by Alice Miller
When she handed over the ring to Dulac, somehow it slipped from his grasp and fell into the grass. She was furious to see it vanish into the green, and she made herself stand still and feign calm as he leaned down to rake his fingers through the grass and pick it up again.
“Sorry,” he said. How strange that a man so intuitive with a pencil could also be so clumsy with his hands. He picked up the ring, ripping a strand of grass with it. “You still won’t tell me who it’s for?”
“It’s for me.”
“A man’s ring?”
She gave him a look that she hoped was withering. She had not thought him the type to gossip.
“You don’t mind if I tell anyone, anyone at all, that I helped you to design a man’s ring?” He was testing her.
“I only hope you have more interesting things to talk about.”
An hour later she was concentrating on the mop’s wet path across the parquet, breathing in the disinfected air, when a nurse arrived beside her elbow.
“I’m sorry?” the girl said, glancing between Mrs. Thwaite and Georgie. “Someone’s here to see Hyde-Lees?”
Mrs. Thwaite’s thin eyebrows slid up. “Are you expecting someone?”
Georgie shook her head and balanced the mop against the bucket.
“Excuse me.” Perhaps whoever it was would have news of Willy. She had received only one note from him, which had been written at Woburn Buildings the day after the Rising. My dear, it read. I must go away on short notice and could be gone for some time, but I will see you at the end of it. WBY
She supposed he must have gone to Ireland, and she hoped he would be all right. They had executed the Irish rebels, and she had scanned the list of the casualties for names she knew. There was only one name she recognised, that of Major John MacBride, who had been executed by firing squad. MacBride was the estranged husband of Maud Gonne.
The matron left her alone. She had not forgotten that she’d had to reprimand Georgie for sitting down on her shift, for breaking a valuable lamp, and, worst of all, for “inappropriately handling” the second lieutenant. Pike’s feet had further deteriorated following the incident, and Mrs. Thwaite considered that Georgie must be entirely to blame. “I am no longer sure I can trust you around the men,” she had said. “You will no longer speak to the second lieutenant.” It was, the matron told her, unsmiling, her last warning.
Georgie found that she felt sorry for Pike. She had noticed his awkwardness, how he had tried to avoid touching her as she carried him back to his bed. She had wondered what it would be like to have Willy that close, to have him that vulnerable. It seemed Willy’s vulnerability was always tempered by performance, always a kind of display. There was a way in which she preferred the second lieutenant’s weakness.
When she arrived out in the foyer, a nurse was walking from the operating room with bright blood down her apron. Watching the nurse from an alcove, her face rather paler than usual, was Dorothy. On seeing Georgie, she smiled and stood up straighter. “I’m sorry—I just thought I’d come and see you, just a whim—”
“I’m still on my shift.”
Dorothy’s face was somehow misshapen, as if her cheeks were still creased from her pillow.
“I’ll go then,” she said.
“You could come back at six,” Georgie said. As she leaned in to kiss her friend’s cheek, Dorothy’s breath started to heave and catch, and she began to cry.
“Sorry,” she said, “I’m not myself.”
“What’s happened? Are you all right?” Had something happened to Willy?
“Oh, it’s—I can’t—” Dorothy rubbed her sleeve across her face. “Anyway, you’re still at work.” She gestured vaguely into the ward.
Georgie stepped forward and put her arm around Dorothy’s shoulders, guiding her towards the stairs. She had never seen Dorothy like this.
“I’ll take you up,” Georgie said, glancing back into the ward, “but just for a minute. There’s a room we can sit in. It won’t be clean, but it will be empty. Hang on.” She left Dorothy for a moment, ran back to the supply cupboard, and collected a pile of white linen. When she returned, she took Dorothy’s arm as if she were a patient and led her up the big staircase. They walked down the wide corridor together and turned into a small room. Georgie shut the door after them. The room had just one single bed in it, stripped. The mattress was wet. Georgie put the linen down on one corner of the mattress and opened the window as wide as it would go. She sat down on the bed and patted it for Dorothy to sit beside her. Dorothy sat. She laced her fingers together in her lap, laced and unlaced them, repeatedly.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know where else to go.” Dorothy’s eyes galloped about the room, until she gazed down into the wet patch on the mattress.
