In April 1929, the three years of nurse training finished. Edda Latimer, Heather Scobie-Latimer and Katherine Treadby-Latimer found themselves certificated junior sisters. Edda had won several prizes, and all three qualified with distinction.
By this time there was nothing about Corunda Base Hospital they didn’t know, nowhere in Corunda Base Hospital they hadn’t worked. The mental hospital was a nightmare best forgotten, mostly because nothing could be done for the poor creatures save to shut them up in padded cells or a dormitory—the asylum was a place of screams, raves, drifting ghosts, murderous maniacs.
No new trainees had appeared in 1927 or 1928, but this year, 1929, would see eight trainees, all matriculated, and all from the West End. With Edda in the lead, the three had talked, argued, pushed, shoved, and campaigned to convince the West Enders that they must, must, must take advantage of the new system, that the old one was dead. The future of nursing lay with training and registration; those nursing unregistered would be reduced to poorly paid skivvies stripped of every atom of interesting work: there to wash, clean up messes, lift and turn patients, serve the meals—all under the supervision of a formal trainee. Lena Corrigan, always leader of the West Enders and at first an obdurate enemy, had come around first, too, and added her voice to the three. With 1929’s eight trainees the result, a grant was secured from the Department of Health to build a proper nurses’ home incorporating flats for sisters. To Edda, Tufts, and Kitty, that battle was the one most worth winning, for it offered girls from underprivileged backgrounds the chance to espouse a proper career without the masculine complications that schoolteaching brought with it, or the servility of secretarying. Nurses had a certain power; anyone thrust into the live-or-die maw of a hospital came out with a profound respect for them, whether they roared like dragons or floated like exquisite angels above the sickbed. Real or imagined, nurses were remembered.
Three new sisters meant difficulties, of course. How could a district hospital employ all three? That the task was easier than it had been in 1926 was purely due to attrition: seven of the most experienced West End nurses from the old system had retired. Unfortunately, their wages were not the equal of registered nurses’ salaries. The hospital was, besides, thrown into an instantaneous chaos early in June—an utterly unexpected, unpredictable cataclysm.
The General Medical Superintendent, Dr. Francis Campbell, had been superintendent for twenty-five years when 1929 arrived, and fully anticipated continuing in his post for another decade. Then, at precisely the same moment as the three junior sisters received their certificates by mail, Frank Campbell died of a heart attack while seated at his desk, an item of furniture to which hospital people firmly believed he was welded, since he was never seen anywhere else on hospital territory. For Frank Campbell, Corunda Base Hospital was his desk. The horrors his kind of superintending generated took place elsewhere, so he didn’t see them. No one knew whether he had felt his heart attack, as he had been alone when it came on, and there was no system of internal communication that he might have used to summon help. He had refused to install one as too expensive. For him, it certainly was.
Hospitals existed under the umbrella of the particular state’s Department of Health, but to most intents and purposes they ruled themselves, especially the non-teaching rural ones. The Hospital Board was empowered to decide things, including filling its staff vacancies from highest to lowest, setting its policies, and administering its funds. Corunda Base Hospital had a huge endowment, safely banked under the control of its Board—moneys that had come from three-quarters of a century of bequests plus astonishing savings.
Decisions about what to do with three junior sisters were deferred until after a new superintendent was appointed, leaving the Latimers in a temporary stasis, entitled to wear the starched organdy veil but not yet permitted to doff their nurse’s aprons. Edda stayed as close to Theatre as she could, working Casualty or Men’s; Kitty stayed on Children’s; and Tufts oscillated between Maternity and Night Sister, the latter wandering the ramps and wards armed with a hurricane lamp. Frank Campbell was too mean to buy batteries!
Then, most unexpectedly, Matron sent for Tufts, who appeared wearing both her sister’s veil and her nurse’s apron.
“I think the apron can go, Sister Scobie.”
“Not yet, ma’am. It can come in handy. Our duties aren’t so defined that we can be sure we won’t encounter a mess.”
“As you wish.” The smooth, rather bland face wore its usual air of unemotional interest. “Though your future careers cannot be decided as yet, Sister Scobie, I feel confident enough of the direction yours should take to be able to speak to you about it even at this distressing time.”
“Yes, Matron.”
“With no less than eight trainees due to begin nursing in about another ten weeks, it behooves me as head of the nursing staff to take immediate steps about their education. The plans Dr. Campbell had formulated I considered wrong in all respects, and make no bones about telling you, Sister, that with his death I have scrapped them to start again. After three years in this establishment, I imagine that I don’t need to tell you my reasons for scrapping his plans?”
