Dorothy Cannell - The Importance of Being Ernestine

I started to say that I was not in any line of business other than being a wife, mother and part-time interior designer, but a glance at her set profile let me know I would be wasting my breath. So I stuck to the issue at hand.

“How critical is Lady Krumley’s condition?”

“Oh, you know them nurses, they can spend ten minutes putting the wind up you just saying ‘the patient is doing as well as can be expected.’” Mrs. Malloy took a compact out of her handbag and waved it at me before powder puffing her nose with enough abandon to cause me to gasp and choke.

“Could you put that thing away,” I said testily. “It has to be every bit as hazardous as secondhand smoke.”

“Well, you’re a fine one to talk! But you know what they say about them holier than thou reformed types.”

I ignored this thrust. “Did the nurse who phoned say if her ladyship was in ICU?”

“What?

“The Intensive Care Unit.”

“No, she didn’t, and watch where you’re driving. You almost went up the back of that van and now me lipstick’s all smeared.” Mrs. Malloy eyed herself in the compact mirror before dropping it back with an irritated plop into her handbag. “And me wanting to look my best for all them handsome young doctors that’s bound to be lining the corridors. Some of the happiest days of me life was watching Emergency Ward 10 on the telly and now that I’m going to live it you have to go and spoil things.”

“That’s not a van?”

“What isn’t?” Mrs. Malloy was dabbing at her purple lips with both pinkies.

“The one you just said I almost hit.” I rounded a corner and drove under a short brick tunnel and emerged into a parking lot. “It’s an ambulance. And this is the Cottage Hospital.”

“Well, I could have told you that! There’s the door to outpatients. Don’t see as we can go too far wrong if we go in that way.”

It sounded sensible. But after fifteen minutes of wandering green hallways that hadn’t been updated since the 1940s and not having spotted one handsome young man in a white coat with a stethoscope dangling around his neck, the fact that we were hopelessly lost became my fault.

“Thanks a lot, Mrs. H.! Me feet are killing me. In the time we’ve been here I could have had me insides taken out and put back in again. That’s five times, as I’ve counted, we’ve been around this way. Even them pictures on the wall are beginning to look at us funny.”

She had a point. The expressions on the faces of the illustrious personages who had served this hospital over the past hundred years appeared to have grown increasingly stern. The directions given to us at the information desk had seemed straightforward at the time. We had taken the lift to the second floor as instructed and turned left at the maternity unit. After that it was pretty much all a blur. But it wasn’t my fault that Mrs. M. was wearing her customary four-inch heels. Neither was I to blame because her miniskirted powder pink raincoat now reeked of disinfectant, or so she claimed. I was about to explain that I wasn’t happy at the prospect of wandering these labyrinths for all eternity, when a man in hospital attire came up behind us wheeling a gurney. Mrs. Malloy immediately brightened. The man wasn’t bad looking and the gurney was unoccupied. Stepping away from the wall she stretched her butterfly lips into her most engaging smile and hooked up a thumb. Hadn’t her mother ever told her she was liable to end up in the morgue if she hitchhiked lifts from strange men in hospital corridors?

Luckily his mother must have warned him about the sort of women he was liable to encounter in the course of a day’s work. Or maybe he had a bad back and couldn’t risk hoisting Mrs. Malloy onto the gurney and making off with her into the sluice room. (From what she had told me sluice rooms had figured prominently in Emergency Ward 10. ) At any rate he chuckled in appreciation of what he obviously took to be her little joke and escorted us a short distance to where personnel were occupied behind a desk area talking into telephones, bustling about with notepads or issuing instructions in a kind of verbal shorthand. Feeling like a lion singling out one deer from the herd to pounce upon I caught the eye of a woman in a floral cotton jacket that seemed to indicate she might be a nurse or possibly a member of the housekeeping staff. She came toward me, while Mrs. M. was still muttering in my ear.

“It’s not like I was ready to go off with a perfect stranger. His name was Joe; it was right there on his jacket pocket. And whatever you’re thinking I know he was dying for a moment alone with me so he could tell me all about his bunions. It was there in his eyes-the deep quiet knowledge of a man who has just met the woman of his dreams. But it was all ruined because you had to insist on tagging along. The very least you could have done was stay behind and pretend you was looking out the windows.”

Clearly in addition to her enthusiasm for Emergency Ward 10, Mrs. Malloy had been reading too many of those nurse doctor books. I little doubted that in next to no time Joe would be transformed into a well-built, well-heeled senior consultant-probably a titled one at that-and instead of wanting to talk about his bunions he would be casually mentioning his three ancestral homes and his silver gray Rolls Royce. I was wondering what sort of car Lady Krumley had been driving, while explaining to the woman in the floral jacket that we had received a phone message requesting we visit her ladyship.

“Let me see what I can find out for you, Mrs. Haskell.” She gave me a brisk smile before going into a huddle with the other assorted jackets and coats. After what seemed ages she came around the counter to escort me and Mrs. Malloy the length of the corridor. “You’re to be allowed ten minutes. The doctors are due back to examine her ladyship shortly. I’m sure I don’t need to caution you that our object is to keep her calm, so please restrict the conversation to general chitchat-nothing to get her the least bit worked up.” A beep sounded and with an exclamation of apology that she was needed elsewhere, the woman pointed a finger to our left and made off at a fast walk.

“Go on.” Mrs. Malloy nudged me. “I’m right behind you.”

“Okay.” I pushed open the closest door and tiptoed into a small square room with a generic landscape print on the wall. Otherwise it was all beige and gray. The figure in the hospital bed did not move. The folded hands appeared glued to the sheet. An oxygen mask covered a good part of her face, and everywhere there were tubes, hooked up to machines that flashed and beeped as if carrying on personal conversations.

“Oh, the poor duck!” Mrs. M. inched her nose over my shoulder. “Why, it don’t even look like her.”

“That’s because it isn’t.”

“What?”

“Isn’t Lady Krumley. We’re in the wrong room.”

“Now you tell me!”

We were backing out, hopefully before the machines set off the alarm and several very large men arrived to cart us away in straitjackets, when we collided with someone. Turning, we faced a man of medium height and middle years, with a receding hairline and eyes set rather too close together above a long thin nose.

“So sorry,” I said, “we’re looking for Lady Krumley’s room.” My nervousness was heightened by the fact that he was staring at us as if we were a pair of German shepherds, readying to leap at his throat if he tried to edge past us. But perhaps he was a man who always looked frightened. His voice when he spoke sounded as though it might be habitually timid.

“Pardon me for asking, Are you the social workers?”

“What’s that to you?” Mrs. Malloy barked back at him.