The Price of a Nurse

Elspeth

On the twenty-fourth of December, Aldenmoor celebrates.

I had not expected it. I had expected the usual white silence, the pills at six and ten, the long corridor with its smell of floor wax and radiator dust. Instead, when I wake, there is a wreath on the Lantern Wing door. Real holly, red ribbon, a sprig of cedar. Someone has put a paper star in the window of the day room and a cardboard Santa on the nurses' station, and from somewhere below me a radio is playing a choir, thin and tinny, singing about a silent night.

Nobody has told the patients it is a celebration. They know anyway. They sit in the day room in their gray cardigans, forty of them, in rows, and stare at the paper star as if it might do something.

Mr. Finch is humming.

I stand in the doorway with my tray and listen. Five. Oh. Three. One. He has the tune of "Good King Wenceslas," and under it, like a bass line, the old account, the nine-two-six-one, going round and round.

"He's been at it since six," says a voice at my elbow.

It is Teague, the night orderly, who ought to be asleep. He is a small bald man with a wet red mouth and a habit of standing too close. He smells of cigarettes and peppermint. I do not like him. He has never once looked me in the eye.

"It's the holiday," he says. "Upsets the routine."

"Yes."

"You'll be wanting your breakfast, Miss Dahlia."

"Yes, thank you."

I give him the smile I have rehearsed. Vacant, sweet, a little grateful. He stares at it for a moment with his small damp eyes. Then he moves away.

I count his footsteps down the corridor. Eleven. A door.

He is on the night rota, I think. Why is he up at seven?

…

Bridget finds me in the linen room at ten.

She has been crying. She has been laughing, too; I can tell by the state of her face, which has the swollen, shining look of a woman who has done both at once. She shuts the door and leans on it and puts both hands over her mouth.

"What?"

"He's out," she says.

"Who?"

"Daniel." She takes her hands down. "Elspeth, he's out. Dr. Kestrel did it this morning. He sent Marcus, the driver, with the long car and a letter on the letterhead. Hollowbrook gave him up without a word. He's at St. Anselm's. It's a clinic in Beacon, private, with a garden. They've given him a room with a window." She makes a sound that is half a sob. "I spoke to him. On the telephone. He said, Mum, they let me have a pudding."

I put my arms round her.

I do not decide to. It is a thing the body does. She is small and rigid and smells of starch and carbolic, and she holds on to me the way a child holds on, with her whole weight, and I stand in the dark with the sheets around me and I feel her shake.

"Eleven years," she says into my shoulder. "Eleven years I've paid for that bed."

"I know."

"And he did it in an hour. With a pen."

"I know."

"What kind of man does that?"

"A man who's decided."

She pulls back. Her eyes are very bright. She wipes her cheeks with the heel of her hand, and then, with an effort I can see, pulls her face back into its professional lines.

"I'll not be much good tonight," she says. "I've promised to ring him at six. And again at nine. I'll sit with the telephone."

"Sit with the telephone."

"You'll not mind?"

"I'll mind if you don't."

She laughs. It is the first real laugh I have heard from her. Then she reaches into her pocket and brings out something wrapped in tissue paper, and presses it into my hand.

"For Christmas."

"Bridget..."

"It's nothing. I knitted it in the evenings."

I unwrap the paper. It is a pair of mittens. Gray wool, a little uneven, with a pattern of snowflakes in white on the cuff. One has a hole where the thumb should be and has been neatly darned with a different color.

"I'm not very good," says Bridget. "I started them in October. I thought, she'll want something warm. For when she goes."

I look at the mittens.

There is a lump in my throat the size of a fist. I put one on. It fits. It is a size too large and smells of lanolin and a little of woodsmoke.

"They're perfect," I say.

"They're not."

"They are."

She touches my face. Quickly, lightly, with two fingers, as she might touch a child's forehead to feel for fever.

"I'll see you tomorrow," she says. "Happy Christmas, love."

…

The day passes.