“No, Matron, you don’t. I understand, and am delighted.”
“Good!” Matron eased a little in her chair. “Would you be interested in the position of Sister Tutor?”
Tufts swallowed. “That would depend, ma’am.”
“Upon what?” The voice was icy.
“Upon the amount of authority the position carries. If I can carve out a training system that satisfies the Nursing Council yet incorporates various aspects that stem from my own deductions, then I am interested. I would also block out an entirely new educational syllabus that goes beyond Nursing Council ideas of what a nurse needs to know. Naturally I would present all my work to you and the new superintendent before submitting it to Sydney, but what I couldn’t undertake is to be an automaton who obeys someone else’s schemes.” The wide gold eyes held an obdurate look. “You see, ma’am, I have my own schemes.”
For a moment Matron Newdigate didn’t answer, the starch of her dress creaking a little more than usual—a sign that she was breathing hard. Finally the words came, measured and detached. “I think, Sister Scobie, that if you didn’t have your own ideas, I would not be offering you this position. It is a senior one carrying a deputy matron’s rank, so I could justify the importation of a Sister Tutor from Sydney or Melbourne. However, a person from Corunda is preferable if a suitable one can be found, and I believe you are eminently suitable. I agree to your terms.”
“Then I accept the post.” Tufts rose to her feet smoothly. “Thank you, Matron. Er—there is one other thing.”
“Pray enlighten me, Sister.”
“I will need to confer privately with Dr. Liam Finucan a very great deal. Unless, of course, you plan to use a different medical man to give the lectures and do some teaching?”
“It will be Dr. Finucan, and I have no objection whatsoever to your being closeted alone with him. These days he’s a perfectly respectable single man—and your colleague,” said Matron, secretly loving this clever, slightly dangerous young woman.
“Good,” said Tufts, and departed.
She found the other two junior sisters in the cottage, drinking tea with Lena Corrigan. Though Sister Marjorie Bainbridge had been given the title of Home Sister and moved into a flat in the newly built nurses’ home, no one from Matron down had bothered to move the Latimers out of their original housing. They now possessed the whole of it, and a degree of comfort that the denizens of the new nurses’ home would never know. The reward of the pioneers.
“I have a definite new job,” Tufts said, accepting a cup.
They all looked interested, but Kitty got in first. “What?”
“Sister Tutor, with deputy matron’s status.”
“Stiffen the snakes!” Lena said on a gasp. “That’s the absolute and utter grouse, Tufts. Glorious!”
Amid hugs and choruses of congratulations, Tufts told the tale of her interview, with a smiling Edda the quietest—oh, not from anger or disappointment, they all knew; it came from an extra joy. Rank and importance for women meant much to Edda.
“Lena, I know the Rectory Anzacs are tastier than arrowroot bikkies, but you’re not drinking tea with us just to dunk an Anzac or see what color Edda’s lipstick is today—you have news, too,” Tufts said, on her second cup of tea and third Anzac biscuit.
“Correct as always, Miss Myrna Loy. She’s the film star Men’s has decided you resemble, Edda, by the way. Kitty is always Marion Davies, but you wobble around a bit.”
“Get on with your news, Lena,” said Tufts with a growl.
Lena’s hands flew up in surrender. “All right, all right! I saw Matron, too, and I’ve got a promotion, too. After nearly twenty years classified as nursing help—”
“I hope Frank Campbell is burning in Hell!” Kitty snarled.
“Matron has managed to what she called ‘grandfather me in’ as an officially registered nurse. I’m Sister Corrigan, and I’m going where my heart lies—the Asylum, as deputy matron in charge.”
That provoked a fresh outburst of triumphant joy; yet one more victory for women, and so well deserved! This time, however, their descent from the heights was tempered with dismay, though all of the Latimers knew their concern was wasted.
“Lena, after three years I know how much you love nursing in the Asylum, but now you’re officially registered, and with your fund of knowledge, you can pick your kind of patient,” Edda said, eyes gone dark grey with anxiety. “Are you sure that being there a thousand percent of your time won’t drive you around the bend, too? There’s nothing can be done for mental cases, and psychiatrists are no help. All they do is observe and catalogue the forms dementia takes. Mental nursing is physically dangerous, but it’s far more dangerous to the spirit. Think of the frustration!”
