Georgina.
Although he had deliberately not thought of her for a long time, her face, smooth, fair, serene, appeared before his mind’s eye as clearly as though she smiled for him.
For a minute or two his feelings were so jumbled he could not have said whether he was delighted or dismayed. He was certainly shocked. Why had she written? After all this time, why now? Was something wrong, had somebody died?
But no – he had letters from all who were important to him, it could not be that. Her father, perhaps? His father? He stared at the envelope as though it might tell him itself. Perhaps it was something else – perhaps she was getting married.
His jaw clenched on that thought. Liam slipped the envelope into his breast pocket. Whatever it said, he could not bear to read it now.
The others were already some distance down the road, seated outside a little estaminet, beers on the table in front of them. He lit a cigarette before joining them.
‘All right, Corp?’ one of them asked, glancing up with concern in his eyes. ‘Not bad news, is it?’
Liam shook his head. ‘No. Just something from somebody I never expected to hear from.’ He laughed, a little shakily.
Another one grinned. ‘She’s heard you’re a hero, Corp – wants to know you now.’
‘Rubbish,’ he muttered, and stuck his head into one of the York newspapers. The letters – all of them – would have to wait until he was alone.
The others read their mail and ordered more beers. Liam’s newspapers were passed around. Lighting a fresh cigarette, he read the war news in the most recent paper and then immersed himself in the more local tit-bits. Although he was barely concentrating, the graphic description of a tragic drowning at Bishopthorpe caught his attention. Whether it was solely that or the effects of the letter in his pocket, he could not have said; but he was suddenly reliving the agonizing emotions of his last day at home. Robert Duncannon’s voice, which he thought he had forgotten, surfaced unbidden, banishing the flicker of hope that letter inspired.
A sudden exclamation from one of the others disturbed his anguish.
‘Well, of all the dirty, low-down tricks! Have you seen this? I never heard about this, did you? Where the bloody hell have we been for the last month?’
‘In the trenches, mate – have you forgotten?’
They all wanted to see, but the newspaper was passed to Liam. Reluctantly he took it, scanning the headlines several times before the meaning sunk in.
In Dublin, a month ago, there had been armed rebellion on the streets. On Easter Monday a republic had been declared, and for several days the General Post Office on Sackville Street was occupied by forces opposed to the Crown. After five days of fighting the rebellion was crushed, but British field guns had destroyed much of the centre of the city.
It seemed incredible. A stab in the back. Like the others he was disgusted, on reading further, by the apparent connection with Germany. An ex-British consul, Sir Roger Casement, had tried to enlist enemy aid, but had been arrested after landing from a German submarine. He was to be tried for High Treason. The Irish rebels had been shot.
He stopped reading, handed the paper to someone else and took a deep breath. Without that letter in his pocket, he knew he would have been frantic by now, wondering whether Georgina might have taken an Easter holiday to be with her aunt in Dublin, wondering whether she was still alive...
But where had that letter come from? And when? Oblivious to his companions, he whipped the envelope from his pocket and tore it open. The letter, dated 30th April and sent from a hospital in London, was almost a month old. ‘Dear Liam...’
Dear God, he thought, closing his eyes, seeing her face, hearing her voice; how long since he had heard her speak his name!
‘... Just a few lines to let you know that we all are well. With the dreadful news from Dublin this week, I fear you may be wondering about us, and although I know your mother writes regularly, I wanted to be sure you were not anxious.
‘Father has been in Dublin since Monday. His letter today says the fighting is over, although he is deeply grieved by the destruction to the city. Not his responsibility, thank God, but he is bitterly angry with those who ordered it, and now fears for the safety of all those involved. It will not stop here, he says.
‘The strange thing is that I applied for leave to go home for Easter, it being so long since I saw Aunt Letty. Father was against it, but in the end Matron could not spare me, so it was just as well. Apparently Aunt Letty refused to stay at home, and came close to being arrested for trying to help the wounded. All this in spite of her arthritis! What a family we are!
‘I hope you are well, dear, and that things are not too terrible for you in France. Your mother writes often and keeps us up to date with your news, but it would be nice to hear from you personally, if you have time to write. If not, then I understand.
‘With affectionate regards – Georgina.
‘Oh, you beautiful girl,’ Liam whispered, crushing the page in his hand.
In June’s early summer dawn, birds were warbling an enthusiastic chorus from the hospital grounds. Roused from a momentary reverie, Georgina stood before the open window of her office, wishing she could be as bright as they were at this hour. It had been a long and wearisome night, not very busy but the last of several weeks without a proper break. She could not wait to have the next couple of hours over, to be away from here and going home to sleep. Three days! Three whole days to relax and do nothing. She needed it.
Voices were stirring on the ward. A young VAD nurse knocked on the open door demanding her attention. The amputation in bed four was severely distressed and would not be quieted; would she come?
‘Names, nurse,’ Georgina repeated wearily. ‘He’s not just an amputee, he does have a name. Please remember that.’
