My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (22 page)

Chapter Twenty-Three

Sidcup and France, winter 1917–July 1918

Nadine appeared again at the hospital the next day, her shirt ironed, her eyes puffy, her demeanour unnaturally calm. Sister was called. Rose stood by, watchful.

‘May I see him?’ Nadine asked, courteously, very controlled.

‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ said Sister.

Nadine swallowed. Every movement was an effort. It looked to Rose as if she were having to remind herself to breathe.

‘I am a nursing VAD of two years’ experience in surgical as well as medical wards. May I make an appointment with Matron to ask permission to apply for a transfer here?’ she said formally, but her voice was shaking.

‘No, my dear, no,’ said Sister. ‘Under the circumstances.’

Nadine nodded as if she had expected it.

‘Then may I beg you to do everything you can and . . .’ She nearly lost her self-control then. Turning to Rose, she said: ‘May I ask you, please, to write to me? To let me know?’

Rose glanced at Sister. Sister raised her eyebrows, gave a tiny sigh and nodded.

‘Yes,’ said Rose. ‘If you send your address.’

‘I’m going to France,’ said Nadine, delicately. ‘As soon as I can get a place. I’ll send . . . yes. Thank you,’ she said. ‘Tell him – oh. No. Thank you. Goodbye.’

As she turned away her movements were as stiff as a doll’s.

*

‘Well, it worked,’ said Rose. ‘She believed you. She’s going to France.’

His eyes flashed up.

‘Of course she is,’ Rose said cruelly. ‘She’s not some namby-pamby creature who can’t face up to things. Anyway, she has nothing to live for now. She wants to die. Like you.’

Riley stared.

*

A woman came, very blue-eyed, to make a plaster cast of the new gaping face: the gaping face mark two. It was healing well. Everything was going well. Gillies would use the cast to consider and practise the size and shape and position of the flaps of flesh, which he would wrap around the new chin.

They did the cast in Tonks’s studio. She and Tonks knew each other from London. He had been her teacher at the Slade, years before. They chatted about art and who was doing what and people they knew. The names trickled before Riley like reflected shadows of sunlight and water on a ceiling, or the underside of a bridge, iridescent glimpses of long ago. Ricketts and Shannon, John Tweed, Gladys, Jimmie, Isadora. The woman, he gathered, had known Rodin – had studied with him in Paris before . . . before. He would have liked to ask about him. He wondered who else she had known. Who she knew. She clearly was not, like him, in the past tense.

Riley stood before them with shirt off and all his wound on display. The bottom of his face hung open, unimpeded, scraps of healed skin hanging loose like pastry waiting to be arranged across the top of a pie. His saliva was in a state of chaos, and he could not always feel when he needed mopping. What should be wet was dry; what should be dry was wet. He had not spoken in five months.

She was very gentle with him.

‘You look like a broken statue,’ she said. ‘Some young god lying around at the Acropolis. Touch my arm if anything is uncomfortable.’

She painted his face with something. Put a little card tube up each nostril, carefully. His splints had been removed for the occasion and he couldn’t lie back, so the tubes kept falling out.

She smiled. It was a bit ridiculous. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘Francis Derwent Wood, the painter, is making the most marvellous masks out of tin. They’re terribly realistic. It’s another option.’

Riley stood, utterly passive. He wondered if she’d met Van Gogh. He wondered if she understood what was going to be done to him. Every thought was a fucking blade through his heart.

He loved her. She was so kind to help him.

She poured the cold stuff over his face in dollops: wet and cold and heavy over his eyes and his cheeks and his nose and the rest of what he had, presumably, but he couldn’t really tell because his nerve endings were mashed to bits and his feelings were confused.

The plaster sucked at his face like mud. He felt buried alive.

*

There had been no problem about putting Nursing Member Waveney on the list to go to France. Though a great many of the wounded just drowned in the mudholes of Passchendaele, plenty were still coming through.

She had been sent in midwinter to Le Touquet, to the casino by the sea where Riley had lain with his shoulder wound. No one knew her. She knew no one. She did everything she knew how to do. It was surreal but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Not uncomfortable enough. She wanted worse. She was thin but she was tough. Given the choice, she took the night-shifts. Daylight upset her. Not that there was much of it. It was a wet, cold, dingy winter.

