Quiet Hours

On the cardiology ward of St Bride’s Hospital, the hours between two and five in the morning had a character of their own. The corridors were dimly lit, the machines hummed and beeped at a lower volume, and the patients, mostly elderly, slept the heavy, uneasy sleep of people far from home. For Tamsin Reyes, who had been a nurse for just under a year, these were the hours she both dreaded and secretly loved.

The patient in bed fourteen was called Mr Albert Fenn. He was eighty-three, recovering from a heart attack, and he suffered from chronic insomnia. Every night, at almost exactly three o’clock, his call bell would light up at the nurses’ station.

The first time, Tamsin hurried to his bedside expecting chest pain. Instead, she found him sitting up, perfectly calm, with his reading glasses on his nose.

“I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong. I just wondered whether you might know what the time is in Buenos Aires.”

She stared at him. “I’m sorry?”

“My granddaughter lives there. I like to imagine what she’s doing.” He smiled apologetically. “It’s the only time of night I can’t bear my own company.”

Tamsin had six other patients and a pile of paperwork. She should have reassured him, dimmed the light and left. Instead, she worked out that it was midnight in Buenos Aires, and she sat down on the edge of the plastic chair beside his bed, just for a minute.

The minute became twenty. The following night, it became forty.

It became a routine: the bell at three, a cup of tea she was not strictly supposed to make him, and a conversation conducted in whispers so as not to wake the other men in the bay. Albert had been an engineer who built bridges in four continents. He had been married for fifty-one years to a woman called Joan, who had died two years earlier. He had opinions about everything, from cricket to quantum physics, and he was the first person in months who asked Tamsin questions about herself and actually waited for the answers.

She found herself telling him things she hadn’t told anyone. That she was exhausted in a way sleep didn’t fix. That she was beginning to wonder whether she had chosen the wrong career. That she had cried in the staff toilets twice that month, after shifts where there had been too many patients and not enough nurses, and she had gone home feeling that she had done everything badly.

Albert listened without interrupting, which was rarer than she had realised.

“Do you know what Joan used to say?” he said one night. “That the people who worry about doing a job badly are almost never the ones doing it badly. It’s the others you have to watch.”

In return, he was candid with her in a way that sometimes startled her. He talked about death without any sentimentality, as a practical matter, like the maintenance of a bridge. He talked about his regrets: the years he had spent abroad while his children were growing up, a falling-out with his son that had lasted a decade and been resolved, he said, “about five years too late”. He admitted that he was frightened, not of dying, but of becoming dependent and vulnerable, of being “a problem to be managed”.

“You’re not a problem,” Tamsin said.

“I ring a bell at three in the morning to ask about Argentina,” he said dryly. “I’m a delightful problem, but a problem nonetheless.”

There were rules, of course, about professional boundaries, and Tamsin was aware that she was bending them. Her ward manager, a brisk woman called Sister Okafor, noticed the cups of tea. She called Tamsin into her office one morning, and Tamsin prepared herself for a warning.

“Mr Fenn’s blood pressure has been better at night since you started sitting with him,” Sister Okafor said instead. “His sleep is improving. That’s not nothing.” She paused. “Just make sure you’re also looking after yourself. You can’t pour from an empty cup, as the posters say. Irritatingly, the posters are right.”

After five weeks, Albert was well enough to be discharged. His son came to collect him. On his last night, the bell rang at three, as usual, and Tamsin brought two cups of tea.

“I’ve been thinking,” Albert said, “about your crisis of vocation.”

She laughed. “Is that what it is?”

“It’s what Joan would have called it. She was a nurse too, you know. Forty years.” He hadn’t told her that before. “She nearly gave up in her first year. She told me that what kept her going was one patient who made her feel she was more than a pair of hands.” He looked at her over his glasses. “I’m not suggesting I’m anyone’s reason for anything. But I think you’re a good nurse, Tamsin, and I think you’d regret leaving.”

A month later, a postcard arrived at the ward, addressed to “the night nurse with the tea”. On the front was a picture of Buenos Aires. On the back, in shaky handwriting, Albert had written: “Sleeping a little better. It’s 3 a.m. here and I’m thinking of you all. Don’t you dare give up.”

Tamsin pinned it on the staff room noticeboard. It’s still there, slightly faded now, next to a poster about empty cups.