Chapter 15 The Act

Delphia Orval was sixty that spring and had been sister of Bellcairn for thirty years when the news came up the slope that a government had passed an act, and that the act, when it came into force, would take the Marrowden and every hospital like it and put them into a single service, and that after a date to be fixed the poor of Vessock would be treated, at the point of use, for nothing at all. She had heard a great deal in thirty years about what the poor of Vessock would one day have, and she had learned not to believe announcements, because an announcement is a promise and a promise is a thing that costs nothing to make and is paid for by somebody else. But this one had been argued for over years and carried in a vote and written into law, and it did not say that the destitute should be relieved, which was the old word, or that the sick poor should be admitted without payment, which was the line Fenmore had set at the front of the big book. It said that the service would be comprehensive, and free at the point of use, and that no one would be asked on the way into a hospital what he earned. Delphia read the words twice, and then a third time, and then she did the thing she had taught herself not to do in thirty years, which was to believe them. The means test went out in the first year, and with it the Quillock clerk and the form and the small room behind the hatch where a boy from Craddon had once lain on his mother's hip while Delphia forged the almoner's initials to put him above the line. She was not sorry to see the form go. She had carried that forged finding the way a person carries a coin that is not hers, and the abolition of the form did not make it lawful, because a thing done to keep a promise to the poor is not undone by the law catching up with it; the law catches up and the doing stays done, and the woman who did it is still the only person alive who knows the shape of the mark she made. The boy, Hensley Duskin, had grown up and gone away to the war and come home, and was a fitter in Brammoor with a boy of his own, and did not know, and would not be told. The man the new board sent up to take the place of the old secretary was called Pelham Druce. He was forty, and he came in a dark suit and a hat with a folder under his arm, and he was neither a fool nor a brute, which was the worst thing about him, because a fool can be managed and a brute can be feared, and Druce was only efficient, and an efficient man who does not love the thing he is running will run it into the ground as neatly as into the future and can prove the figures either way. He walked the building with Delphia and Coline and asked the right questions and wrote the answers in the folder, and at the end of the round he said the thing the building would spend the next twenty years hearing, which was that the Marrowden was a fine old hospital and that the service would be stronger when it was not so many small ones, and that there would one day be a district hospital, modern and large, that would serve the whole of the valley better than a hundred-year-old pile on a hill. He did not mean it as a threat. That was the thing to understand about Pelham Druce, that he never meant it as a threat. He meant it as a fact, delivered in the first year, in the course of a morning, as though it were weather. Redvers Yarrell died in the first winter of the new service, at seventy-nine, in his chair in the lodge, with the log open on the shelf and the last line of it finished in his own small hand to the minute of the hour before. They found him in the morning when the coal came, and the boy from Craddon who had run his errands for six years sat on the step outside the lodge and would not be moved until the carters had taken the body down, because he had decided, in the way of a boy, that someone should keep the gate even if the gatekeeper was gone. Coline cleared the lodge and found under the shelf the box of lost things: the boot, the ring, the comb, the printed card, the child's wooden horse, and the sovereign the chairman had given him after the fire, all of it kept for forty years for owners who had never come back. She carried the box up to her own room and put it on the shelf above her desk, beside the photograph of her mother and the framed one of her mother's sister, and she did not throw any of it away, because a gatekeeper's box of lost things was the only property the building owned that anyone would miss if it went, and she was not yet willing to find out whether that was still true. And before she retired, Delphia did one small thing that no one asked her to do. The old admission book was full and a new one had been bound and given to the wards, and on the first page of the new book, in the space where the printed rules ended, she wrote out, in her own hand, the three lines that Fenmore had written on the first page of the first: that the sick poor of Vessock would be received without payment, that those able to pay would be received as lodgers, and that no one would be refused in an emergency of any kind. The third line was now the law and no longer a promise, and she wrote it anyway, and she signed it as sister of Bellcairn, which she had been for thirty years and was about to stop being, and she did it because she did not trust a service to keep a promise it had not written down itself, and because the front of a book is the only place a hospital has ever been able to say plainly what it is for. ---