The Going Down of the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

pants and wet shoes. I’d have been uncomfortable in my own living-room. Knocking round the public areas of a large hospital, watched curiously by staff who knew I had been one of them and thought I had gone native, and with some anxiety by civilians who didn’t know the background and just thought I was peculiar, I felt singularly disadvantaged. If I’d had my purse with me I could have headed for the nearest department store to regularise the situation, but nobody takes their purse swimming. I’m not even sure that wet notes are legal tender.
    The receptionist listened with sympathy and some amusement, then nodded me to a handy chair and turned to her switchboard. “I know who’ll sort you out.”
    I would have known too if I hadn’t been away from hospitals so long. The chief fixer in any infirmary is always the head porter. The hospital secretary, the chief nursing officer, the senior doctor, all these are worthy people whose contribution to running the establishment cannot be overstated. But each of them is responsible for a particular area of hospital management defined by clean-etched lines, and things like the reassembly of battle-scarred Action Men from the children’s ward, and caring for budgerigars brought in clutched to the breasts of little old ladies who should be worrying about their broken hips, and dressing visiting physicians who are soaked to the skin and sixty miles from their nearest funds, never quite fit into their parameters. The head porter deals with everything that anybody else can reasonably claim isn’t their job. In a very real sense, the hospital buck stops with him.
    So less than ten minutes after the receptionist called him, the biggest, blackest head porter you ever saw bustled through the swing-doors bearing a stack of towels, clothes, brush and comb, even cosmetics—we hadn’t actually met till now, remember—before him. He saw Little Orphan Annie sitting damply in her corner and beamed. I grinned back. I was relieved to see the succour that he brought, but mostly it was a Pavlovian response to a face that cheerful. I felt warm for the first time in hours.
    I retired to the Ladies and got first dry and then decent. I put together a perfectly respectable, if not exactly haut couture, outfit from a nurse’s blouse and white lab coat belted round the middle to take up the length—you don’t find many lab technicians my height, they’d have trouble reaching the shelves—with a pair of backless mules for shoes. The head porter, bless him, had even scrounged me some underwear. The knickers were a pair of wholly honorable white cellular passion-killers, but the bra would have taken any two people my size. I returned it, with the towels and my thanks. My own damp belongings I stuffed into the carrier-bag provided for the purpose.
    Thus warmed, cheered and upholstered in a manner befitting a middle-aged woman with a professional past, I sallied forth to court the approval of my new friends for my new image. Jim Fernie the porter beamed again with proprietorial pride, as if I were his little girl who had just dressed herself for the first time.
    â€œHalf the doctors in this hospital will be asking you for a second opinion,” he said. I thought it more likely that someone would press a mop into my hand and tell me to deal with the sago on the canteen floor, but I appreciated his confidence.
    I went to pirouette for Ros the receptionist too, but she had a customer. I could see her talking, her face serious, and gesturing past his broad dark-suited back. When he thanked her and limped off in the direction indicated, I went to show her my spring collection.
    She was suitably impressed. “What price Bruce Oldfield now?” Personally I couldn’t see where a karate film star came into it.
    When she had said all there was to say about my costume, she nodded towards the lifts and said, “That was your friend’s da