More Miracle Than Bird

by Alice Miller

  She also had a telegram from Willy, who had written, simply: I WILL DO BETTER. She propped the note up on her bedside table. She would go to his At Home, arrive before the guests, and they could have a proper conversation. She would make her own decision. In the meantime, Dorothy had asked her to meet her and Ezra tomorrow night. That would distract her. She remembered an old poem of Willy’s:

  Sweetheart, do not love too long:

  I loved long and long,

  And grew to be out of fashion

  Like an old song.

  Why did she love him? He had initiated her into the Order. She still remembered his voice from that first night of her initiation. So do I commit myself. She had gone to his lectures, she owned all his books and had read them until lines from his essays and plays and poems circled in her head of their own accord. He was a brilliant poet. She loved his mind. They had work to do together.

  Now she had her days free to work, but Harkin’s lies and her conversation with Willy meant that she struggled to trust what was in front of her. She still hadn’t found any real leads on Thomas of the White Hand. Her next appointment with Miss Radcliffe was not for five days. Nelly sent her a small amount of money, but told her that she would not send more. Without her shifts at the hospital, this was a serious problem. She walked between places rather than taking a cab, and she ate at cheap teahouses, but even living frugally she wouldn’t be able to subsist for long. Something needed to change, but she could not work out what.

  That night after she got back from the library and was lying in bed, there were steps up to her dormitory door. A banging. She heard the handle turn. She didn’t want to open her eyes.

  She opened them. It was a young boy, no more than twelve, standing in the doorway of her room.

  “Excuse me, miss. I’m sorry, miss. But there’s a call for you on the telephone.”

  She pressed her head with her hand, felt the angles of her own face. “The telephone? Who is it?”

  “They won’t say, miss.”

  The boy must have been one of the servants’ children, drawn the short straw to go and bother one of the VADs. Irritated at the disturbance, and still half-asleep, Georgie considered telling the boy to go away, but she realised it was the middle of the night, and no one would call at this hour without a very good reason. Could something have happened to Nelly? She shooed the boy away, got up, and put on her robe, making her way to the stairwell. She ran down the stairs so quickly she slid down the last three, and would have fallen if she hadn’t gripped the balustrade. The boy, who evidently had got only so far as the bottom of the stairs, laughed at her. She ignored him, just carried on through to the corridor, feeling the cold wooden floor through her slippers.

  She pressed the metal receiver to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  But there was no sound on the other end. She looked around for the boy, but there was no sign of him either.

  “Hello?”

  She could hear something. A faint scratching, perhaps. She tried once more. “Is someone there?”

  “There are plenty of people in the world, Miss Hyde-Lees.” It was a very strained voice, and it was hard to tell if it belonged to a man or a woman.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “There are plenty. So why do you have to pick the wrong one?”

  “Who is this, please?”

  “For the love of God,” the voice said, “pick another. Let him go.”

  There was a loud click, and the call was disconnected. She waited, in case the telephone would ring again, but it was silent. She realised she was cold, standing in the hall, and she turned to go back to bed. She took the stairs slowly, letting her slippers fall heavily on the tiles. Was the phone call meant to refer to Willy? She didn’t understand it. When she got into her narrow bed, she felt alone, shaky, unable to settle her thoughts. It took a long time to get back to sleep.

  The next morning someone knocked on the door of the dormitory, an authoritative knock. Georgie waited a moment before answering. When she opened it, she was surprised to see Mrs. Thwaite.

  “Hyde-Lees,” she said. “I’m afraid we need you.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Without her, Mrs. Thwaite explained, they simply did not have the nurses to keep the hospital afloat. Lieutenant Gray was still unwell, Colonel Fraser’s condition had worsened, and another of the nurses had fallen ill. Georgie agreed to come at once.

  When she arrived at the hospital, the men were pleased to see her and welcomed her by name. Colonel Fraser cheered for her, and Second Lieutenant Pike—whom she was very surprised to see—called across the room that he, particularly, had missed her terribly, that he had thought she was never coming back. There wasn’t time for an explanation as to why he was still there. There were floors to mop, and Georgie found she’d never felt so enthusiastic about washing a floor in her life. With this singular task, her brain cooled off, levelled. The ability to run a mop along the floor, and see the floor shine clean and wet, demonstrated a kind of logic, a system. Even Mrs. Thwaite seemed lighter than usual, coming in often to walk between the beds, exchange words with the officers; even she could be heard laughing at an officer’s rumbled quip. Why had Georgie found it so hard here? Yes, the men were not well, some had gory wounds to show for it, but it was an honest place. Everyone was doing the best they could. Sometimes that was crying or screaming. Sometimes it was cracking obscene jokes. But no one was pretending. No one had made any of it up.

  Although she wanted to talk to Pike, she had to do the floors quickly and keep a close watch on Lieutenant Gray, whose night terrors had apparently gotten worse. The lieutenant had a gunshot wound in his calf, and Mrs. Thwaite told her that the night before, he had torn his own wound on purpose, ripping open all the doctor’s stitches with a pocketknife. They had confiscated the knife, and Mrs. Thwaite said they wanted to take him to the upstairs room, but they did not have an extra nurse to keep him under surveillance. For the moment, he must stay on the ward.

