The narrator, the short story’s unnamed protagonist, begins the narrative by describing her first day at her new job as a hospital cleaner. As she goes about her first cleaning tasks, she is surprised by the “glazed and unhurried” way in which her coworkers navigate their own cleaning routines, noting that she, by contrast, is youthful, energetic, and eager to impress. After finishing her first assignments early, the narrator goes to ask her supervisor, Marie, for something else to do. Marie, who has been relaxing in the storeroom, assigns her to clean out the hospital’s ash bins, a disgusting task that the narrator thinks is Marie’s way of taking “revenge” on her for “working too briskly.”
The narrator describes one of her coworkers, Dot, as a shy, helpful woman with a beehive hairdo. While cleaning the patients’ rooms, the narrator meets an elderly veteran named Mr. Moreton. He asks her to take the money from his drawer and buy him a pack of cigarettes, a request which the hospital’s matron has forbidden her to comply with. The narrator denies his request, a decision that she will repeat on a daily basis as Mr. Moreton continues to beg her for cigarettes. Despite the narrator’s refusal, the two begin developing a friendship. One day, after witnessing the narrator chatting with Mr. Moreton, a nurse pulls her aside to tell her that she should not “fraternise” with the patients, especially if she is a cleaner. The narrator apologizes and continues her work, moving next to the area of the hospital dedicated to elective surgeries. She considers that, like the recovering elective surgery patients, she is “filling in [her] own allotment of time” at the hospital, but she will be on her way to Europe when she finally leaves.
At work one day, Dot—who sells household products, cosmetics, and jewelry from a catalogue as a side business—hands the narrator a catalogue and an order form “as if it’s already a done deal.” The narrator knows that Dot’s husband, Len, doubts that she will ever succeed as a saleswoman or achieve the catalogue company’s “Christmas gift bonus.” Speaking of Christmas, the narrator has accepted Tony’s offer to go to the office Christmas party with him because she was affected by the way he kindly comforted the insecure “nose job girls” as they emerged from surgery.
Mr. Moreton tells the narrator that he’s been given “a few weeks or a month or two” to live, and that his family will be coming to visit him soon. When the narrator apologizes again for not bringing him a cigarette, explaining that getting fired would prevent her from traveling to Europe, Mr. Moreton is understanding and remarks that she doesn’t seem like the type of person to spend a lifetime working at the hospital. When Mr. Moreton makes a comment about his approaching death, the narrator takes his hand, and Marie suddenly appears at the door. Marie furiously scolds the narrator for “lingering” in Mr. Moreton’s room, and appears even angrier for the fact that the matron sought her out to tell her about it. Marie then punishes her by demanding that she clean the bathroom in the wing of the hospital that is slated to be demolished that week. The narrator tries to concentrate on the fact that she will be leaving at the end of the summer.
Later, Dot and Noeleen talk about Dot’s catalogue products and refer to the narrator as “the scholar.” They began using the nickname after Dot saw the narrator reading a book at the bus stop. The narrator finds the nickname annoying, but says that she changed her mind when she saw the poor condition of Dot’s purse, and the careful way that the women handled change when Noeleen bought a product from Dot’s catalogue. Taking the catalogue, the narrator orders enough items for Noeleen to achieve the Christmas gift bonus as well as the “Gold Seller” stickpin. The amount she spends will cost her two days’ work at the hospital. She is looking forward to seeing the expression on Len’s face when he finds out about Dot’s achievement, but he proudly congratulates her instead, making the narrator realize that she made unfair assumptions about him.
Mr. Moreton tells the narrator that his daughter is visiting him tomorrow, and that she wouldn’t be coming unless he was about to die soon. The next day, the narrator arrives at work early and sneaks into Mr. Moreton’s room. She then takes him to the bathroom in the wing that she has just cleaned and lets him take a bath. Mr. Moreton enjoys the experience immensely. When the narrator takes him back to his room, his visible change in behavior, and the “recklessness” in voice in particular, motivates her to wheel him out of the hospital and give him a cigarette from her purse. He relishes the cigarette and enjoys the warm morning air. Watching him, the narrator remarks that he looks handsome, and thinks to herself that he looks like a different person entirely.
They hear the propped-open exit door close behind them, and the narrator imagines a plane to London taking off without her. Mr. Moreton realizes aloud that the narrator will lose her job, but the narrator responds that she “couldn’t care less about the job,” and that she will travel to Europe another time. The narrator and Mr. Moreton steel themselves as they move toward the entrance of the hospital. Mr. Moreton begins humming, then laughing, and then coughing. The narrator holds his hand until his coughing fit is over, and they begin moving forward again, laughing all the while. The narrator imagines her coworkers going about their routines without her, Marie making comments about her absence, and the matron waiting ominously for her at the nurse’s station. But she calls her entrance with Mr. Moreton “a perfect moment,” and says that they both contentedly believed that the path ahead of them “[would] stretch on forever.”
