Memento Mori

middle-aged with a bad-tempered twitch at one side of her face between lip and jaw, Granny Barnacle declared she had absolutely placed her. ‘The workhouse mind. You see what’ll happen now. Anyone that’s a nuisance or can’t contain themselves like me with Bright’s disease, they won’t last long in this ward. You get pneumonia in the winter, can’t help but do, and that’s her chance.’

‘What you think she’ll do, Granny Barnacle?’

‘Do? It’s what she won’t do. You wait to the winter, you’ll be lyin’ there and nothin’ done for you. Specially if you got no relations or that to raise inquiries.’

‘The other nurses is all right, Granny, though.’

‘You’ll see a difference in them.’

There had been a difference. The nurses were terrified of their new superior, that was all. But as they became more brisk and efficient so did the majority of the grannies behold them with hostile thoughts and deadly suspicions. When the night staff came on duty the ward relaxed, and this took the form of much shouting throughout the night. The grannies shouted in their sleep and half-waking restlessness. They accepted their sedative pills fearfully, and in the morning would ask each other, ‘Was I all right last night?’ not quite remembering whether they or another had made the noise.

‘It all goes down in the book,’ said Granny Barnacle. ‘Nothing happens during the night but what it goes into the book. And Sister Bastard sees it in the morning. You know what that’ll mean, don’t you, when the winter comes?’

At first, Miss Taylor took a frivolous view of these sayings. It was true the new sister was jittery and strict, and over fifty years of age, and frightened. It will all blow over, thought Miss Taylor, when both sides get used to the change. She was sorry for Sister Burstead and her fifty-odd years. Thirty years ago, thought Miss Taylor, I was into my fifties, and getting old. How nerve-wracking it is to be getting old, how much better to be old! It had been touch and go, in those days, whether she would leave the Colstons and settle down with her brother in Coventry while she had the chance. It was such a temptation to leave them, she having been cultivated by twenty-five years’ association with Charmian. By the time she was fifty it really seemed absurd for her to continue her service with Charmian, her habits and tastes were so superior to those of the maids she met on her travels with Charmian, so much more intelligent. She had been all on edge for the first two years of her fifties, not knowing whether to go to look after the widowed brother in Coventry and enjoy some status or whether to continue waking Charmian up every morning, and observing in silence Godfrey’s infidelities. For two years while she made up her mind she had given Charmian hell, threatening to leave every month, folding Charmian’s dresses in the trunk so that they were horribly creased, going off to art galleries while Charmian rang for her in vain.

‘You’re far worse now,’ Charmian would tell her, ‘than when you were going through the menopause.

Charmian plied her with bottles of tonic medicine which she had poured down the lavatory with a weird joy. At last, after a month’s holiday with her brother in Coventry, she found she could never stand life with him and his ways, the getting him off to his office in the morning, the keeping him in clean shirts, and the avaricious whist parties in the evening. At the Colstons’ there was always some exotic company, and Charmian’s sitting-room had been done out in black and orange. All the time she was at Coventry Miss Taylor had missed the exciting scraps of conversation which she had been used to hearing on Charmian’s afternoons.

‘Charmian darling, don’t you think, honestly, I should have Boris bumped off?’

‘No, I rather like Boris.’

And those telephone messages far into the nights.

‘Is that you, Taylor darling? Get Charmian to the phone, will you? Tell her I’m in a state. Tell her I want to read her my new poem.’ That was thirty years ago.

Ten years before that, the telephone messages had been different again, ‘Taylor, tell Mrs Colston I’m in London. Guy Leet. Not a word, Taylor to Mr Colston.’ These were messages which Miss Taylor sometimes did not deliver. Charmian herself was going through her difficult age at that time, and was apt to fly like a cat at any man who made approaches to her, even Guy who had previously been her lover.

At the age of fifty-three Miss Taylor had settled down. She could even meet Alec Warner without any of the old feelings. She went everywhere with Charmian, sat for hours while Charmian read aloud her books, while still in manuscript, gave judgement. As gradually the other servants became difficult and left, so Jean Taylor took charge. When Charmian had her hair bobbed so did Miss Taylor.

When Charmian entered the Catholic Church Miss Taylor was received, really just to please Charmian.

She rarely saw her brother from Coventry, and when she did, counted herself lucky to have escaped him. On one occasion she told Godfrey Colston to watch his step. The disappointed twitch at the side of her mouth which had appeared during her forties, now gradually disappeared.

So it will be, thought Miss Taylor, in the case of Sister Burstead, once she settles down. The twitch will go.

Presently, however, Miss Taylor began to feel there was very little chance of the new sister’s twitch disappearing. The grannies were so worked up about her, it would not be surprising if she did indeed let them die of pneumonia should she ever get the chance.

‘You must speak to the doctor, Granny Barnacle,’ said Miss Taylor, ‘if you really feel you aren’t getting the right treatment.’

‘The doctor my backside. They’re hand-in-glove. What’s an old woman to them I ask you?’

The only good that could be discerned in the arrival of the new sister was the fact that the ward was now more alert. Everyone’s wits had improved, as if the sister were a sort of shock treatment. The grannies had forgotten their will-making, and no longer threatened to disinherit each other or the nurses.

Mrs Reewes-Duncan, however, made the great mistake of threatening the sister with her solicitor one dinner- time when the meat was tough or off, Miss Taylor could not recall which. ‘Fetch the ward sister to me,’ Mrs Reewes-Duncan demanded. ‘Fetch her here to me.

The sister marched in purposefully when thus summoned.

‘Well, Granny Duncan, what’s the matter? Hurry up now, I’m busy. What’s the matter?’

‘This meat, my good woman …’ The ward felt at once that Granny Duncan was making a great mistake. ‘My niece will be informed … My solicitor …’