It was blithely said, but Connie felt a sting in this presumption. It attributed to her a calculation of which she felt herself quite innocent. She had indeed devoted herself to work, but not because she had renounced the idea of marriage. Why should it have to be one thing or the other? With an inward weariness she gave a little shrug.
The younger girl was mumbling something to her mother, who nodded and raised her eyes in complicitous appeal to Connie. ‘Ah, would you mind, dear – we’ve just come from ballet class, and Bella would like to show you what she’s learned …’
‘I’d be delighted,’ she said, smiling. The girl, only about five or six, had a pale, intense brow beneath which her dark eyes gleamed. She took a small step back on the pavement, as if into a spotlight, and raised herself en pointe. Then, with arms held aloft, she executed a dainty pirouette, first one way, then the other. She came to rest with a little bow. Her movements had been so sweetly self-conscious that Connie, as she clapped, felt tears blinding her. That poor boy. Marianne, joining the applause, took a moment to notice, but once she did her expression turned to alarm.
‘Constance? Oh, my darling, you’re distraught …’ Connie had turned her face away, not wishing to upset the children.
‘I’m sorry – so sorry,’ she gasped, her shoulders starting to heave. The pity of the thing – you could hide from it, for a while, but it had a way of catching you eventually. She felt Marianne’s hand on her shoulder.
‘I suppose these last few days have been dreadful,’ she murmured. ‘One reads the papers …’
‘I’ve just been –’ Connie too kept her voice low ‘– I’ve just been in surgery all afternoon, a boy, we had to amputate his leg –’ She took a deep breath, and blinked up at the sky for a moment. ‘He’d already lost the other one. There was so much blood everywhere … We got him out of the theatre, but he didn’t regain consciousness. He just slipped away.’ Even the surgeon had looked devastated. She felt an inward shiver of despair. What was the use of winning the war if none of the men who won it survived?
There was a pause, then Marianne said softly, ‘You poor girl. I’m sure you did everything you could for him.’
Connie heard her own choked voice again. ‘Before he went under – I mean under the anaesthetic – he said to me –’ she took another gasping breath ‘– “Now for the big adventure.” They were his last words.’ She shook her head, stunned that the boy’s adventure – his whole life – had been so brief. He might have returned to his village in Devon, might have married and had daughters, just like these two of Marianne’s – who, she now saw, were staring at her in unabashed curiosity. It provoked a kind of sobbing laugh in her, and of a sudden she recovered her command. ‘Matthew, that was his name. Matthew Mullen,’ she said, blotting the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief.
Marianne took the hint that Connie wished to leave the subject alone. They gave one another a meaning look, before Connie turned to the diminutive ballerina. ‘That was an excellent pirouette, Bella – as you can see, I was rather overwhelmed!’
‘Shall we invite Constance to your school concert, then, girls?’
They nodded consent to their mother.
‘I’d like that very much,’ said Connie.
‘In the meantime,’ Marianne continued, ‘perhaps you’ll come over to see us in Kensington one evening. We’ve turned the house into a sort of home for convalescent officers. I know they’d appreciate company.’ They talked for a few minutes longer, until Connie checked her watch and said that she would have to be getting back. The girls had gathered in to nestle against their mother, forming a neat family grouping in their summer dresses, and Connie, tired and tear-stained, felt a sudden piercing envy of her friend; how lovely it would be to have nothing in prospect beyond taking one’s children out for an afternoon of ballet and shopping, instead of hurrying back to the crowded wards, to the stretchers on the floor, to the men racked with their vile stinking wounds.
Marianne had leaned in to kiss her on the cheek. ‘It’s so lovely to see you again, dear. I’m going to make sure we don’t lose touch – I mean it.’
