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mind hurrying,' he had the cheek to add as he entered the ward, leaving Anna to stop off at the office to pick up the notes and to get rid of May Fenn, who was hanging about by the desk.
    'Later, May,' she said, as the girl asked her what 'anastomosis' was, please, and did it mean joining up ends?
    Simon was waiting, arms folded, at Mrs Cole's bedside. At little more than twenty-four hours post-op she thought she should be helped out of bed, and kept on and on about it. She had had an ovarian tumour removed as big as a full-term baby. She had a large wound and a lot of stitches, and she was eighty-one years old. Simon didn't want her mobilised for another full day.
    'Tomorrow, maybe,' he was telling her as Anna caught up with him. 'You'd find it very uncomfortable moving about today.'
    'Painful, you mean... Oh, I don't mind that; I can put up with pain. What I don't want is to drop dead from a clot, long before my time.' She had thick grey hair, which the pillows had pushed up in a bush all over her head—this and her eyes, bright with fever, made her look fighting fierce.
    'We won't let that happen, Mrs Cole.' Simon was gentle with her. 'You'll have breathing exercises this morning from Miss Gunne, our physio. She's a dab hand at preventing clots. Meantime, I'd like you to rest.'
    'I hope she won't be long.'
    'She won't,' Simon promised, as they left her bed. 'Well, there's a first time for everything,' he remarked at the ward desk, 'but I don't think I've ever before known a patient so anxious to be up and about.'
    'Certainly not at such an early stage,' Anna agreed, glancing back at Mrs Cole, who, with her head stuck rigidly forward, was anxiously watching the doors. 'Strictly speaking,' she added, 'she should have gone into Geriatrics.'
    'I prefer to have her here,' was Simon's reply, and Anna said no more.
    The two hysterectomy patients were checked and their discharges agreed for that afternoon, which delighted both ladies who made for the pay-phone to telephone their families.
    Jill Pearson, the perinotomy patient, was a young woman of nineteen who had recently moved in with her boyfriend and was encountering sexual difficulties, due to a narrow introitus. Simon had performed a midline episiotomy long enough to provide an adequate vaginal orifice.
    She had soluble stitches in place, which were giving her pain on movement. 'We'll keep you in another day, Jill,' Simon explained, 'then you can go home, and as each day passes the discomfort will grow less. Once it has completely gone, in about two to three weeks, recommence intercourse to prevent the new opening shrinking down.'
    'All right.' She looked faintly embarrassed, and wisely Simon said no more beyond assuring her that many young women had the same trouble as she.
    'Otherwise we'll be having her thinking she's a freak,' he said to Anna at the doors, then hurried away to a meeting with one of the paediatric team.
    The consultant paediatrician, Paul Gee, was the doctor who had pronounced Baby Payne fit and well, and sanctioned his release to foster-parents ten days ago. His mother and grandmother never came back to the hospital to see him. 'They've washed the poor little kid right out of their lives,' Rose said as she folded up his blankets with a murderous look in her eye.
    By lunchtime, when Mrs Cole had made two near-successful attempts to get out of bed, Anna decided that cot-sides were the only sensible step. It was difficult, if not impossible, to watch her all the time—especially as they were one nurse short, due to Janice Hall having left.
    Nurse Cheng was sent to get the cot-sides out of Stores. 'But don't bring them in until I've had a word with Mrs Cole,' Anna told her, putting down her pen and going to sit by the old lady's bed. 'Mrs Cole, we feel your bed is a little on the narrow side,' she began, 'and, in case you fall out when you're asleep, we thought we'd put some rails up—little chromium bars, like pipes, which will keep you perfectly