The Tailor's Girl

Fiona McIntosh was born in England, spent her early childhood in West Africa and has lived in Australia for the past three decades. She worked for many years in the travel industry but after her shift to full-time writing she roams the world researching and drawing inspiration for her novels. Adelaide is her home base, which she shares with her husband and twin sons, but Fiona does most of her writing from the peace of southern Tasmania. To date she has written twenty adult novels across various genres and six novels for children.

fionamcintosh.com

For Jack McIntosh
. . . who dreams of having his suits tailored at Savile Row.

NOVEMBER 1919

The man startled awake and stared at familiar bubbled paintwork on the ceiling, but the more he tried to grab for the dreamlike memories, the more they drifted away like gossamer spider-silk floating on a breeze. The night terrors left behind a telltale marker, though: an acridity that he could taste in his throat. It carried the metallic tang of blood, the sickening stench of rotting flesh and human waste, the pervasive charcoal aroma of gunpowder, or of old tobacco, sweat . . . but mostly the chilling, acidic taste of fear. He was assured by those caring for him that he was reliving life in the trenches –
It’s
common enough; Don’t worry, it will pass
and other kindly placations – but none helped to stop the recurring nightmare.

He shivered beneath the hospital sheet, printed in blue at one corner with the name of his present home, Edmonton Military Hospital. The blanket was rough and insufficient but his small iron bed was near the radiator. He felt comforted by its ancient, wheezing presence and wondered how many other men had lain in this very bed and why. To the casual observer he looked well enough. The injuries had healed sufficiently and now a limp was the only visible indication that he’d sustained an injury on the front line. It was the invisible scar that he carried inside that was far more sinister.

He couldn’t remember how he’d been injured and, because he’d been delivered as a ‘missing soldier’, the medical team couldn’t tell him either. They’d agreed that given the timing of his injuries, and the particular crisscross style of his bandaging, he must have spent a period in a field hospital, perhaps in Flanders, before a stint at a base hospital, most probably at Rouens in France. And so he had come to accept that he’d likely fought at Ypres.

Repatriated several months earlier, he had been brought here to London. Through most of that time he had been unconscious from serious concussion, as well as intermittently rattling with fever from infection. He could recall nothing prior to June 1918, other than the vivid images in his sleep that fled as soon as he surfaced. His first clear memory was waking up on a ship as it crossed the Channel to England. It was summer – July, he recalled. Men were singing, smoking, talking quietly in corners, while others groaned from their wounds. Everyone was as hot as he felt and preferred being out on the decks but no one complained. They’d all experienced hell and survived it. He remembered staring blank-faced at the scene around him, confusion his only emotion – he simply couldn’t remember what they were all trying to forget.

‘Morning, Jonesey.’ A bright voice cut into his exasperation, bringing him back to the present. ‘Brrr . . . it’s a cold one.’

‘Good morning to you, Nancy,’ he said, finding a smile for the nurse who never seemed to lose her humour.

‘How are we?’ She began checking his pulse.

‘
We
are just fine,’ he said, mightily impressed by the blinding whiteness of her starched pinafore apron that contrasted with the navy-black uniform beneath. Both provided a monochrome backdrop for her hair, painted from a fiery palette. Nancy wore her nurse’s hat as far back as she dared and ringlets of golden-flame curls escaped. She wouldn’t turn heads, but he defied anyone not to find her attractive. Her perkiness was seductive; it shone through even while she counted, looking at her fob watch with its upside-down face.

‘You certainly look fine,’ she finally said. ‘And, may I say, very handsome too in spite of that beard.’ She winked.

He rubbed his jaw, still refusing to remove the unruly growth that had emerged dark and un-greyed.

‘Perhaps someone might recognise you if you shaved,’ Nancy said archly, plumping his pillows. ‘Are you going to get dressed?’

‘Is there any point?’ he said, mimicking her cheery tone.

She gave him a play slap. ‘Yes, Mr Jones. For a start I’d love to know your real name. You certainly don’t sound like you belong here.’

‘Where do I belong?’ he asked, standing for her so she could arrange his bedclothes. He strolled to the window, trying to disguise the way the slipper on his left foot dragged on the lino like a soft sigh.

‘Oh, some posh place down south, I suspect,’ she answered.

He pondered this. ‘Maybe I’m a great actor.’

