Chapter 8 Bellcairn Ward

Sorcha Ivaline had worked in the laundry under the Marrowden Infirmary for nineteen years, and in all that time she had climbed the stairs to the children's ward twice, and both times were the same time, because both times the child in the bed was her own. The laundry was a long room at the back of the building with two coppers set into brick and a mangle by the wall and a drying yard beyond the door where the sheets went up on lines in any weather that would dry them, and it was the hottest place in Vessock, hotter than the foundry, hotter than the glasshouse by the canal. Sorcha was fifty that spring and had run the coppers since she was thirty-one, when her husband had been killed at the gasworks and she had needed work that came with a room, and she had a flat back and a broad red face and hands that had been boiled so often they had lost the feeling in the tips. She ordered the work of six women and two girls and she ordered it the way a sergeant orders a line, without raising her voice, because in a laundry the steam carried every word to the far end of the room and a laundress who shouted was a laundress who had already lost the room. Her husband had been a stoker's mate at the gasworks and had been killed by a fall of coke when Effa was three. The infirmary had taken her on within the month, because a widow with a child and a flat back was exactly the kind of worker a laundry wanted, and Sorcha had understood at once that the job and the room were not a kindness but a bargain, and that she was on the losing side of it, and that she had no other side to be on. Her daughter Effa was nine. She was a thin child with her father's dark eyes and her mother's flat, patient way of standing, and in February that year she came home from school with a sore throat and a headache and a flush on her cheeks that Sorcha knew, before the doctor came, was not any ordinary warm. The doctor came and said scarlet fever and wrote the paper, and by evening Effa was in Bellcairn Ward, on the second floor, and Sorcha was standing in the laundry with her hands in the water and her child three flights up in a room she was not permitted to enter. There was a rule about it. It was not written in the rules, or if it was written it was written in the paragraph about infectious disease and the movement of staff, but every woman in the laundry knew it, which was that a laundress could not go into a ward, because a laundress carried the ward's linen back down with her and the fever travelled on cloth the way it travelled on hands. So Sorcha stood at the bottom of the stairwell on the first night with her arms folded and looked up the dark stairs, and did not go up, and went back to the coppers. For nine days the fever had her daughter. The sister of Bellcairn was Delphia Orval, who had been moved there from the men's ward when the surgical wing was opened, and who came down to the laundry every evening to find Sorcha and tell her, in a plain voice, exactly how the child had slept and what she had eaten and whether the rash had begun to fade, because a sister in a fever ward learns quickly that the family outside the door is a patient too, and that the cure for the family is a piece of the truth, delivered by a person who has seen the child. On the fifth night Effa was worse. The sister came down at a quarter to ten and said that the child's breathing was quick and her fever high and that the medical officer had been sent for, and Sorcha did what she had been refusing to do for five nights. She took off her boots and climbed the back stairs in her stockings and stood in the passage outside Bellcairn with her shoulder against the wall and looked through the little window in the door at the end bed, where her daughter lay with a nurse beside her, and she watched the nurse wipe the child's forehead with a cloth and hold her hand, and she would have stood there until morning if the sister had not come out and put a hand flat against her chest and pushed her, gently, back down the stairs. The fever made the laundry the other half of the ward. Every sheet and shift and towel that came down the stairs from Bellcairn came down in a covered basket, and Sorcha's girls emptied the baskets into the copper and boiled the linen until it was safe, and wrung it and hung it and boiled it again, and Sorcha stood over the copper with the wooden paddle and pushed the linen down under the water and thought of nothing at all, because thinking was a thing she had learned to do with her hands rather than her head, and her hands were busy. She slept on the bench in the laundry for the nine nights her daughter was upstairs, with her shawl over her and the fire banked low, and the girl Dorrie brought her tea at five, and no one from the office came down and no one from the office went up, and the two halves of the building ran their fever with a wall between them, and the fever crossed the wall anyway, on the linen, on the hands, on the woven covers of the baskets, because a building can forbid a mother a stair and cannot forbid a germ a basket. Effa lived. She came out of the fever on the eighth day and out of the ward on the twelfth, and Sorcha carried her home through the yard past the boiler house with the child's arms around her neck and her whole weight on her hip, and she did not say anything to the sister about what she had seen through the door, and the sister did not mention it, but after that winter Sorcha acknowledged the building in a way she had not before. She had always understood the infirmary as a place that used her, a great engine at the top of the slope that took the sweat of the laundry and gave back nothing but a wage and a room. Now she understood it as a place that could keep a child alive, and she understood that this did not make it good, because the same building had a rule that would not let a mother climb a stair, and the rule was not wrong and the stair was not kind, and both of them were the building, and the building was neither. ---