Dazzle Patterns

by Dazzle Patterns (v5. 0) (epub)

  She followed him up the creaky stairs and into a hallway smelling of turpentine and linseed oil. In a room opening onto the corridor, a man was leaning towards a canvas, dabbing paint onto a winter scene of the harbour, a ship in the middle distance, dazzle-patterned.

  The painter, about thirty, lanky, with red hair, turned. “Oh, hello, Fred.” Exuding coiled energy, he shucked off a paint-smeared apron and hung it on his easel.

  Fred said, “Miss Clare Holmes, this is Arthur Lismer.”

  Lismer sprang back, looked at his painting, and turned reluctantly. “They are beautiful in their own way, aren’t they?”

  The ships that came in and out of Halifax, painted in dazzle, were startling. They crouched like enormous animals, resplendent in their broken stripes of white and black and green and blue, as if decked out for a joyous parade rather than heading into grim seas.

  “Patterns break up the silhouette of the ship at sea. Not so much camouflage as artifice.” Lismer wiped his hands on an oily cloth. “Can’t make sense of what is right in front of you.” Lismer looked at Clare with intense green eyes, which darted from her forehead to her ears, snagging for just a split second on her eye patch, before moving on to her chin and back to her good eye. “What can we do for you, Miss Holmes?”

  “I just stopped in on my way somewhere else,” Clare said.

  “She works at the factory and I thought she might be interested to see the work we’re doing,” Fred said.

  “Oh, yes, of course.” Lismer seemed to bounce off his toes as he followed them to the open door at the end of the hall. “Mr. Baker here is quite talented,” he said, nodding in Fred’s direction. Clare wondered, embarrassed, if he’d mistaken them for sweethearts.

  LONG WORKTABLES STREWN WITH papers crowded the room. Men sat at stools, some bent over drawings, some leaning on their elbows talking. A few looked up at Clare’s face and then quickly away. She hovered near the door. Fred took a portfolio from a shelf, opened it on a nearby table, and motioned her over.

  The first drawings were on gridded paper, swirls and leafy patterns that might be wallpaper. There were carpenters’ drawings for tables and cabinets with small studies of ornamented legs and pulls. Finally there were glass vases, goblets and bowls, with patterns quite unlike the ones they made at the glassworks. Instead of maple leaves and acorns there were waves and birds, exotic plants, and sinuous figures of women.

  “This class is industrial design, furniture, fabrics …”

  “Does Jack Bell know you’re doing this?” Clare said.

  Fred’s face stiffened. He began putting his drawings back in the portfolio. “Jack Bell isn’t interested in my designs.”

  Lismer, who had been distracted with a question from one of the other students, bounded to Fred’s table. He picked up a bright geometric drawing, an intricate interwoven pattern of abstract flowers. “You should submit this one to Toronto city hall, Fred, for the stained glass.”

  “Arthur, can I talk to you, please?” A broad-shouldered woman stood in the doorway. Her full bosom was stuffed tightly into her blouse. She stood rooted on small feet clad in black lace-up ankle boots.

  “I’m just about to start a class, Mary,” Lismer said.

  “I know. That’s how I knew I’d find you here!” It was difficult to tell how old the woman was. She wore her hair in the old-fashioned high bun, swept up at the sides. But her face was youthful, especially her eyes, which were unwavering. “I only need a moment.”

  Lismer turned and with poorly veiled irritation followed her into the hall.

  “I should be going,” Clare said. “Thank you for showing me around.”

  Rain had begun to lash against the windows, running in straight clean tracks down the pristine glass. She’d be soaked by the time she got back to Rose’s. The thought of Leo intruded unbidden, as it so often did. The cold wet trenches, the familiar guilt, and then an unformed fear moving in her. What was it Jack had said, Passchendaele was hell?

  “Are you sure? Why not wait until the rain eases off?” Fred said.

  “Then I might be here all night.” Clare dabbed at the sweat beading her upper lip with her coat sleeve. She was suddenly anxious to get home. In fact, her brief determination to leave her bedroom that morning had evaporated. All she could think of was slipping from the rough edges of the day into the dark folds of laudanum. But it was all gone.

