Chapter 19 Two Hospitals

The offer came to Adela Hastrey in the winter of 1968, and it was the offer she had spent six years hoping for and had stopped expecting, and it was shaped like a choice. She was to be appointed physician to the new hospital at Staddleford, in the medical department, with a ward of her own and a voice in the planning of the others, and she was to take up the post in the year the first beds opened. The letter said all of that in a single paragraph and then said the other thing in the next, which was that the appointment would take effect upon the transfer of the medical services from the Marrowden, and that the candidate appointed would be asked, as part of the planning, to give the professional opinion of the medical staff in support of the transfer and to assist in the drawing up of the timetable by which the old wards would be closed and the new ones filled. In plain words, which is how the letter did not put it and everyone who read it did, she was to be given a hospital on the condition that she helped to close the one that had made her. She had known the condition was in the air. She had not known it would be in the letter, in the same paragraph as the ward of her own. She took the letter up to the empty ward at the end of the day and sat with it. Letham Ward was empty that winter because it had been closed for want of staff and the beds had been moved to Dunmarch, and the ward that had held twelve women and once thirteen patients was a long bare room with the beds stacked at one end and the light coming in at the windows that had been set low so that a patient lying down could see the weather and not the sky. She walked the empty ward and read the letter again, and she understood that the building had brought her here and the city was taking her away, and that the two of them were the same two things that had been arguing over her since she was a girl from Craddon with a school certificate and no money, which were the place she came from and the place she could go. She found the diary a week later. She was clearing the desk in the office at the head of the stairs, because Druce had moved down to the town hall and no one was using the room, and the desk had a shallow drawer that had never been locked and a deep drawer below it that had been stuck for years, and the deep drawer came open that day with a sound like a cough. In it, under a bundle of old memoranda and a brass ruler, was a long ruled volume bound in dark cloth, and in the front of it, in a hand a hundred years old and very clear, were three rules for the admission of patients, and in the middle were the notes of a medical superintendent's day, and at the back were two columns of names. She read the front first, and knew whose book it was, because the three rules were the three rules that Delphia Orval had copied into the new admission book the year she retired, and then she read the two columns at the back and did not know, at first, what she was looking at. The first column was a list of names with a date against each: three hundred and forty of them. The second was shorter, eleven names, and against each of the eleven there was no date, only a cross. She looked at the first column for a long time before she understood that it was a list of the patients who had waited more than a fortnight for a bed, and she looked at the second for longer before she understood that it was a list of the ones who had died waiting, and when she had understood both she sat down in the empty office with the book open on the desk and read the eleven names down to the end, and the last of the eleven was the name of her own grandmother, Nesta Hastrey, of a court off Craddon, who had died in the corridor in the winter of 1929 while a bed was being found for her, and whom Adela had never met and whose name she had heard exactly once, from her mother, and had not thought about in twenty years. The book told her what the report could not. It told her that the building had a debt that had never been entered anywhere the council could see, and that the debt was owed to the eleven and to the three hundred and forty, and that the debt was the reason the building ought to be loved and the reason it could not be kept. She sat with that for the better part of an hour, and then she did the thing she had known, from the moment she read the letter in the empty ward, that she was going to do. She took the letter down to her room and answered it that night, and she accepted the post at Staddleford and agreed to give the medical opinion and to help draw up the timetable, and she added, in her own hand, below her signature, a condition of her own that the letter had not offered and could not refuse, which was that the clinic proposed for the north end of the city be sited on the ground floor of the old Quillock, with the door on the lane, where the people of Craddon already walked, and that it be opened before the last ward of the Marrowden closed, so that there would not be one day on which the nearest door was a bus ride away. The board accepted the condition, because it cost almost nothing and saved them the trouble of finding a site, which is the way conditions are accepted, and Adela put Fenmore's diary in her own bag and took it home and did not show it to anyone, and did not know yet that she would spend the rest of that year deciding what to do with it, and that the answer would not be to give it to the council, and would not be to keep it to herself, and would take longer than a year to find. ---