Colin Dexter - The Wench Is Dead

'Bloody lucky! Even I was thinking about cutting half his innards away!'

'He must be a fundamentally strong sort of man,' admitted Sister, composure now fully recovered.

'I suppose so,' conceded the Consultant, 'apart from his stomach, his lungs, his kidneys, his liver – especially his liver. He might last till he's sixty if he does what we tell him – which I doubt.'

'Keep him another few days, you think?'

'No!' decided the Consultant, after a pause. 'No! Send him home! His wife'll probably do just as good a job as we can. Same medication – out-patients' in two weeks – to see me. OK?'

Eileen Stanton was about to correct the Consultant on his factual error when a nurse burst into the office. 'I'm sorry, Sister – but there's a cardiac arrest, I think – in one of the Amenity Beds.'

'Did he die?' asked Morse.

Eileen, who had come to sit on his bed, nodded sadly. It was mid-afternoon.

'How old was he?'

'Don't know exactly. Few years younger than you, I should think.' Her face was glum. 'Perhaps if…’

'You look as you could do with a bit of tender loving care yourself,' said Morse, reading her thoughts.

'Yes!' She looked at him and smiled, determined to snap out of her mopishness. 'And you, my good sir, are not going to get very much more of our wonderful loving care – after today. We're kicking you out tomorrow – had quite enough of you!'

‘I’m going out, you mean?' Morse wasn't sure if it was good news or bad news; but she told him.

'Good news, isn't it?'

‘I shall miss you.'

'Yes, I shall… ' But Morse could see the tears welling up in her eyes.

'Why don't you tell me what's wrong?' He spoke the words softly; and she told him. Told him about her wretched week; and how kind the hospital had been in letting her switch her normal nights; and how kind, especially, Sister had been… But the big tears were rolling down her cheeks and she turned away and held one hand to her face, searching with the other for her handkerchief. Morse put his own grubby handkerchief gently into her hand, and for a moment the two sat together in silence.

‘I’ll tell you one thing,' said Morse at last. 'It must be pretty flattering to have a couple of fellows fighting over you.'

'No! No, it isn't!' The tears were forming again in the large, sad eyes.

'No! You're right. But listen! It won't do you any good at all – in fact' (Morse whispered) 'it'll make you feel far worse. But if I'd been at that party of yours -when they were fighting over you – I'd have taken on the pair of 'em! You'd have had three men squabbling over you – not just two.'

She smiled through her tears, and wiped her wet cheeks, already feeling much better. 'They're big men, both of them. One of them takes lessons in some of those Martial Arts.'

'All right – Id've lost! Still have fought for you, though, wouldn't I? Remember the words of the poet? "Better to have fought and lost than… something… something… " ' (Morse himself had apparently forgotten the words of the poet.)

She brought her face to within a few inches of his, and looked straight into his eyes: 'I wouldn't have minded a little bit if you had lost, providing you'd let me look after you.'

'You have been looking after me,' said Morse, 'and thank you!'

Getting to her feet, she said no more. And Morse, with a little wistfulness, watched her as she walked away. Perhaps he should have told her that she'd meant 'provided', not 'providing'? No! Such things, Morse knew, were no great worry to the majority of his fellow men and women.

But they were to him.

There is a sadness which invariably and mysteriously accompanies the conclusion of any journey, and the end of any sojourn. Whether or not such sadness is a presage of the last journey we all must take; whether or not it is, more simply, a series of last, protracted goodbyes – it is not of any import here to speculate. But for Morse, the news that he was forthwith to be discharged from the JR2 was simultaneously wonderful and woeful. Music awaited him? Indeed! Soon he would be luxuriating again in Wotan's Farewell from the last act of Die Walkure; and turning up Pavarotti fff from one of the Puccini’s – certainly in mid-morning, when his immediate neighbours were always out and about on their good works for Oxfam. Books, too. He trusted that the Neighbourhood Watch had done its duty in North Oxford, and that his first edition of A Shropshire Lad (1896) was still in its place on his shelves, that slim, white volume that stood proudly amongst its fellows, carrying no extra insurance-cover, like a Royal Prince without a personal bodyguard. Yes, it would be good to get home again: to please himself about what he listened to, or read, or ate… or drank. Well, within reason. Yet, quite certainly, he would miss the hospital! Miss the nurses, miss the fellow-patients, miss the routine, miss the visitors miss so much about the institution which, with its few faults and its many virtues, had admitted him in his sickness and was now discharging him in a comparative health.

But the departure from Ward 7C was not, for Morse, to be a memorable experience. When the message came – hardly a bugle-call! – to join a group of people who were to be ambulanced up to North Oxford, he had little opportunity of saying farewell to anyone. One of his ward-mates ('Waggie') was performing his first post-operatively independent ablutions in the wash-room; another was very fast asleep; one had just been taken to the X-ray Department; the Ethiopian torch-bearer was sitting in his bed, with Do-Not-Disturb written all over him, reading The Blue Ticket (!); and the last was (and had been for hours) closeted behind his curtains, clearly destined little longer for this earthly life; perhaps, indeed, having already said his own farewells to everybody. As for the nurses, most were bustling purposively about their duties (one or two new faces, anyway), and Morse realized that he was just another patient, and one no longer requiring that special care of just one week ago. Eileen he had not expected to see again, now back to her normal Nights, as she'd told him. Nor was Sister herself anywhere to be seen as he was wheeled out of the ward by a cheerful young porter with a crew-cut and ear-rings. The Fair Fiona, though, he did see – sitting patiently in the next bay beside an ancient citizen, holding a sputum-pot in front of his dribbling lips. With her free hand she waved, and mouthed a 'Good luck!'. But Morse was no lip-reader and, uncomprehending, he was pushed on through the exit corridor where he and his attendant waited for the service-lift to arrive at Level 7.

Although Mrs Green had kept Morse's partial central-heating partially on, the flat seemed cold and unwelcoming. It would have been good for anyone to be there to welcome him: certainly (and especially) Christine – or Eileen, or Fiona; even, come to think of it, the dreaded Dragon of the Loch herself. But there was no one. Lewis had not been in to clear up the stuff stuck through the letter-box, and Morse picked up two white-enveloped Christmas cards (one from his insurance company, with the facsimiled signature of the managing director); and his two Sunday newspapers. Such newspapers, although there was an occasional permutation of titles, invariably reflected the conflict in Morse's mind between the Cultured and the Coarse – the choice between the front page of the present one, Synod in Dispute over Disestablishment, and Sex Slave's Six-Week Ordeal in Silk-lined Coffin of the other. If Morse chose the latter first (as, in fact, he did) at least he had the excuse that it was undoubtedly the finer headline. And this Sunday, as usual, he first flicked through the pages of full-breasted photographs and features on Hollywood intrigues and Soap infidelities. Then, he made himself a cup of instant coffee (which he much preferred to 'the real thing') before settling down to read about the most recent fluctuations on the world's stock-markets, and the bleak prospects for the diseased and starving millions of the world's unhappy continents.