Green for Danger by Christianna Brand Page A

to him about his operation while you prepare him for it, or he’ll start refusing to have it done or something. By the way, I believe the police rang up to inquire for his wife; if she comes, you’d better let her sit with him before he goes up to the theatre.”
    â€œYes, Sister.”
    â€œAnd you’d better go up with him, Sanson, and stay there and bring him back. By the way, there’s that duodenal being done before him. Would you like to watch it? Have you seen any abdominals?”
    â€œWell, no I haven’t, Sister. I would like to see it, if I could.”
    â€œYes, all right, then. The other two can manage in here for an hour or so. You can take Higgins up early. It’ll keep him from lying here upsetting the others by getting nervy and also get rid of the wife if she turns out to be trying.”
    Mrs. Higgins turned out to be very trying. She objected to being sent out to the bunk while Barnes came round with his stethoscope, checking up on the patients due for anæsthetic that day; and again while Gervase Eden made a second examination and sat for a little while talking to her husband at his bedside. At nine-thirty, by which time, in a hospital ward, the day seems well advanced, Esther transferred the old man to a trolley with the help of an orderly, and pushed him out of the ward and across the great, circular hall towards the theatre.
    2
    The modern operating-theatre is no longer a dazzling white, trying to the surgeon’s eyes and inclined to tricky shadows, but a restful, rather dark green. The theatre at Heron’s Park was a large, square, green-tiled room, with glass cabinets and shelves of metal sterilising drums ranged round its walls; the table was in the centre, under a huge, circular metal lamp, lined with innumerable mirrors so angled that the surgeon’s hands cast no shadow across his work. The table itself was of light, strong metal, white-enamelled and hinged at either end; it stood on a thick, central pedestal so that no legs or cross bars should get in the surgeon’s way, and was fitted with pedals and handscrews for raising or lowering the whole or either end. It was covered with a thick pad of sorbo rubber, wrapped in a linen sheet. The stretcher was placed over this, and steel supports removed, leaving the patient still lying on the canvas of the stretcher, so that as little lifting as possible need be done after operation. To the patient’s right were two small trolleys, presided over by the theatre sister, one with a selection of instruments appropriate to the operation on hand; the other with open troughs of knives and scissors, needles and catgut and swabs. To the left of the table was a tray on a single tall leg so that it could be pulled across the patient’s body, to receive the instruments used or still in use; a basin of antiseptic stood ready for rinsing the hands, and a couple of buckets to receive the blood-stained swabs. In a corner of the theatre, a red rubber sheet was spread out on the floor, where the swabs could be counted over and checked and rechecked with a slate hanging on the wall over the sterilising drums from which the swabs were taken. The temperature of the room was kept very high by means of radiators hidden in the walls, and over all was the strong, sweet, sickly smell of ether.
    Barney was sitting at the head of the table getting the first patient under, when Esther arrived wheeling Higgins. His trolley stood to his left, a sturdy metal affair with the big iron cylinders of gas and oxygen strapped to one side of it, the water in the glass jar, through which the anæsthetic must pass on its way to the patient, bubbling merrily away at the top. A thick red rubber balloon, in a black net bag, inflated and deflated regularly with the patient’s respirations.
    Higgins had had his pre-operative injection of morphia and atropine in the ward, and was feeling drowsy and more or less at ease. “You’ll have