“What is it? What’s happened? Come on.”
Dorothy mumbled into her handkerchief and blew her nose. She looked up. “I should have married Freddie Manning! I should have married Herbert bloody Blake!”
“Oh,” Georgie said. “I thought someone had died. Those men would have bored you stupid.”
“Why did Ezra bother marrying?”
“What has he done?”
“He’s throwing himself at—this woman. This writer—she has even come to the house. He pretends it’s nothing. It’s horrible.”
“So Willy is all right?”
“Willy? What? Of course.”
“He isn’t in Ireland?”
She shook her head. “No.” She wrinkled her nose. “You have given up on all that?”
“Of course I have.” Georgie laughed. She was so relieved that nothing had happened to him, she picked up a pillow and tossed it at Dorothy, who caught it.
“Why is this wet?” Dorothy didn’t wait for the answer but gazed at the pillow. “He’s infatuated with her. Taking her arm, laughing, following her around. He praises every word she says and scorns every one of mine.”
“Is he home now?”
“Probably.”
“You should go and talk to him. I need to get back downstairs. The matron’s not fond of me; she can’t catch me here. I’m halfway through doing the floors—”
“I can’t go back. I hate him.” Dorothy threw the pillow on the bed and stared at it.
“You don’t. Quite the opposite, I think.”
“How can I love someone who only looks out for himself!”
“Maybe we’re all a little like that.” Georgie wondered if the tapping she could hear could be footsteps coming up the stairs. She moved closer to the door.
Dorothy was shaking her head and pointed to the wet patch on the mattress. “What is that?” She had once said that she would have volunteered at the hospital if she hadn’t got married.
“Sweat, I think.” They would smell it if it were something else. This was the room where they put the particularly mad ones, that they couldn’t have in the ward. Two days before, an officer had arrived who had made a whining noise like a shell falling; it had sent several of the other men into a panic, and so they had carried him up here. Solitary, they called this room. She wasn’t sure where the man had gone after that. If she were a wounded soldier, she would probably fake that kind of behaviour just to get a room to herself.
“That’s disgusting.” Dorothy wiped her hands on her dress.
“Well, if you hadn’t married Ezra, you’d be here, wouldn’t you? Making sweat-drenched beds, tipping out bedpans, swaddling infected wounds. You made the right decision. He won’t leave you. How is your painting?”
Dorothy sniffed, put her hand over her nose, and offered a small cough. “You say we’re all selfish. You mean that I am.”
“You. Me. The nurses downstairs. The officers. The rebels. The executioners. Ezra—”
“But me especially?” Dorothy said, and recognising how she sounded, she smiled, as footsteps could be heard to pause right outside the door. Georgie lunged forward and grabbed the white sheet and shook it in the air, just as Mrs. Thwaite stepped into the room.
“Hyde-Lees.”
“I’m just making this bed,” Georgie said.
“No one told you—”
“I just anticipated—”
“And who is this?”
Georgie opened her mouth and shut it again.
“You can’t just march about doing the Lord knows what with an unauthorised stranger. You know this bed needs to be cleaned and aired before it’s made. You are halfway through a task downstairs. I will not put up with such—utter—carelessness. I really have no choice but to dismiss you.”
Dorothy made a loud gasping noise, flourished a tissue, and blew her delicate nose, producing a squeal rather like a lapdog being asphyxiated. Georgie and Mrs. Thwaite both turned and stared at her.
“Excuse—excuse—me,” Dorothy said, and she pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and waved it in the air alongside her soiled tissue. “I’m Georgie’s cousin. And we—we just got news from the front. One of those telegrams. Georgie’s brother.”
