A Star Looks Down

‘You are a little idiot,’ he began, ‘talking like that to one of the most distinguished surgeons in Europe.’

Beth was at the stove, dishing up. ‘Oh? Does he live on a pedestal or something? He seemed quite human to me.’

‘Of course he’s human,’ her brother spoke testily, ‘but he’s…he should be respected…’

‘But I was quite polite.’

He agreed reluctantly and went on: ‘Yes, but do you know what he said after you’d gone? He wanted to know where you worked and then he said that you didn’t appear to him to be quite like the other nurses he had met.’

Beth bore their plates to the table. ‘Ah, he noticed how plain I am.’

‘Well, I daresay,’ William agreed with brutal candour, ‘but he could have meant that you didn’t treat him with enough respect.’

‘Pooh,’ said Beth with scorn, ‘and you were chatty enough, the pair of you.’

William was attacking his supper in the manner of a starving man. ‘I happened to meet him,’ he said with a full mouth and great dignity, ‘and he asked me to take a message about the times of his lectures.’

Beth gave him a second helping. ‘I wonder where he lives?’ she wanted to know.

‘Haven’t a clue. What’s for pudding?’

After supper he left her to the washing up and went to his room to study, and when she expressed surprise at his sudden enthusiasm for work, he told her rather sheepishly that old van Zeust was a good enough fellow and knew how to give a lecture. ‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘I happen to be interested in his particular line of work.’ He gave her a lofty look as he left the room, although he was back again within five minutes to ask if she could lend him a fiver until the end of the month.

She went and fetched the money at once, for she was a good sister to him and moreover quite understood that young men needed money for beer and taking girls out. The fiver was part of a nest egg she had been saving towards some new clothes, and she very much doubted if she would get it back again. But William was a dear; he had been kind to her when they had left Chifney and he paid his half of the rent, even if he did borrow it back again within a week or so. In a year or two’s time, when he had finished his post-graduate work and got himself a really good job, he would probably marry, and then she would have to find a smaller flat and live in it by herself—unless she got married too, and that didn’t seem very likely; not now. If she had stayed at home and her father had been alive, she would have been Miss Partridge of Chifney House, and perhaps one of the young men living in the district, sons of small landowners, would have married her, for there she had been the daughter of the house and what she lacked in looks she had made up for with charm, so that she had had a great many friends. But here in London, no one cared who she was; it had taken her a little while to get used to the indifference of Londoners to each other, and indeed, she had discovered during the years that they had lived there that life in a city wasn’t at all the same thing as life at Chifney—there, if you were ill, the whole village knew, willing helpers rallied round to feed the cat, mow the grass, leave delicious baked custards on the doorstep, fetch the children from school, and when her father had been alive he could always be depended upon to help out if funds were low. She very much doubted if her stepbrother did that.

The Dutch professor was in the theatre the next morning. The first case was a kidney transplant, to be done by Professor MacDonald, one of the leading men in that line of surgery. It was soon apparent that he and the Dutchman were old friends; Beth could hear their voices in the surgeons’ changing room, the Scotsman’s deliberate and a little gruff, his companion’s deep and slow. They came out together presently and went into theatre, and when Beth went in with the patient they were scrubbed, standing facing each other across the operating table. The surgical registrar was scrubbed too and so were two house surgeons; the place teemed with white and green-clad figures. Beth, thinking of the long hours ahead, was glad that she didn’t have to stay in theatre; she would be kept busy with patients from the other theatres and it would be later—much later—when she would come back to collect her patient once more. She handed him over now to the theatre staff and slipped away quickly to fetch the next case for Theatre Two.

It was hours later when she went to collect the kidney transplant. She was off duty at four-thirty again, but she saw that she could forget that; the man wasn’t well and needed constant attention from both herself and Harriet King; besides that, his drain blocked and she had to buzz for the registrar, and while they were getting it to work again the patient stopped breathing, so that she had to leave the drain to him and begin resuscitation while someone went hot-foot for Professor MacDonald.

He came immediately, straight from the changing room bringing Professor van Zeust with him, still in their theatre trousers and vests, their caps on their heads. They might have looked faintly absurd if it hadn’t been for their air of quiet authority.

