were all sitting late one night in the Burrells’ flat, which it is unnecessary to describe, since it was identical with the Knowells’ and the Mathews’ flats, when Alice remarked, with a nervous laugh, that it was no good Willie’s thinking of dashing off to the wars, because she thought she was pregnant.
Willie was sitting next to her as usual; he squeezed his large sunburnt hand on her shoulder, and laughed, giving her his affectionate protective look. ‘It’s all very well,’ persisted Alice. ‘Oh, well, to hell with everything.’ And she reached for a cigarette.
No one took it seriously. But a week later, when the Burrells were rung up to join a party for dancing, Alice remarked in a calm way that she had no time for dancing for a couple of days, because she had to do something about this damned baby. Douglas, returning from the office, reported to Martha that he had met Willie in the bar and Willie said it was very serious, no laughing matter at all. Stella, all delighted animation, rang up to offer her services. But Alice, the trained nurse, was vaguely reassuring. She was quite all right, she said.
Stella was offended, and showed it by saying that it was stupid to get pregnant when – But this sentence flowed into ‘And, in any case, she’s only doing it to keep Willie from being called up.’ Martha said indignantly that anyone would think Alice was doing it on purpose. To which Stella replied with her rich, shrewd laugh. Martha was annoyed because she was associated with a sex which chose such dishonest methods for getting its own way.
‘I bet she’s not really doing anything about getting rid of it,’ said Stella virtuously. But one felt her energies were not really behind this indignation.
She and Martha were secure in a plan of their own. Martha had suggested they might go and take a course in Red Cross. It was on a day when the newspaper had warned them that an enemy (left undefined, like a blank in an official form to be filled in later as events decided) might sweep across Africa in a swastikaed or – the case might be – hammer-and-sickled horde. In this case, the black population, always ungrateful to the British colonists, would naturally side with the unscrupulous invaders, undermined as they were by sedition-mongers, agitators and Fabian influences from England. The prospect brightened the eyes of innumerable women; one should be prepared; and in due time Red Cross courses were announced.
‘Matty and I are thinking of joining an ambulance unit,’ said Stella demurely. ‘After all, we won’t have any responsibilities here if you go on active service, will we?’
Martha had dropped this suggestion in passing, just as she had tentatively suggested the Red Cross course, only to find it taken up and moulded by Stella. And the uneasy silence of their husbands contributed to their perseverance. At ten o’clock one morning, Martha and Stella were in their seats for the first of these lectures.
It was a large room filled with rows of school desks. They were crowded with about sixty women, who must be housewives or leisured daughters at this hour of the day. The lecturer was an elderly woman, fat, red-faced, with jolly little black eyes. Under the edges of her flowing coif showed flat scooplike curls of iron-grey hair, gummed against her cheeks; for, unlike the nuns whose garb this so much resembled, this woman was a female still – those curls proclaimed it. The masses of her flesh were tightly confined in glazed white, and supported on the large splayed feet which were the reward of her work.
This, then, was Sister Dorothy Dalraye, known for the last thirty years to her friends and colleagues, now numbering several thousands, as Doll. She introduced herself with the cheerful cry of ‘Well, girls, since we’re all going to be together for six weeks, you must call me Sister Doll!’ And proceeded to a series of bright remarks, infusing into her animated black eyes a look of insinuating suggestiveness, so that her audience instinctively listened as if some doubtful joke was imminent. But no: it appeared her innuendoes referred to the coming war – or rather, the enemy who was as yet unnamed. Martha unravelled her ambiguities to mean that she, unlike Stella, hoped to fight Hitler and not Stalin; at last she made some references to ‘the Hun’ which settled the matter. That this was a memory from the last war was made clear when she called it, just as Mr Quest might do, ‘the Great Unmentionable’, but without his bitter note of betrayal. Sister Doll had fought alongside the boys during the Great Unmentionable, and on various fronts. She named them. She produced anecdote after anecdote, apparently at random. But Martha slowly realized that this was not at all as casual as it looked. This gathering of some sixty women had ceased to be individuals. They were being slowly welded together. They were listening in silence, and every face showed anticipation, as if they were being led, by the cheerful tallyhoing of Sister Doll, to view entrancing vistas of country. Sister Doll was adroitly, and with the confidence of one who had done it many times before, building up a picture of herself, and so of them, as a cheerfully modest, indefatigably devoted minister of mercy who took physical bravery for granted. But behind this picture, absolutely genuine, was another; and it was this that beckoned the audience: adventure. Sister Doll was promising them adventure. Once again Martha heard the mud, the squalor, the slaughter of the trenches recreated in the memory of someone who had been a victim of them – Sister Doll remarked in passing that she had ‘lost’ her boy at Passchendaele – as cleanly gallant and exciting.
She spoke for some twenty minutes, this jolly old campaigner; then, judging it was enough, she proceeded to talk about discipline. It was clear that this was by no means as popular as those inspiring reminiscences – perhaps because these women, being mostly married women with servants, had reached the position where they believed their task was to discipline others and not themselves. In this they resembled Sister Doll. At any rate, judging from the critical and sceptical look on their faces, they were reflecting that the discipline of the nursing profession, like its uniform, was more hierarchic than practical. They were minutely observing Sister Doll’s uniform, with its white glaze, its ritual buckles and badges, and its romantic flowing white veil, with the common sense of disparaging housewives. They began to cough and shuffle like a theatre audience. Not a moment too soon Sister Doll prevented them from separating again into a collection of individuals, by turning to her main topic for that day, which was how to make a bed properly. Not, however, without remarking with a sort of regretful severity, looking at the wall in case she might be accused of singling anyone out, that some people said, though of course she wouldn’t know if it were true or not, that the young people of today hadn’t the sense of vocation of her generation. Martha had decided that she had no intention of devoting six weeks, although only a few hours a week were demanded of her, to the company of this elderly war horse who nevertheless continually suggested a happy hockey-playing schoolgirl. She therefore occupied her time in trying to decide what was the common denominator of this mass of women; for certainly there must be a special kind of woman who rushes, at the first sound of the bugle, to learn how to nurse ‘the boys’. There was no doubt that this was how they were picturing themselves, and how Sister Doll was encouraging them to think; a white-garbed angel among wounded men was the image that filled their minds, despite this talk of a threatened civilian population. But she could only conclude that the difference between them and herself was that they were all taking down minute notes about the correct way to fold bedclothes.
She looked towards Stella, who was coiled seductively on the hard bench, head propped on slender hands, eyes fixed on Sister Doll. It was clear that she was not listening to a word. It looked as if she was deliberately trying to present the picture of a detached observer. She happened to be wearing a white linen dress, whose severity was designed to emphasize her slim curves; or perhaps it was that she had felt white to be more ‘suitable’ for a nursing course than any other colour. But her small, apricot-tinted face with its enormous lazy dark eyes, the soft slender body in its white, were the cruellest comment on the only other white figure in the room, fat and perspiring Sister Doll, half a dozen paces away. It appeared that Sister Doll felt it, or at least her inattention; for during those pauses while she was waiting for her class to take down sentences such as ‘The greatest care must be taken to keep the patient’s bed neat and tidy’, she turned hot little eyes full of rather flustered reproach, on Stella, who was regarding
