Homecomings by C.P. Snow

THROUGH the underground corridor of the hospital, which smelt of brick dust and disinfectant, Margaret and I were finding our way to Geoffrey's office. Along the passage, whose walls, as bare as those of a tube railway, carried uncovered water-pipes, went mothers with children. At a kind of junction or open space sat a group of women, their children in pushchairs, as though expecting nothing, waiting endlessly, just left there, children not specially ill, their fate not specially tragic, waiting with the resignation that made hospitals seem like forgotten railway stations littered with the poor and unlucky camping out for the weekly train. Nurses, their faces high-coloured and opaque, moved past them with strong, heavy-thighed steps as though they did not exist.

When at last we saw a notice, turned down a subsidiary passage and reached the office, which was still underground, Geoffrey's secretary told us that he was with the child, that he had been giving him his sixth injection. That if we liked, we could wait in the doctor's room until he returned. Like the nurses in the corridor, she was a strong young woman, her face comely and composed with minor power. When she spoke to us it was in a tone which was brisk and well ordered, but which held an undertone of blame, as though we were obscurely responsible for our ill fortune. It was the tone which is not far distant from most of us, when we have to witness suffering and address it, as though when the veils of good nature were off we believed that the suffering were merely culpable, and suffering a sin.