‘I’d have recognised you.’ She shook her head, frowning. ‘I think you were a solicitor, or a banker,’ she said. ‘I’d definitely go on a date with you then.’

‘Did I ask you out?’ he said, swinging around, embarrassed. He fiddled with retying his dressing gown.

‘No, but I am waiting for an invitation now that you can walk and we’re finally in peacetime.’ She gave him another knowing glance.

Peacetime
. It was meaningless to him. ‘What’s the date, Nan?’

‘November nineteenth, although you won’t be the first to ask that today, I’m sure. I think the whole country is still in a state of hangover.’ She laughed, shaking her head. ‘I keep pinching myself it’s over. Four years . . .’ She sighed, snapped her fingers. ‘And over just like that. What was it all about?’

He was the wrong person to ask. He turned to gaze back into the well-kept grounds of the hospital – he’d been told that glorious shows of flowers had once adorned the front entrance but the garden beds had served as vegetable plots for the past few years. Next spring bright petals would erase that patch of history as they burst into bloom once again. He was in a wing they dubbed the sanatorium, a remote part of the hospital that had been enjoyable when there were four of them but his three companions had been claimed, returned to their families, and now the sanatorium’s distant location only heightened his isolation.

Another small garden outside was still ringed by barren, thorny rose bushes. The lawn looked crispy with frost and he saw a robin perched on a near-naked bush, where it had found space amongst the burnished orange of rosehips and was warbling his melodious tune. He presumed the songster was male from the U-shape of the olive-brown forehead.
How do I know that?
he thought. The robin looked as lonely as he felt and its tune, reaching him through the glass, sounded as plaintive as his mood. He understood, knowing this bird liked the quiet as much as he did.

‘Right, Jonesy. I’ll be back shortly. Will you have showered by then?’

‘Definitely. I’d hate to disappoint you.’

She squeezed his arm. ‘If only all patients were as easy as you. You’re welcome to stay forever.’

Her words chilled him. He knew she meant them kindly, but he revolted at the jest.

‘You’re one of the lucky ones,’ she added. ‘You see that pretty woman there?’ She nodded beyond the window and he saw a dark-haired woman in a navy suit and tan gloves walking down the pathway that cut past his wing. ‘I heard today that she lost her brother a little while back. He’d be about your age; she said he was thirty-three. She sounded so broken over it . . . as though it happened yesterday.’

‘Lost?’

‘Died in action but no information about it – his body left behind, buried as another nameless soldier in 1915. Ypres, I think she said.’

He blinked. ‘Where I was?’

‘We’re assuming you were from there,’ she said, waving a cautionary finger.

The woman had disappeared behind the hedge. ‘Who is she visiting?’

‘No one, as such. You know, where you sit out there, all grumpy most days, is also the delivery entrance.’ As he nodded Nancy shrugged. ‘She was dropping something off to the hospital director. She must have waited for him in the tearoom. I overheard her talking about her brother.’ Nancy became matter-of-fact again. ‘Right, into the shower and then you can join the communal breakfast —’

‘Oh, Nancy, I’d prefer —’

‘Yes, Mr Jones, I know what you’d prefer but . . . hospital orders.’

‘What about the Spanish flu?’

She blinked, looking momentarily distraught. ‘We lost another two through the night. And two more nurses – that’s four of our girls now.’

‘Nan, I’m so sorry,’ he said, feeling ashamed for ruining her mood.

‘It’s a dreadful thing, not choosy at all. Beth Churcher was a great nurse – we all loved her. She died in two days. That’s all it took. One moment healthy, the next that awful lavender-coloured skin pigment that would have told her she had a death sentence.’ He shook his head with regret. He didn’t know Beth, but he could see Nan was heartbroken. ‘And young Joey Nesbitt. He was going home in a week or so. I didn’t know the other gentleman or nurse but we were briefed at the meeting this morning. And they won’t be the last,’ she said, her expression mournful now.

‘All the more reason, surely, for me to remain here,’ he tried.

Miraculously, Nan agreed. ‘This end of the hospital is quite deserted. You probably are protected, and I haven’t worked the same wards as Betty – one in which Tommy and the other fellow died.’ She dug up her smile again. ‘All right. You stay here. I’ll bring some food in shortly. But don’t forget, tomorrow’s the Peace Party. I’ve had your spare shirt laundered. Everyone’s putting on their best clothes. I’ll leave a razor.’ She winked again as she left him.