* * *
Connie caught a number 11 going back to the Strand. As she retraced her steps up to Endell Street she heard the bell in the hospital square resound with two sonorous clangs. It signified a new convoy of wounded just arriving. She entered through the staff gate and was about to go straight to the emergency room when she stopped, and hurried down the stone flags to the mortuary. Four tables were already occupied, each corpse laid out, mummified beneath a white sheet. She asked one of the attendants to show her Private Mullen. The corner of the sheet was pulled back to reveal the mask of yellowish marble stillness, the eyelids closed, the mouth slightly ajar. It was a face so much calmer than she had seen it in life. She gazed at it for some moments, then reached under the sheet to touch the hand which had gripped hers so fiercely. She felt its chill, then nodded to the attendant. A metal clipboard was affixed to the end of the trolley, and she looked briefly at Mullen’s details: date of birth, record of service, type of wound, registered entry into hospital. And at the bottom, the bald phrase that Connie herself had written, time and again. Died of Wounds.
During the following days the hospital was in pandemonium. The dusty rumble of motor lorries and ambulances as they passed through the gate and into the square was almost unceasing, and the wards were operating dangerously beyond their capacity of 570 beds. The small team of surgeons were so overworked that Connie found herself pressed into an ancillary role, holding retractors steady, cauterising small bleeding vessels, even sewing up wounds. She did not expect praise for this unauthorised work – it was all hands to the pump – though Dr Muir had asked for her to be seconded to the receiving room during the rush, which she supposed was a kind of compliment. But these extra duties in no way relieved her of the everyday care of the wards, where the new VADS, unused to such levels of emergency, were falling prey to septic fingers and heatstroke; to make things worse, experienced orderlies were being summoned to the front to replace wounded stretcher-bearers. Most of the men endured their discomfort with quiet forbearance, and would barely raise their voices above a whimper; but there was one, a cocky subaltern named Henshall, who drove Connie to distraction, importuning helpless VADs with demands to ‘talk to Sister Callaway’ at all hours of the day and night. He had been at Endell Street for three weeks, but it felt more like three months. It was like being pestered by an infant – for however much of her time she devoted to him, it was never enough to satisfy his irksome appetite for attention.
A full week after the big push was under way, Connie was about to turn in for the evening when one of the new VADs on night duty called by. She had just come from St Teresa’s, the ward reserved for officers, with a message from a patient urgently asking to see her. Connie felt her shoulders slump: she had a strong intuition who it might be.
‘Henshall?’
The VAD widened her eyes in confusion. ‘I don’t know, Sister. But he did seem rather insistent. He said he knows you.’
‘That sounds like him,’ she said, and sighed. She could ignore him and sneak off to her digs across the road: in all likelihood he was simply angling for a chat. ‘I’ll go over there in a few minutes.’
It was a quarter to midnight, the time when the hospital was at its quietest. The worst of the wounded had been exhausted into silence, or else lowed softly, like cattle. The night terrors would more often visit in the small hours, blundering into a man’s dreams and replaying through his unconscious the scenes of torment. At times the wards resembled a fiendish experiment in endurance as men thrashed and cursed, then sank back, utterly worn out, to wait for the dawn. As she walked across the square, Connie’s gas lamp threw giant shadows against the walls, and she thought again of Dickens visiting it as a workhouse, hearing the inmates’ footfall, perhaps glimpsing some gaunt-faced waif whose face would lodge in his mind’s eye …
She entered St Teresa’s, steeped in opaque
black and green shadows, illuminated only from chinks in the window blinds or the tiny night lights spaced between every fourth or fifth bed. The ward was silent but for a man moaning in his sleep. Almost tiptoeing on her rubber-soled shoes, she walked along the row towards Henshall’s bed, reckoning the while how long she would have to humour him this night. To her surprise – and relief – he was profoundly asleep. She raked her lamp over the remaining beds; she had not yet checked the few officers who had arrived in this evening’s convoy. In the furthest corner she saw that one of them might be awake – she could usually tell from the sound of their breathing. She took a step nearer, and as the lamp created a little pool of light in the space between them, she saw that his face was turned to the wall. Some feature of it – the set of the jaw, or the shape of the head – reminded her of someone she couldn’t instantly name. Someone she knew, possibly –
The man, disturbed by the light, turned his face on the pillow. Recalling it later she thought it was his spectral paleness that caused her to step back in fright. But it was his voice that did it. ‘Constance.’
