第14章 The Second Winter

Coline Marchen had been matron of the Marrowden for five years when the second war came, and she had learned in those five years a thing that Hespera Selvine had never told her outright, which was that the work of a matron was not the wards. The wards were the sisters' work, and the sisters were good. The matron's work was the building: its coal and its water and its linen and its staff and its standing with the board, and the endless arithmetic by which all of those were kept in one house at one time. Selvine had done it for twenty-eight years and had made it look like hardness, and Coline had inherited the hardness along with the keys and had found that it was mostly sums. The war came up the slope the way the first war had come, in things rather than people. There was no military wing at the Marrowden and there never would be; the wounded went to the big hospital by the station, as they had in the other war, and the Marrowden took the ordinary sick of a city that was sending its young away and making, in their absence, more of the ordinary sick than before. The blackout was the first change and the most complete. Every window was hung with a double curtain of black paper and cloth, and the theatre with its glass roof was masked in a frame of timber and tarred felt, so that the room built to admit the sky became the darkest room in Vessock, and the surgeon worked under a shaded lamp, and the probationers learned to count sponges in a light they could not see by. The sandbags went along the front of the Quillock and against the wall of the boiler house, and the great door on the slope was fitted with a blast curtain that had to be drawn and opened a hundred times a day, so that the entrance hall, which had been built to be impressive, became a place of draughts and shouted instructions and a smell of wet canvas that Coline would remember as the smell of the whole war. The staff went before the patients did. Two of the younger nurses joined the services in the first year, and a sister who had served twelve years in Letham went to a military hospital in the south, and the building did what it had always done with a gap, which was to spread the work of the missing person across the people who remained until the remaining people were doing two jobs apiece and calling it the war. Volunteers came up from Craddon to scrub and carry and sit with patients, women whose own sons were away and who wanted, in the manner of that city, to be useful rather than thanked, and Coline took them and taught them what a volunteer can be taught in a week, which is the difference between washing a floor and washing a ward, and did not teach them the rest, because the rest takes years and they would not stay years. The diet was cut in the second winter. The list came up from the town hall with a line in it about the meat and the milk, and Coline read the line and wrote beneath it, as Selvine had written before her, that in her judgment the patients' diet could not be reduced without raising the mortality, and that if the board wanted it reduced the board would have to do it in a minute with her name against it. The board let the diet stand, and this time it was not because a death written up in a newspaper would cost more than the meat, though that was also true. It was because there was a war on, and in a war a board that was seen to starve its own hospital could not explain itself, and Coline had learned by then that a matron did not need to win an argument if she could arrange for the other side to lose it, and she was not proud of the lesson. Gilroy Wisley was seventy-four that winter and had not fired the boilers in earnest for six years. He had trained a quieter man, Hesketh, who had come up from the gasworks with a young family and a way of listening to a boiler the way a doctor listens to a chest, and who had taken over the four-o'clock firing and the banked coals and the chalk wall, though he wrote on the wall in a hand that was not like Wisley's and had put his own marks in a column beside. But the old man came down most mornings anyway and sat on the bench in the boiler room with his stick across his knees and his cough going through him, and he watched the fire and the gauge and did not talk, and Hesketh, who might have resented the watching, did not, because he had understood early that the old man was not watching him but the building, and that a man who has kept a fire for thirty years is allowed to keep an eye on it after his hands have stopped. In January Wisley did not come down. He had the cough at last in his chest where it could do the thing it had been doing quietly for forty years, and he was put in Ostmere, the fever ward that had become a general ward when the fevers were no longer kept apart, and Hesketh fired the boilers alone and came up every evening and sat by the bed and told him the pressure and the weather and the state of the yard, because he had learned that a dying man wants the news of the place he is leaving more than the news of the place he is going. The old man died on a Sunday in February with the fire, at his own instruction, banked a notch lower than Hesketh would have banked it, so that the boiler would be quiet through the night and no patient would be kept awake by the sound of beaten iron, and afterward Coline went down to the boiler room and stood in front of the chalk wall and read it back, year by year, to a year before she had been born, and she wiped none of it, and she told Hesketh to keep writing and to keep the old man's columns where they were. Redvers Yarrell still kept the gate. He was seventy-eight and had a chair in the lodge now and a boy from Craddon who ran the errands, and the log had come down to a single ruled line an hour, but he wrote it himself and would not have it otherwise, and he had outlived the man who had ordered the yard gate and the man who had ordered the front door and the whole board that had built the building they opened into. Coline went down to see him one night in that second winter when the blackout was at its worst and the warning had gone twice and nothing had come, and found him at the open door of the lodge with his coat on, looking up the lane at a sky he was not allowed to light a lamp against. "They will not come here," he said. "There is nothing up here worth a bomb. That is the trouble with a hospital on a hill. You are never important enough to be hit and never safe enough to stop thinking about it." "You should be in bed," Coline said. "I have slept in this lodge for thirty-eight years," Yarrell said. "I do not expect to sleep anywhere else, and I would rather the last place I sleep be the one that kept me." He looked at her a moment in the dark. "You knew Dr. Fenmore better than I did at the end," he said. "But I knew him when the paint was wet. He asked for eighty beds and got sixty-two, and he told me once that a building only ever tells you the truth in winter. This is the winter, matron. What does it say?" Coline stood in the doorway and listened to the building, which was the hum of the boiler and the low sound of the wards carrying down through the stone, and the wet canvas of the blast curtain rattling at the front door, and the wind along the lane. "That it is still here," she said. "That will do," said Yarrell, and he shut the lodge door and went to bed in the gate he had kept since before either of them could have said what a hospital was for. ---