Shroud for a Nightingale

III

They finished the meal almost in silence. Then Sister Gearing left, first murmuring something about a clinical teaching session on the E.N.T. ward. Dalgliesh found himself walking back to Nightingale House with Sister Rolfe. They left the dining-room together and he retrieved his coat from the rack. They men passed down a long corridor and through the outpatients’ department It had obviously only recently been opened and the furniture and decoration were still bright and new. The large waiting-hall with its groups of Formica-topped tables and easy chairs, its troughs of pot plants and unremarkable pictures was cheerful enough, but Dalgliesh had no wish to linger. He had the healthy man’s dislike and disgust of hospitals, founded partly on fear and partly on repugnance, and he found this atmosphere of determined cheerfulness and spurious normality unconvincing and frightening. The smell of disinfectant, which to Miss Beale was the elixir of life, infected him with the gloomier intimations of mortality. He did not think that he feared death. He had come close to it once or twice in his career and it had not unduly dismayed him. But he did grievously fear old age, mortal illness and disablement He dreaded the loss of independence, the indignities of senility, the yielding up of privacy, the abomination of pain, the glimpses of patient compassion in the faces of friends who knew that their indulgences would not be claimed for long. These things might have to be faced in time unless death took him quickly and easily. Well, be would face them. He was not arrogant enough to suppose himself secure from the lot of other men. But in the meantime, he preferred not to be reminded.

The out-patients’ department was next to the casualty department entrance and as they passed it a stretcher was wheeled in. The patient was an emaciated old man; his moist lips spewed feebly above the rim of a vomit bowl, his immense eyes rolled uncomprehendingly in the skull-like head. Dalgliesh became aware that Sister Rolfe was looking at him. He turned his head in time to catch her glance of speculation and, he thought, contempt.

“You don’t like this place, do you?” she asked.

“I’m not very happy in it, certainly.”

“Neither am I at present, but I suspect for very different reasons.”

They walked on for a minute in silence. Then Dalgliesh asked if Leonard Morris lunched in the staff dining-room when he was in the hospital.

“Not often. I believe he brings sandwiches and eats them in the pharmacy office. He prefers his own company.”

“Or that of Sister Gearing?”

She laughed contemptuously.

“Oh, you’ve got on to that have you? But of course! She was entertaining him last night, I hear. Either the food or the subsequent activity seems to have been rather more than the little man could take. What thorough little scavengers the police are! It must be a strange job, sniffing around for evil like a dog round trees.”

“Isn’t evil a strong word for Leonard Morris’s sexual preoccupations?”

“Of course. I was just being clever. But I shouldn’t let the Morris-Gearing affair worry you. It’s been hiccupping on for so long now that it’s become almost respectable. It isn’t even good for a gossip. She’s the kind of woman who must have someone in tow, and he likes someone to confide in about the awfulness of his family and the beastliness of the hospital medical staff. They don’t exactly take him at his own evaluation as an equal professional man. He’s got four children, by the way. I imagine that if his wife decided to divorce him and he and Gearing were free to marry nothing would disconcert them more. Gearing would like a husband no doubt, but I don’t think she’s cast poor little Morris for the role. It’s more likely…”

She broke off. Dalgliesh asked:

“You think she has a more eligible candidate in mind?”

“Why not try asking her? She doesn’t confide in me.”

“But you are responsible for her work? The clinical instructor comes under the senior nurse tutor?”

“I’m responsible for her work not her morals.”

They had reached the far door of the casualty department and as Sister Rolfe put out her hand to push it open Mr. Courtney-Briggs swept in. He was followed by a half-dozen chattering junior staff, white-coated and with stethoscopes slung round their necks. The two on each side of him were nodding in deferential attention as the great man spoke. Dalgliesh thought that he had the conceit, the patina of vulgarity and the slightly coarse savoir-faire which he associated with one type of successful professional man. As if reading his thoughts, Miss Rolfe said:

“They’re not all alike, you know. Take Mr. Molravey, our ophthalmic surgeon. He reminds me of a dormouse. Every Tuesday morning he patters in and stands for five hours in the theatre without speaking an unnecessary word, whiskers twitching and picking away with fastidious little paws at a succession of patients’ eyes. Then he thanks everyone formally down to the most junior theatre nurse, peels off his gloves and patters away again to play with his collection of butterflies.”

“A modest little man, in fact”

She turned towards him and he detected again in her eyes that uncomfortable elliptical flicker of contempt.

“Oh no! Not modest! He gives a different performance, that’s all. Mr. Molravey is just as ”convinced as is Mr. Courtney-Briggs that he’s a very remarkable surgeon. They are both vain in a professional sense. Vanity, Mr. Dalgliesh, is a surgeon’s besetting sin as subservience is a nurse’s. I’ve never yet met a successful surgeon who wasn’t convinced that he ranked only one degree lower than Almighty God. They’re all infected with hubris.“ She paused:

“Isn’t that supposed to be true also of murderers?”

“Of one type of murderer. You must remember that murder is a highly individual crime.”

“Is it? I should have thought that the motives and the means would be monotonously familiar to you. But you, of course, are the expert.”

Dalgliesh said: “You have little respect for men apparently, Sister?”

“A great deal of respect. I just don’t happen to like them. But you have to respect a sex that has brought selfishness to such an art. That’s what gives you your strength, this ability to devote yourselves entirely to your own interest.”

Dalgliesh said, a little maliciously, that he was surprised that Miss Rolfe, since she obviously resented the subservience of her job, hadn’t chosen a more masculine occupation. Medicine perhaps? She laughed bitterly.

“I wanted to do medicine but I had a father who didn’t believe in educating women. I’m forty-six, remember. When I was at school we didn’t have universal free grammar school education. Father earned too much for me to get a free place, so he had to pay. He stopped paying as soon as he decently could, when I was sixteen.”

Dalgliesh found nothing appropriate to say. The confidence surprised him. She was hardly the woman, he would have thought, to expose a personal grievance to a stranger and he didn’t flatter himself that she found him sympathetic. She would find no man sympathetic. The outburst was probably a spontaneous release of pent up bitterness, but whether against her father, men in general or the limitations and subservience of her job it was hard to say.

They had left the hospital now and were passing along the narrow path which led to Nightingale House. Neither of them spoke another word until the house was reached. Sister Rolfe wrapped her long cloak tightly around her and pulled up her hood as if it could protect her from more than the bite of the wind. Dalgliesh was immersed in his private thoughts. And thus, with the width of the path between them, they paced together in silence under the trees.