I watch it go. It goes slowly, in the white way that days go at Aldenmoor, with the sound of the radio and the clink of cutlery in the dining room and the smell of boiled ham creeping up the stairs. At noon the patients are given a Christmas dinner. At one I am summoned to the Quiet Room for an hour with Kestrel, who sits across from me in his shirtsleeves with a pot of tea, and for fifty minutes says nothing at all.

He doesn't take notes. He doesn't use the lamp. He only pours the tea and pushes the cup toward me and lets me watch him not look at me.

At the end, he says, "Daniel is settled."

"Yes."

"I wanted you to hear it from me."

"I heard it from her."

"Ah." A pause. "Then you know she is happy."

"Yes."

"Good." He turns his left cufflink one full turn. "I find I'm rather glad of that."

I look at him. At the long gray face and the tired eyes. He has the look of a man who has put down something heavy and is surprised to find that his arms still ache.

"Why did you do it?"

"I've told you. It was a clerical matter."

"It was eleven years."

"It was an hour," says Kestrel, "and I should have done it in the first." He picks up his cup. "Drink your tea, Dahlia."

I drink my tea.

It is lukewarm and strong and tastes faintly of bergamot.

I think: Whatever else he is, this is a thing he did.

I put it in a column. I do not know yet which.

…

At nine o'clock the telephone in the staff room rings.

I hear it from the corridor, where I am walking my slow evening circuit with a blanket round my shoulders and Teague trailing three paces behind. It rings twice. It stops. A murmur. A silence. Then, very faintly, through the half-open door, a woman's voice, high and breathless and shaking with joy.

"Hello, my darling. Hello. It's Mum."

I stop.

"Are you warm? Have you had your tea? No, it's grand, I'm grand. I'm only..."

Her voice breaks. She laughs through it.

"I'm only so happy to hear you."

I stand in the corridor with the mittens on my hands.

"Miss Dahlia," says Teague, behind me. "It's past your hour."

"Yes."

"The doctor wants you in bed."

"Yes."

"Come along, now." His hand closes on my elbow.

It is not a rough grip. It is merely a hand. But it is a hand that has never touched me before, and it holds on for a fraction of a second longer than it needs to, and in that moment I smell peppermint on his breath, strong and sweet, and I think of a tin with a candy cane on the lid.

Peppermints. For the road.

I let him lead me up the stair.

…

I do not sleep.

I lie on the quilt with my eyes open, in the lamp's thin circle, and turn Callie Ashby's letter over in my head, and count. Bridget's call ended at nine twenty. I heard the receiver go down. I heard her laugh, alone, in the staff room, and the scrape of a chair. I heard her cross the corridor at nine thirty, in her flat white shoes, and say good night to someone in a tone that was almost singing.

At ten the lights went down.

At midnight, a bell somewhere in the village struck, thin as a spoon on glass. I heard another answer it from the hill. Snow began, softly, against the window.

At twelve fifteen, I heard the stair door.

It is a heavy fire door at the end of the Lantern Wing corridor. It has a sticking latch. It opens with a groan and closes with a clank, and I have heard it four hundred times. But this time it opens and does not close. It stays open. I can feel the draft under my own door.

I lie still.

I hear a step. Not Teague's; he shuffles. Not Bridget's; she walks heel-toe, firmly, like a woman crossing a lawn. This is slower. Heavier. A man's tread, in good shoes, placed with care.

It passes my door.

It goes on down the corridor.

It stops.

I wait for the sound of a key.

It does not come. Instead I hear a low voice, quite close, murmuring a word I cannot catch. A silence. Then a woman's voice, startled, rising, cut off.

I am out of bed.

I am across the room with my hand on the latch, and I have it open an inch, and I am looking through the crack into the dim corridor, and the corridor is empty.

There is a smell.

Very faint. Sweet. Medicinal.

I know it.

It is the smell of the cloth that was held over my face in the study at Lake Verrin.

…

I do not scream. I want that known.

I stand in the doorway of my room in my nightgown and a pair of gray mittens, and I look at the empty corridor, and I do the one thing I am best at. I count.

Four doors on the left. Three on the right. The linen room. The pantry. The stair.

Where would they take her?

Not the pantry; Teague is in the pantry. Not the linen room; I've been in the linen room all day.