  She turned and hurried down the corridor, her winter coat suddenly prickly in the stuffy classroom.

  As she approached the studio where Lismer had been painting, she could hear Mary. Her voice husky, her tone angry. “Arthur, you know many women can’t attend classes during the day. They work, like the men.”

  “Women don’t need to learn industrial design. They’re not interested in factory jobs. They’d be taking spaces that men need. We already have a waiting list and the room is overcrowded.” Lismer’s voice was getting louder.

  Clare tried to slip past the door.

  “You … miss, come in here.”

  Clare turned, startled.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mary.”

  “No, I mean it, Arthur. Has anyone asked what women might want to study here?”

  Clare hesitated at the door.

  Lismer looked at her apologetically and then at his watch. “Come in, please, it will just be a moment.” And then, “I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

  The smell of turpentine hung thickly in the room.

  “Clare.”

  “What do you do, Clare?” Mary said.

  “I work at the glassworks.” Clare found herself staring at Lismer’s painting.

  Mary arched an eyebrow at Lismer. “And what do you do there?”

  “I check for flaws.”

  “Do you like the work?” Mary asked.

  “Ye-ess.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “Well, I like seeing all the different kinds of things the factory makes and how they make them.” How to describe the glass-blower’s mysterious and beautiful alchemy or how she loved turning glass in the light. Clare took deep breaths, head full of bees.

  Mary was leaning towards her, fixing her with her gaze. She clearly expected Clare to say more. It was difficult to pinpoint what colour the woman’s eyes were. Grey? Blue?

  “It’s a job in the city. It’s better than staying on the farm,” Clare said.

  “What if you could learn how to design the glass?” Mary said to Clare, but looking smugly at Arthur Lismer.

  “Well, I’ve never really thought about it.” The dazzle patterns began vibrating.

  Lismer looked at his watch again, impatiently. “Okay, Mary, you’ve made your point. But, it really is impossible to add more spaces to this class.”

  “What about this room?”

  “We don’t have another teacher.”

  “I can teach drawing basics, just like I do with the Normal School girls during the day. At least, if women students ever get the chance to take a design class, they’ll have something to start with.”

  Lismer sighed and scrubbed at his high forehead, as if to rub away a headache. “I guess we can try it and see how it goes.” He hurried out of the room, smoothing his thin hair with both hands. “Basic drawing,” he said over his shoulder, as he disappeared down the hall.

  Mary looked at Clare with a sly smile. “I’m sorry I kept you. Thank you for your time.” She looked at Clare more closely. “Are you quite all right?”

  “I’ll just be going then,” Clare said. She was burning up and swaying a little on her feet. The Irish Fusiliers pipe band was streaming up from the street, pushing past her, their saffron kilts swaying, heading for the room where Arthur Lismer was now teaching. They were tiny, like the nurses and children, the trains and horses that emerged from under her bed. The sound of the pipes filled Clare’s head. “You can’t go in there,” she called after them, frantic, pressing herself against the wall. She was responsible for their presence and terrified that they would disr
upt the class and, more importantly, show the world, finally, that she was mad.

  Mary rushed to her side just as she was sliding down the wall, the pipers marching through the classroom door and into blackness.

  18

  “THEY’RE SHIPPING THE TROOPS from the eastern front, now the Russians are out.” Marty shovelled mashed potatoes into his mouth as fast as he could. There was more for the guys who got back to the mess tent first.

  “Where are the bloody Yanks?” Wes said, banging a hobnail into the sole of his boot with a stone.

  LEO WOKE IN THE NIGHT. From his dugout he could see a trickle of stars fading in and out through mist.

  “You’re awake,” Marty said. “I can hear you blinking.”

  “Guess I am.” Leo pulled his blanket, filmed with cold droplets, up to his chin.

  “Remember how we used to like to sleep in the field?” Marty said. He smelled of cheap French cigarettes. He wasn’t winning lately at poker.

  “And the time we found ourselves sharing it with Wilson’s bull?” Leo laughed under his breath.

  “I’ve never seen you run so fast,” Marty chuckled, shifting in his bunk.