The tone was not interrogative: he knew her. She brought the light so close it dazzled him, and he put his hand defensively over his eyes.
‘Would you mind awfully lowering that thing?’ he said, nodding at the lamp. She gasped, then, because that voice was his for certain. Will. Here, in this hospital. She put the lamp on the floor, plunging them into shadow again.
‘Will … I’m – I can hardly – When did you –’
‘I knew it was you,’ he said, and she could hear a weak smile in his words. ‘I saw you at the door, earlier – at first I thought I was hallucinating – then I heard some chap along the row talking about “Sister Callaway”.’
In a daze she sat down on his bedside chair, and gazed into his face. It seemed so improbable he should be here. In the half-light she saw how the pale skin had stretched over his cheekbones, which had the odd effect of making him look both older and somehow younger. His hair, cropped much closer than when she had known him, lent his skull a pathetic fragility. Holding her gaze, he moved his hand slowly until it rested on hers. The touch seemed to wake her up to herself.
‘What happened – I mean, what have you got?’ She found that she was suddenly fearful of his being terribly maimed. Will’s face tilted a fraction downwards.
‘Bullet pierced the lung. Surgeon at the field hospital said I was pretty lucky …’
‘May I look?’ she asked him. In answer, he undid a button of his loose pyjama jacket to reveal his bandaged chest. With accelerating heart, she peeled back the cotton and gauze to check; as the bandage tugged she felt his body stiffen, but he made no sound. The bullet hole, puckered and purplish, was about the size of a sixpence; it had pierced the right of his chest, away from the heart. That was good. The wound also looked clean, and free of any necrotic odour. She felt his eyes on her as she completed her inspection. ‘It seems to be healing,’ she said, catching his eye and then looking away. ‘Is there anything you need?’
He shook his head very slightly. Then, after a pause, he said, ‘It’s very queer meeting up again like this, isn’t it?’
‘I was just thinking that,’ she said with a smile. ‘Of all the hospitals you might have gone to …’
He nodded. ‘I was told that they’d be taking me to some officers’ hospital. But when we got to Waterloo the crush was so awful there was no chance of getting a special allocation. Then some orderly just pinned a label on me saying “Endell Street”. So here I am. I gather they call it the “Flappers’ Hospital”.’
‘Yes, they do. It’s run almost entirely by women. I hope that doesn’t distress you?’
He heard a tiny quiver of the old mischief in her voice, and smiled. ‘Far from it. I’d heard it was one of the best in London –’
‘Oh?’
‘– and now that I’ve met the staff I know it for certain.’ He gave a wheezy chuckle, which became a kind of gasping cough. Connie helped raise him up against the pillow, and made a quick check of his pulse and temperature. Neither seemed wildly irregular. In low voices they continued to talk for a few minutes more. She saw him tiring.
‘I think you should try to get some sleep,’ she said.
‘Not yet. There are things I have to tell you …’ Did she know about Louis? he wondered. Did she already know?
‘You can tell me tomorrow, after you’ve rested. I’ll dress that wound again.’ She was standing over him now, hesitating. She could have leaned in to kiss him, but instead she took his hand and gave it a little squeeze. He held on to it as she was about to withdraw.
‘Connie,’ he said in a changed voice, ‘I’m so very glad to see you again.’
She smiled, and released her hand. He watched as her figure receded down the ward and disappeared through the doors.
When he woke the next morning, Will was befuddled with morphia and tiredness. He wondered for a moment if he really had talked to Connie the night before, or if she had been merely a very lively figment from the distorted netherworld of his dreams. No, he was sure that he had; she had come to his bedside with a lamp. A young woman, a VAD he supposed, came to his bedside and gave his wound a tentative examination. The window behind his bed had been opened, and a warm breath of honeysuckle was wafting through.
‘It’s a lovely morning,’ the girl said brightly. ‘Would you care to sit outside in the square?’