Mrs. Thwaite stared at the telegram in Dorothy’s hand, and the tight muscles around her jaw fell loose. Her eyes swivelled between Dorothy and Georgie before falling back on Dorothy’s hand.
“It looks like an ordinary telegram,” the matron said softly.
“It’s from my aunt,” Dorothy said. “She just told me. I am on my way to her now.”
Mrs. Thwaite took a sharp breath in. “Your—brother—is he . . . ?”
“Killed in action at Verdun,” Dorothy said with great solemnity. “She’s in shock, of course.” Georgie thought of her brother, Harold, who had never dreamed of going to the front, who dedicated most of his attention to the stock market, and whose shirts had started to burst around his middle. She didn’t know where to look.
Mrs. Thwaite put one hand on Georgie’s shoulder and another on Dorothy’s, and squeezed. “I’m so very, very sorry,” she said to Georgie. Her eyes were enormous. “Leave the sheets. Take as much time as you need.”
Georgie was about to argue with Mrs. Thwaite, but Dorothy pressed the telegram into her hand and gave her a warning look. Mrs. Thwaite was leaving the room, gently closing the door behind her.
Once she was gone, Dorothy watched Georgie unfold the telegram. It was dated three days ago and read:
BACK THURS, PLEASE ORDER CLARET. WBY.
“I didn’t want to get you into trouble,” Dorothy said, returning the tissue to her pocket.
“What if she’d looked at it? What if she’d read it?”
Dorothy arched her lovely neck. “She didn’t, though, did she?”
Georgie fingered the telegram. “And he is coming back on Thursday? To London? Where is he? Where has he been?”
Dorothy smiled. “He went to France, to propose to Maud.”
TWENTY-ONE
On the ward, she was pouring water for the officers from a glass carafe. She concentrated on the gushing sound as the water tipped from the carafe’s glass lip into the glass. She would not think about Maud Gonne. She would give up on Willy, who was conspicuous only in his absence, and his tendency to make her feel like a fool.
Two men arrived to take Major Hammond to the convalescent home. The major struggled to get into the wheelchair, but when Georgie started to walk towards him, he hissed at her. She stayed back and concentrated on pouring water for the other men. The major had never asked her name, or thanked her for tending to his wound. When he bothered to look at her at all, he stared at her as if she were a grease spot on a dress shirt.
Dorothy had gone back to Ezra. The men wheeled Major Hammond out the door. Georgie continued pouring.
When she approached Pike’s bed, he was watching her. He picked up his glass and held it out for her, which made it harder for her to pour.
“Put it on the table, please,” Georgie said.
He kept holding it. “I wanted to apologise.”
“I’m not allowed to speak to you,” Georgie said.
The lines in Pike’s forehead and around his mouth seemed to have carved themselves deeper. For a moment she forgot about the glass and saw what he’d look like when he was old, perhaps living in a house somewhere, with a Labrador and a yellow-haired daughter.
“I really didn’t mean to get you into any trouble.”
“It’s fine. Give me the glass,” she said, reaching for it.
“I feel terrible—”
She reached forward and snatched the glass from his fingers, surprising herself with the fierceness of her movement.
“Are you all right?” he said, looking closely at her. “Did something happen?”
She shook her head and focused on the stream of water. The sound it made.
“Tell me,” he said.
She stopped pouring. She inhaled sharply, about to reprimand him, but instead she breathed out. “I was wrong about something, that’s all.” She had not spilled a drop. She looked up to see Mrs. Thwaite arrive on the ward. She placed the glass firmly on the second lieutenant’s bedside table and walked away from the bed.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” he called after her. “I know the bloody feeling.”
Georgie looked up at Mrs. Thwaite, who was gesturing to her to come over. Beside her was another nurse, wearing a bright white uniform.
“Off you go, Sanderson,” Mrs. Thwaite said to the nurse, and turned to Georgie. “I’d like to have a word with you in my office.”