  The two of them lay on their backs, silent, looking at the stars.

  “I’m going to sleep in a feather bed, under two quilts and a dry roof, every night of my life, once I get out of here,” Marty said. “I’m going to sleep and sleep …” His voice trailed off.

  “How about starting now?” someone hissed from down the line.

  AT DAWN, the men set out without speaking. An air of despondency had begun to sink over them. There were rumours of massing troops and equipment on the German lines and they’d been given extra rum rations last night. Always a bad sign.

  Somewhere in the dense fog, a bird trilled. It’s spring! Leo thought with surprise. “Poor buggers, they’re still singing,” he said over his shoulder to Marty.

  “No choice, I guess,” Marty grunted. “Just like us. Can’t leave.”

  Leo looked at the soldiers around him: miners, bank clerks, farm kids. No matter what they’d done before, their instincts had been ground down to the same thing.

  Still, sometimes the absurdity of this murderous groping through the earth would hit Leo like a cold wind. And in the instant before he could push the bitter thought back he would be ready to put down his tools, climb up out of the earth, and walk away from it all, even if it meant a bullet for cowardice.

  LEO’S PACK WAS LIGHTER than usual. He wasn’t carrying geological equipment. But he was already starting to sweat, as he did every day when he headed underground. In the last weeks, every man in the unit had been assigned to construction. Leo’s helmet swung from his hand. He had a fatalistic feeling about helmets in the tunnels. It wasn’t like up top, where bullets could bounce off a guy’s helmet. If twenty tons of earth fell on him, a helmet would hardly make a difference. Leo ducked into the tunnel. He needed both hands for the climb down. He pulled on his helmet and ducked into the tunnel entrance.

  “Okay?” Marty, behind him, slapped his back.

  The domed tunnel opened into a large troop quarry, recently excavated by Kiwi moles. Light from a weak bulb glistened off white chalk walls, illuminating rows of benches, canisters of food, barrels of water. A few men were tying empty food canisters in bundles for carrying up top. The room smelled of bully beef farts and fear-stained sweat. Carved into the wall was the word Aukland.

  Leo and his unit were pushing on to work on another chamber. They shouldered picks and shovels from an equipment dump in one corner. “Rattle ya dags,” a strapping young Kiwi with dark eyes and white teeth said, punching Marty in the shoulder as he picked up a load and headed out of the dugout. “Three hundred more comin’ down here today.”

  The next tunnel needed rebracing where earth had fallen from the ceiling.

  “Leave me some wood. I’ll fix this.” Leo crouched to pull hammers and nails from his pack. “I’ll see you in Wellington.” The Kiwis had christened the next troop chamber too.

  “No, I’ll see you in Grafton,” Marty gave him a sideways smile, pulling a hammer and chisel from his pocket.

  Leo examined the clod of earth, which had fallen from the tunnel roof. Sand. He crumbled it in his hand and held it to his nose. It smelled of bedrock, flinty and sterile. What light once played over it, what shallows it may have lingered in, what estuary it was once swept into, lost. Buried. Forgotten. The mysterious elation he first felt as a child thinking of time abandoned him.

  A sound like far off thunder rolled far above him. A tremor. A few more grains fell from the tunnel roof. Leo straightened. Two. Three seconds of silence. A muffled shout. From where? And then, thunder again. One deep rumble after another. A mighty continuous barrage. Leo dropped his tools, picked up his rifle and pack, and began running towards the next chamber.

  19

  FRED BAKER STARED AT the wind-tossed rain. Icy gusts turning to snow hit the glass. He was uneasy about Clare Holmes going into it alone. She didn’t seem right.

  Mary appeared at the door, flushed.

  “Mrs. Hamilton, this class is underway,” Lismer said, straightening his bow tie and turning away angrily.

  “It’s the young woman,” Mary said, gesturing back down the hall. “She’s not well.”

  Fred stood and peered past the open door, where Clare still slumped against the wall.

  Arthur Lismer whirled around. “Good Lord!” He sprang off his toes and dashed down the hall, Fred Baker right behind.

  Clare was pale. Trickles of sweat ran down her temples. By the time Fred leaned down to where she lay stretched out on the wood floor, her eye was fluttering open. She took one look at Fred and closed it again.

