It showed itself in the appearance of the staff, in carefully polished shoes and unusually neat uniforms, in scuttling hurry as they moved about the morning’s work. The more junior the member of the staff, the more apparent was the uneasiness. The porter in the Main Hall carefully Sellotaping a newly written list of ward telephone numbers to the scarred wooden desk under the enquiry window; the first year nurses stacking bowls and bedpans in the sluices so that the cleanest were on top of the pile; even the scrubbing women in the corridors; all reflected an edged anxiety. In the sisters’ dining room, the four tables were already being cleared, the floor was being swept and the sideboard laid for the midmorning lunch break. None of the sisters, not even Ruth Arthur, lingered over second and third cups of tea this morning. They went to their wards on the dot of eight, none of them making any comment about their unwonted earliness as they followed Dolly East, always the first to go, from their dark little dining room on the first floor.
