Iris Murdoch - Under the Net

I was what was termed an orderly. My hours were eight to six, with three-quarters of an hour for lunch, and one day off a week. I was attached to a ward which specialized in head injuries and was called Corelli' in accordance with the Hospital custom of calling its wards by the names of wealthy benefactors: Mr Corelli having been a soap manufacturer from Sicily whose son once received a fractured skull through driving his Lancia when under the influence of drink in the Uxbridge Road. His child restored, the elder Corelli had acted with suitable generosity, and hence the name of the ward in which I had now been working for four days.

My tasks were simple. When I arrived at eight a.m. I took a mop and bucket and cleaned three corridors and two flights of stairs. These surfaces were easy to clean, and I achieved spectacular alterations of colour with the help of a little soap. After this, I washed up the crockery of the patients' breakfast which was stacked up waiting for me by now in the ward kitchen. Corelli occupied three corridors, one on the ground floor called Corelli I, and two on the first floor called Corelli II and III. The ward kitchen was in Corelli III, and it was here that my activity centred, and in a cubby hole next to the kitchen that I left my coat, and retired to sit and read the newspapers should there ever be a spare moment. After the washing up I went and fetched the cans of milk from the main kitchen, which was known as the Transept Kitchen, and took them back to Corelli III on a trolley which I brought up on a special service-lift. I enjoyed this bit very much. To reach the Transept Kitchen I had to walk quite a long way through the corridors of other wards with strange names; and as I walked quickly along, passing unfamiliar people in white coats, they on their tasks and I on mine, I felt like a man entrusted with an important mission. When I got back to Corelli I was allowed to perform an operation of almost clinical significance, that is to warm the milk on the big electric stove and pour it into mugs which the nurses took to those of the patients who were allowed to have it. After that I cut bread and butter and then washed up the mugs and saucepans and cleaned the kitchen.

I was still more than a little nervous of my colleagues and superiors and very anxious to please. With the nurses, who were mainly young Irish girls without a thought in their heads, unless obsession with matrimony may be called a thought, I immediately got on very well. They were calling me 'Jakie' on the second day, and treating me with an affectionate teasing tyranny. I noticed with interest that none of them took me seriously as a male. I exuded an aroma which, although we got on so splendidly, in some way kept them off; perhaps some obscure instinct warned them that I was an intellectual. With the Ward Matron I got on well too, though in a different way. The Ward Matron was so august a person, so elderly and austere and with such a high notion of her own dignity, that the possibility of certain frictions was removed simply by the social distance which lay between us. My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person. The only question which I raised was whether or not I did my work well and kept out of the way; and as I did these things she showed her approval by ignoring me, except that on the first occasion on each day when we passed each other in the corridor she would turn her head very slightly with a faint intensification of expression which if produced almost indefinitely might have become a smile.

Beyond the Ward Matron into the stratosphere of the Hospital hierarchy my vision did not extend. It was with the intermediate portions of my small society that my relations were most uneasy. Under the Matron were three Sisters, one for each of the Corellis, and it was from these beings that I directly received most of my orders. The lives of these women, already far advanced, were made a misery, on the one hand by the Matron, who treated them with unremitting despotism, and on the other by the nurses who repaid them with continual veiled mockery for the pains which the Sisters, in order to recoup their own dignity, felt bound to inflict upon those beneath them. The Sisters found me hard to understand. They suspected me of wanting to score off them, not only because of my friendly relations with their enemies the nurses, but because, more than anyone else with whom I had contact in the Hospital, they divined something of my real nature. I presented them with a problem that made them nervous; and for them alone of all the women with whom I had to do in that place, I indubitably existed as a man. An electrical current passed between us, they continually avoided my eye, and when they gave me orders, their high-pitched voices went a semitone higher.

I was particularly fond of the Sister of Corelli III, which was the one with whom I had most to do, who was called Sister Piddingham and known to the nurses as The Pid. The Pid must have been about fifty, or perhaps more, and many years might have passed since she had started dyeing her long grey hair black. Her voice and eyes, made sharp by verbal warfare and professional habits of critical scrutiny, followed me continually as I worked in the kitchen. Her very anxiety to criticize me made a bond between us; I should have liked to have done something special and unexpected to please her, such as bringing her flowers, but I knew that she took me seriously enough to be capable of construing this as an act of condescension and hating me for it. For the sad mystery of her mode of existence I felt a respect which almost amounted to tenor. The only other Hospital people of whom I saw anything were a man called Stitch, who was a sort of resident head-porter, who was very stupid and hated me heartily, and one or two ward maids who were more or less semi-deficient.

Every day at lunch time I would buy sandwiches at the Transept Canteen and then go and fetch Mars from Dave's flat: sometimes then I would catch a glimpse of Dave, from whose face the astonishment that had appeared there when I had first told him of my job had not yet completely faded; and I would tell myself that the whole thing would have been well worth it even if it were only for the sake of giving Dave such a jolt. Then I would return with Mars to sit in the garden outside Corelli I and eat my sandwiches. The garden here consisted of a long smooth lawn with two rows of cherry trees planted in the grass. I knew they were cherry trees because the nurses were always exclaiming about what the garden looked like in the spring. I would sit under one of the trees, while Mars bounded about close by, giving his attention now to one tree and now to another, and the young nurses of Corelli would come and gather round me like nymphs and laugh at me and say that I looked like a wise man sitting cross-legged under my tree, and admire Mars and make much of him, and defend me against Stitch, who would have liked to have forbidden me to have Mars in the garden at all. I enjoyed these lunch times.

It was in the afternoon that I managed at last to see something of the patients. But this wasn't until the later afternoon. I looked forward to this all day. In my apprehension of it, the Hospital declined through a scale of decreasing degrees of reality in proportion to the distance away from the patients. They were the centre to which all else was peripheral. The patients in Corelli were all men, and all in a variety of conditions resulting from blows on the head. Some of them had concussion with or without fractured skulls and others had more mysterious capital ailments. They lay there with their turbans of white bandages and their eyes narrowed with headache, and watched me as I mopped the floor; and I felt for them a mixture of pity and awe, such as an Indian might feel for a sacred animal. I should have liked to have talked to them, and once or twice I did begin a conversation, but on each occasion one of the Sisters came and stopped it. It was felt to be improper for orderlies to address patients.