The Meddlers

The fat orderly on the third floor of the Maternity Unit was worried. It showed in the way she moved aimlessly from single room to three-bedded room, from corridor to Sister’s office, with a damp gray rag wadded in one pudgy hand, a bottle of all-purpose cleaner in the other. It showed in the way she washed the staff coffee cups after the mid-morning break, drying each one for a full minute as she stared blankly out the window at the bulk of the Physical Medicine Building across the courtyard.

Not that anyone would really have noticed much difference in her. No one ever did notice her, unless they wanted her for something, and even then they would simply call irritably, “Where’s the orderly? The fat one?” because hardly anyone bothered to remember her name. She was so blank an individual, so ordinary, that she seemed to melt into the background even when being directly spoken to. She was as much a part of Maternity as the green gloss paint on the corridor walls, the piles of gowns and sheets
in the linen cupboard and the heavy swinging doors that led to the labor room. Not even Sister Field, who was rather hot on human relations and concerned herself a great deal with the quality of communication between staff and patients, could see the fat orderly as a person. With so negative a personality, how could anyone see her as a person?

And yet she was worried. This was a rare experience for her, because she was not an individual who took herself at all seriously, in many ways sharing the general view of her own nonentity. Other people had personal problems with their husbands or their children or their boy friends or the people they worked with, but not Edna. She had her job and her room in the Maids’ Home, and her weekly magazines full of love stories—in all of which she believed implicitly—and her television serials equally full of real people, and that was enough for her. To grapple with a moral dilemma, as she was now doing, was a very new and bothering experience.

Not that she knew she was grappling with a moral dilemma. All she knew was that something wasn’t right about the patient in room eleven. It wasn’t so much that she had no outside visitors like the other patients; lots of unmarried mothers were delivered in the Unit, and Edna accepted unquestioningly the loneliness that surrounded them. It wasn’t just that she was in a single room when she was making perfectly normal progress, and such rooms were usually kept for mothers with infections or special complications, or doctors’ wives. These facts merely added to the oddness of the situation.

The really odd thing was the number of important hospital people who were around. When she had gone into strong labor the day before, you’d have thought it was the Queen or Elizabeth Taylor or someone like that, the way they had come rushing. The doctor who worked over in the converted Isolation Unit near the back gates of the hospital, he’d come together with six—six!— people who seemed to be his assistants. And Miss Guttner herself had come to do the delivery, and Edna knew after eleven years of working in Maternity that she only came after the midwives and the registrars and everyone else had tried to manage and couldn’t. And this girl had had a perfectly ordinary labor, something else
Edna knew from her eleven years of being part of the Unit’s furniture.

And there had been the Hospital Secretary, and Matron, and no less than three of the specialists—the one from the Children’s Unit, and the one from the Endocrinology Unit, and Sir Peter Apthorp, the Chief of Staff.

And after the baby was born, and they’d said it was a boy, seven pounds eleven, full term, no problems, perfect Agpar score (Edna didn’t know what exactly an Agpar score was, only that a perfect one meant the baby was fine), look what they’d done. They hadn’t put him in the nursery like the other babies. They hadn’t given him to his mother, not once. Edna knew that because Sister Field had walked out of the labor room the minute he’d been delivered, holding him wrapped up in a bloodstained green towel. Edna had been standing just outside the door when that happened, cleaning the wheels of the spare anesthetic trolley, and had seen through the door to the mother on the table, and her face had been all flat and blotchy because she was under anesthetic—Dr. Palmer was just turning off the machine—so she couldn’t have seen her baby. Yet they had taken him right away, out of the Unit altogether.

And so many people were still buzzing around today, sitting crushed in Sister’s office and drinking all that coffee, and talking and talking and talking. It was funny about the way they talked. She knew they talked English—she could tell that—but what they said couldn’t be understood, not the way you understood the way the nurses talked, and the mothers. They were a dirty lot, the mothers. Some of the things they said really upset Edna sometimes. People who had just had the glorious experience of childbirth, who had had love affairs and weddings first the way people ought to, they shouldn’t talk dirty like the mothers did. But at least you could understand them, not like those people in Sister’s office.

But even though she couldn’t really understand them properly, she picked up some things from what they said as she poured out their coffee and carried plates of biscuits from one to the other. Computers, for example. What had computers got to do with a baby with a perfect Agpar score and a mother like the one in room eleven?

And, drying the last coffee cup, Edna thought about the mother again, because she was the one that really bothered her most.

A pretty girl, with black hair and blue eyes with long black curly eyelashes—“Blue eyes put in with a smutty finger”—like the girl in the story about the governess who got mixed up with a gang of kidnapers. But not like her otherwise. The governess had feelings and felt them all the time. But this new mother who ought to be having feelings a lot, she just sat in bed reading, and when Edna had said to her this morning while she was dusting her locker, “How’s your little baby? What are you calling him?” she had just looked at her blankly over her book and had shrugged her shoulders and said nothing.

And she wasn’t feeding, that was another thing. Every mother in the Unit had to feed her baby, even if she was going to have it adopted. It was a rule, and in eleven years the only time it had been broken was for mothers from the TB Unit, and there had only been two of them. This bothered Edna a lot. That poor baby! Where was he, and what were they doing about feeding him? It was all wrong! And if Edna knew it, wasn’t Edna the person to do something about it?

When she went off duty at seven, she had solved her dilemma. She had a problem, and people who had problems wrote to magazines for help—that was what they were for. She would write to Margaret English, the one who gave her Warm Wise Advice to the whole family. She’d tell her. She’d know what to do.

“What do you think of this one?” Brenda said and pushed the three sheets of scrawled paper across the desk to Mrs. Barber. “I’ve read it twice, and I don’t know. I thought at first it was just another nut gone overboard on the September serial—she goes on about babies being kidnaped and mothers being hypnotized, and that’s a straight lift from Part Three. But I don’t know. There’re some things she says … Agpar scores, I mean. What the hell is that? There was nothing about that in the serial.”

“We ran a piece on it a couple of years ago,” Mrs. Barber said. “Something to do with examining babies at birth.” She read swiftly and then read the letter again. And shook her head. She had been
one of the six letter answerers who added up to the mythical Margaret English for five years—longer than any of the others—and she had an enviable nose for a crank. If anyone could spot a phony or a weird one it was Mrs. Barber.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “She certainly believes it—I mean, that a baby’s been kidnaped and the rest of it—but she seems to think the whole hospital staff are in on the plot. That’s really off. But she seems to belong to the place. Lives there. I don’t know. We could follow it up, I suppose—if there is something in it—we don’t want another Nottingham.”

Brenda grimaced. Indeed they didn’t. It would be a long time before they would forget the man who had written saying he’d kill his wife, and they had written back soothingly, and then he had.

She took the letter back and read it again and then sighed. “I suppose we should. Police? Or what?”

Mrs. Barber shook her head. “Keep it in the family. Ring the Dr. Hunter page. They’ve got that chap—what’s his name?—Dennis, David Dennis. He’s a good researcher, always going round the hospitals, and he’ll find out what’s going on there. If it does turn out she’s a nut case—well, we’ll know what to do about it. But get Dennis to find out what he can, just in case.”

So Brenda rang the Dr. Hunter page and spoke to David Dennis. And when he heard that the hospital in question was the Sillick Memorial, and that the letter had mentioned Dr. George Briant, he rang Mike on the
Echo
because Mike had said something at the last meeting of the Chapel about him. That he was a geneticist onto something that might be worth following up—if it ever came off. Mike might be interested.

Mike was.