A wiry woman in her mid-thirties, Lena Corrigan had a mop of dark red, curly hair, and eyes of much the same color; she was the widow of a man who had been fonder of the bottle than his wife, and had no children. More than that bare outline the Latimers did not know; she was proud and embittered, Lena Corrigan.
“Lord bless you, Edda, I know the pitfalls,” Lena said, her patience intact because she knew Edda’s protest was genuinely felt. “Loonies fascinate me, I suppose that’s the crux of it, and now Frank Campbell’s gone, the asylum stands a chance of a psychiatrist and some treatment. Mental nursing won’t always be a lost cause. I know it attracts some people who are definitely loonier than the patients, but it’s not an irrefutable law. If I can’t do anything else, I’m going to keep detailed notes on every single case—one day observations like mine will be seen as important.” The fiery eyes glowed redly. “I’m in on the ground floor, just as I have been as a nurse who scraped an education. And I thank you for the help, especially from Edda and Tufts. You girls can teach.”
“Deputy matron in charge,” said Kitty. “Many congratulations, Lena, and at least you’ll be paid well at last.” Suddenly she jumped. “Oh! Listen, girls! Mama told me a rumor yesterday.”
“About what?” Edda asked, sounding bored.
“Our new superintendent.”
“Of course! Daddy’s on the Hospital Board!” Tufts cried.
“Who? What? Where? When? Why? And how?” Lena asked.
“I knew you’d all prick up your ears at that!” Kitty said on a chuckle. “No, he’s not Jack Thurlow, Edda.”
“Take a running jump, Kits. Who?”
“Maude says he bears a famous Corunda name, and it is not Treadby. His name is Dr. Charles Henry Burdum, he’s thirty-three years old, and until this job came up he was the superintendent of a large sector of the Manchester Royal Infirmary,” said Kitty.
“Stone the bloody crows!” said Edda on a gasp, then frowned. “That’s rot, Kitty. ‘Superintendent of a large sector’ indeed! You mean he was one of half a dozen deputy supers swanning around one of Europe’s most prestigious hospitals.” She gurgled in her throat. “Superintendent of bedpans and urine bottles!”
“Mama said he was ‘high up’—whatever that means.”
Lena waved her hands about. “Oh, Edda, shut up! What I want to know is, which Burdum is he? A Corunda Burdum, or some ring-in from the Old Country with the same name? As far as I know, old Tom Burdum has no heirs except Grace’s Good Samaritan and Edda’s riding companion, Jack Thurlow.” She emphasized “riding.”
Kitty gave a shiver of delicious anticipation and settled to tell the rest of her tale secure in the knowledge that she had hooked her audience completely. “He’s the son of old Tom’s son, would you believe? I mean, the whole of Corunda knows Tom and son Henry had a shocking quarrel sixty years ago, and that Henry left not only Corunda, but also New South Wales, as it was then—no Commonwealth of Australia sixty years ago! Henry went to England, and never communicated with old Tom. About twenty years ago old Tom was notified that Henry had been killed when two trains collided in Scotland—dozens of people died, it seems. The letter to old Tom said Henry was a bachelor with no issue.”
“Yes, and all Corunda knows that was what soured old Tom on the world, especially after Jack Thurlow let him down,” Lena said.
“Well,” said Kitty triumphantly, “the letter from Scotland was wrong! Not long after he had arrived in England, Henry married a well-off widow and didn’t need old Tom’s money. He founded a successful insurance underwriting company, while his wife’s family made big bikkies milling cotton textiles. A son, Charles, was born thirty-three years ago. The wife died in labor with him, and Henry went quite crazy in a harmless way. It was left to the mother’s family to care for the boy, Charles.”
“But surely old Tom wouldn’t have been misled about Henry’s death? That’s ridiculous,” Edda said.
“I gather the train accident was a shambles, and while the authorities found identification on Henry’s body, they found no evidence of a wife or son. With the wife dead and her family estranged from Henry, no one suspected he was on the train. The boy’s name of Burdum didn’t arise during his minority, at least in a way that was noticed. Simply, after some stipulated waiting period produced no answers about Henry, the authorities assumed that old Tom in Corunda was his next-of-kin, and notified him. In the meantime, Henry’s son, Charles, lived and prospered in Lancashire. He went to Eton and Balliol College at Oxford, then took a medical degree at Guy’s.” Kitty looked rather naughty. “It turns out that Mama already knew most of the story—she did quite a lot of research on Dr. Charles Burdum when she first heard of him a couple of years ago.”
