Wish with the Candles. Betty Neels

handed the sterile towels and watched while the surgeons arranged them with meticulous care and then fastened them with the towel clips she had ready. The professor asked placidly, ‘Is everything fixed, Sister?’—a question she knew covered not only the actual operation itself but the patient’s immediate aftercare as well. She said briefly, ‘Yes, sir,’ and proffered a knife.

      He took it without haste. ‘Good—I take it we’re all ready,’ and made a neat incision.

      The operation seemed to be going very well. The professor dissected and snipped and probed and cut again and after a long time he and Mr Soames started to stitch the end results together. They were perhaps half-way through this delicate, very fast process when Jessop, about to change the lotion in the bowl stand beside the professor, made one of her clumsy movements and lurched against him, pouring a jugful of warm saline over his legs, and for good measure, touching him with her hand. Emma prayed a wordless little prayer as she said calmly:

      ‘Another gown for the professor, Staff. Nurse Cully, fetch another set of bowls. Mr Moore, be good enough to stay by me in case I should need anything.’ She handed a tetra cloth to Mr Soames, and the professor, after one short, explosive sentence in his own language, stood back from the table so that Staff could take his unsterile gown. He nodded to Mr Soames before he went to scrub again and Mr Soames said, ‘Right, old chap, Will and I will carry on, shall we?’

      No one else had said anything—what was there to say at such a time? Poor Jessop, quite overcome, had fled out of the theatre, and Emma had let her go, for she would be worse than useless now, and a good wholesome cry in the kitchen would restore her nerve more quickly than anything else.

      Professor Teylingen came back presently and Staff with him to relieve an uneasy Mr Moore, and the operation was finished without further mishap with the men talking among themselves in a deliberate, calm manner which Emma felt sure that in the professor’s case was assumed, for she could sense his rage, well battened down under his bland exterior, and felt sure that once he had finished his work he would make no bones about unleashing it.

      He did, but not immediately. The patient had gone back to the IC Unit, the theatre had been cleared and got ready for the next, luckily short case and Emma was scrubbing up once more before he appeared beside her. He wasted no time on preliminaries, but, ‘Sister, you will be good enough to see that Nurse Jessop remains out of the theatre while I am in it. I will not have my patients’ lives jeopardized by a nurse who cannot do her work properly.’ He picked up a nailbrush and gave her a cold look. ‘Perhaps I should speak to Sister Cox.’

      ‘Don’t you dare!’ said Emma before she could stop herself, and then remembering who he was added, ‘Sir,’ and saw his lips twitch faintly.

      ‘No one—I repeat, no one, Sister Hastings—tells me what I may dare to do or not to do.’

      Now she had made him even more angry. Poor Jessop! ‘Listen,’ she said earnestly, quite forgetting to say sir this time, ‘don’t tell Mad M…Sister Cox. You see she’s…she didn’t want Nurse Jessop here in the first place and so she thinks she’s no good, and Jessop’s scared stiff of her. I know she’s clumsy and slow, but if she’s given a chance she’ll be a good nurse one day. Give her that chance, I’ll keep her on swab counting if you like…but if only someone would tell her she’s not a fool.’ She sighed. ‘People are so stupid,’ said Emma indignantly, and glared at him over her mask.

      ‘And I am included amongst these—er—stupid people?’ He sounded interested.

      Her ‘Yes’ was a mumble. She had got herself into a fine mess. Probably he would request Mad Minnie to keep her out of the theatre too and that would leave only Staff to scrub…and serve him right. She began to scrub the other hand with her usual thoroughness and had the brush taken from her as he twisted her round to face him.

      ‘I don’t seem to be starting off on the right foot, do I?’ he asked mildly. ‘I don’t make a habit of making girls cry, you know—but the patient comes first, don’t you agree? Would it help if we were to go and find this nurse and endeavour to calm her down? You say she is going to be a good nurse—who am I to dispute your opinion?’

      They found Jessop in the kitchen, squeezed behind the door with reddened eyes and a deplorable sniff. Emma said at once, ‘Ah, there you are, Jessop. I shall need you in theatre in a minute or two, so stop crying like a good girl. No one’s angry—here’s Professor Teylingen to tell you so. Now I’m going to scrub and when professor goes to scrub too go into theatre and make sure everything’s ready, will you?’

      She walked away, leaving him to deal with the situation, and presently when she went into theatre, evinced no curiosity as to what he had said to Jessop, who was standing, gowned and masked, waiting for her. The operation was to be a comparatively simple one. The patient had suffered a stab wound some weeks previously, had recovered from it, and now was back in hospital with an empyema. Now he was going to have an inch or so of rib removed and a drainage tube inserted—a fairly quick operation which Jessop should manage to get through without doing anything too awful. Emma counted her swabs, signed to Jessop to tie the surgeon’s gowns, checked the contents of the Mayo’s table and handed the first of the sterile towels to Little Willy.

      A quarter of an hour later she was clearing up her instruments once more and Jessop was carefully unscrewing the sucker jar. The men, with a brief word, had gone, Staff and Cully would be back in twenty minutes or so and Mrs Tate, the auxiliary, would be on duty in a couple of minutes. Emma put the last of the instruments into one of the lotion bowls and said, ‘All right, Nurse, you’re off at one, aren’t you? Mrs Tate can finish that,’ and bent to do her sharps as Jessop said: ‘Thank you, Sister,’ and ploughed her way to the door, narrowly avoiding two electric cables and a bucket, and then turned round and ploughed all the way back again. ‘He’s lovely, Sister,’ she breathed. ‘He told me that when he was a medical student he forgot he was scrubbed up and turned on the diathermy machine and everyone had to wait while he took off his gown and his gloves and scrubbed up again and on his way back he touched the surgeon’s gown. He says he’s never forgotten it, and he said,’ she went on rapidly, ‘that you have to do something awful like that just once and then you never do it again, so I’m not to worry.’

      She looked rather imploringly at Emma. ‘He is right, isn’t he, Sister?’

      ‘Yes,’ said Emma firmly, ‘he’s quite right, and he’s been very kind too—you realize that, don’t you? You could have done a lot of damage to the patient. Supposing Professor Teylingen had jerked his hand—he was stitching, remember?’

      Jessop looked crestfallen. ‘Yes, I know, Sister. I—I thought I had—that’s why I ran away. I’m sorry I did. He said I must never run away again because we’re a team and we can’t manage without each other. I thought…that is, Sister Cox said I was a nuisance…’

      Emma started on the needles. ‘No, you’re not—you’ll do quite well, especially if you remember that bit about one of a team. And remember too that Sister Cox has had a lot of pain with her feet and she’s been in theatre so long, she’s forgotten just a little how difficult it is at first.’ She smiled. ‘Now go off duty, Nurse.’

      Jessop went to the door again. At it she said, ‘Goodbye, Sister—you’re nice.’

      And let’s hope I stay that way, thought Emma, and don’t get like Mad Minnie. The prospect was daunting; she closed her mind to it and began to think about Little Willy’s invitation to go with him to see the latest film that evening. They had been out together on several occasions, but although she liked him, that was as far as it went and she suspected that it was as far as it went with him too. She supposed she would go, and along with the thought came a speculative one as to what the professor intended to do with his evening, and where he was living, and with whom.

      In the Sisters’ dining-room, where she went a short time later, she was greeted with expectant faces and a great many questions.

      ‘You lucky devil,’ remarked one of her closer friends, Madge Freeman from Men’s Surgical. ‘I saw him in the distance this