A Surgical Affair Read online

  “Gosh!” said the second voice.

  “Do you remember that time all six of us burst into tears when Baker was lecturing us? Well, I didn’t cry this time. I just looked terribly, terribly hurt and offended, as if I’d never been near—” The voice broke off as Diana picked up the tray of things she needed and made for the door. But not before she saw Nurse Joan Edmonds’s head pop around the screen and then disappear, to the sound of more giggles. Nurse Edmonds was 19 years old, but looked 16, dark-haired and small. Although not one of the most efficient nurses on the ward, she had a pretty face and a pleasant nature.

  Diana called in at the office.

  “Hello, Sister. What have you been doing to poor Nurse Edmonds? My spies have told me all about it.”

  “A little disciplinary matter, that’s all.” Sister sighed. “It’s hard to be cross with them. They look so young. I keep remembering the time many years ago when I was 19, and Matron lectured me about climbing into the Nurses’ Home after a dance: ‘And not in uniform, either!’ she said. ‘In an off-the-shoulder dress!’ ”

  Diana was studying the theater list pinned on the notice board. “This is a great day for me. My first appendix. Dr. Royston says I can do Miss Stevens. She’s a healthy girl of 17, with no complications—I hope. I’ve helped him do so many now, so I should be all right on my own.”

  “But he’ll be there, assisting you?”

  “Oh, yes! But thank goodness Mr. Cole will be doing Out-Patients this afternoon. I think if he shouted at me in the middle, I’d drop my scalpel.”

  Sister looked thoughtfully at Diana. “If you had to have your appendix out in this hospital, who would you choose to do the operation?” she asked.

  Diana pretended to ponder over the question for a moment, but there was no doubt in her mind. “I think Dr. Royston. You see,” she explained hastily, “these days Mr. Cole doesn’t have much experience with appendixes, he’s out of touch—doing all the big things.”

  Sister shook her head. “I’d have Mr. Cole. I’m his biggest fan. The patients think he’s wonderful, too.”

  With an armful of files, Miss Harvey swept through the door, a yellow orchid pinned to the lapel of her smart black suit.

  “I heard you, Nan—about Mr. Cole. But you’re not his biggest fan, I am!”

  “What a heavenly orchid.” Diana said enviously.

  For a moment Miss Harvey looked embarrassed, then she was smiling happily at them both.

  “It’s no good, everybody will have to know sooner or later. Anyway, I can never keep a secret for long.” She dropped her voice. “I’m engaged.”

  “How wonderful!” cried Sister.

  “Who to?” asked Diana.

  “To somebody you know.” Miss Harvey laughed happily. “Dr. Pallie.”

  “You’re very lucky, he’s a charming man.” Diana shook Miss Harvey’s hand warmly. “Isn’t she a dark horse, Sister?”

  Sister smiled and looked wistfully at her friend. “Yes, you are, Kate. Nobody suspected anything was going on between you. I’m glad it’s Dr. Pallie, though. He’s very nice.”

  “It’s not a whirlwind romance. We’ve been very friendly since the hospital party last Christmas,” Miss Harvey told them gaily, “but we knew each other for years before that.”

  “When’s the wedding?”

  “As soon as possible, but no fuss. We’re both too old for that. Just our families—and I’ll go on being called Miss Harvey in the hospital. Nothing will change, really.”

  “Nothing—and everything. I hope you’ll be happy, Kate, I’m sure you will. Now, I must get on,” said Sister, hurrying out of the office.

  Miss Harvey looked anxiously at Diana. “What did she mean, “Nothing—and everything?” She’s behaving very oddly. Did I say something wrong?”

  “No. I think your news gave her a bit of a shock, though. You’ve known her for years, haven’t you?”

  Miss Harvey sighed. “Yes. I think I’m probably Nan’s best friend, after her cousin Fay, of course. Perhaps I should have told her the news alone first. I didn’t realize she would take it like this.”

  “I’ll go and talk to her.”

  In the sterilizing room, Sister Baker had busily started to lay out a. trolley for wound dressings.