*

To start with, Rose did not write to her very often. A card: ‘Your friend is well; no date has been set yet for his next go of surgery.’

It was difficult for Rose. She had been so thrown by Nadine’s plea when she’d agreed to write that she hadn’t thought it through. Was she writing to tell the truth? Or to support Riley’s lie, that the wound was slight and he was going back to the front?

Nadine wrote back: ‘Thank you. We keep horribly busy here. You can imagine.’

*

When she was transferred to the massive metropolis that was Étaples, Nadine hid her face during the journey. She didn’t want to see the great tents, the blue sky, the sandhills, the spiky grass and the restless sea beyond, to the north, which was wrong, because sea should be to the south, like Brighton and Lyme Regis and the Riviera. She didn’t want to see the Chinese labourers putting up huts, the floods of nurses and wounded, the trains, the horses, the sick and frantic life. There were some trees. She didn’t want to see the trees. She didn’t want to see the Boulogne to Paris railway running by, a constant reminder that they were in the wrong place. The long huts were ugly, the green and red chintz curtains ridiculous. The ground vibrated constantly with the quiver of drumfire from the front. People all around collapsed with Étaplesitis, puking and crapping. Women were dismissed for running around with men who were not dismissed. Everything was as wrong as she felt. She was glad.

She took all the dirtiest jobs. She didn’t complain. She didn’t join in. She didn’t raise her head all winter. The girls with whom she shared the draughty tent and canvas bunks were half in the same mood as her, the other half respectful of it. They’d seen it before. They liked her, for the simple reason that her headlong misery made her take on all the worst jobs so they didn’t have to. They were grateful that she never held back when the gas cases came in, burnt and blistered and sticky, coughing up bits of grey lung. They were grateful, too, that she didn’t, like the rest of them, subvert her constant terror into constant nerve-jangling moans about chilblains or tiredness or the weather. They were grateful to her for not throwing hysterics about someone finishing the Bovril or the paltry soup before she had a cup.

She liked only one thing: the patients. The worse their condition, the more she liked them. She liked to sit by them late at night, helping them to move when they couldn’t breathe well, adjusting their limbs, scratching where they couldn’t reach, talking softly with them. Long, long nights, low lamplight, smells of petrol and Lysol, the roaring guns, far away, the golden glow in the distance. Night and work were her blankets. Best was when convoys came in at night: nights of the full moon or clear weather, when the hits would have been many and direct, and many, many boys would have been saved from the worst fate, survival. She liked meeting the ambulances as they roared and rattled in, careering out of the darkness, their lights off to be invisible to enemy planes, their girl drivers mad-eyed, stiff as wire, crazed with sleeplessness. She liked piling the boys out, the stretcher cases and the walkers, the screamers and the shakers, the blobs, the bleeding, the armless, the legless, Xs on their foreheads where they’d had their shot of morphine, all the characters of the grim tableau.

She knew now exactly what Riley had been talking about when he had said he didn’t exist. She knew now the hollow manic energy induced by living at crisis pitch all the time. It left you – well, it never left you: it
rendered
you brutalised, incapable, unthinking, unfeeling, scar tissue all over. No feeling at all. Wild. Everything was terribly remote and she was utterly impenetrable.

Such
marvellous
high spirits, as someone – who? Some bloody woman in a hat, in a coat, in a mud-encrusted limousine – had said. Some representative of something. Lady this. Princess that.

*

Another card: ‘His spirits are not the best but he has started reading, which must be good news. He got through A Tale of Two Cities in three days.’

Rose might not be able to tell the truth but she was not going to lie.

Replied: ‘He took A Tale of Two Cities with him when he first went out in 1914. I suppose he didn’t get round to reading it then. He used to enjoy R. L. Stevenson. I don’t suppose I would know what he would like now. How is Julia?’

Rose thought,
Sweet girl, to ask about Julia

*

She liked washing them, dressing their wounds, being gentle with them, as they would soon be out of this sick, sick world. She didn’t like to see them die, the shuddering, the sheet-plucking, the ever-shorter breaths – but she liked it when they were dead. After a while she stopped discouraging it. Death had a happy ending every time. Peace. She liked their poor corpses, safe on their way to a named and numbered grave among their friends, cosy within the system built and created for them. Not lying out there, in the dark, alone.