“Piffle!” said Tufts. “Maude would have spread the story.”
“No, she decided to sit on her knowledge—guess why?”
“Too easy,” said Edda with a sneer. “Maude earmarked the rich doctor as your future husband, Kits.”
“If there was a prize for instinct, Edda, you’d win it,” Kitty said, sighing. “You’re undoubtedly right.” She brightened. “Anyway, we have plenty of time. Cables may fly the ether in an hour, but it still takes six weeks to sail from Southampton to the east coast of Australia, and first the Board has to offer the job to a Pommy—that wouldn’t be popular, were his name not Burdum.”
Grace’s reaction was similar when Edda called the next day; for the moment she was standing by for Theatre, which wasn’t busy, and Grace was on the telephone party line into the Trelawneys, so could be visited. As a new mother, Grace craved company—why was it her lot to conceive if Bear so much as took his trousers off?
The side of Edda that loved her twin utterly was very happy to know that Grace’s impulsive marriage had worked so well; they were as content a couple as one could find, devoted to each other, fretting when they were apart, wrapped in their two sons, Brian and John. Brian had been born on 2nd April 1928, and John fourteen months later on 31st May 1929. Though Grace hadn’t managed to produce twins, she had produced her two children close enough together in age to suggest that they would enjoy an unusual bond of affection as they grew up. Certainly Brian, a frost-fair mite who walked and talked early, was passionately attached to his wee brother, now two months old, equally fair and equally forward. Of course there were those who predicted that this closeness in age would lead to lifelong brotherly hatred, but that was people.
Corunda had replaced district nurse Pauline Duncan with a fearsome dragon, Sister Monica Herd, who combined visits to the district’s housebound invalids with visits to new mothers. An import from Sydney who revelled in driving miles to see the sick, Sister Herd was exactly who Grace needed, just as the ward sisters had been in her nursing days. In other words, Sister Herd frightened the living daylights out of Grace, who cleaned up baby messes at once and didn’t allow the nappy situation to deteriorate as it had during Brian’s diaper days. The prize Sister Herd dangled was a fully toilet-trained child at nine months: Grace worked with feverish zeal to achieve this freedom, terrified of Sister Herd’s visits—oh, that tongue! A whiplash soaked in acid.
“Bear’s due for another raise in pay,” said Grace over tea and thin, delicate crumpets called pikelets, served with jam and whipped cream. “Honestly, I’m so lucky! My boys are well ahead of anybody else’s the same age, I live in a nice house, and I have a good, teetotal husband—oh, how most husbands drink! The housekeeping money goes in beery urine.”
Edda nodded absently, used to this patter. But she was never proof against her nephews—pray that at least one of them has a bit of Edda in him to stiffen all that sweetness and light! Bear and Grace are fine as long as things are fine, but how would they cope if disaster struck? Then she shook herself and admitted that the other part of her love for Grace rather purred at the prospect of a very small and transient misfortune for them. That was the part of Edda that didn’t love her sister wholeheartedly; it loved, yes, but with qualifications and quantifications that grew every time she realized afresh how incompetent Grace was, how stupid. And how weak Bear was with her, the fool.
Even to having children, for heaven’s sake! Bear had told her, man-to-man (and what does that say about you, Edda?) that he feared he and Grace were the kind who made a baby nearly every time they—well, did it.
“So I’m not going to do it until we can afford another one, and especially until Grace has had a good rest. That means,” said Bear earnestly, “being abstemious while little John grows a whole lot more. When he’s two, we’ll go back to it.”
“Have you discussed this with Grace?” Edda asked, winded.
“She’ll like it. Oh, she loves me and—um—it. But a few minutes of pleasure can be followed by two years of mess and upheaval, and, well, Grace doesn’t thrive in chaos.”
“Most of the chaos,” Edda said tartly, “she causes herself! But you do whatever you think you must, Bear.”
She had left the subject severely alone thereafter, but if Bear and Grace truly were living without it, the chaos was no less. Grace just plain couldn’t organize herself.
“What are you going to be when you grow up, Brian?” Edda asked the child, perched on her knee.
“A train driver,” he said solemnly, eating his pikelet with jam and cream. “Big locomotives, but.”
She burst out laughing. “Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Bear and I take them both down to the shunting yards when he’s home,” said Grace. Her glance slewed sideways, grey and cunning. “What about you and Jack?” she asked.