  As soon as Georgie had finished mopping, an officer she didn’t recognise called out that he needed some water. She poured him some and checked again on Lieutenant Gray, who for the moment was still sleeping. She was also required to sterilise the newly arrived Captain Markham’s wound. And so it went, for the next three hours—she was leaning over men, refilling cups of water, adjusting a blanket, washing a wound, nodding, coaxing them back into sleep, it was all right, they were safe, not at the front, in London, in London.

  Often after their dreams the men couldn’t go back to sleep, and all she could do was sit with them, and try herself to stay awake. Too often the officers’ dreams were like viruses; they spat up blurred horrors. She had read Dr. Freud’s book which suggested the repetition of trauma was a way of mastery. Keeping up the vigilance you had failed earlier. Calling the terror to you, to try to master it. She tried to see this in the men. But what she saw was so far from mastery, or even the attempt to overcome. All she saw were minds torn open by shock, stuck in the moments that had broken them. When Lieutenant Gray woke, he once more called her Mary and hissed obscenities at her.

  In her dinner break, she quickly changed her clothes and went to meet Dorothy and Ezra at a cramped restaurant near Soho. The place was dark, but as it was unseasonably warm, the windows had been flung open, and the streetlight pooled on the bright blue linen tablecloths. They both stood up and kissed her. She was relieved to see them looking the same: Dorothy with her large eyes that embraced you in a single glance, Ezra with his untameable hair like a dark halo. For some reason she thought they would be changed somehow. They had already finished eating, and gave the impression they had been sitting and drinking awhile. Although Georgie had not had dinner, she eyed the fine crumbs left on the tablecloth and found she didn’t want anything. She was already aware that she would soon have to return to the hospital, and she felt alert, as if she needed to be on her guard.

  “What would you like, madam?” A waiter had appeared at her elbow.
r />   “A glass of water.”

  Ezra shook his head. “What? Absolutely not.”

  “I can’t drink, I’m on shift.”

  “Oh, just a tipple, darling, come on.” He held up his glass. “It’s been a long time, you must indulge us. We are drinking. She’ll have a brandy Alexander.”

  “Very good,” the man said, glancing at Georgie.

  “All right. One. But only one.”

  “Georgie has an imaginary brother to mourn,” Dorothy said, smiling.

  Ezra did not ask what this meant, but picked up a small cluster of pine needles from around the candle on the table, and thoughtfully pulled it apart, extracting one of the needles, inserting it in the far corner of his mouth, and proceeding to chew on it.

  “How is the hospital, anyway?” Dorothy said, ignoring her husband.

  “All right. Saving me from myself.”

  Ezra nodded and explained to her that he had been working, and also trying to fix the unfixable Poetry magazine, and sometimes he attended the loftiest of circles where everyone was an amiable imbecile . . . but really the war had stopped poetry everywhere—undigested war being no better than undigested anything else. Dorothy was clearly not listening to her husband, which made it more difficult for Georgie to pay proper attention.

  “There’s no time for anyone to digest,” he was saying. “None of the London poets are worth a damn apart from Eliot and our old Eagle.”

  The waiter returned with her drink, and Ezra stuffed a few more needles in his mouth and turned to Georgie, two needles hanging from his lip like a farmer’s boy chewing on a piece of straw.

  “How is all that, then? The great romance?”

  Dorothy gave him a look. Ezra gave the impression of standing on the edge of a building, tilting, tilting, waiting to see if anyone was concerned by his behaviour, if anyone would leap in to try to save him. He also gave the impression that if you did try to save him, he would turn around and laugh at you.

  Georgie shook her head and stared into her drink. It had a brown glow, as if it held a fire inside, and when she sipped it, the taste was strangely greasy. “Even I’ve given up on that.”

  But Ezra was insistent. “But how are we going to fix his poetry? I saw it in your voluptuous eyes, my dear, that you wish to steer this great man onto a better course. For all of us.”

  “Ezra,” Dorothy said at last, “it’s not her problem.”

  “But it is everyone’s problem to save poetry from a fate of coarse melodrama, of crushing boredom, of great, wasted gifts. Besides”—he turned to Georgie—“he was talking about you last week, George, and he called you gentle, and very clever, and—I am not making this up—a ‘barbaric beauty.’”

  Georgie looked away, embarrassed. She put her nose in her drink and drank. Still greasy. She tried to think of the hospital, tried to think of clear, basic tasks.

  “I believe in everyone having their heart’s desire at the earliest opportunity,” Ezra was saying, looking at Dorothy.

  “I think his poems are getting better,” Dorothy said.

  “They’re not,” Ezra said.

  “Perhaps we could ban him from using the first person,” Georgie said.

  “Oh, bloody good Lord in heaven, no. Not that.”

  “Why not? Perhaps he needs to think differently about the role of the personal.”

  “But most great poetry—truly great poetry—has been written in the first person.”

  “Who says that?”

  “I do. Because it’s true. Of the last—well—two thousand years or so. The third person sometimes works. The second is horribly wooden.”

