913 with her hands shaking. That winter the woman with the cancer asked Coline for something. She asked it one night when the ward was quiet, and she asked it plainly, without grief, the way a woman asks a neighbour for the loan of a bowl: whether there was anything the sister could give her that would end it, and whether the sister would give it if there was. Coline sat on the edge of the bed and held the woman's hand and told her the truth, which was that there was nothing she could give and nothing she would give, and that she would sit with her every night for as long as it lasted, and that she was sorry. The woman thanked her, and died three weeks later, and Coline was with her, and afterward Coline went out through the yard gate at dawn and walked up to Alderfield, where the paupers' graves were, and stood among the rows of small stones, and she did not pray, because she had stopped praying at twenty, but she stayed a while, because the dead of the ward were hers, and somebody in the world ought to stand with them a little longer than the ward could afford. ---