He couldn’t imagine how a party could be deemed wise given the flu epidemic that was sweeping the nation. Only last week while sitting in the garden he’d heard through the privet hedge a family passing by. One of the children was singing a rhyme and he suspected she hardly understood the macabre words:

I had a little bird

Its name was Enza

I opened the window

And in-flu-Enza.

Spanish flu, as it had been nicknamed, was on a grand killing spree, and had no sympathy that Europe had already lost a generation of young men. It was now going to kill their parents, their grandparents, their sisters and brothers, their aunts and uncles and cousins . . . their friends.

Some were saying this disease was worse than the Black Death and slaughtering faster than any war could. He’d read that it had begun in the trenches. Soldiers who didn’t succumb on the battlefield took the illness home – some believed it erupted in Scotland and headed on a murderous path south, killing in the thousands. He’d read a figure that by October more than one quarter of a million Britons, most of them formerly healthy, were dead from Spanish Flu.

And now they’d begun dying here in the hospital.

He returned his attention to the path that had carried away the bereaved young woman. The sound of her heels on the bricks echoed dully in his mind, and he felt envious of her freedom to walk away from this place.

_______________

The dreams were now worse, filled with a yellowy-green killing mist and men stumbling around blinded, dying of suffocation, bowels emptying in a final pitiful humiliation as bodies sank in slimy mud that was knee-deep. No one had names, uniforms gave him no clue, and his companions had no faces – some had been blown away, others unrecognisable.

Today he woke resentful, hating that he was no one. He belonged to someone, surely!

He showered briskly, secretly still thrilled at the novelty of being left alone to his ablutions. He wet the cake of soap that Nan had left with the razor, which was already screwed together and enclosed a new blade his experienced thumb told him, though where he had gained such experience was anyone’s guess. The soap was dry and cracked from lack of use. Nevertheless, its flaws smoothed out the moment water came into contact and as he lathered up his beard, the sharp, medicinal odour of coal tar filled the small bathroom. For just a fleeting second the pungent fragrance whisked him somewhere and he was sure he was a child, sitting in a bathtub with the impression that a uniformed older woman was smiling approvingly as she wrapped him in a big white towel. And then the vision was gone; his awareness hadn’t lingered on her face but the large hands, with sausage-like fingers and no rings, were achingly familiar, the distant voice beloved. Then, he couldn’t find that memory again, couldn’t hear her soft mutterings any more – no matter how much he inhaled the strong, oily smell.

Jones snatched a flannel to wipe the steam from the mirror. The old glass had tarnished, its silvering breaking down in the bevelled edges and particularly where the holes for screws had been made. Small metallic pinpricks peppered one side of his reflection, which he stared at moodily. By almost smothering half of his face in an odd shadow, it seemed to mock him. He was only half a man; the other half – the side that knew itself and who he was, where he came from – was a ghost wandering the battlefields of Ypres . . . if that was even where he’d been.

Why couldn’t he recognise who was looking back at him with the flop of shiny, near-black hair and those haunted eyes?
They match your school blazer
, he heard in his mind, but who had spoken those words? Which school had he attended whose pupils wore indigo? The bathroom pipes suddenly juddered loudly, and he flung down the razor into the sink where the metal clattered against the enamel and the pieces fell apart, echoing how he felt inside. Broken. Dismantled.

Instead of shaving he rinsed his face, drying it roughly in a low rage of frustration, the petrol-like soap smell still clinging to his beard. Nancy would not be pleased. He dressed obediently in the freshly laundered and ironed shirt that had been returned. His only suit – a hand-me-down from who knew where – was old, worn at the knees and faded at the elbows, frayed on two of the buttonholes. It offended him on some level but in truth it served its purpose and fitted him well enough. He had no genuine grounds for complaint, especially as most returned wounded soldiers were given an instantly recognisable saxe blue suit, with oddly white lapels and a bright-red tie to wear. Nan, who’d taken such an interest in him, had brought this suit from home. Her cousin’s friend didn’t need it any more. He had not asked the obvious question but had wrinkled his nose at the faint whiff of coal.

‘Wear it more and air it out,’ Nancy had suggested with a soft punch. He knew she liked touching him playfully. ‘Then that mothball smell will disappear.’

Perhaps naphthalene would chase off the Spanish flu bug, he thought humourlessly now as he straightened the jacket.