  CLARE WOKE TO DARKNESS, except for a crack of light. Blankets at the windows. She lifted her hand to her eye and felt the patch. And she remembered. They had to remove her eye.

  The crack of light opened. A backlit figure appeared.

  “How are we?” a woman said.

  “I had an enucleation,” Clare said.

  “Yes, that was some time ago.”

  “Did they take my other one out?” Clare said. “Am I blind?”

  “Well, now, can you see me?” the woman asked.

  “Yes, but I often see things that aren’t there.” Clare turned her head away, held still her restless, aching limbs.

  “I’m your nurse, Mrs. Winston, and I can assure you I am really here. Though I’d much rather be home in my own bed.”

  “My nurse?”

  “You had a spell. And they brought you here.”

  Clare searched her mind for her last waking moments. Visiting the glassworks. Tea with the glass-maker. Had she visited the art school? It seemed like such an unlikely event it had blurred into memory.

  “Mrs. Winston?” she said.

  “Yes, dear?” The nurse bent over her, counting her pulse.

  “I forgot my medicine at home.”

  “Your medicine?”

  “I need to take it.”

  “What kind of medicine?”

  “Drops. For my nerves.”

  The nurse looked at her sharply.

  “Laudanum. Dr. Perkins gave them to me.”

  “Well, we’ll have her stop by tomorrow to see you.”

  “But you can give me some now? Just to help me sleep?” Tears gathered in her eyes. She squeezed them shut hard, to force the tears onto her pillow.

  The nurse sighed. “Just one drop,” she said.

  A SOUR ODOUR WOKE CLARE. Morning. A man was leaning over her. It took her a moment to place the reddened nose and the coarse moustache. But the smell of his breath she remembered. Dr. Cox.

  “Well, young lady, how are you this morning?”

  “Not well.”

  Terrible pains climbed her back and legs. The bedsheets were soaked with sweat.

  “You were weak and dehydrated.” Dr. Cox slipped up the eye patch. “And in the throes of withdrawal from laudanum.” He replaced the eye patch. “Mrs.
Winston tells me you had become addicted.”

  “Addicted?” Clare tried to sit up. “She is mistaken. I take a little every day to calm my nerves. But I am certainly not addicted.”

  “Come, come now, Miss Holmes. I’ve talked to Dr. Perkins. She told me you had agreed to taper off the drops.”

  “I tried,” Clare said after a few moments silence.

  “I doubt that very much.” Dr. Cox made a note on Clare’s chart. “The fact is, it is very difficult for people to give up laudanum on their own. If we weren’t so busy with this war and the explosion there would have been someone to supervise you.”

  “But your friend …” he glanced at her chart, “Mr. Baker, brought you in to the hospital last night. And now that you’re here, whatever else is wrong with you, if anything, will have to wait until we get you clear of this stuff.”

  THE CEILING DISSOLVED. She was lying under the open sky. The sun a hot open eye she was unable to turn off. Even when she closed her eye she could feel it burning through her.

  She woke again, shivering, her blankets thrown off.

  Sometimes her nurse was at her bedside and held her head while she vomited into an enamel pail.

  Clare tried to convince an indifferent Mrs. Winston that it was her responsibility to give her more laudanum. Only that would truly make her better. But Mrs. Winston simply clucked and plumped her pillow.

  Clare lay back and waited for the small armies of children, horses, and pipe bands to begin marching around her bed.

  On the third day she sat up and took some thin oxtail soup. Mrs. Winston helped her out of bed and braced her as she walked shakily to the toilet down the hall.

  “We need to clean you up.” Mrs. Winston fished a sponge out of a soapy basin at her bedside table. “Your mother is here. You’re a popular girl. Your friends Geraldine and Mr. Baker both stopped by yesterday but I thought it not best. Mr. Baker left you this.” She pulled an envelope from her uniform pocket and handed it to Clare.

  Dear Miss Holmes, the nurse assures me that you are on the mend and will be going home soon. Please feel free to let me know if there is anything at all I can do for you during your recovery, Best wishes, Fred Baker.