Richard Gordon - DOCTOR AT LARGE

'Have you any socks that need mending?' she asked one morning. 'If you'll bring them up I'll darn them for you. I've nothing else to do in the evenings. I never go out.'.

We were sitting alone in the Sister's private sitting-room, a small apartment fierce with yellow chintz and brassware next to the ward. Every day I was invited there for a cup of milky coffee served timidly by the junior probationer, while Nurse Plumtree took a tin of her own chocolate biscuits from the bureau, put her feet up on the rushwork stool, and lit a cigarette. 'In fact,' she went on, 'I've got an evening off tomorrow. From five o'clock. I don't know what on earth to do with it.'

'Really? Well, er-perhaps something may turn up,' I said warily. 'Who knows?'

She sipped her coffee sorrowfully.

The morning after my talk with Grimsdyke she threw into her conversation, 'I've got a half-day on Wednesday. Starting at twelve o'clock. And I'm due for a late pass till midnight. But I don't expect I shall take them. There just doesn't seem anything to do.'

I already knew this, having sneaked a glance at the nurses' off-duty book kept with the insurance certificates on her desk. I had made up my mind. Nurse Plumtree was presentable and pleasant; besides, there was not the faintest chance of being snubbed.

I coughed.

'If you're really without plans, perhaps you'd like to come to the pictures, or something?'

For an instant her eyes widened. 'I'm not sure if I can really leave the ward. Nurse Macpherson isn't very experienced.'

'Of course not.'

'As well as being a lot too familiar with the patients-'

'So I've noticed.'

'And anyway, she's far too interested in one of the students for the good of her work.'

'Really? Do try and come. I'll see you at six,' I said, rising. 'Outside the dental department.'

My romance with Nurse Plumtree caused no more surprise in the hospital than the annual blooming of the geraniums outside the Secretary's office in summer. My colleagues grinned more widely the more I asked them to stand-in for me during the evenings, and Nurse Macpherson once winked at me over a ward screen; but to most people at St Swithin's we were simply another staff nurse and houseman obeying the local laws of biology.

Like many other young couples with no money in London, we sat at the back in the Festival Hall and the Empress Hall, we dined at Lyons, and we drank in the cosy saloon bars of tucked-away pubs, of which my medical education had left me with a more precise knowledge than of human anatomy. Often Nurse Plumtree paid for herself and sometimes she paid for us both. She was an easy girl to entertain, because she was fond of long silences during which she would stare at the opposite wall as if recalling the faces of friends long dead; and her conversation, when it came, was almost wholly about the hospital. As my few former girl friends had all been nurses this failure to throw off the cap and apron did not discourage me, and I consoled myself that another companion might have talked only about ponies or Proust; but after a few weeks I found myself irresistibly wishing that she would stop telling me exactly what was happening to number twenty-two's blood chlorides, and the bright retort she had made to Nurse Macpherson when informed that the ward's allocation of liquid paraffin had been used up in a week.

There was another more disheartening impediment in my relationship with Nurse Plumtree. I confessed this late one evening to Grimsdyke, when he came into my room to scrounge cigarettes.

'How's the sex life?' he asked cheerfully. 'Feeling more contented?'

'Well-yes and no.'

'What? You mean the course of true love hasn't run smooth?'

'Too smoothly, if anything,' I told him. 'You know how it is with nurses-we go to a flick or a concert or something, then I rush her back to the hospital before her late pass expires, we have a quick neck among half the medical school outside the mortuary gate, then I push her into the Nurses' Home on the stroke of eleven. If I kept her out another minute her good name would be ruined for ever, so it seems.'

'Frustrating.'

'You don't have to read Freud and Kinsey to know it doesn't do a chap much good. But what's the alternative? Apart from holding hands in Hyde Park?'

'How about a little intramural love life?'

'In St Swithin's, where they separate the sexes like a Victorian swimming-bath?'

'There's always the fire-escape.'

'Ah, the fire-escape!' This ugly zigzag up the wall of the Residents' Quarters was a monument to the victory of the insurance company's prudence over that of the matron. By climbing the darkened floors of the empty out-patients' block at night, crossing the roof of the physiotherapy department, and dodging past the night porter's mess-room, we could smuggle a nurse into our forbidden corridors. This risky adventure was rarely suggested, for the nurse, if discovered, was regarded by the Matron to be fit for nothing more but the Chamber of Horrors.

'There's nothing to it, old lad,' Grimsdyke went on, as I looked at him dubiously. 'Wait for a dark night, lay in a bottle of courting sherry, have a decent shave, and you're all set for a cosy evening. So much warmer than Hyde Park, too.'

At our next meeting I mentioned the fire-escape to Nurse Plumtree. As I expected, she looked sad, sniffed, and said, 'Oh, Richard!'

Feeling I should provide some excuse, I went on quickly, 'But I mean, I thought we could just have a cup of coffee, and I could show you my microscope slides of gastric ulcers that I've been telling you about. I mean, it would be quite-well, you know, all right-'

'Oh, Richard! It would spoil everything.'

'What, you mean just looking at my slides? They're most interesting, and of course I have to borrow a microscope from one of the other residents, so I can't very well show them to you elsewhere. But of course, if you don't want to-'

She sighed deeply, and looked away. I felt that Grimsdyke would have managed the invitation much better! I had tempted her only with the pathological equivalent of etchings. There was another of her silences, then we talked about the best way of treating post-operative thrombosis.

Our affair jogged along for several weeks. There was no alternative, for she now simply told me when she was next off duty and assumed that I would be waiting to take her out. It was a relationship with many concrete advantages, for Nurse Plumtree was a tender-hearted girl whose motherly instincts were not wholly absorbed by her profession. From our first outing she had mended my shirts, lent me books, and provided currant cake with the morning coffee; now she bought me ties and bars of chocolate, pressed on me handfuls of vitamins from the medicine cupboard, knitted me a muffler, and made me wear braces instead of an old rugger club tie for keeping up my trousers, which she pressed proudly every Sunday with her iron in the Nurses' Home. My friends thought I had not looked so tidy or so well fed for a long, time.

Two events disturbed the placid current of this romance. The first was Nurse Macpherson's transference to night duty.

In the printed charge handed to him by the hospital Secretary on his appointment, each senior house surgeon at St Swithin's was enjoined 'to visit your wards at least once nightly before retiring, to take the report from the senior night nurse and attend to the needs of the patients, at whatever hour that might be'. This night round was the most conscientiously performed of all the house surgeons' duties, for night nurses, who have to sleep all day and work alone all night, are lonely souls who suffer from a deficiency of masculine companionship. For this reason the most untidy and unromantic houseman is confident of a welcome in the darkened ward, even if he has just been thrown out of the King George and arrives, like my predecessor, wearing the head porter's hat and riding a bicycle. Besides, all nurses are good cooks and without the ward sister counting the rations over their shoulders gladly provide peckish housemen with bacon and eggs at midnight.