“What about us?” Edda countered, making Grace work for it.
“Well, you’re an item, you have been for years. But you never seem to push things along, do you?”
“I don’t want to—push things, as you phrase it, Grace. I don’t want a husband or children.”
“Well, you jolly well should!” said Grace crossly. “Don’t you realize how awkward you’re making life for me?”
Edda’s eyes were always a little strange, but sometimes they could grow uncomfortably dangerous, as they did now while she stared at her twin. “How have I made your life awkward, dear?” she cooed dulcetly.
Grace shivered, but a lifetime of Edda made it possible for her to stick to her guns long enough to fire the round she had always intended to fire. “People gossip about Jack Thurlow and me,” she said grittily, “and I dislike it. There’s nothing going on between us because he’s your friend, not mine. Now people are saying I made up the romance between you and Jack to hide my own involvement with him. That you and Jack are my lie!”
With a kiss for Brian’s cheek, Edda put the child down and rose to her feet. “Hard cack, Grace!” she snapped. “If you think for one moment that I’m going to marry Jack Thurlow just to make your life more endurable, then you’ve got another think coming! Try looking after yourself, then you won’t need Jack.”
At the corner of Trelawney Way and Wallace Street an irate Edda, not looking, stepped into the road amid squealing brakes.
“Jesus, Edda, I nearly hit you!” Jack Thurlow was saying, his face white. “Get in, woman.”
“Going to see Grace?” Edda asked, strangely unshaken.
“I was, but I’d rather see you. Busy?”
“I have to be near a phone, so how about my hospital home?” She laughed. “When I think of how Matron went on about men on the premises when we started training over three years ago! Now that we’ve turned into sisters, she can’t say a thing.”
They had been lovers for a year, and it had been good for Edda, who had done a copious amount of research before setting off down her primrose path to Sin. From Polynesian, Indian, Chinese, and various other sources she had worked out her personal “safe” period for sexual intercourse, and adhered to it inflexibly. Luckily her menstrual cycle was clockwork regular, so the safe segment ought to be sufficient. Thus far it had worked, which gave her additional faith in it, but no amount of physical desire in the world, she vowed, would see her break that schedule. She had also armed herself with a dose of ergotamine tartrate to dislodge an early fetus, and more than that she couldn’t do.
“I’m chuffed,” she said, putting the kettle on.
He gave her that wonderful smile. “Why, exactly?”
“Why do you suppose we drink so much strong tea?”
“Habit. It’s a drug within the bounds of the law.”
“Very true!”
“Why are you so chuffed, Edda?”
“We’ve managed to throw so much dust in Corunda’s eyes that the whole town is convinced you’re sleeping with Grace.”
“Shit!” He sat up straight, face suddenly angry. “I might have known! Grace? Grace is a duty, not a thrill!”
Finished making the tea, Edda sat down. “What I’ve never really worked out,” she said as she poured, “is why Grace became your duty. She’s not your relative.”
“It’s impossible to explain to someone as efficient and well organized as you, Edda,” he said, clearly at a loss. “Grace is one of those people who can’t manage—”
“Oh, well do I know it!” Edda interrupted, voice bitter. “Yet before she went nursing, when we lived at the Rectory, Grace was organized. She always knew what she wanted and how to get it—even Father noticed that, and it foiled Maude on more than one occasion. Underneath all that woolly thoughtlessness there’s a Grace quite capable of organization and method. It’s just that she gets what she wants by being helpless, so the old Rectory efficiency has been buried. How deeply? I don’t know. Except that it’s there, Jack. Believe me, it’s there.” She shrugged. “Grace has bamboozled you into thinking you owe her a duty, but the truth is that you owe her nothing. You toil on her behalf, and she never pays. In other words, you give her charity. In which case, go to it, my friend.”
“Yes, a charity duty,” he said, nodding. “That fits. But I can’t have Corunda thinking the worse of her.”
“I have a partial answer,” she said.
“You wouldn’t be Edda if you didn’t. Tell me!”
“We have to become less furtive about our relationship, is first and foremost. If you’re known to be sleeping with me, Corunda will have to revise its theories about you and Grace. Yes, I know it’s scandalous to be sleeping together, but for no other reason than the act. We’re both unattached, free to love.”
“What I call ‘pristine scandal’—virtuous enough within itself,” Jack said, laughter creeping into his eyes, “but all too easily tainted by exposure to the heat of human attention.”
