She Is Upset in Her Feelings

Just after supper yesterday evening, Nurse Baxter came knocking on my study door. I was in the habit of taking a cup of cocoa before retiring and assumed this was Cook come calling, with her usual bedtime tray. I was not expecting Nurse Baxter. No one ever expects Nurse Baxter. She is the sort of woman who always comes upon you suddenly like an unexpected shower. You never quite get time to brace yourself. In she came like a localised earthquake and planted herself upon my sofa. She did not wait to be invited but helped herself to one of the chocolate digestives I take with my cocoa and launched into her spiel. “It’s about Patricia,” she announced with a flourish, “Patricia Werthley. I’m frightfully worried about the girl.” I neither spoke, nor made any attempt to speak, knowing full well that Nurse Baxter would need no encouragement to continue. And continue she did. Patricia Werthley was not herself; she hadn’t been all week. There’d been tears during her trigonometry paper and further tears during dinner. Right this instant, she was up in the senior girls’ dormitory, sobbing into one of Nurse Baxter’s own monogramed hankies. Nurse Baxter did not know what to do. She paused here. I wondered if she might be finished and made the mistake of reaching for a chocolate digestive. This slight, and rather pedestrian movement was enough to tip her into the next sad chapter in the affair of Patricia Werthley. Nurse Baxter had tried everything on the girl. She’d examined her head to toe and could find no physical fault. She’d prescribed aspirin, cod liver oil, a cold shower, a brisk walk and a generous dose of Epsom’s liver salts, none of which had made the blindest bit of difference. Despite her best and most valiant attempts, Patricia Werthley continued to be not-quite-right and Nurse Baxter did not know what to do about it. She sat back on the sofa and folded her arms across her ample lap. I could see she was finished, though I didn’t dare make any further assault on the digestives. Any sudden movement was liable to set her off again. I’d been at St Brigid’s long enough to have endured several of these episodes. Thankfully, they weren’t common. Mostly, the girls were sensible enough to keep their private issues to themselves, or where a confidante proved absolutely essential, approach one of the other female staff members; someone with a modicum of sense. Those poor girls who came knocking on the infirmary door, might have been better served flushing their own troubled heads down the lavatory for all the assistance they got from Nurse Baxter. I’d have let the woman go, if it was up to me. But the Board weren’t to be moved on the matter. Nurse Baxter was part of the furniture, here at St Brigid’s. I stared at her from the other side of the coffee table. It was only six weeks since we’d had our last little conversation. “Is it like Emily Reeves?” I asked. Nurse Baxter blushed, but nodded, yes, in her opinion, it was very much like poor Emily Reeves. “What exactly did Patricia Werthley say was wrong with her?” I asked, fearing the worst, though still holding out hope for something simple and easily dealt with, a toothache ideally, or a bowel complaint. “She said,” whispered Nurse Baxter, “that she is upset in her feelings. I don’t understand. There’s nothing wrong with the girl. How can she be in such a state, when there’s nothing physically wrong with her?” I looked at Nurse Baxter. She was a damn sight better put together than when she first arrived -I daresay the other ladies on staff had had a hand in this- but there was still something rather thrown together about Nurse Baxter. Looking at her, you might have guessed she’d had brothers, nine of them, and a dead mother and a father who farmed pigs in the middle of nowhere and took no interest in his only daughter. I reminded myself, for the umpteenth time, that none of this was Nurse Baxter’s fault. She was a victim of her own circumstances, incapable of understanding what Patricia Werthley was going through. I took a deep breath and offered Nurse Baxter the packet of digestives. “Now,” I began, “we’ve talked about this before Nurse. People can be hurt in lots of different ways. You’re well-used to physical pains and ailments. It is also possible to have one’s feelings hurt. This can feel like a form of pain.” Nurse Baxter sat there, cramming the digestives into her one after another. She watched me, open-eyed like I was a television programme or some such novelty; like she was hearing all this for the very first time. 

Inspired by a line from Agatha Christie’s 1942 novel, The Moving Finger