‘Sorry, Sister – Private Hopkinson. It’s just that – ’
‘I know – when you were in France, they were in and out so fast there was no time for names.’ Georgina had heard that too many times from this young woman. ‘Here we have time – here, names are important.’
The nurse bowed her head in acknowledgement, but could not control an irritated sigh. She was thorough, but Georgina wished she would give some evidence of caring for these boys who were here, often for several months. They needed more than medication and clean dressings, they needed interest and reassurance: she had learned that much from the Quakers and was determined to have it here. Once the euphoria of survival had worn off, many of them became despondent. Some had families close enough to visit, but too few knew what to say. It was as though the experience of war and terrible wounds had set insurmountable barriers between those boys and their loved ones.
Georgina was convinced that men who felt they were cared for recovered more quickly than those who imagined themselves a burden to the staff. For some nurses affection was hard to give without great personal cost to themselves; and the inexperienced sometimes erred by giving too much. It was a narrow, difficult line to tread, always with the danger of provoking passionate adoration from this one or that. Georgina had found herself, from time to time, the object of both lust and fantasy as well as gratitude masquerading as love. The young officers were more susceptible, for some reason, than their men. She explained to each that what they felt was natural, if temporary; they would recover in a surprisingly short space of time. Few believed her, asking if they might write. In spite of her discouragement some did, from home, from convalescent hospitals, from France. But rarely more than once. She kept their letters.
The ones who broke her heart were the ones who died.
It was perhaps because their future had been full of a potential which would never now be realized; or perhaps each death represented, to her, a personal failure. It was not something she could adequately explain. It might have been simply the sight of those young, beautiful bodies, which should have been warm and passionate and full of life, and were suddenly so cold and grey in death. If only briefly, sh
e loved them all, and grieved for them like children. Only the detached nature of her love, the fact that she had never explored its physical possibilities, saved her from personal involvement. It was something she was but dimly aware of, yet she clung to it as a nun clings to her marriage in Christ.
Most of the Medical Officers were older, married men, too grossly overworked to indulge in more than the mildest flirtation. There had been one on temporary attachment, however, who had been attractive and single and barely older than herself. He was abrasive with the staff but unusually kind to the patients. For that alone, Georgina had liked him, until in his odd way he had tried to pay court to her. That he was doing so had not occurred to her until one morning over coffee, when he had declared with blunt frustration that she was one of the best nurses he had ever worked with, and by far the most beautiful. It was such a pity, he added, that she never raised her eyes to the level of whole, healthy, normal men; but if she did, he supposed she would not be the excellent nurse she was.
Dumbfounded by that declaration, she had not even blushed; simply stared at him. Finishing his coffee, he had turned to leave.
‘I thought you were perfect,’ he said from the doorway. ‘But you’re not — you lack a woman’s heart.’
That had hurt. Thinking of it now, she wondered whether that careful schooling of her emotions – so hard won, over so many years – had atrophied all feminine inclinations, leaving her as sexless as a machine. And yet, with her background, marriage would have been folly and as marriage generally followed on love, she had always been careful not to seek it, not to encourage in any way. Instead, like a nun, everything had been channelled into her vocation.
But still, that accusation from a man – a man she had liked and respected — cut to the quick. By way of compensation she drove herself and her nurses even harder, trying to instil her philosophy into all of them. But mostly they were too tired, too overworked, too desperately in need of kindness themselves, to be able to summon the necessary response.
Which was how she felt now. But the words would have to come, the sincerity have to be found, the encouragement expressed.
Leaving the hospital at eight, Georgina was exhausted almost to the point of tears. When the porter called her back, she was tempted to ignore him. Even the small bundle of letters failed to lift her spirits. With a brief word of thanks she pushed them into her pocket.
On the tram she fell asleep and had to be roused at the terminus. A motor bus across the river, and yet another to take her to Kensington Gardens. She was home by half-past nine. The flat was deserted, her father and his servant away, yet again, in Ireland, where executions were the order of the day, and rebels with whom few had sympathized were being raised to the level of martyrs.
It was a bitter, heartbreaking situation. Like her father, Georgina could see no sense in it. It seemed the crowning folly of years of mismanagement, years in which the famous English sense of fair play had been remarkable only for its absence. If only, she often thought, the government would not persist in treating Ireland like a recalcitrant child. Such arbitrary punishment was less likely to hammer evil out, than temper it to greater strength for the next attempt. And there would be other attempts, of that her father was sure; his prognostications for the future were dire indeed, and the smaller tragedy was that his present sympathies were in direct conflict with his sense of duty.
He had tried, yet again, to resign, but short of laying himself open to a charge of treason, it was impossible to reveal that depth of antagonism to his masters at the War Office. Georgina had never seen him so desperately low in spirit, and there was little she could afford in the way of comfort. Ireland was her country too.
