Stella Duffy - Money in the Morgue

Sister Comfort held her tongue and stalked off along the yard towards the kitchen block and Matron finally turned to Rosamund.

‘How much did you win, Miss Farquharson?’

Surprised by the unexpectedly bald question, Rosamund responded immediately, ‘Oh, a hundred, Matron. A whole hundred quid. I have to give some of it over to a few people that I … I need to help out, but all the same, it’s put me in a grand mood. I am awfully sorry about being so late and getting Comfort’s nose out of joint, I don’t mean to be such a bother, really I don’t. I guess I’m just not used to such, well, boring work.’

Matron sighed, ‘Yes, I can imagine for a young woman such as yourself, saving lives and keeping a hospital going in wartime is terribly tedious. I suggest you leave your winnings here. I’ll put them in the safe and you can collect the money when your shift finishes. Minus, of course, the hours I’ll dock from your pay for your late start tonight and the several days you’ve been late over the past weeks. Is ten pounds a fair price, do you think, to keep your job?’

Rosamund’s large green eyes widened even further, was Matron really threatening to sack her if she didn’t hand over a tenner? Matron was waiting, one hand out for the money, the key to the safe in the other.

‘I, well, I—’ stuttered Rosamund.

‘It would be awfully difficult getting a job right now, don’t you think, Miss Farquharson? Let alone without a reference. Still, I’m sure there are some factory jobs, somewhere about. Or land work, I believe there are quite a few young ladies working with the shearing gangs these days, what with the shortage of manpower.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ Rosamund was flustered, her face as red as her lipstick, ‘I thought—’

‘That I was a pushover, just because I’m not vinegar-sharp like Sister Comfort? Then you have another think coming, young lady. Let’s be quite honest, shall we?’ Matron squared her shoulders and turned to face Rosamund, ‘Your behaviour has been abysmal, since the day you arrived. You’ve made a fool of yourself with Private Sanders, and don’t make that face, I could hardly have failed to notice, you have the entire team of VADs gossiping about you, and goodness knows what the soldiers in Military 1 say in private, given their words in public are bad enough. There is a man dying here tonight, alone but for a grandson who, I now discover, barely knows him and chose not to visit him until tonight, despite several requests. You have a chance to redeem yourself, take the consequences of your actions and get to work on a new start. It is the one chance I will give you.’

Matron’s voice was low and considered, but her words cut far deeper than Sister Comfort’s scolding. Rosamund tried to respond but, when she opened her mouth, she found she had no words to express her shock. Matron nodded in satisfaction.

‘Leave your winnings with me, I shall lock the money in my safe and, when your shift is finished in the morning, you may collect the balance of ninety pounds.’

Matron finished her words, emphasising the word ‘ninety’ to assure Rosamund that she meant to follow through with her threat.

Rosamund clicked open her purse, dumped the bundle of notes on Matron’s desk and rushed from the office. Had she been in any state to slam the door behind her, she would have done, instead the warm wind did the job for her, slamming the door and rattling the whole office with its force.

Matron sat down and looked at the notes, at the key in her hand, and the neatly gathered pile of unpaid demands littering her desk. The small office shuddered as another gust of wind battered the thin weatherboard walls, a shock of lightning briefly lit the sky beyond the bare window, a stronger crack of thunder hard on its heels, and finally the downpour began. Matron leaned back in her worn leather chair and nodded. At least the torrent would keep anyone else from her door for the moment.

The occupant of the private room at the front of Military 1 was also having a difficult evening. He had been trying for some time to write a letter, a letter that was overdue and yet, for the life of him, he couldn’t seem to put pen to paper this evening. Nor had he managed to do so on any of the three evenings preceding. The rain now drumming a fierce tattoo on the corrugated iron roof above, syncopated with that which fell on the curved frame of the porch beyond, might have had something to do with it, but he feared his inability to express himself on paper was the symptom of a deeper malaise. It was just possible that he was homesick.

‘My dearest Troy’, he began again.

He stopped, looked at the page, crossed out the three words and took a clean sheet of paper.

‘Darling Troy’.

Shaking his head, he took up a third sheet of paper and tried once more.

‘My Troy’.

Again he faltered. ‘You utter dolt, Alleyn,’ he whispered to himself, conscious of the ward full of men mere feet away beyond the flimsy partition walls that formed the small private room he had been assigned as the base for this operation.

‘Troy is far from being a fool,’ he went on, ‘she knows very well there is a great deal to do with your work that you cannot say to her and even more that you struggle to say in person, let alone on paper. And God knows when this letter will get to her. Just write the words, you blasted idiot.’

He could not. Whether it was the incessant rain drowning all possibility of contemplation, or the sense of several dozen men beyond the thin walls, few of them sleeping, all with their own worries, all missing their own loved ones, Alleyn knew himself defeated.

He stepped away from the small table that served as a desk, stretching as he did so. He reached for his pipe and lit it, holding the match for a moment in his long, thin fingers. By the light of the match, and that thrown from the dimmed desk lamp, he saw himself reflected in the side window. A tall man stared back, a raised eyebrow rapidly followed by a frown. He rubbed his nose and sighed, cracking the window open a little further to shift the reflection and let in the scent of the drenched roses that were all about the hospital. The roses, at least, would be glad of the rain. Alleyn was glad of it himself, he’d been sleeping badly in the fierce heat of the past week, and it hadn’t helped that the secrecy of his task here at Mount Seager meant he had been cooped up in this private room almost the whole time since he had arrived under cover of darkness a week earlier, awaiting word from his superiors. The reason for his arrival at Mount Seager was known only to Alleyn himself, the Chair of the Hospital Board, an old and trusted friend of the most senior man in the New Zealand police force, and a single contact at the hospital. Matron appeared to have bought the story that Alleyn was the Chair’s English cousin, a writer collecting traditional tales in the Antipodes, cut off from home by the war and struck down by the kind of nervous distress known only to the most modern of artists and then only those with a private income. The tale was given out that he needed rest and quiet, and so rest and quiet—or as much as the men of Military 1 would allow—had been prescribed. He had been in place for the past week, listening through the partition walls, noting movement beyond this side window and the smaller one that opened onto the porch with a good view of the yard beyond, and studying the notes and observations passed on by his contact. As yet, there had been no development worth reporting to his superiors and nothing at all to write to Troy.

Alleyn looked at the travel alarm clock on his table, it was almost a quarter past ten. The grumbling and subdued guffaws of the men next door would abate soon. He sat down at the table, took up a clean sheet of paper and tried again.