“Sometimes I suspect you got high marks at school, Jack. I’ll have to leave your name and number with the hospital switchboard.” His laughter spilled over. “That will definitely set the gossip ball rolling!”
Jack would be an ideal lover, the seventeen-year-old Edda had told herself, though it was toward the end of 1928 before she learned the fact as a fact, and then she had only her tastes to tell her. No matter that she couldn’t compare: Jack knew how to please her.
It had happened suddenly, unexpectedly, in the glaring daylight by the river—anyone might have come along and found them! But no one had, and that set the pattern of their luck as this new phase in their old relationship flowered to full perfection.
Simply, they had been sitting side by side on the grass, the horses tethered to a tree, when he reached for her and kissed her with an experimental lightness that she ardently returned as soon as she got her breath back. The kiss deepened; an alien desire spread through her that prompted her to remove his shirt as fast as he was removing hers. No protests, no pretexts, no pretenses, no hesitation. Edda thought the feel of Jack’s naked body against her own skin the most glorious sensation imaginable, something far beyond the blind groping of an ignorant brain. It reminded her of being lashed by that snake; she was sophisticated enough to know that the snake/man metaphor was very popular in psychiatric circles. But that didn’t detract at all from the colossal wrench of utter pleasure invading her, or the feel of those muscles.
And her luck had held: no pregnancy, because his impulse had occurred during her safe period. After those first frenzied couplings that had come almost without pause, Jack lay so exhausted that Edda, invigorated rather than fatigued, was able to explain her system of birth control, all worked out, but with no place to go until this day. Her energy and logic took him aback, but he listened, and, wanting no babies himself, he readily agreed to limit their sexual activity to her safe times. In fact, it had been a shock to find her a virgin; she gave a flawless imitation of an experienced woman of the world, and she was twenty-three. The little fraud! But at least she had prepared for this day, which made her a rare virgin indeed.
Now, of course, Jack knew Edda well enough to obey orders; if Grace needed their affair to be made public, then so be it. The worst repercussions would fall on Edda, who surely knew what she was unleashing. His own reputation would be enhanced. Thus Jack cooperated willingly in letting Corunda know which Latimer girl he was entertaining in a biblical way.
Edda broke the news to Grace personally on her next visit, and, hurting because she was wounded, spoke extremely frankly.
Quite what reaction she had expected Edda hadn’t known, save that she thought Grace would be very pleased, and loved her enough to feel glad she, too, had some masculine company.
What Edda saw was a stiffening of Grace’s body, an expression of blazing anger on that pinched little face—why was it pinched? Had the person inside it shrunk? And why did Grace’s eyes blaze?
“You—you snake in the grass!”
A confounded Edda drew back. “I beg your pardon?”
“You bitch! You traitor! You selfish, selfish cow!” Grace cried, beside herself. “Why did you have to steal Jack, of all men? Aren’t there enough others in Corunda for you?”
Edda tried, hanging desperately onto her temper. “The last time I saw you, you complained to me that Corunda deemed Jack Thurlow your lover, and you asked me to help allay that. I have obeyed your request. Corunda knows which woman Jack Thurlow is really involved with, and it isn’t you.”
“Bitch! You stole him from me!”
“Bullshit I did, you stupid ninny!” said Edda, temper going. “Jack belonged to me, not to you, always! I introduced him to you, remember? How could I steal from you what you’ve never, never owned? You have a husband, a really decent one at that—why should you need any part of my lover?”
“Bitch! Thief! Jack is my friend! My friend! My husband approves, and if he approves, what business is it of anyone else’s? Leave Jack Thurlow alone, you—you snake!”
Little Brian was standing, arms wrapped around his baby brother, looking from his mother to his beloved aunt in complete bewilderment, his clear blue eyes full of unshed tears. Neither Grace nor Edda noticed him.
“I see,” said Edda, drawing on a pair of red kid gloves. She was looking particularly attractive in one of the newer styles, waisted and longer, in the same stunning red. Nor was she wearing a hat, preferring to let the world see her black hair immaculately waved in the new fashion, curling at its ends. The outfit had struck Grace like a hammer, made her feel dowdy, parochial, the housewife-mother-of-two, stuck in a dreary rut.
Edda’s bag was black patent leather with a big red kid bow across its front; she clipped it under her arm and turned on one fashionable black patent heel. “A ridiculous conversation, Grace, that I am hereby terminating. Your trouble, sister, is that you’re spoiled and indulged by two men, to one of whom you have no legal claim. If they didn’t run after you, you’d be much better off.”