  “Kate and Dr. Pallie. They’ll go well together,” she said to Diana. “He’s so serious and she’s so lively; almost the same age, too. How nice to be getting married. Perhaps it’s never really too late?”

  Diana shook her head and smiled. “I’m sure it’s not. We never know what’s around the corner in life.”

  Sister bent over to put a bowl on the lower shelf. Diana noticed her face suddenly go white. It was as if a sharp stab of pain had pierced the center of her body. For a moment Sister did not move, as if the agony was so intense, so unbearable. Then the pain seemed to disappear completely. Later Diana wondered if she had imagined it all, if it had been a horrible nightmare.

  At two o’clock that afternoon Miss Doris Stevens, shorthand typist, was wheeled unconscious into the theater by Dr. Pallie.

  Diana, gloved and gowned, painted the exposed skin with antiseptic spirit and arranged the sterile towels. She stood next to Sister Jay, with Mark opposite them.

  He warned her quietly. “Not too big an incision. This girl might want to wear a bikini in the summer.”

  Diana took the scalpel and made a careful cut into the skin. But the skin was thick and unyielding, she had only scratched the surface.

  “Be bold,” Mark told her.

  The blade went more easily through the layer of yellow fat and then into the glistening muscle. It was not easy to find the appendix and to bring it out through such a small hole. Diana thought how deceptively simple it had always looked when Mark was operating.

  “Easy does it,” said Mark softly, as she tied a ligature around the base of the red, swollen appendix.

  The operation lasted longer than the time normally needed for a straightforward appendectomy and left Diana exhausted by the mental and physical strain of being the chief surgeon rather than merely assisting. She pulled off her mask and dropped thankfully into the office armchair.

  Mark came in and patted her on the arm. “Well done!”

  “Was I all right?” She looked at him anxiously.

  “You were fine. But you should practise tying knots.”

  Diana sighed. “I know. I was too slow over them.”

  He took some string from the desk and sat down in front of her. “Look, I’ll show you how to tie a first-rate surgical knot. Hold out your arm.”

  For five minutes they tied knots on each other’s arms, until Diana was making them quickly and firmly.

  “Spend five minutes in your room each night, practising knots. I’ll know if you do, because your next appendix should take half as long,” said Mark, smiling.

  Diana said gratefully, “It’s very nice of you to help me.”

  He looked strangely embarrassed and avoided meeting her gaze. “If I don’t show you these things, nobody will.”

  And she decided that to Mark it was just a part of his work. There was nothing “nice” about the help he was giving her. Then Diana remembered there was a question she had wanted to ask him for weeks and this seemed a good opportunity.

  “Have you ever fainted at an operation?”

  He looked at her, puzzled. “Once. I’d been up most of the night and had no breakfast. I keeled right over, when my chief was doing a parotid. Why?”

  “Well, since I was ill, two years ago, I’ve nearly fainted three times; never in the theater, though, and I don’t go right out. I just see stars. Everything swims around, and I have to sit down.” She was looking at him anxiously. “I’m always afraid it might happen during an operation. If it did, I think I’d be so ashamed, I’d give all this up ... and go on the stage.”

  They both smiled at the desperate threat she had made, then Mark’s face became serious. He put his hand firmly on her shoulder and looked into her eyes. Diana
felt some of his strength transmitted to her own body, and when he spoke she knew that he was right.

  “Don’t be a silly girl. You’re not going to faint.”

  At that moment Bill Evans ambled into the office and grinned at them both. “I’m sorry to interrupt this touching scene, but I’m anesthetizing for the next case. Your last patient hasn’t regained consciousness, and Pallie is sitting with her.”

  “A boy of 11, with a small piece of glass buried in his hand,” Mark told him briefly. When Evans left the room, he said, “Do you think that man tries to be offensive, or can’t he help it?”

  Diana sat at a table opposite Mark, as he cut across the palm of the boy’s hand. While she held the two flaps of skin apart, he probed and searched, slowly and methodically, among the narrow tendons that glistened under the overhead light; all of them looked infuriatingly like hundreds of tiny pieces of glass. The X-ray gave Mark only an approximate idea of where to find the glass, and after an hour he had drawn a blank.