  “What about Lord Byron? What about Milton?”

  “As I say, it sometimes works. And as with all rules, there are millions of exceptions. Also we can’t hold up Byron or Milton as an example of anything but obtuseness.” He looked bored.

  “Ezra misses Stone Cottage,” Dorothy interjected. “He is talking to you like you’re Willy.”

  “I am not. I am talking to her like she is herself, which is how she should be talked to. And I detest the country. I only ever went out there for posterity.”

  “And still, you miss it. You miss him.”

  Ezra turned to Georgie. “My wife doesn’t listen to me.”

  “It sounds like she listens more carefully than you want her to.”

  Ezra sniffed and turned away from them both.

  Dorothy said, “Well, what would you suggest to fix him? In your infinite wisdom?”

  He turned back. “Me? Nothing. It’s in my interest to let him wither into foolishness.”

  “You don’t believe that,” Dorothy said flatly.

  The waiter was coming back, and Ezra ceremoniously spat what was left of the needles into his palm. “Dorothy and I have done what we can. It’s up to you now. This is your voyage of discovery, your journey into the underworld. It’s your own great poem to be written. Shall we have another drink?”

  “Yes,” said Georgie.

  She was tipsy by the time she got back to the hospital, but she believed she could hide it from the men. Mrs. Thwaite had gone upstairs to sleep. In her tiredness, she started to imagine things: she saw Willy again, on the street after the raid, and for some reason she was chasing him up the dusty street, but every time she grabbed his shoulder, he turned around with another face, that of Lieutenant Gray with his face half blown off, or Mrs. Thwaite with her look of disbelief, or Second Lieutenant Pike with his curved hair like owls’ horns.

  Pike himself was in his bed, staring up, still awake. When she approached, he eyed her with suspicion.

  “You left us,” he said. “Where did you go?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It does, yes.”

  In the bed next to him, Colonel Fraser laughed. “He’s been desolate without you, Hyde-Lees. You must promise never to leave again.”

  Georgie smiled, as if this were a joke. She did not know what to do with Pike, who was looking at her with such intensity she had to look away. What could she possibly say? What had she ever thought of this man? Hadn’t he been just one more body in a bed?

  “What about you?” she said. “I thought you were leaving.”

  “There’s a story to that one.”

  “I have to stay near Lieutenant Gray.”

  “Well, you know where to find me.” He was smiling now. “Hyde-Lees, have you been drinking?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You have! I won’t tell anyone,” he said, “but I’m glad you let yourself do something. You take life too seriously.”

  “I must go and check on the lieutenant.”

  Pike nodded, still smiling. She left him.

  Lieutenant Gray was still sleeping. She stood by the bed, watching his chest collect his breath, and dispel it.

  She wanted another drink. She walked out to the nurses’ lockers and foraged through the other girls’ things, to see if she could find anything. Finally, stuffed in the pocket of a cardigan in a bag, she found a miniature bottle of whisky. Quickly, she unscrewed the lid and drank. She hid the bottle under old newspapers in the rubbish bin and returned to the ward. There were only a few hours to go. The room smelled of fresh linen and a large vase of lavender sprigs that one of the officers’ wives had brought in. By now even Pike was sleeping, his mouth open, letting out gentle snores. The newspapers were spread about the beds, and you could almost imagine that this was just an ordinary group of people; if it weren’t for the lined-up beds, the white sheets, the bandages, the blood, and the missing limbs. If you just replaced the medicine bottles with champagne flutes and blurred your vision, it could be the end of a large party.

  She sat down on a stool facing the silver trolley; her sleepy eyes drowsed across the neatly stacked instruments, the gleaming bottles and basins, and she leaned her stool against the far wall, and dozed.

  A man was calling to her.

  “Nurse.” A thin voice. “It’s the lieutenant, Nurse.” Georgie stood up fast, s
hook her drowsy head. It was still dark, but fine hints of light were peering through the curtains. Almost morning. She walked over to the lieutenant’s bed and saw the young boy’s body half spilled out of the bed, one arm dangling down. She reached up to help him back into his bed, but she realised that the lieutenant’s blanket was wet. She thought at first he had wet himself—in the darkness, everything was black or grey—but she slowly realised that the blanket was soaked through with blood. She reached to touch the boy’s wrist, and his skin was cool. There was blood on her fingers, and she rubbed it against the cream blanket.

  “He’s dead,” the man in the bed next to him said.

  “Just sleeping,” Georgie said, wondering why she bothered to lie. The blood had soaked everywhere, and she could smell it, fleshy and metallic. She leaned over the boy and found that his fingers still clutched a silver scalpel that he must have taken from the trolley and used to slice his own chest open. How could he have done such a thing silently? Without waking anyone? Her eyes were adjusting, and she could see the boy’s eyes. They were open, staring out. She gripped his wrist; he was definitely dead. The ward was still silent, but at the same time she could hear a high-pitched hum in her ears, a kind of not-hearing, her brain trying to block this out.

  And someone was behind her. She turned around fast. It was Pike, out of bed and standing beside her.