The kettle.

The kettle in the pantry whistled at three twelve, and nobody lifted it. Last night.

I begin to walk.

I walk in my bare feet, heel to toe, along the strip of runner at the edge of the corridor where the boards do not creak. I do not run. Running is for people who want to be caught. I walk like a sleepwalker, with my hands slack at my sides, and my eyes half closed, and if anyone should ask I am a doll who has wandered from her bed, and I am looking for a drink of water.

I pass the linen room. The door is shut.

I pass the staff room. The light is off. The receiver of the telephone lies on the table beside the cradle, off the hook, making a thin high continuous whine that I can hear through the door.

I pass the pantry.

The door is open six inches. The room beyond is dark. I smell cigarettes, and peppermint, and something else.

I stop.

"Is that Miss Dahlia?" says a voice in the dark.

…

It is not Teague.

It is lower than Teague's, and slower, and has a kind of gravel in it. A man's voice, a big man's, easy and courteous, like a doorman's or a bailiff's.

I know it.

I have heard it in a parking lot. In a conservatory. In the dim end of a corridor at two in the morning, saying Miss Sorrell, I'd like a word.

Hollis.

"Sleepwalking," says the voice. "How about that. The doctor said you did."

I stand there.

I let my face go slack. I let my head tilt, a little to the left, as a child's does when it is half asleep. I let my lips part. And in the thin high voice I have practiced for six weeks in the dark, I say:

"I want a drink of water."

A pause.

"Sure you do," says Hollis.

He comes to the door.

I have not seen him since the conservatory. He's thinner. There are shadows under his eyes. He wears a long gray overcoat, wet at the shoulders, and his hat is in his hand. He looks at me for a long time. His eyes go over my face, my hands, the mittens. They rest on the mittens a moment longer than they should.

"Pretty," he says.

"Bridget made them."

I let it fall from my lips like a piece of ice. I do not change my tone.

"Did she?"

"She's kind."

"She is." He turns his hat in his fingers. "She was."

The word lands.

It is a tiny word. Three letters. It slides into the dark of the pantry like a knife, and I feel it go all the way in.

Was.

"I'd like to go back to bed now," I say.

"Not yet."

He steps aside, out of the doorway, and for the first time I can see into the room.

…

It is a small pantry. Shelves of tinned tomatoes, flour, sugar, a row of enamel mugs on hooks. A deal table. A gas ring, with the kettle on it. The kettle is not whistling. The flame is off.

Bridget is on the floor.

She is lying on her side beside the table, with one arm flung out and her cap off and her hair, which I have never seen loose, spread across the linoleum. Her eyes are half open. Her mouth is a little ajar. She has a look of mild surprise, such as one might wear on being told, politely, that the bus has been cancelled.

Beside her hand there is an empty vial, and a syringe.

Teague is sitting on the upturned crate by the door with his hands between his knees. He is gray. He will not look at me. Behind him, on the table, there is a sheet of Aldenmoor letterhead, typed, with a pen laid across it.

"Isn't it sad," says Hollis. "They work so hard, these girls. Eleven years in this place. And then one night the pressure gets to be too much."

I do not speak.

"She's been stealing from the dispensary. Did you know that, Miss Dahlia? For months. Insulin, mostly. Sedatives. She had a son in some home or other, and I think she'd got in over her head." His voice is gentle. "She left a note. It's all there. She was very sorry."

"She was happy," I say.

I do not mean to.

It's out before I can stop it. A dry, small, level sentence, in my own voice, not the doll's. It falls on the linoleum between us.

Hollis looks at me.

I see it arrive. I see the little pause, the narrowing, the tiny recalculation behind the eyes. He is a careful man. He does not make mistakes twice.

"Is that right?" he says softly.

"She was telephoning her son."

"Was she?"

"She said..." I lick my lips. I let the doll back into my face. I let the vacancy come up like a tide. "She said he'd had a pudding."

A long silence.

Hollis puts his hat back on his head.

"You're a sweet girl," he says. "You should go to bed."

I go.