  Diana looked crossly at Evans, who kept sighing impatiently. “It’s here somewhere. I know I’m in the right place,” Mark murmured. Only Diana heard him.

  “There’s no hurry, is there?” she asked softly.

  “We’ll stay here all night, if we have to.”

  Then they heard a very faint click. Gently, he held aside one of the tendons with a metal retractor. They saw the tiny glinting piece of glass. He picked it up carefully and threw it in a dish. “That’s it,” said Mark, sitting back. “We’ll sew up.”

  Of all the operations they performed together, Diana always remembered that one. Mark had been so patient and calm.

  She joined Dr. Pallie in the anesthetic room. Every five minutes he placed a mask over Miss Stevens’s face and patiently squeezed oxygen from the rubber bag into her lungs.

  “Any change?” Diana asked.

  He shook his head gravely. “Not yet. She is having a long sleep. I think she was too sensitive to the muscle-relaxing drug I gave her. All we can do is wait.”

  Diana assisted Mark with an amputation, followed by two emergency operations. Then she snatched a quick bite to eat in the dining room before returning to relieve Dr. Pallie.

  It was a lonely vigil. The theater, the office and the corridors were empty. Only Miss Stevens’s rhythmical breathing disturbed the silence. Down in Charity Ward, the patients must have been wondering why the appendix case was still up in the theater; the girl’s parents had probably phoned to inquire about her.

  When Dr. Pallie returned, his face strained and tired, Diana asked him anxiously, “When do you think she’ll come around?”

  He shrugged. “It is difficult to say. Maybe soon, maybe not for hours.”

  They sat in silence for some time. Then Diana said, “I’ve just remembered. I must congratulate you—on your engagement.”

  Dr. Pallie took the rubber bag from Diana. “Oh? Kate has told you.”

  “Well, she knew we’d all find out eventually.”

  He smiled contentedly. “I am very lucky. I do not make friends easily, but with Kate, I find I talk and laugh. She makes me more alive. Before, I think I was only half alive.”

  Diana suddenly thought of Mark. “Yes, I know that feeling. I think if you find somebody who does that to you, it’s a very precious thing.”

  Then Dr. Pallie saw Miss Stevens’s head move. Quickly, he went up and shook her shoulder.

  “Miss Stevens! Miss Stevens! Wake up!”

  Her mouth moved, and then the eyes opened.

  He looked up at Diana and smiled. “It is all right now. Would you send for the porters, Dr. Field, please?”

  Diana walked wearily through the door of the residents’ quarters late that night, longing for a hot bath and the “cool friendliness of clean sheets.”

  Suddenly she collided with a girl wearing a red dress and black high-heeled shoes; it was the nurse she had overheard in the ward that morning. Before Diana had time to say, “Hello, Nurse Edmonds! We always seem to be bumping into each other!” the girl had run out through the door.

  As she walked onto her room, a nagging, unpleasant thought came into Diana’s head, which became more painful when she saw the light shining under Mark’s door.

  “Why shouldn’t he entertain a nurse in his room?” she asked herself, as she prepared for her bath. “It’s against hospital rules, that’s the only reason why not. She’s pretty, he’s been working hard all day. Even if Mark did kiss me, it was only frivolously, at the end of a party. We’re friends, that’s all. Of course he sees other girls. I must concentrate on my work,” she told herself firmly, “and on the first part of my Fellowship exam. How stupid of me to be upset. As if Mark ever thinks about me!”

  Lying in bed that night, Diana thought of Richard, always faithful, always there if she needed him. Earnest, excitable, confident Richard, whose love she could always rely upon. But would he ever really understand her passionate interest in surgery, her desire to spend every moment she could in the operating theater? She thought not. He didn’t fit into this new life she was leading, where every day brought a new adventure, another experience to strengthen her ambition to be a surgeon. And how could she explain it all to him?

  Before Diana fell into a heavy sleep, she willed the telephone by her bed not to ring that night, so she could wake free from the weariness that had suddenly come over her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Mark opened his eyes. He gazed at Diana, who was sitting opposite him.