Will replied that he would. Needled by doubt, he then said, ‘Could you tell me – is there a Connie Callaway working in this hospital?’
The girl giggled. ‘If you mean Sister Callaway, yes. I didn’t know her name was Connie,’ she added. He felt a surge of relief, and began to smile as the girl fussed shyly around him. She helped him out of bed and into a wheelchair, tucking a blanket round his legs, then wheeled him, via a lift and corridors bustling with uniformed women, into the large courtyard they called ‘the square’. It was already thronged with patients in bath chairs and wheelchairs, swaddled in blankets like his own, some engaged in murmurous conversation with one another. The scene resembled a quiet Sunday at a rest home, except that the pale valetudinarians here were all young men, not pensioners. The VAD, having found him a shaded corner, dipped her head towards his.
‘Are you quite comfortable, sir?’
‘I’d be more comfortable if you called me William. And your name?’
‘Bridges, sir, I mean, um –’ she said, colouring slightly.
‘Well, Miss Bridges, would you kindly tell Sister Callaway I’d like to see her, when she has a moment to spare?’
The girl made a kind of curtsy, and hurried off.
He was dozing off again when he sensed a presence at his side.
‘Hullo again,’ said Connie. In the light of day she seemed changed to him: somewhat drawn, even stern, with a wary little corrugation in her brow. Her eyes were beautiful, still, but sadder too. He wondered then at all the horrors she had probably seen – the mutilations, the gas gangrene, the burnt flesh. The same things he had seen. But he was a man – a soldier. He was supposed to cope. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked him.
How was he feeling? Fretful, in truth, at the thought of what he had to tell her. He gave a little shrug to her question. Perhaps he communicated his secret agitation to her, because her expression had become clouded. ‘Last night … didn’t you say that you were at Mametz.’
‘Yes, I was.’ When he said nothing further, she had a sudden intuitive flash.
‘I had a telephone call yesterday from my mother. My aunt, Mima, has been hysterical with worry. Louis has been reported missing since last Saturday – I think she said that he was at Mametz, too.’
Without looking at her, Will said quietly, ‘He was. We happened to be in the same sector, quite by coincidence.’
‘You mean, you were actually with him?’ There was a tiny lift of hopefulness in her voice that touched him unbearably. He was going to have to tell her.
‘We met up a few times. I s
aw him just before we went over … Our battle orders were a … We were moving over ground that had absolutely no cover – a machine gun was going full pelt above us …’
The hesitant way he spoke made her uneasy. ‘Did you see him – after that?’ Now, finally, he turned his face to her, but before he could speak, she said, ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
He nodded. When he looked at her again, her eyes were swimming, but she stood quite straight. A minute or more passed as the revelation vibrated in the air between them. ‘D’you know –’ Connie swallowed hard, then holding her voice tight continued ‘– how he died?’
‘Bravely,’ he said, and paused. ‘He was running towards the German trenches, leading his company – what was left of it. He got – sniped. I was about twenty yards away. I’d just reached him when … I caught one, too. I don’t remember anything after that. Some Red Cross men happened to find me.’
It was the first time he had put this into words, but he had never imagined his listener would be Louis’s own cousin. At the casualty clearing station he had learned that three-quarters of the battalion had been lost at Anselm Copse. Not even Bathurst and Otway had made it back. Whenever he thought of Marsden and his battlefield model – the forewarning ignored – he felt sick with shame and fury. But of what earthly use was that? The fighting there was still going on, and the casualty lists in The Times indicated no respite in the numbers.
She still stood there. He said her name quietly, and when she made no reply he supposed she was too preoccupied to have heard him. But at length she turned, and said, ‘I’m glad it was you who told me.’ And she walked away.
That evening, when Connie returned to her digs in Shorts Gardens she found, in a bitter-sweet irony of timing, her first letter from Fred in several days. Army censors forbade reference to the name of the place he was writing from, but she knew he too had been involved in the big push. It was dated 1 July, and written waveringly in pencil.
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