Читать книгу Dr. Morelle at Midnight - Ernest Dudley - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

The atmosphere of the operating-theatre was decidedly warm. A gleam of white walls, the glitter of bottles and winking instruments, even the autoclaves and washbasin taps seemed to pick up the brilliance of the green-white light.

A team of people stood round the operating-table under the intense heat of the 500-watt lamp. The table was draped with a green cloth. The patient was entirely covered in green towels. Except for the head. They called it the working area because the chief was operating on the brain. Green-robed, wearing white rubber boots, green cap, white gauze breathing-mask like everyone else in the theatre, he went skilfully to work.

On either side of the operating-table near the patient’s head were instrument trolleys. These too were draped in green. Over the patient’s head, on a high table, scalpels and scissors winked in the brilliant lights.

The pretty brunette student staring down from the crowded, glass-enclosed students’ gallery into the operating-theatre wondered inconsequently who the patient was. He could be a murderer, for all we know, she thought.

The surgeon’s hand flickered. Instantly the senior dresser passed him the correct instrument. No word spoken. The silent language of hand signals.

The operation was at a critical stage. Lifting his eyes, one of the green-garbed figures glanced up and gazed round the theatre, he alone appeared detached, an observer. The pretty brunette whose attention had been oddly attracted by the tall figure before, perhaps because everyone else was vitally concerned with the operation, wondered who he was. She knew the short, dumpy man next to him. He was Sir Trevor Kirkland, the famous neurologist; it looked as if the other was there by Sir Trevor’s invitation to see the Swiss surgeon’s new method of trepanning. The registrar, the house-surgeon, the theatre sister, the anaesthetist, staff nurse, ward nurse, a team to back up the chief, a team with the most important job in the world, these she knew by sight.

A nurse passed that tall, detached figure carrying swabs. Green swabs, each with a fine metal line running through it, so that if by any ill chance one got left behind inside the patient, X-rays would soon pick it up. She began counting them, reported them all correct. She was concerned with nothing else. Just swabs.

Another nurse put used instruments back into the sterilizer.

There was a slight sound as the anaesthetist moved. He and his assistant sat at the foot of the patient, completely cut off from their colleagues behind the screen formed by the draped instrument trolleys set on either side and over the patient. While the other members of the team concentrated on the operation these two men were the sentinels of the patient’s life. They watched the black oval-shaped ball attached to the anaesthetic mask as it inflated and deflated in time to the patient’s breathing. At regular intervals they took the blood-pressure and checked the pulse.

The brunette student saw the tall man next to Kirkland return his gaze to the patient’s head. At the beginning of the operation the chief had scratched an outline on the shaven scalp to mark out the area where he was to operate. He had cut into the layers of skin which comprise the scalp. At this stage he had made brief, terse observations to the students who, robed and masked, were in the theatre.

He had drilled a hole in the skull itself to enable him to insert a very fine little saw. With this he cut away the bone. A delicate moment this, the outer layers of the skull are very hard, but the inner parts are spongy. To cut through them calls for extreme skill. Yet the chief, with his muscular hands and spatulate fingers had referred earlier in his strong accent and with macabre humour to this part of his work as carpentry.

The white walls of the operating-theatre were high and their shining cleanliness made them look even more bare than they were. On one side ran the row of wash-basins and taps, opposite were shelves which held large bottles of medicaments and beneath them stood trolleys on which were autoclaves, steel instrument-holders.

Everyone sensed a sudden rise of tension in the quiet, starkly clean operating-theatre. There was no hasty movement, just a slight contraction of the chief’s beetling eyebrows. The critical moment had been reached. The brain had been lifted from its cavity on tapes. Now the chief had to cut away the area which was to be removed.

Almost suddenly the movements of the black ball slowed down, nearly ceased. The chief knew nothing of the patient’s relapse. The anaesthetist knew. Knew the patient’s life depended now on his own skill, and the chief’s. He began pressing the black ball. In, out. His assistant checked the pulse.

The chief was warned of the patient’s condition. He gave no sign that anything was amiss. He signalled for an instrument. The senior dresser passed it, picking it from the tray prepared by the theatre-sister before the operation began. The chief began to cut. The theatre-sister was commenting to herself with professional pride that the chief, although she had never worked with him before, had not so far deviated from her arrangement of the layout of the instruments as she’d judged he’d need them.

The tall figure with the strange air of distinction about him heard the anaesthetist speak briefly to his assistant. Drugs were to be injected to sustain the patient. Slowly the black ball, which seconds before had hung like a symbol of death itself, began to move. Automatically. The breathing gradually strengthened. The patient’s blood-pressure was taken. It was normal. So was his pulse.

As if he knew that the present climax had been safely passed, the tall man allowed his gaze once more to leave the operating-table. His dark, hooded eyes travelled slowly round the theatre again, seeking perhaps some relief from the impersonal, almost inhuman skill of the chief.

The brunette up in the students’ gallery wondered when she would be down there as a dresser. Three of the dressers working on this op were fourth-year students. Now she saw a staring-eyed nurse gazing fixedly at the chief’s hands. Her own looked as if they were trembling. It looked like her first big operation. After this time it would never be so bad again.

Behind the glass windows of the gallery, high above the theatre floor, packed with the staring faces of students, the brunette turned to another, a man student beside her, and whispered. She had asked him if he knew who the tall figure was, he looked like someone important, didn’t he agree? There was a quick nod, then both turned their eyes back to the operating-table. The nurse was still counting swabs.

The black ball moved regularly. The operation had been in progress for four hours.

