more soundly and exhaustedly that night than on most nights. The ward lay till morning still and soundless, breathing like one body instead of eleven.
The reorganization of the Maud Long Ward began next day, and all patients declared it a mercy for Granny Barnacle that she had been spared it.
Hitherto, the twelve beds in the Maud Long Ward had occupied only half of the space in the room; they had been a surplus from another, larger, medical ward, comprised mainly of elderly women. The new arrangement was designed to fill up the remaining half of the Maud Long Ward with a further nine elderly patients. These were to be put at the far end. Already, while the preparations were still in progress, this end of the ward was referred to among the nurses as the ‘geriatric corner ‘.
‘What’s that word mean they keep saying?’ Granny Roberts demanded of Miss Taylor.
‘It’s to do with old age. There must be some very old patients coming in.’
‘We supposed to be teenagers, then?’
Granny Valvona said, ‘Our new friends will probably be centenarians.’
‘I didn’t catch — just a minute till I get the trumpet right,’ said Granny Roberts, who always referred to her small hearing fixture as the trumpet.
‘See,’ said Granny Green, ‘what they’re bringing in to the ward.’
A line of cots was being wheeled up the ward and arranged in the new geriatric corner. These cots were much the same as the other hospital beds, but with the startling difference that they had high railed sides like children’s cots.
Granny Valvona crossed herself.
Next, the patients were wheeled in. Perhaps this was not the best introduction of the newcomers to the old established set. Being in varying advanced states of senility, and also being specially upset by the move, the new arrivals were making more noise and dribbling more from the mouth than usual.
Sister Lucy came round the grannies’ beds, explaining that they would have to be patient with these advanced cases. Knitting needles must not be left lying about near the geriatric corner, in case any of the newcomers should hurt themselves. The patients were not to be alarmed if anything funny should occur. At this point the sister had to call a nurse’s attention to one of the new patients, a frail, wizened, but rather pretty little woman, who was trying to climb over the side of her cot. The nurse rushed to settle the old woman back in bed. The patient set up an infant-like wail, yet not entirely that of a child — it was more like that of an old woman copying the cry of an infant.
The sister continued addressing the grannies in confidential tones. ‘You must try to remember,’ she said, ‘that these cases are very advanced, poor dears. And don’t get upset, like good girls. Try and help the nurses by keeping quiet and tidy.’
‘We’ll soon be senile ourselves at this rate,’ said Granny Green.
‘Ssh-sh,’ said the sister. ‘We don’t use that word. They are geriatric cases.
When she had gone Granny Duncan said, ‘To think that I spent my middle years looking forward to my old age and a rest!’
Another geriatric case was trying to climb over the cot. A nurse bustled to the rescue.
‘A mercy,’ said Granny Duncan, ‘poor Granny Barnacle didn’t live to see it. Poor souls — Don’t you be rough with her, Nurse!’
The patient had, in fact, pulled the nurse’s cap off and was now clamouring for a drink of water. The nurse replaced her cap, and while another nurse held a plastic beaker of water to the old woman’s lips, assured the ward, ‘They’ll settle down. The moving’s upset them.’
After a stormy night, the newcomers did seem quieter next morning, though one or two made a clamour in the ordinary course of conversation, and most, when they were helped out of bed to stand shakily upheld for a moment by the nurse, wet the floor. In the afternoon a specialist lady and an assistant came with draught-boards which she laid on the floor beside four of the new patients who were sitting up in chairs, but whose hands were crippled. They did not protest when their socks and slippers were removed and their feet manipulated and rubbed by the younger woman. Their socks and slippers were replaced and they seemed to know what to do when the draught-boards were set in front of their feet.
‘Look, did you ever,’ said Granny Valvona. ‘They’re playing draughts with their feet.’
‘I ask you,’ said Granny Roberts, ‘is it a bloody circus we are here?’
‘That’s nothing to what you’ll see in geriatrics,’ said the nurse proudly.
‘A blessing poor Granny Barnacle wasn’t spared to see it.’
Miss Taylor absorbed as much of the new experience as she could, for the sake of Alec Warner. But the death of Granny Barnacle, her own arthritic pains, and the noisy intrusion of the senile cases had confused her. She was crying towards the end of the day, and worried lest the nurse should catch her at it, and perhaps report her too sick to be wheeled down next morning to the Mass which she and Miss Valvona had requested for the soul of Granny Barnacle who had no relatives to mourn her.
Miss Taylor dropped asleep, and waking in the middle of the night because of her painful limbs, still pretended to sleep on, and went without her injection. At eleven o’clock next morning Miss Valvona and Miss Taylor were wheeled into the hospital chapel. They were accompanied by three other grannies, not Catholics, from the Maud Long Ward who had been attached to Granny Barnacle in various ways, including those of love, scorn, resentment, and pity.
During the course of the Mass an irrational idea streaked through Miss Taylor’s mind. She dismissed it and concentrated on her prayers. But this irrational idea, which related to the identity of Dame Lettie’s tormentor, was to return to her later again and again.
TEN
‘Is that Mr Godfrey Colston?’ said the man on the telephone.
‘Yes, speaking.’
‘Remember you must die,’ said the man.