It was a good deal later by the time the man was fit to move down to the Intensive Care Unit, and there was a great mass of clearing up to do after that. It was much later still when Beth crossed the courtyard on the way to fetch her bicycle and saw Professor van Zeust again. He looked quite different now; immaculate in a conventional, beautifully tailored suit. Out of the tail of her eye she saw him get into a massive Citroën CS, and decided that its size suited his vast proportions very nicely. He had gone by the time she had got her bike out and got back to the courtyard.

She didn’t see him for several days after that; indeed, beyond an annoying persistence her mind had developed in thinking of him, he should have been, as it were, a closed book. It was William who made it difficult for her to make an end of him; he talked about the Dutchman incessantly, not only when he got home in the evenings when he was free to do so, but during their breakfasts together; a meal usually eaten at speed and with no more conversation than was absolutely necessary. The professor was, according to her brother, not at all a bad fellow—knew his stuff but didn’t have a big head about it, and what was more, he had been a first-class rugger player.

‘Doesn’t he play any more?’ asked Beth, swallowing bread and butter as fast as she could.

William gave her a withering look. ‘Good lord, he’s getting on for forty—at least, he’s thirty-six, and that’s pretty old.’

She supposed it was; in twelve years’ time she would be that age herself, although forty in a man didn’t sound old at all, whereas in a woman… She wondered with vague worry where she would be when she was forty. In all probability not married, for her looks were hardly likely to improve with age.

It was the following day after this not very satisfying conversation that the theatre was alerted for an emergency. They had had a busy morning and a break for dinner would be nice, so that there was an involuntary sigh when the Theatre Super, Miss Toms, put her head round the door with the news. ‘Theatre One,’ she said crisply. ‘Miss Partridge, take one of the porters and go down to Private Wing—the patient is to come up at once. Acute appendix.’

Beth, half way out of her theatre dress, put it back on again. Miss Toms, fortyish, elegant and always polite, was obeyed by everyone, and that included the housemen, even at times the consultants, although they were probably unaware of it. She had a habit of addressing everyone by their correct names, too, which somehow made the theatre into a more human place to work in. She smiled at Beth now. ‘You shall be relieved, as soon as possible,’ she promised, ‘but this is rather a special patient—Mevrouw Thorbecke, Professor van Zeust’s sister. I imagine he will be coming into theatre. Professor MacDonald will be operating.’

Beth nodded and Miss Toms sailed away to scrub up; she always scrubbed for staff or staff’s family, and although the professor wasn’t quite staff, his sister would be accorded the same treatment.

The patient was a pretty woman even though she was a sickly pale green and her fair hair was damp with sweat. She was game too, for she managed a smile as they got her on to the trolley, she even managed a murmured hullo and muttered in English: ‘I didn’t believe it but they are violet.’ The remark mystified Beth, but there was so much to do just then that she forgot it immediately.

Miss Toms was right; Professor Van Zeust was in the anaesthetic room when they reached it, gowned and masked and talking to Professor MacDonald and Doctor Moore, the senior anaesthetist, but he didn’t stay long, only to say something in a cheerful voice and in his own language to his sister. He didn’t look at Beth at all.

It was a nasty appendix, on the point of perforation. The two men grunted with satisfaction when the offending thing had been removed and Professor MacDonald began to close the small wound. ‘Who is looking after the brats?’ he asked his companion.

The Dutchman snipped a suture thread. ‘No time to make any arrangements—not yet. I’ll have to get hold of someone, I suppose; Martina won’t feel like coping with them for a few weeks. They’re a match for anyone in the best of health, let alone for anyone a little under the weather.’

‘When’s Dirk due back?’

‘Another six weeks.’ He tossed the stitch scissors on to the Mayo’s table and stood back a little. He smiled over his mask at Miss Toms and then said, ‘Thanks, George, I’ll hang around if I may.’