Only one thing had cheered her father in recent weeks, and that had been the arrival of the Australians in London. The first contingent had marched to Westminster Abbey on 25th April to commemorate the anniversary of the landing at Gallipoli. Since then others were to be seen everywhere about the town, handsome, muscular, sun-bronzed men on leave, engagingly friendly if curiously disinclined to salute the many British officers at large on the streets.
That aspect afforded Robert Duncannon a certain amount of perverse satisfaction, and in the midst of his despair over what was happening in Dublin, he had related to Georgina a story that was currently being repeated in shocked tones throughout the War Office. While in Egypt, apparently, a young Australian officer had been accompanying a visiting brigadier on a tour of inspection. Coming upon a soldier on guard duty engaged in eating a pie, the horrified young officer immediately ordered him to present arms, whereupon the soldier calmly requested the brigadier to hold his pie while he did so.
True or not, that story amused Robert enormously, as did the legend of those rare salutes. These wild colonial boys were idiosyncratic when it came to one of the prime rules of British army life, and would apparently only afford that civility to those officers known to them and respected.
‘Which must cut out the entire General Staff,’ Robert had commented with acid appreciation. ‘No wonder Haig loathes them — he was always so particular about his status!’
But when Georgina had gently teased him with the question of how he would feel if the Australian soldiers did not salute him, Robert had lapsed once more into bleak despondency.
‘Well as I don’t have much respect left for myself at the moment, how on earth could I complain?’
That comment, Georgina felt, mirrored her father’s attitude with disturbing clarity. She was anxious about him, on top of all the other constant, pressing anxieties which made up her life these days. Ireland, the war, her work, all intruded into every waking hour, and often the sleeping ones as well. She dreamed sometimes of Liam, a recurrent nightmare in which a faceless, mutilated body on her ward turned out to be him.
It was not necessary to ask her father whether any of the Australians currently in London included Liam. Robert Duncannon had made a contact on the Australian staff in London, who was primed to tell him the instant Liam’s name came up either for leave or as a casualty. Nevertheless, that did not prevent her heart leaping every time she saw one particularly tall, fair soldier in the by now familiar slouch hat. But it was never him and the disappointment was always acute. Her need to see him, to have some word from him at least, grew out of all proportion, becoming for her a touchstone, the one thing that would relieve all other anxiety. She did not ask herself why that conviction had taken root, nor question its logic; she knew, quite simply, that it was so. She was also aware that Liam was unlikely, after all this time, to write to her. If she wanted to hear from him, she would have to be the one to break the silence. And by that time Georgina was incapable of weighing the issues involved.
But it was a month now since she had set pen to paper, using the flimsy peg of what had happened in Dublin as the excuse for writing, four weeks in which she had searched assiduously for his hand on every missive which arrived. Mornings of disappointment had given way to night hours in which she cursed herself for trying to break those silent years. She told herself that there was no reason why, after all this time, he should want to hear from her, or care whether she was in London, Dublin or Timbuktoo; and in the greater hell of imagined rejection, it seemed to her to have been better to leave things alone.
Quite deliberately, a week ago, it being the only way to do her work and retain her sanity, Georgina had put him out of her mind. Now, glancing at the army-issue envelope, she assumed that it was from Robin, and dropped it on the bed. Unpinning her stiff white collar, peeling off the grey nurse’s uniform, she peered down at the writing and realized it was different. Needing a better light she hurried into the sitting room, thrusting back the heavy curtains to let in the morning sun.
Hardly daring to believe that it might be from Liam, she tore at the envelope with trembling fingers. Her eyes ran down the single page, taking in formal, stilted, uncharacteristic phrases to the signature at the end. For a second she was torn between delight and pain; and then she smiled,
remembering her own difficulties, the strain of finding words to overcome the years between. It must have been the same for him.
He did not apologize, as she had not, for the years of silence, but simply thanked her for writing, said he was glad to have her letter and relieved that she had not been in Dublin during the riots. He had been in the line for weeks, and mail had been delayed, which was why he had not replied earlier. Life in France was better than he had imagined, and they had not been involved in anything serious. The following sentence had been obliterated by the censor, so Georgina assumed it must have contained some reference to where they were or about to be. She held the page up to the light, but that thick black line was all-encompassing and she swore with frustration. After all this time every word of his was precious to her; she could not bear to be so denied.
The letter ended on a note of hope. Liam said he looked forward to hearing from her again; he would like to know something of what life was like for her in London. His signature, strong and forward-sloping, was underlined by a single flourish.
Pleased beyond all reason, Georgina burst into tears.
Nineteen
At the end of June, three weeks after posting her letter to Stephen, Zoe was still waiting for a reply. The letter received the previous week was not in answer to any of hers, in fact it was little more than a note, outlining where the ship was and why. The apology for his brusqueness over the phone was brief. There were few allusions to his own emotions, either with regard to her or the situation out there, although he did say in a postscript that she was not to worry about him, the media made far more of isolated incidents than was necessary.
Liam's Story Page 35