The Pull of the Stars(3)

I noticed just one headline about the flu today, low down on the right: Increase in Reports of Influenza. A masterpiece of understatement, as if it were only the reporting that had increased, or perhaps the pandemic was a figment of the collective imagination. I wondered whether it was the newspaper publisher’s decision to play down the danger or if he’d received orders from above.

The grand, old-fashioned silhouette of the hospital reared up ahead against the pallid sky. My stomach coiled. Excitement or nerves; hard to tell them apart these days. I struggled to the stairs and let gravity help me down.

On the lower deck, a man hawked and spat on the floor. People twitched and drew back shoes and hems.

A female voice wailed, Sure you might as well spray us with bullets!

Stepping off the tram, I saw the latest official notice in huge letters, pasted up every few feet.

A NEW FOE IS IN OUR MIDST: PANIC.

THE GENERAL WEAKENING OF NERVE POWER

KNOWN AS WAR-WEARINESS

HAS OPENED A DOOR TO CONTAGION.

DEFEATISTS ARE THE ALLIES OF DISEASE.



I supposed the authorities were trying to buck us up in their shrill way, but it seemed unfair to blame the sick for defeatism.

Written across the top of the hospital gates, in gilded wrought iron that caught the last of the streetlight: Vita gloriosa vita. Life, glorious life.

On my first day, when I’d been just twenty-one, the motto had made me tingle from scalp to toe. My father had stumped up the fees for the full three-year course at the Technical School for Nurses, and I’d been sent here for ward work three afternoons a week; it was in this hulking, four-storey building—handsome in a bleak, Victorian way—that I’d learnt everything of substance.

Vita gloriosa vita. The serifs were tipped with soot, I noticed now.

I crossed the courtyard behind a pair of white-coiffed nuns and followed them in. Religious sisters were said to make the most devoted, self-abnegating nurses; I wasn’t sure about that, but I’d certainly been made to feel second best by a few nuns over my years here. Like most of the hospitals, schools, and orphanages in Ireland, this place couldn’t have run without the expertise and labour of the various orders of the sisters. Most of the staff were Roman Catholics, but the hospital was open to any residents of the capital who needed care (though Protestants usually went to their own hospitals or hired private nurses).

I should have been down the country. I’d been due a whole three days off, so I’d arranged to go to Dadda’s farm for a little rest and fresh air but then had to send him a telegram at the last minute explaining that my leave was cancelled. I couldn’t be spared, since so many nurses—including Matron herself—had come down with the grippe.

Dadda and his wife’s farm, technically. Tim and I were perfectly civil to our stepmother and vice versa. Even though she’d never had children of her own, she’d always kept us at a slight remove, and I supposed we’d done the same. At least she had no reason to resent us now we were grown and supporting ourselves in Dublin. Nurses were notoriously underpaid, but my brother and I managed to rent a small house, mostly thanks to Tim’s military pension.

Urgency girdled me now. Eileen Devine, Ita Noonan, Delia Garrett; how were my patients getting on without me?

It felt colder inside the hospital than out these days; lamps were kept turned down and coal fires meagrely fed. Every week, more grippe cases were carried into our wards, more cots jammed in. The hospital’s atmosphere of scrupulous order—which had survived four years of wartime disruption and shortages and even the Rising’s six days of gunfire and chaos—was finally crumbling under this burden. Staff who fell sick disappeared like pawns from a chessboard. The rest of us made do, worked harder, faster, pulled more than our weight—but it wasn’t enough. This flu was clogging the whole works of the hospital.

Not just the hospital, I reminded myself—the whole of Dublin. The whole country. As far as I could tell, the whole world was a machine grinding to a halt. Across the globe, in hundreds of languages, signs were going up urging people to cover their coughs. We had it no worse here than anywhere else; self-pity was as useless as panic.

No sign of our porter this morning; I hoped he wasn’t off sick too. Only a charwoman sluicing the marble with carbolic around the base of the blue-robed Virgin.

As I hurried past Admitting towards the stairs to Maternity/Fever, I recognised a junior nurse behind her mask; she was red-spattered from bib to hem like something out of an abattoir. Standards were really slipping.

Nurse Cavanagh, are you just out of surgery?

She shook her head and answered hoarsely: Just now, on my way here, Nurse Power—a woman insisted I come see to a man who’d fallen in the street. Quite black in the face, he was, clawing at his collar.

I put my hand on the junior’s wrist to calm her.

She went on in gulps. I was trying to sit him up on the cobblestones and undo his collar studs to help him breathe—

Very good.

—but he let out one great cough and…Nurse Cavanagh gestured at the blood all over her with widespread, tacky fingers.

I could smell it, harsh and metallic. Oh, my dear. Has he been triaged yet?

But when I followed her eyes to the draped stretcher on the floor behind her, I guessed he was past that point, beyond our reach. Whoever had brought a stretcher into the road and helped Nurse Cavanagh carry him into the hospital must have abandoned the two of them here.