The two men went out together and Beth came from the corner where she had been waiting to take over the care of the patient. It was quiet in the Recovery Room; there were no other patients there, most of the staff were still at their dinner and Miss Toms, having performed her duties with the ease and perfection expected of her, had disappeared too. A theatre staff nurse and a student were getting the theatre ready once more for the afternoon list, in ten minutes or so the rest of them would be streaming back and the skeleton staff which had remained behind would be free to go to their dinners. But for the moment Beth was occupied with her patient; there was little enough to do, as she would be round in a few minutes—indeed, as Beth inspected the quiet face on the trolley, she could see a faint tremor of the eyelids, so that she began the usual routine of hand patting and ‘Wake up, Mevrouw Thorbecke, it’s all over, everything’s fine.’

She had to do this several times before her patient responded with a languid lifting of her eyelids and a mumbled word or two which made no sense at all.

Beth made her observations and charted them and looked at her carefully; she was quite fit to go back to the ward, but no patient might be sent back from the Recovery Room until they opened their eyes properly, told the nurse their name and could state if they were in pain or not.

‘Are you in pain?’ asked Beth in her nice quiet voice.

Mevrouw Thorbecke nodded, her eyes shut.

‘I’ll give you something for it. Will you tell me your name?’

‘You know who I am—I wish to sleep.’ Her voice was a mumble and a frown came and went. ‘I have a pain.’

‘OK,’ said Beth, talking to herself, ‘you shall have something now, though you’re not really supposed to have it until you’re quite round. Hang on a sec…’

Mevrouw Thorbecke mumbled crossly in her own language as Beth checked her pulse. The smallest of sounds behind her made her look over her shoulder. Professor van Zeust was standing quite close, leaning against one of the trolleys and her eyes brightened at the sight of him. ‘Oh, what luck that you should turn up just when I could do with you,’ she exclaimed sunnily, and he, who had been there all the time, smiled a little.

‘You need help?’ he inquired mildly.

‘Well, Mevrouw Thorbecke is almost round and we’re not supposed to give a post-op. until the patient is quite conscious, but now you’re here, perhaps you’d give me the all clear to give her some Pethedine before she goes downstairs. She’s quite OK, but not quite with us yet.’

The professor’s mouth twitched just a little. ‘I’ll take the responsibility, Staff Nurse—ram home whatever you’ve got there and get her down to the ward, will you? Doctor Moore asked me to look in; he was called away to some emergency.’

He walked unhurriedly over to the trolley and took his sister’s pulse and when she opened an unwilling eye said something to her in a soft voice. ‘She’s fine,’ he declared, and went away so quietly that Beth didn’t realize that he had gone.

She delivered her patient, drowsy now, to the Ward Sister on the Private Wing and sped back to the Recovery Room. Sister Collins and Harriet would be back in a matter of minutes; she started to clear up with Mrs Wise, the orderly, to help her and they were just finished when the other two returned.

The afternoon went quickly after that, but then it nearly always did, there was always so much to do. The list was a long one and although Beth was due off at half past seven, it was considerably later than that when at last she left the theatre.

It had been William’s half day and she was surprised and touched to find that he had laid the table and made a few rather inadequate preparations for supper. He followed her into the kitchen while she cooked it, something he seldom did, so that she asked: ‘Aren’t you going out? You usually do on your half day—did Wendy stand you up?’

Wendy was the current young lady of his fancy; she was a physiotherapist whom no one liked much because she gave herself airs, but Beth had suffered an unending catalogue of her perfections with sisterly patience, knowing that within a week or two her brother’s eye would have been caught by some other girl. They were all alike, the young doctors and students, and no one took them seriously, although a few fell permanently in love and got engaged or even married. But William would be too busy for the next year or so to think about marrying; he had only just got started on his career and at the end of his six months with Professor MacDonald’s firm he would be joining the medical side if they would have him, and after that it would be a year—two years, at least, before he could apply for a post as registrar. She dished up their meal and carried it through to the sitting-room while he explained that Wendy hadn’t stood him up; he had decided to stay home because he wanted to talk to her.

‘Me?’ exclaimed Beth, much astonished at this brotherly attention. ‘Whatever for? I haven’t any money till payday…’

William frowned. ‘It’s not that,’ he said impatiently. ‘You’ve got a week’s holiday starting on Sunday, haven’t you, Beth?’ He sounded uneasy all at once.

She began her supper and then paused to pour their coffee. ‘Yes—fancy you remembering that. But it’s only Tuesday you know, and I’m not going anywhere. Do you want the flat to yourself or something?’