“He keeps talking to me,” Georgie said weakly. “I don’t know how to stop him.” She kept her eyes on the floor.
“Follow me, please.” The matron walked out of the ward and down the corridor. Georgie followed her. The room Mrs. Thwaite used as an office was small. She had given up every other space she could to the officers. Sometimes Georgie forgot that this was Mrs. Thwaite’s own home, that usually she lived here on her own, without her front room filled with officers, nurses, and visiting doctors. The room was rectangular and looked as though it were unchanged since the eighteenth century, except for an orderly pile of forms on the heavy mahogany desk and a series of faces staring out from half a dozen gold frames hanging on the wall. Above the frames hung a large canvas of a pastoral scene, with burnt orange and light green fields.
“Please take a seat.” Georgie flattened her blue crêpe de chine veil, smoothed her apron, and sat.
Mrs. Thwaite took a deep breath. “I wanted to let you know that if you need time, you can ask. I would suggest that you go home now.”
Georgie was surprised by how intently Mrs. Thwaite was staring at her.
“How old was your brother?”
Georgie had already forgotten her supposed brother. She cleared her throat, silently hating Dorothy for putting her in this position. “Twenty-four.”
“My boys were nineteen and twenty-one. They were together when they died, which is good, I think. I always think it will have made it easier for them to find each other—you know—in heaven. Perhaps they have already met your brother there.”
Georgie nodded. She felt a surge of hysteria rise, and patted it down. Mrs. Thwaite’s conjecture was especially unlikely given that this week Harold was up at Oxford busily failing his exams for the second time. Mrs. Thwaite was staring out behind Georgie, at the wall behind her head, and her eyes were dry. Georgie sat in the chair with one hand in her pocket, pressing her fingers against her leg. She was scared to look away from the woman’s face. Mrs. Thwaite’s eyelids were puffed up, as if they had been stuffed with something soft. Georgie vaguely remembered hearing that Mrs. Thwaite was a widow, but she hadn’t realised she had also had children, let alone sons who were killed in the war. After a minute, she broke eye contact to examine the faces in the gold frames on the wall, to try to discern which might have been her sons, but from where she sat she couldn’t make out one face from another.
“The more you lose, the better you get at managing. It becomes more important to have a code to live by. I find rules to be very useful in a way I didn’t before. I have to trust in God, you know, and to trust that he has chosen to gi
ve me a very hard test indeed, because he knows that I can bear it.”
Georgie looked away from the faces and felt a twinge in her neck. How was she ever supposed to explain that her brother was perfectly fine, that no one had died, that her friend had made something up in fear that Georgie would lose her job?
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said instead.
“But no one really knows, do they? I only hope my boys are in heaven. They were rascals, you know.”
“I’m sure that’s where they are.” Georgie didn’t believe in heaven, but if she had, she would’ve been certain in that moment that she was not bound there herself.
Mrs. Thwaite was still talking. “It’s too easy to spend all your time with the dead,” she said. “That’s why it’s good for us to be here, I think. To look after those who are still alive. Second Lieutenant Pike looks like my youngest, you know. Oliver. He’s fond of you.”
Georgie nodded and smiled.
Mrs. Thwaite’s gaze was steady. “I thank the Lord every day for keeping us safe, and for bringing people like you in to help us.”
Georgie, digging her fingernails in her thigh, winced, and for a horrible moment thought she might laugh.
“Really,” she said, “it’s nothing.”
TWENTY-TWO
A crash and Georgie leapt up, on her feet before she knew she was awake. Down the hall a woman screamed, once, twice, three times. The same woman? A thud, and the building was shaking, the air-raid siren blowing through the dormitory. She leapt out of her bed and ran out to the stairwell in her nightgown and slippers. Three other nurses were rushing down the stairs. Georgie could hear the landlady’s voice down the corridor: “Calm, please. Order.”