第3章 The Matron's Round

Hespera Selvine began her round at a quarter to six, while the night nurse was still writing her report, and ended it at nine, and in the three hours between she inspected everything in the Marrowden Infirmary that could be inspected and a few things that could not. She carried her keys on her belt. There were nineteen of them, and she knew each by its weight and its shape without looking down, the way a reader knows the pages of a book she has read a hundred times. The keys were not a sign of her authority. They were her authority, because in a building where nothing could be opened without them, the woman who held them decided what the day would contain. Letham Ward first, because Letham held the women, and the women talked, and what the women of Letham said by ten in the morning would be known all over Craddon by nightfall. The night nurse, a thin young woman named Brackley who had been at the infirmary two years, stood at the table with her report, and Selvine listened without interrupting, because a matron who interrupts a report is a matron who teaches her nurses to leave things out. "The woman in the end bed died at a quarter past four," Brackley said. "Mrs. Tulliver. I laid her out." "Her daughter was here yesterday." "She came at six and went at eight. She asked whether she could be told the hour, and I gave it her, and she cried a little and then she asked about the fees." "Did you tell her there were no fees?" "I told her what you told me to tell her. That the parish pays for the bed and she owes the infirmary nothing." Selvine nodded. She went down the ward, past the beds, and stopped at the empty one, where the mattress had been turned and the sheets were already off, because a bed in Letham Ward was never allowed the dignity of staying empty for longer than the time it took to strip it. She put her hand on the iron rail, which was cold, and she thought about Mrs. Tulliver, whom she had admitted herself on a Tuesday three weeks earlier and had known from the first hour would not leave the building except through the yard gate. Then she went to Wrenmoor, which was the maternity room, and there she found the thing that would be her whole day, though it was not yet seven. The girl in the second bed was nineteen and had given her name to the porter as Nuala, without a surname, and had been delivered of a boy at two in the morning by the probationer and the medical officer on duty. The boy was alive and small and lay in a drawer of the table beside the bed, swaddled in a piece of flannel that had been cut from a nurse's apron. The girl had not slept. She lay with her arm across the drawer, touching it, as though the touching were the only thing keeping the child in the room. Selvine stood at the foot of the bed and did the arithmetic she had done a hundred times. The Marrowden Infirmary was not a lying-in hospital. It took maternity cases only in an emergency of the kind that would not wait for the parish cart to carry them to the workhouse, and having taken them it was allowed to keep the mother a fortnight and not a day longer, and the child, if the mother was unmarried and had no settlement in the city, went with the mother to the workhouse, where it would be separated from her as soon as it was weaned. "How long have you been in Vessock?" Selvine asked. "Two years. I came with my brother. He works at the rope walk." "Does he know?" "He knows." "Does he know the child is coming?" "He knows that too." Selvine looked at the girl, and the girl looked back, and neither of them said the thing that lay between them, which was that a fortnight from today someone would come from the workhouse with a cart, and this bed would be stripped and turned like Mrs. Tulliver's, and the child would begin a life in a place where the mother's arm could not reach it. "You will stay the fortnight," Selvine said. "You will eat and you will rest and you will give the boy what he needs. And at the end of the fortnight I will write on your paper that in my judgment you were not fit to be moved, and the board will read it and the workhouse will read it, and whether they believe it is not my concern." The girl's eyes filled but she did not cry, and Selvine did not stay to watch her not cry, because a matron who stays is a matron who invites the display she has already decided she cannot afford. She went on through the building. She inspected the kitchens, where the cook, Yenna Lorra, showed her the meat that had come in from the contract butcher, and Selvine made a note that the next joint was to be sent back, because the contract was worth twelve pounds a quarter and she had learned that a butcher who is not watched will count on a matron not knowing the difference between a joint and a shank. She inspected the laundry, where the coppers steamed and the laundress, Sorcha Ivaline, had two girls from Craddon working the mangle, and where a pile of sheets that had come from the fever ward waited in a corner for the boiling. She inspected the stores and found a nurse had been taking bread for a patient who was not on the diet list, and she did not dismiss her, because she had been that nurse once, at twenty-two, in a hospital in another city, and she remembered the loaf and the patient and the price of both. At nine she sat down in her room with the door open, the way she always sat, so that anyone passing in the corridor could see her and decide whether the thing they were carrying was worth bringing in. Her room had a desk and a chair and a cupboard and, on the shelf above the desk, a framed photograph of a woman in a dark dress and a girl of about seven standing in front of her, both of them unsmiling, as people in photographs of that period mostly were. The woman was her sister, dead these nine years. The girl was her sister's daughter, Maribel, who lived now with an aunt in Thornby and wrote to her twice a year, and whom Selvine saw at Christmas, and who called her Aunt Hespera and knew nothing of the fortnight in Wrenmoor, or the paper, or the writing of a judgment that was not true, because a matron's small mercies were not the kind of thing that got written into her letters, and Selvine did not intend that they ever should be. ---