I turn, in my bare feet and my gray mittens, and I walk back the way I came. I do not look at the body. I do not look at Teague. I count my steps along the strip of runner: eleven, twelve, thirteen. I do not stop until I reach my room. I close the door. I turn the latch.

Then I slide down the wood to the floor, and put the heel of my hand against my mouth, and bite.

…

I do not cry. I find I can't.

Instead, I sit with my back against the door and my knees drawn up, in the dark, and think in the cold clean voice that has never failed me.

Price of a nurse.

One life. Eleven years of servitude. A son in a bed at Hollowbrook, and a girl's note in a pocket, and a pair of mittens with a darned thumb.

Bridget put the page in the post at four forty.

A gray sedan went on at the turn.

It took them thirty-one hours.

I do the arithmetic because it is what I have. Thirty-one hours between a woman in woolen gloves dropping an envelope into a slot and a man in a long coat bending over her in a pantry with a cloth. I could have prevented it. I knew. I stood at the window and counted her return, and I saw a car on the drive, and I told myself it was a delivery.

Acceptable, I wrote.

Acceptable.

I hold the word in my mouth. It tastes of pennies.

I have always said that numbers do not lie. I believed it. I believed it in the Foundation's audit rooms and in the cold room at Lake Verrin and on the long white road to Aldenmoor with a dead man's blood still in my hair. It was the one article of faith I had.

It is true. It is entirely true. A number is simply what it is.

It's what you do with it that lies.

I take off the left mitten.

In the dark I turn it over and find the darned thumb with my fingertip. The wool is rough and slightly warm. I press it to my cheek.

Down the corridor, a door opens. A man's voice speaks, low, urgent, and I recognize it: the upright, dry, courteous voice of a man who has been called from his bed.

"Who has touched her?"

A silence.

"Mr. Teague. I asked you a question."

Then, quietly, so that I only just hear it through the wood and the dark:

"Nobody is to leave this building."

…

At two, a hand knocks at my door.

Two soft knocks, and a pause.

I do not move.

"Dahlia." It is Kestrel. His voice is hoarse. "I know you are awake. I would very much like to come in."

I look at the strip of light under the door.

"Please," he says. "I am not here as a doctor."

I stand. My knees are stiff. I unlatch the door and open it.

He is in his coat, over his shirtsleeves, with his tie undone. There is snow on his hair. He looks ten years older than he did at tea. He stands on the threshold and does not come in, and for the first time since I met him I see that his hands are shaking.

"She rang me," he says.

"What?"

"At a quarter to eleven. From the staff room." He swallows. "She wanted me to know that he was well. That he'd eaten. That she'd..." His voice goes. He tries again. "She said, Thank you, Doctor, for the pudding."

I say nothing.

"I told her it was nothing. I told her to go to bed." He takes a breath. "I told her to go to bed."

"You weren't to know."

"I am a man who knows," says Kestrel, "a great deal."

He looks at me. In the dim light I see his eyes are red.

"Warren," he says. "Or Cordelia. Or both. It does not matter which." He puts his hand over his mouth and takes it away. "I have been very patient, Elspeth."

It is the first time he has said it since the Orchard.

Elspeth.

I hear it land, in the corridor, in the dark, between two people who have both lost the same woman. He does not look as if he knows he has said it.

"Yes," I say. "I know."

"I should like," says Kestrel, "to stop being patient."

I put out my hand.

I take his. It is cold, and enormous, and trembling. I draw him over the threshold and shut the door behind him.

"Sit down," I say. "I'll tell you what we do."

…

At dawn I find the tin.

It is in the pocket of my dressing gown, where I put it. Red, round, with a rusted corner. I open it. There are eleven peppermints left, twisted in cellophane, white and hard.

I hold one in my palm for a long time.

Then I put it in my mouth.

It is sweet. It is cold. It burns a little on the back of the tongue. I sit by the window, in the gray light, with the snow coming down in thick slow flakes on the road she will never drive again, and I suck the peppermint until it is gone.

Happy Christmas, Elspeth.

It's tomorrow.

I thought I'd get in early.

It is Christmas Day.

I count the eleven that remain, one by one, and I do not eat another.