Grace opened her mouth, burst into tears, and howled; so did Brian, equally noisily. Edda stalked to the door.
“Another thing,” she said, opening the door. “Choose your audience. The only thing this bout of waterworks does for me is make me want to smack you—hard!” And she was out, she was gone.
At the front gate she began to tremble, but there were too many curtains pulled partway back to emulate Grace. Chin in the air, Edda walked down the street looking as if she owned it, only then remembering that she hadn’t told Grace about Dr. Charles Burdum, who Corunda gossip said was taking over the hospital.
Only Tufts weathered those confused, uncertain weeks between the death of Dr. Francis Campbell and the appointment of the new General Superintendent, for she floated above an opalescent haze of happiness nothing had prepared her for. On the surface, her new position as Sister Tutor wasn’t very demanding, as she would have a mere eight trainees under her wing, but she also saw that she could train the West Enders left until time eliminated them; some at least would repay the effort. That Matron had given her leeway to implement her ideas was wonderful, for there were yet other areas where a Sister Tutor’s hand could make vast differences. No one could work at Corunda Base for three years and be unaware how indifferent the domestic and culinary staff were to the purposes of a hospital. Tufts wanted to change that, too, make the wardsmaids understand what a germ was and where it lurked, make the cooks and kitchen staff proud to serve tasty meals that earned them praise from all who ate them. Domestic and Culinary came under the care of a deputy matron of retirement age, Anne Harding, one of those relics of a bygone era all institutions seem to harbor in dark and dusty corners. Well, all of it had to change. No more feeding everybody for sixpence a day. Only how was she going to go about dragging Domestic and Culinary into the twentieth century?
If a secret glow of warmth cocooned her heart, that was because she was back on the old terms with Liam Finucan, who had suffered the sixteen months of his divorce suit as unobtrusively as possible, and emerged at its end legally severed from his faithless wife and under no obligation to pay her something known as alimony. That in spite of the judicial ruling he did pay Eris a small allowance was not symptomatic of weakness but of compassion; he couldn’t live with the thought that a partner of fifteen years left the union without the prospect of living any better than her man-friend-of-the-moment decided.
“I’m glad you pay her something,” Tufts said as she bustled around the pathologist’s office. “Oh, Liam, what a mess you’ve let this place become! You didn’t used to be so untidy.”
“I missed my chief assistant, even if she was never official. I could have murdered Gertie Newdigate,” he said, watching her.
Tufts giggled. “Gertie! The name doesn’t suit her one bit.”
“No, but it probably pushed her into an early dragonhood.”
“What’s the lab like?”
“In fine form. After you left I buckled down and taught Billy to be a much better technician than he was. Now I have a second technician, Allen, who’s better trained and qualified.”
“So all I have to do is sort out your office.”
“Yes.” The dark grey eyes gleamed. “I saved it for you.”
“Big of you. Well, come on, man, chop-chop! Sort all these files into alphabetical order and then we’ll look at them, decide if the labels are the right ones, and then file them.”
“You’re a lot bossier, Heather.”
“Tufts, not Heather. And as I’m now a sister, of course I’m bossier. You and I have to produce training schedules of all sorts, but we can’t do that until your office is in order.”
He hadn’t changed a bit, she concluded as the shambles disappeared before a formidable new organization—far more profound than any he had ever practiced before. Necessary, if either of them was to be able to put an unerring finger on a file or book or paper without hesitation. The hospital carpenter, who had a lot of free time, suddenly found himself busier than he had been in years; Tufts commissioned him to make proper drawer units for all Liam’s assortment of records. Since the job appealed to him and he liked Dr. Finucan, the carpenter unfurled the wings of a talented cabinetmaker, and dowered Liam’s office with quite beautiful cabinetry, all stained a matching pale mahogany.
“Which means,” said Tufts with huge enthusiasm, “that when I’m finished with your office, it will look far spiffier than the Superintendent’s. I like that, so you’re going to cough up for a Persian carpet on the floor and some prestigious etchings on the walls. I’m sending your books to a good binder—they’ll look spiffy leather-bound and gilt-lettered.”
As each directive was issued he nodded mutely, then obeyed it; she had that effect, Sister Tutor.