  “The unpleasant thing about sleeping after lunch,” he told her wearily, “is this ghastly feeling when you wake up.”

  They were alone in the common-room. They had come off duty at one o’clock, and the whole afternoon lay before them.

  Mark stretched out his hand and turned the knob of the radio. The soft, rhythmic beat of a Latin-American rumba filled the room.

  Then he jumped up and threw open the window. Diana could feel a strange warmth in the air. It was the first day of spring.

  “I’m suddenly longing for home,” he said, almost to himself, as he stared at the clouds rolling by. “To eat a real steak again, under the stars. To sail a yacht in Sydney harbor. To feel the sun on my back, as I come in on the surf. And I’d like to see my sister’s baby daughter. I only know her from photos.”

  “But you’re in England,” Diana told him quietly. “So what are you going to do?”

  Mark turned and sat down. Then he told her exactly what he was going to do.

  He had a date with Denise up in London. Yes, she was a model. She would be as smart and well-groomed as ever, her golden hair perfectly waved and probably wearing a neat, black suit. She was taller than Mark, and very beautiful. That was the trouble with her. She was perfect—until she started to speak. Then Mark found that he soon became bored.

  Diana thought, “How right I was! Just as I imagined her.” Then Mark was imitating Denise. “Don’t you realize how I adore you?” she would ask him. “I think you’re so clever, being a surgeon. I just feel quite ill at the sight of blood. You dance divinely, and I’m such a silly-billy on my feet.”

  This sent Diana into a fit of giggles.

  Once a week, or once every ten days, he found Denise was fun to be with. Anyway, she had a blue Cadillac, with a leopard-skin interior. They were going to see Roll up the Carpet, the new musical in the West End.

  “Outside the theater after the show she’ll probably slip a carefully manicured hand through my arm and say, ‘Where to now, Mark?’ And I’ll say, ‘Get off my back, Denise. Tonight anyway.’ She’ll understand.”

  “Perhaps that’s why you get on well together,” Diana said. “You don’t make demands on each other.”

  Mark said Denise knew plenty of men. Most of them wanted to marry her. He had the feeling that from the moment they first met, at Alec Neal’s party, she had set out to add him to her collection of admirers.

  “I can see why,” Diana thought. “She was fascinated by his shyness and reserve. It’s strangely m
ixed with independence and bluntness.”

  “She soon found I was different from the others,” Mark went on. “She doesn’t attract me and I’ve never pretended she does.” They sat in silence for a moment.

  Then Mark said, “Can’t think why I’ve been boring you with all this. I guess it’s because you’re a good listener. You manage to look interested, even if you’re not. What are you doing today?”

  Diana hesitated for a moment. Should she tell him it was her birthday? 27 years old! Surely she was beyond the stage when a birthday is celebrated? The less said about it the better. And anyway, of what possible interest could it be to Mark? Denise was probably very young, and he’d think 27 awfully old.

  So she told him she had an appointment at the hairdresser (which was true) and then she had some letters to write.

  Suddenly, Mark remembered he had to give the ward some instructions about a patient and rushed off.

  When Diana arrived back at the hospital, very self-conscious about the new shorter hair style she had treated herself to, the hall porter presented her with a large parcel.

  “A young man brought it in, Dr. Field. He was sorry to find you out. He couldn’t wait. Seemed in a hurry.”

  “That was Richard,” thought Diana. “Why could he not have phoned to say he was coming?”

  “Came all the way from Norwich, he said.”

  She opened the parcel and found the largest box of chocolates she’d ever seen. It was done up with a beautiful pink bow. A note inside, in Richard’s large handwriting, said; “Sorry if I miss you when I call at the hospital. Am terribly busy with work at the moment. Have a very happy birthday, Di, if that’s possible stuck inside a hospital. I’ll call you when I can. Love, Richard.” Diana walked slowly upstairs. She remembered the birthday parties she used to have as a little girl. Jellies, a huge cake with colored candles, a new dress and black dancing pumps. There would be games with prizes and lots of balloons everywhere; paper hats for everybody.