The Pull of the Stars(8)

A little breathless, Ita Noonan answered randomly: Rashers!

That’s right.

I knew never to dispute a point with a delirious patient.

Could she be hungry for her breakfast? Unlikely, in her state; patients with serious flu cases had no appetite. Haggard at thirty-three years old, pale but for those flame-red cheeks, her belly a hard hill. Eleven previous deliveries, it said on Ita Noonan’s chart, seven children still living, and this twelfth birth not expected for another two and a half months. (Since Mrs. Noonan had been able to tell us nothing about when she might have conceived or when she’d felt the quickening, Sister Finnigan had had to make a stab at the due date based on the height of the uterus.) My job wasn’t to cure all Ita Noonan’s ills but to bring her safe through this particular calamity, I reminded myself, to push her little boat back into the current of what I imagined to be her barely bearable life.

I placed my first two fingers on the skin between tendon and bone on the thumb side of her wrist. With my left hand, I pulled out the heavy disk of my watch. I counted twenty-three beats in fifteen seconds and multiplied by four. Pulse rate 95, at the upper end of normal; I jotted it down in minute letters. (Wartime policy, to save paper.) The rhythm was Regularly irregular, I noted, which was typical during a fever. Pulse force normal, a small mercy.

I drew out the thermometer from under Ita Noonan’s arm; its glass dragged at her tired skin. The mercury stood at 101, the equivalent of 102 taken orally, which was not too alarming, but temperatures were generally at their lowest in the early morning, and hers would climb again. I penciled the point on the graph. Many an illness had a characteristic line of exposure, incubation, invasion, defervescence, convalescence—the silhouette of a familiar mountain range.

Ita Noonan turned confiding now. She wheezed, said in her thick inner-city accent: In the wardrobe, with the cardinal!

Mm. Just lie quiet, we’ll take care of everything.

We? I remembered I was on my own today.

Ita Noonan’s chest strained to rise and fall, her breasts two windfalls rotting on dropped branches. Six breaths in fifteen seconds. I multiplied and wrote down Respirations 24. That was still rather high. Mild nasal flaring.

She beckoned me closer with her gaudy stained fingers. I leaned in and got a whiff of linseed from her poultice and something else…a bad tooth?

Ita Noonan whispered: There’s a baby.

I wasn’t sure how old her youngest was; some of these women were unlucky enough to produce two in a year. You’ve a little one at home?

But she was pointing down, secretive, not quite touching the drum under her sweat-dampened nightdress or even looking at it.

Oh yes, another one on the way, I agreed, but not for a good long while yet.

Her eyes were sunken; was she dehydrated? I lifted down the kettle to make her some beef tea. In this cramped space, we had only a pair of spirit lamps for cooking, so on one of them we kept a kettle always simmering, and on the other a wide pan for sterilising, in the absence of an autoclave to steam things clean. I picked up the jug of cold boiled water and poured some into the beef tea so it wouldn’t scald Ita Noonan. I put the lidded cup into her hands and waited to make sure that in her confusion, she remembered how to suck from the hole.

A hard shake to the thermometer drove the mercury down into its glass bulb. I dipped it in the basin of carbolic, then rinsed it and put it back in my bib.

Delia Garrett slapped down her magazine and let out an angry cough behind her polished fingernails. I want to get home to my little girls.

I took one of her plump wrists and counted the beats, my eyes on the silver-framed family portrait on the miniature bedside table. (Patients’ effects were meant to be kept in the drawer, for hygiene, but we knew when to turn a blind eye.) Who’s looking after them while your husband’s at the office?

She swallowed a sob. An older lady up the avenue, but they don’t like her and I hardly blame them.

Pulse rate nothing out of the ordinary, the rhythm just a little syncopated. No need for the thermometer because her skin was the same temperature as mine. What concerned me was the pressure of her blood against my fingers. Pulse force bounding, I wrote down. Hard to tell how much was due to her agitation.

I observed her respiratory rate now.

Isn’t it a mercy you’ve only a light dose, Mrs. Garrett? I was the same myself back in September.

I was trying to distract her because one never let a patient know one was counting her breaths or self-consciousness would alter the rhythm. Respirations 20, I wrote.

Delia Garrett narrowed her pretty eyes. What’s your name—your Christian name?

It was against protocol to share any personal information; Sister Finnigan taught us to maintain gravitas by staying aloof. If you let patients become familiar, they’ll respect you less.

But these were strange times and this was my ward, and if I had to run it today, I’d do it my way. Not that it felt as if I were running anything, exactly; just coping, hour by hour.

So I found myself saying, It’s Julia, as it happens.

A rare smile from Delia Garrett. I like that. So did they jam you in a storeroom, Julia Power, between a dying woman and one who’s off her head?

I found myself warming to the wealthy Protestant for all her obstreperousness. I shook my head. I was nursed at home, by my brother, actually. But when you’re expecting, this flu can lead to…complications.

(I didn’t want to spook her by listing them: miscarriage, premature labour, stillbirth, even maternal death.)