How lucky for their sweethearts
, she thought,
who will not have to deal with any messy aftermath, who will never have to know what ‘died of wounds’ means. Lucky girls, with just plain grief. Just simple, pure death, and a photo of a hero to weep over and be proud of. Because death was what it was all for, wasn’t it? All the bombs, the shells, the snipers, the aerial torpedoes, the submarine torpedoes, the liquid fire, the trench mortars, the artillery, the bayonets, the grenades, the chlorine gas, the mustard gas, the tanks, the planes for dropping bombs from the sky, the tunnelling and laying bombs under the ground . . . endless list . . . well, it is endless . . . all the things that were being invented – were being invented! That
men
were inventing, and women were making – all those things are for killing you. And if they don’t kill you they wound you, and when they wound you, you get patched up – by me! – and sent out again until they do kill you.

The other girls – the bored, the sex-mad, the curious, the sentimental, the power-seekers, the thrill-seekers, the poetry writers, the bovine, those who would do anything to get away from home, even the sanest, sweetest, densest, cleverest, best-adjusted girls, long coats and jerseys, cup-of-tea-and-a-fag girls, even the cheerful, who brayed about the Yanks coming in – Nadine could see that they were all crazy by now.

She did not ask herself what she was doing there. She knew. She was helping. Every lantern in the windswept dark, each phosphorescent gleam, flapping canvas and snapping doors, the rattling of steel and glass in the sterilising room, the galvanised cauldrons boiling day and night, camphor oil, strychnine, caffeine, morphine, saline and yellow soap, temperature pulse and respiration, sweat mud dirt blood sweat piss tears, die now or die in an hour or so. He loved a girl in Paris; he didn’t want her; he had done what he swore he would not – he had loved her and left her – and her mother was right and she was betrayed and . . .

Ah, but who cares?

It would be obscene, out here, to care for such trifles.

*

When no one was looking she kissed the dying, their cheeks, their foreheads, their mouths. Sometimes they kissed her back in the dark, in the silence but for groans and calls for Mother. They whispered, ‘I love you.’

‘I love you too, darling,’ she whispered back. Because in the face of death, really, who cares about love?

*

A card: ‘Stevenson a great success! It keeps him calm and in decent spirits while waiting for his surgery, which you will be glad to know should come off soon.’

More surgery! Well, Mademoiselle will have something to deal with, won’t she?

She had been picturing a pert little Parisienne with tiny feet and fancy knickers, a temptress, a houri, a spy, a snake in the grass with the qualities that not even the best man could be expected to resist, a scented, lipsticked creature with a
moue-moue
mouth and a
mouemoue
accent . . .

Or the peasant girl he’d been with before, some deep, sexual, animal allure that could not be gainsaid . . .

No.

If she hadn’t seen it in his own writing . . .

*

Some patients were so impatient that Gillies felt obliged to rush their treatment, lest their frame of mind affect their recovery – but this one was the opposite. The apathy was the danger, but it could be put to good use. They had been able to wait for complete healing. There was no point in trying to race ahead with a graft under the scalp, tempting though the design was. Gillies had decided after all on a vulcanite jawbone. There it sat: ready, beautiful, pink, sterile, made to measure, in a kidney basin. And there lay the ruined face, with its gaping lack, swathed in white sheets like an ancient statue’s head half buried in a mossy grove.

Tidy the edges; snipping. Leave enough border to sew on the new. There’s a fair bit of muscle remaining –
room for recovery there, with any luck
.

The little jut of surviving ramus, like a misplaced tooth in the red flesh on either side . . . the twists of wire for attaching the vulcanite.

The drill, the forceps, the gauzes.

The poor long-suffering tongue, clipped away to the side for the moment.

The head newly shaved. The iodine and Lysol.

The flap drawn like a sewing pattern on the fine skin, quite far back so he’ll look all right with a hat on,
though with hair growth like his he’ll be fine, comb it this way or that – shame you can’t just stretch skin . . . though you can stretch leather, so why not? Expand hair-bearing skin somehow, fewer follicles per square inch but even so . . . for burns, alopecia . . . have to think about that.