Who doted publicly on Liam Finucan, with curious consequences. Even including the sixteen-month hiatus of a divorce that severely curtailed their personal relationship, Liam and Tufts had been such good friends and colleagues for so long that the entire staff of Corunda Base knew there was nothing shady going on between them. “The Experiment” was a good example. Tufts had found two other men on the staff whose hair flopped in their eyes and blinded them, and bought each one a Mason Pearson hairbrush. Then every morning she attacked the floppy lock, assaulting the scalp and its follicles so ruthlessly that, as the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, the hair began to grow in the opposite direction. Each man’s lock was measured with calipers on the first of the month and the measurements entered in a journal, together with photographs. And by winter of 1929, The Experiment had succeeded—each man’s lock of hair no longer blinded him. Her two other guinea pigs were given Sister Tutor’s blessing and dismissed, but Liam never was. Tufts got a kick out of the project, and saved her most difficult problems or questions for hairbrush time. People viewed it as an intrinsic part of a very special, completely Platonic friendship.
Interestingly, the one name never mentioned on the gossip grapevine was Tufts Scobie’s. Given that she was quite stunningly pretty, her Diana-the-Goddess image puzzled people on early contact, but longer acquaintance showed them it was part of her mystique.
The man who understood Tufts’s nature best was Liam Finucan, who loved her with every particle of his being, and never thought of her as Tufts. Perhaps it was his forties endowed Liam with the wisdom never to declare his love, or perhaps it had all to do with a unique sensitivity of the soul; whatever the root cause was, he loved in the complete silence that doesn’t give itself away even by a fleeting look or a tiny yet betraying gesture. Liam and Heather were absolute best friends.
The winter months of 1929 saw Corunda Base Hospital in a worse state of flux than anyone remembered, for the Board was engaged in a storm of cables with Manchester and Dr. Charles Burdum. No new superintendent was contemplated for the moment.
The junior sisters—even Tufts, with a firm job offer—were in a state of Limbo, a name given it by Edda because it was good and blessed, but had no God; the Superintendent was hospital God.
Uncertainty over their futures hovered perpetually—would the new Super be another Frank, or his opposite? It began to seem to Edda that she would be leaving for parts unknown, especially given the shattering quarrel with Grace, who was behaving like someone Edda had never met—indeed, Grace refused to meet! Oh, to think that my twin sister damns me as a trollop! Unconscionable! She’s turned into a fishwife who’d burn me as a witch!
Superintendent Francis Campbell had been a conservative stick-in-the-mud whose sole venture into nursing training, the Latimers, had been virtually forced upon him; repercussions, like the West Enders now starting to train and register in the new way, had annoyed him greatly. What he visualized was a grossly increasing budget for nurse wages and salaries in years to come. Yes, as trainees they were paid a pittance, but they had to be housed, fed, taught, and supervised, and when they achieved their registrations they cost far more than old-style West Enders. Almost his last thought before dying was that the eight trainees beginning were all West Enders: his cheap nursing asset was no more. How dared West Enders do this? Good-for-nothing trollops! He might have gone on in this vein, had he not died instead.
Dr. Campbell’s tenure of the chief hospital position far predated the Great War, and many of the new techniques and treatments had passed him by; those that had not been forced upon him by his two senior surgeons, three senior physicians, his anesthetist, and that perennial nuisance, Ned Mason the obstetrician, were not adopted. Such as the appointment of a radiologist whose job would have been to run a proper X-ray department containing the very latest X-ray equipment, and a psychiatrist for the asylum. As far as Dr. Frank Campbell was concerned, the main function of his hospital was to keep its costs right down and incur no new expenses in the name of medical progress. Pah! Hospitals were places to die in. If you didn’t die, you were lucky. Treatment only slowed the dying down.
To compound the woes of the new junior sisters, Matron and her two deputies spent the rest of that winter of 1929, until September, in getting their records and arguments into an order that would impress the new superintendent; he would see the nursing department as a collection of disciplined individuals able to spare him much time and energy when it came to every aspect of nursing’s nature. The hospital Secretary, Walter Paulet, was similarly closeted with his accounts department; rumor had it tearing their scant hair out by its roots over the lack of system in Frank Campbell’s paperwork. Somehow when they were reduced to black figures on white paper, Dr. Campbell’s machinations to feed everyone for sixpence a day looked—well, rather appalling.
But, as luckily is the way with most institutions, Corunda Base Hospital itself continued to function on doctors, nurses, domestic staff, food preparers, and ancillary staff in the same old way, so that the patients lived (or died) in relative ignorance of the drama going on at an executive level. Indeed, it was a rare patient even knew that a hospital had executives.