DOCTOR AT LARGE

nurses this failure to throw off the cap and apron did not discourage me, and I consoled myself that another companion might have talked only about ponies or Proust; but after a few weeks I found myself irresistibly wishing that she would stop telling me exactly what was happening to number twenty-two's blood chlorides, and the bright retort she had made to Nurse Macpherson when informed that the ward's allocation of liquid paraffin had been used up in a week.

There was another more disheartening impediment in my relationship with Nurse Plumtree. I confessed this late one evening to Grimsdyke, when he came into my room to scrounge cigarettes.

'How's the sex life?' he asked cheerfully. 'Feeling more contented?'

'Well-yes and no.'

'What? You mean the course of true love hasn't run smooth?'

'Too smoothly, if anything,' I told him. 'You know how it is with nurses-we go to a flick or a concert or something, then I rush her back to the hospital before her late pass expires, we have a quick neck among half the medical school outside the mortuary gate, then I push her into the Nurses' Home on the stroke of eleven. If I kept her out another minute her good name would be ruined for ever, so it seems.'

'Frustrating.'

'You don't have to read Freud and Kinsey to know it doesn't do a chap much good. But what's the alternative? Apart from holding hands in Hyde Park?'

'How about a little intramural love life?'

'In St Swithin's, where they separate the sexes like a Victorian swimming-bath?'

'There's always the fire-escape.'

'Ah, the fire-escape!' This ugly zigzag up the wall of the Residents' Quarters was a monument to the victory of the insurance company's prudence over that of the matron. By climbing the darkened floors of the empty out- patients' block at night, crossing the roof of the physiotherapy department, and dodging past the night porter's mess-room, we could smuggle a nurse into our forbidden corridors. This risky adventure was rarely suggested, for the nurse, if discovered, was regarded by the Matron to be fit for nothing more but the Chamber of Horrors.

'There's nothing to it, old lad,' Grimsdyke went on, as I looked at him dubiously. 'Wait for a dark night, lay in a bottle of courting sherry, have a decent shave, and you're all set for a cosy evening. So much warmer than Hyde Park, too.'

At our next meeting I mentioned the fire-escape to Nurse Plumtree. As I expected, she looked sad, sniffed, and said, 'Oh, Richard!'

Feeling I should provide some excuse, I went on quickly, 'But I mean, I thought we could just have a cup of coffee, and I could show you my microscope slides of gastric ulcers that I've been telling you about. I mean, it would be quite-well, you know, all right-'

'Oh, Richard! It would spoil everything.'

'What, you mean just looking at my slides? They're most interesting, and of course I have to borrow a microscope from one of the other residents, so I can't very well show them to you elsewhere. But of course, if you don't want to-'

She sighed deeply, and looked away. I felt that Grimsdyke would have managed the invitation much better! I had tempted her only with the pathological equivalent of etchings. There was another of her silences, then we talked about the best way of treating post-operative thrombosis.

Our affair jogged along for several weeks. There was no alternative, for she now simply told me when she was next off duty and assumed that I would be waiting to take her out. It was a relationship with many concrete advantages, for Nurse Plumtree was a tender-hearted girl whose motherly instincts were not wholly absorbed by her profession. From our first outing she had mended my shirts, lent me books, and provided currant cake with the morning coffee; now she bought me ties and bars of chocolate, pressed on me handfuls of vitamins from the medicine cupboard, knitted me a muffler, and made me wear braces instead of an old rugger club tie for keeping up my trousers, which she pressed proudly every Sunday with her iron in the Nurses' Home. My friends thought I had not looked so tidy or so well fed for a long, time.

Two events disturbed the placid current of this romance. The first was Nurse Macpherson's transference to night duty.

In the printed charge handed to him by the hospital Secretary on his appointment, each senior house surgeon at St Swithin's was enjoined 'to visit your wards at least once nightly before retiring, to take the report from the senior night nurse and attend to the needs of the patients, at whatever hour that might be'. This night round was the most conscientiously performed of all the house surgeons' duties, for night nurses, who have to sleep all day and work alone all night, are lonely souls who suffer from a deficiency of masculine companionship. For this reason the most untidy and unromantic houseman is confident of a welcome in the darkened ward, even if he has just been thrown out of the King George and arrives, like my predecessor, wearing the head porter's hat and riding a bicycle. Besides, all nurses are good cooks and without the ward sister counting the rations over their shoulders gladly provide peckish housemen with bacon and eggs at midnight.

My night rounds had so far been dull, because the nurse on Fortitude was a newly-promoted girl who breathlessly read me the ward report with one timid eye on the door for the visit of the surgical night sister; on Constancy, the night nurse was a thin, spectacled woman with a faint moustache, who in the half-light reminded me of Groucho Marx. One night I came up the empty corridor after seeing Nurse Plumtree into the Nurses' Home as usual, and found Nurse Macpherson frying bacon and eggs and smoking a cigarette in the small kitchen next to the ward.

'What on earth are you doing here?' I asked in surprise.

'Why, hello, there! For three months I'm to be Queen of the Night, tra-la! Didn't Plumtree tell you?'

I shook my head.

'How about some eggs and bacon? Or would you prefer'-she opened a box on the diet trolley-'some egg custard and pureed spinach?'

'As a matter of fact I could do with a bite. As usual, they gave us a rotten supper in the Residency. You know, that brawn stuff the patients won't eat.'

She nodded. 'How well I do! It would pass unnoticed in a pathology exam with 'Draw, Label, and Identify this Tissue' stuck on it. There's a bottle of beer in the comforts cupboard,' she went on, breaking a couple more eggs. 'Help yourself and pour me a glass.'

'Aren't you worried about the night sister?' I asked, hesitating.

'What, old Muggsy Munson? She's got her feet up in the Sister's room with a nice cup of tea reading the _Washerwoman's Weekly,_ I'll bet. She comes round as regularly as the hands of a clock.'

I sat down at the ward table, wondering why a nurse smoking in uniform always presented such a curiously abandoned appearance. Then I remembered that I had just kissed my girl-friend good night. 'How are the patients, Nurse?' I asked, trying to re-establish our professional relationship.

'Please, please, don't talk about them out of the ward, I beg.' She forked bacon from the pan. 'I cannot talk shop with my meals. The Nurses' Home is ghastly-it's mastoids with the mince, mumps with the macaroni, membranes with the mash. That's one of the things I've got against Plumtree-' She bit her lip. 'I shouldn't have said that, I suppose?'

'Not said it?' I tried to sound as indifferent as possible.

'Why?,

'Well-everyone knows that you and Plumtree-I mean, she's a very good sort at heart.'

'She certainly strikes me as being a decent sort of girl, I must say.'

'Oh, yes, very nice. Such a pity about her acne.'

'Acne?' I recalled that Nurse Plumtree's face was occasionally marred by a small square of sticking- plaster.

'Yes, all over her back. But of course-' She giggled. 'You wouldn't know about that, would you? But she's a nice placid person.'

'I happen to dislike chattering women,' I said, a little stiffly.

'She's no chatterbox. Why, sometimes she sits for hours and hours without saying anything, just looking into the middle distance.'

'I find her quite an interesting companion, anyway,' I insisted.

'So do we in the Home, these days. The things she tells us about you! My, my! I want to blush sometimes. Did