As the chief worked, the tall man noticed how the joints on his powerful wrists stood out, even under the rubber gloves. How much controlled power was there, he reflected. The part in the cavity of the head to be removed was cut away. The brain, held gently, firmly on the tapes was replaced. How strange, the brain, the tall figure ruminated. Such a delicate, wonderful piece of mechanism, so easily damaged. Yet in itself not aware of touch, only of heat.

The brunette saw the tall man press the sponge-band round his brow, tied there to absorb sweat, and while she guessed what it must be like to work in a temperature of over seventy degrees, which it had to be, she thought that the tall figure had a strangely attractive air about him, even behind the robe and mask.

It was nearly over. The anaesthetist leaned back in his chair. He grinned up at his assistant. ‘He’s all right, now,’ he said, in a whisper, ‘But there’ll be no keeping this one under while the chief nips out for coffee.’ He smiled at the recollection. Nobody ever believed him. But it was true. He’d held a patient under while the chief surgeon, who had been operating for eight hours, went to get a quick cup of coffee. Then the chief returned, to resume the operation, which lasted another four hours.

The trembling ward nurse had crept closer. She took a long, steady look. Then her eyes caught those of the tall figure and she saw a glint of humour in them, as if he knew that she would feel different now, she wasn’t likely to pass out now. She was over the worst. She would advance one step along the road of cool, unemotional efficiency which is the nurse’s stock-in-trade.

The chief replaced the part of the skull which had been removed, then stitched back the scalp.

There was a moment of relaxed stillness. Then the chief stepped back from the table. He began to take off his rubber gloves. Turning to the students he elaborated several of the points he had made during the operation. While he talked the patient was wheeled out of the theatre. Back to the ward. Back to life.

In the students’ gallery there was the unheard movement as students got up, stretched cramped limbs and began to discuss notes. The brunette student turned away from the man who had been beside her, to watch the tall figure pull down his gauze breathing-mask and take a deep unrestricted breath. For some odd reason a thrill ran through her as she saw that he looked even more attractive than she had pictured he might be. It was a pale, aquiline face with a sardonically curved mouth above the strong chin. She wondered who he was. She asked the man next to her, and he said he thought he’d seen the face before, but couldn’t place it. The girl saw the short man whom she knew to be Sir Trevor Kirkland turn to the tall man and speak to him. She wished she could hear what he said.

‘Don’t know about you, Dr. Morelle, but I could use some coffee,’ Kirkland was saying. Dr. Morelle nodded and they went out of the operating-theatre and turned along the corridor in the direction of Sir Trevor Kirkland’s office. In the office the neurologist seemed a different man. Divested of the white boots, long green gown, white linen trousers, and seen in his normal tweeds, he looked almost homely. His once-sandy hair was sparse, his eyebrows, also sandy, were bushy. They hid keen eyes that sparkled with intelligence. The lines of his face were heavy and he was fresh-complexioned. He produced an old pipe from his pocket and began to fill it from a tobacco-tin on the mantel-piece.

A nurse brought coffee and he stirred his quickly, his pudgy fingers, a gardener’s fingers, handling the spoon as delicately as if it was an artery forceps. He waved his hand at the nurse to take away the robe and trousers, boots and masks he and Dr. Morelle had discarded.

Dr. Morelle wore a dark grey worsted single-breasted suit and a dark bow tie; an inch of silk shirt cuff showed at his sleeves.

Kirkland indicated the bowl of roses that stood on the table. ‘Aren’t they fine? Cut them myself this morning, before I left home. Yesterday morning, I should say,’ he glanced at his watch, which showed one-thirty a.m. ‘It’s a good year for roses. Mine have never been better.’ He waved his spoon in the direction of the operation-theatre. ‘What did you think of it?’

‘The new techniques he demonstrated were remarkably impressive.’ Dr. Morelle said.

The other nodded enthusiastically and plunged into a technical résumé of what had transpired on the operation-table, ending up by asking Dr. Morelle if he would like to join him in a discussion with the surgeon himself. But Dr. Morelle declined politely, explaining that he was leaving early for the South of France.

‘I heard you were going,’ Kirkland said. He opened the hand-finished silver cigarette-box on his desk and offered it to Dr. Morelle.

‘I will smoke my own, if you don’t mind.’ And Dr. Morelle took out and lit a Le Sphinx. Smoke curled up as the two men talked. Sir Trevor questioned Dr. Morelle about his forthcoming trip. He expressed envy that Dr. Morelle should have had a villa in Monte Carlo lent to him so opportunely.

Dr. Morelle nodded. ‘It is fortunate. I was beginning to find it difficult to obtain the peace I need, in London. Like you, I suffer from too many consultations.’

‘I thought the famous Miss Frayle guarded your privacy,’ the other said humorously.

A faint frown contracted Dr. Morelle’s eyebrows. He said coldly, ‘Miss Frayle left my employ some time ago. She wished to widen her experience and education. She is studying at the Sorbonne.’

‘Miss Frayle in Paris, eh? Is she enjoying it?’

‘I believe so.’ Dr. Morelle turned away. He appeared to be studying the roses in the bowl. Then Kirkland saw his glance drift to the clock on the office wall and he made a movement towards the door. ‘Must you go? I hoped you might have time for a talk with his nibs.’

‘I’m afraid not,’ Dr. Morelle said. ‘I have to pack for the plane.’

The two men walked to the door. As Dr. Morelle went off down the corridor, Sir Trevor called after him, wishing him a comfortable trip, but Dr. Morelle didn’t seem to hear him. He didn’t turn back.