Purposes of Love Read Free Page A

tenant was allowed to display not more than six objects of her own; Vivian, with some difficulty, had succeeded in getting her row of books counted as one instead of seventeen.
    At breakfast she shared a table with the other nine members of her training set, half listening to what they said, which in six months had become familiar, even soothing, as the National Anthem.
    “Well, you know what the round is on Malplaquet when you’re on alone. And then she ticked me off for not having started the washings, and she hadn’t done a thing herself except play up to all the housemen. … Sister’s day off, I remember because we were having a cup of tea behind the kitchen door. … And they found it simply full of fluid, six pints they got. …”
    The noise died down as if a door had been shut on it. The Sister who was taking breakfast had risen to call the roll. Vivian answered to her name mechanically, seeing in her mind the coffee-shop and Jan sitting at a window-table which, for no particular reason, she had assigned to him. The roll came to an end.
    “Nurse Cope to Crecy. Nurse Fowler to Harfleur. Nurse Kimball to Verdun. Nurse Lingard to Verdun.” The Sister sat down; the rattle of voices began again.
    “I say, fancy. Were you due to change your ward, Lingard?”
    “No,” said Vivian stolidly.
    “Does it mess up your off-duty?”
    “I was meeting my brother.”
    “Oh, bad luck. ”
    As if she had staked on the wrong colour at roulette, Vivian thought. Indeed, making any sort of engagement outside the hospital was very similar in principle. Her mind felt heavy and dull; she could see Jan looking out of the window and, after a long time, at his watch. She had, too, a silly vision of the hospital spinning round like a wheel and nurses rolling round it to fall, feebly struggling, into fortuitous holes. There was no way of getting at Jan. She had forgotten, in any case, to ask where he was staying.
    Following the usual procedure—notice of moves was never given, so hers was a predicament happening to someone nearly every day—she sought out one of the Verdun probationers.
    “What duty will I be taking, do you know?”
    “You’re extra. Heavy take-in this week. Extra beds both sides and right down the middle.”
    “Oh,” said Vivian. “Thanks.” It meant that she was not on the ward schedule and would be sent off each day when the Sister happened to think of it.
    “Made arrangements?” said the Verdun probationer. “Bad luck.”
    The Home Sister went out, releasing them. Through the scraping of chairs she could hear Colonna Kimball, two tables away, swearing. She was the other nurse who had been read out for Verdun, a second-year whose path Vivian had not crossed so far. Her vocabulary seemed richer than the one in standard use, and Vivian noticed that a rather precious public-school accent lent it the effect of higher explosive charge.
    Verdun was the newest women’s surgical ward, a dazzling open stretch of light and symmetry and porcelain and chromium. Even with its extra beds it looked spacious and orderly; but custom had, for Vivian, invested the Victorian muddle of Crecy with a kind of shabby cosiness, and she felt chilly and jumpy like a cat in a new house. She imagined Jan watching her fuss as one might the scuttlings of a worried ant in a formicarium; pulled herself together, and began on the line of beds, stripping them, because she was extra, for the others to make.
    “Beds again,” said the first old woman she came to, drawing her knees up under the loose blanket. She rubbed her skinny arms, sore from daily injections. “Seems to me life’s nothing but beds and stabbing.” Vivian made a standard soothing answer, and went on quickly because she had thought of something that made her laugh.
    “What are you thinking?” said the voice of Kimball behind her.
    “Casanova.”
    “No, no. Cellini. Cellini definitely.”
    “Well, yes.” Vivian folded the next quilt over a chair.
    “Casanova’s