Chapter 5 The Boiler Room

Gilroy Wisley had fired the boilers under the Marrowden ground since before there was a Marrowden Infirmary to fire them for. The boiler house had belonged to the old house of industry and had been kept when the rest of that building was pulled down, and now the new block drew its heat and its hot water through an iron main that ran in a brick trench under the yard. No part of the infirmary, not the theatre with its glass roof, not the maternity room, not the ward where a hundred sheets a week had to be boiled and rinsed and dried, could do anything at all without the fire that Wisley kept. He was forty-nine that winter and had the forearms of a man who had spent thirty of those years feeding coal into a fire, and the cough of the same man, though he did not connect the two and would have denied the connection if anyone had made it. He started at four in the morning, when the yard was black and the only light in the building was the one over his own door. He riddled the grate, shook the ash down onto the floor, opened the damper, and built the fire back up from the banked coals of the night, and by five the water in the main was beginning to move, and by six the first copper in the laundry was steaming, and by seven the whole building had come awake on the heat he had made in the dark. His mate at the boilers was a young man named Crendal, who had come to the infirmary the same year Wisley had and who had learned the fire from him the way a son learns a trade, which is to say badly at first and then without being told. In the autumn of 1914 Crendal went away with the others, and Wisley worked the boilers alone. He did not talk about the war. The war came to the yard gate in the shape of things rather than people: more linen than before, because the wards were fuller; less coal than before, because the coal went where the coal went; and once, in the spring, a consignment of bandages and dressings that arrived in crates with foreign words on them and had to be stored in the dry. The infirmary did not take wounded soldiers; the wounded went to the big hospital down by the station, which had a military wing, and the Marrowden took what it had always taken, which was the ordinary sick of a city that had sent its young men away and was making the sick of the ones who remained in greater numbers than before. Wisley saw the war as a smaller pile of coal and a longer list of hours, and he did not think this made him a small man; he thought it made him a man who knew what a boiler was for. The winter of 1915 was the hard one. In January the coal came short, and then shorter, and the steward told Wisley that the whole building must be run on what was in the yard and no more would come until the end of the month. On the coldest night of that winter the main froze in the trench where it crossed under the yard, at the place where the brickwork had settled and the pipe lay in a low spot, and at two in the morning the water stopped coming to the wards. Wisley knew the sound of a stopped main the way a shepherd knows the sound of a stopped bell. He was in bed in the little room beside the boiler house, and he woke and heard the silence in the pipes, and he was up and in his boots before he had decided anything. He could not thaw a buried pipe with a fire. What he could do was keep the boiler at full pressure and run the water backward through the laundry connection, which would push the cold plug out of the low spot if the pressure held, and if the pressure did not hold it would burst the pipe and leave the building with no heat at all until the spring. He banked the fire with the last of the good coal and the old timber from the fence that was waiting to be replaced, and he stood at the gauge with his hand on the valve for three hours in the cold of the boiler room with his breath going out of him in clouds, and he let the pressure climb a notch at a time, and at a quarter past five the pipes began to knock and then to run, and the water came back to the building. At six the matron came down. She stood in the doorway of the boiler room with her keys on her belt and looked at the fire and at the man and at the gauge, and she said the thing she had come to say, which was short. "The wards are warm," Hespera Selvine said. "The theatre had water for the morning list. Whatever you did, do not write it up anywhere except in your own book." "I keep the hours in chalk," Wisley said, and pointed at the wall by the door, where he had kept a tally, shift by shift, year by year, in a hand so plain it looked printed. It was the only record in the building of who had kept it warm. Selvine looked at the wall for a while. Then she took a small purse out of her pocket and put it on the bench, which was her private money and not the infirmary's, and she told him to buy a bottle of something for his chest, and she went back up the stairs before he could say whether he would or would not. The building never knew how much it leaned on him, and he preferred it that way. He had seen a surgeon come down from the theatre in his gown and pass the boiler-house door without turning his head, and he had seen the same surgeon come back an hour later and stand in the doorway asking, as though it were a courtesy between equals, whether the water would hold until the list was done. Wisley had a phrase for that, which he kept to himself: the important people come down and ask after the thing they came to ask about has already happened. He did not resent it. A boiler room is not a place that men look into; it is a place that makes other places possible, and the making is invisible by its nature, and a man who takes up an invisible trade must make his peace with it or leave the trade. Wisley did not buy the bottle. He banked the fire and sat in his chair and drank his tea and coughed, and by the light of the door he looked at the wall of chalk, which went back to a year when he had been a young man with no cough, and he thought that when the building finally did away with him it would not know that it had done away with anyone at all, because a boiler does not remember the man who fed it, and a warm ward does not remember the winter it was spared. ---