‘It comes to the same thing,’ said Miss Taylor.
She is wandering, thought Lettie, and she said, ‘In the Balkan countries, the peasants turn their aged parents out of doors every summer to beg their keep for the winter.’
‘Indeed?’ said Miss Taylor. ‘That is an interesting system.’ Her hand, when Dame Lettie lifted it to say good- bye, was painful at the distorted joints.
‘I hope,’ said Miss Taylor, ‘you will think no more of employing Mrs Pettigrew.’
Dame Lettie thought, She is jealous of anyone else’s having to do with Charmian.
Perhaps I am, thought Miss Taylor who could read Dame Lettie’s idea.
And as usual after Dame Lettie had left, she pondered and understood more and more why Lettie came so frequently to visit her and seemed to find it pleasant, and at the same time seldom spoke or behaved pleasantly. It was the old enmity about Miss Taylor’s love affair in 1907 which in fact Dame Lettie had forgotten — had dangerously forgotten; so that she retained in her mind a vague fascinating enmity for Jean Taylor without any salutary definition. Whereas Miss Taylor herself, until quite recently, had remembered the details of her love affair, and Dame Lettie’s subsequent engagement to marry the man, which came to nothing after all. But recently, thought Miss Taylor, I am beginning to feel as she does. Enmity is catching. Miss Taylor closed her eyes and laid her hands loosely on the rug which covered her knees. Soon the nurses would come in to put the grannies to bed. Meanwhile she thought with a sleepy pleasure, I enjoy Dame Lettie’s visits, I look forward to them, in spite of which I treat her with my asperity. Perhaps it is because I have now so little to lose. Perhaps it is because these encounters have an exhilarating quality. I might sink into a torpor were it not for fat old Lettie. And perhaps, into the bargain, I might use her in the matter of the ward sister, although that is unlikely.
‘Granny Taylor — Gemini.
‘There,’ said Miss Taylor.
The Maud Long Ward had been put to bed and was now awaiting supper.
‘It comes near the mark,’ said Miss Valvona. ‘You can always know by your horoscope when your visitors are coming to see you, Granny Taylor. Either your Dame or that gentleman that comes; you can always tell by the stars.’
Granny Trotsky lifted her wizened head with low brow and pug nose, and said something. Her health had been degenerating for some weeks. It was no longer possible to hear exactly what she said. Miss Taylor was the quickest in the ward at guessing what Granny Trotsky’s remarks might be, but Miss Barnacle was the most inventive.
Granny Trotsky repeated her words, whatever they were.
Miss Taylor replied, ‘All right, Granny.’
‘What did she say?’ demanded Granny Valvona.
‘I am not sure,’ said Miss Taylor.
Mrs Reewes-Duncan, who claimed to have lived in a bungalow in former days, addressed Miss Valvona. ‘Are you aware that the horoscope you have just read out to us specifies evening festivities, whereas Granny Taylor’s visitor came at three-fifteen this afternoon?’
Granny Trotsky again raised her curiously shaped head and spoke, emphasizing her statement with vehement nods of this head which was so fearfully and wonderfully made. Whereupon Granny Barnacle ventured, ‘She says festivities my backside. What’s the use of the stars foretell with that murderous bitch of a sister outside there, she says, waiting to finish off the whole ward in the winter when the lot goes down with pneumonia. You’ll be reading your stars, she says, all right when they need the beds for the next lot. That’s what she says — don’t you, Granny Trotsky?’
Granny Trotsky, raising her head, made one more, and very voluble effort, then dropped exhausted on her pillow, closing her eyes.
‘That’s what she said,’ said Granny Barnacle. ‘And right she is, too. Come the winter them that’s made nuisances of theirselves don’t last long under that sort.’
A ripple of murmurs ran up the rows of beds. It ceased as a nurse walked through the ward, and started again when she had gone.
Miss Valvona’s strong eyes stared through her spectacles into the past, as they frequently did in the autumn, and she saw the shop door open on a Sunday afternoon, and the perfect ices her father manufactured, and heard the beautiful bellow of his accordion after night had fallen, on and on till closing time. ‘Oh, the parlour and the sundaes and white ladies we used to serve,’ she said, ‘and my father with the Box. The white ladies stiff on your plate, they were hard, and made from the best-quality products. And the fellows would say to me, “How do, Doreen,” even if they had another girl with them after the pictures. And my father got down the Box and played like a champion. It cost him fifty pounds, in those days, mind you, it was a lot.’
Granny Duncan addressed Miss Taylor, ‘Did you ask that Dame to do something for us, at all?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Miss Taylor, ‘but I mentioned that we were not so comfortable now as we have been previously.’
‘She goin’ to
‘She is not herself on the management committee,’ Miss Taylor explained. ‘It is a friend of hers who is on the committee. Now, it will take time. I can’t, you know, press her. She is very easily put off. And then, you know, in the meantime, we must try to make the best of this.’ The nurse walked back through the ward among the grannies, all sullen and silent but for Granny Trotsky who had now fallen noisily asleep with her mouth open.
It was true, thought Miss Taylor, that the young nurses were less jolly since Sister Burstead had taken over the ward. Of course it was but two seconds before she had become ‘Sister Bastard’ on the lips of Granny Barnacle. The associations of her name, perhaps, in addition to her age — Sister Burstead was well over fifty — had affected Granny Barnacle with immediate hostile feelings. ‘Over fifty they got the workhouse mind. You can’t never trust a ward sister over fifty. They don’t study that there’s new ways of goin’ on since the war by law.’ These sentiments in turn had affected the other occupants of the ward. But the ground had been prepared the week before by their knowledge of the departure of the younger sister: ‘A change, hear that? — there’s to be a change. What’s the stars say, Granny Valvona?’ Then, on the morning that Sister Burstead took over, she being wiry, bespectacled, and
