Chapter 4 A Probationer's First Night

Coline Marchen came down from Ashenby on a Monday morning with her box tied with string and her mother's words still in her ears: that a nurse was a kind of servant who had been to school. She was eighteen. She had been told to report to the matron at eight, and she arrived at half past seven and stood in the entrance hall for the half hour, because she did not know where else to stand, and because being early had always seemed to her a way of asking for nothing. She had wanted to be a teacher. There was no money for the training and no school in Ashenby that would have taken her, and her father, who drove a cart for a coal merchant, had said that a hospital would feed her and lodge her and teach her a trade, and that a girl with a trade was a girl who could leave a room without asking permission. She had signed nothing, because there was nothing to sign. A probationer paid no fee and received no wage, and at the end of three years, if she was thought steady, she would be offered a place on the staff at twenty-four pounds a year and her keep. The matron looked at her for a long moment and asked two questions, whether she was afraid of work and whether she was afraid of the dead, and Coline said no to the first and did not know how to answer the second, so she said nothing, and the matron took the nothing for an answer and gave her a uniform and sent her to Dunmarch Ward, which held the men, and told her to be there by noon. Dunmarch had twelve beds and, that day, thirteen patients, because one of the beds held two children whose mother was dying in the next ward and whom nobody had come to fetch. The sister of the ward was a woman named Delphia Orval, thirty-six, who had been nursing since she was Coline's age, and who told her, in the first minute, the only rule that mattered. "You will never tell a patient that he is dying," Sister Orval said. "Not because it is forbidden. Because it is not yours to say. It is the doctor's, and half the time it is not even his." The work was not the work she had imagined. She had imagined the medicine, the bottles and the bandages and the clean white order of it, and what she found was the body, which was not clean and was not ordered, and which had to be washed and turned and fed and carried and cleaned up after, twelve times a bed, all day, and again all night. She learned to lift a man without hurting her own back, and to make a bed with the patient still in it, and to hold a basin steady with one hand while a man who had been strong a week ago was sick into it and then apologised. She learned that the smell of a ward was not one smell but a conversation of smells, and that after a month she would no longer notice it, and that this was the thing that frightened her more than the body did, that the body would become ordinary. Her first night came at the end of her third week. The probationers were put on night duty in pairs, one to a ward and one to the corridor, and Coline was given Dunmarch, with the sister gone to bed in the room above and a bell that would ring in her room if the ward rang the corridor bell. At half past ten the lamps were turned down to one, and the ward became a place of long shadows and small sounds: a man breathing, a man turning, a man coughing in a way that Coline had learned by then to listen to and not like. At one o'clock the man in the bed by the stove began to breathe differently. His name was Orme and he had worked at the gasworks and he had a growth in his throat that had been operated on twice and had come back both times, and for three days he had been taking less and less and asking for water more and more. Coline stood beside him with the water and he could not swallow it, and he looked at her the way a man looks at a door he hopes will open, and she put the cup down and took his hand instead. She had been told not to do that. It was in the rules she had been given on the first morning, the fourth of the rules, or the fifth: that a probationer was not to sit with a patient, and was not to promise anything, and was to call the sister if the patient's condition altered. She called the sister. The sister came down in her dressing gown with her hair in a plait and looked at Orme and at Coline and said nothing to either of them, and stayed until four, and at four Orme died, and it was the sister who was holding his hand and not Coline, and Coline stood at the foot of the bed and watched and said the words she had been taught for the occasion, which were that there was no more to be done. They laid him out together, the sister and the probationer, in the small room off the ward where the water was, and the sister showed her how, and Coline's hands shook, and the sister did not mention her hands, not then and not ever. Afterward they drank tea in the kitchen and the sister said the only thing she ever said about it. "You wanted to sit with him," she said. "I sat with him. That is how it is for the first year. For your second year you will want to, and you will not, and for your third year you will not want to. When you stop wanting to, that is when you will be a nurse. That is when you will need to watch yourself, because that is the day you will be able to do the work and will have forgotten why anyone should." Coline went up to her room at half past six in the grey light with her apron folded and her feet aching and her hands still not quite steady, and she lay on the bed without undressing and looked at the ceiling, and she thought about Orme and about the door he had hoped would open, and she decided, before she slept, that she would stay, and that she would try to be the sort of nurse who did not forget, and she did not know yet, that morning, how hard a promise that was to keep, or how much of the building's long life would be spent testing it. ---