by M. J. Cates
“Not at all,” Imogen said, “but I suppose I should get to work.”
Mrs. Boxer bustled ahead of her, swiping at invisible dust.
“I’ll leave you to it then. You take a look at those figures, Doctor. I think you’ll be impressed.”
Imogen went into her office and closed the door. She looked out the window at the sparrows and squirrels. In the distance, two male patients, crooked and bent, were raking leaves. They reminded Imogen of a painting she had seen somewhere.
She sat at the desk and undid the ribbon around the folder and began to read. Within minutes she found mistakes: subtotals that did not add up to their given totals, percentages that did not add up to a hundred.
“It must be my arithmetic,” she said quietly, and went over the figures again.
It was not her arithmetic. She flipped back to the first page. It was stamped and signed by the chairman of the hospital’s medical board. Was it possible he’d approved work of this calibre? If he was counting on these figures to secure a raise in funding he’d be laughed out of the committee.
She read on, checking a column labelled “condition at discharge.” Almost every patient discharged was listed as “cured.” Anyone even slightly familiar with mental illness and its treatment would know that the largest number should be “improved.” She went over the columns of names and found patients that had been counted as cured more than once. Readmission had apparently not cancelled out the earlier “cure.”
Imogen closed the folder, and sat very still, hands folded on the desk before her. Mrs. Boxer, however good-natured, was clearly going to be of no help. The implications of this darkened the room, as if the blinds had been lowered.
14
When he had first returned home from the war to live with his father in Rochester, Quentin had been subject to fits of uncontrollable weeping. His exterior wounds had healed, all infection fled, but there remained within him a reservoir of sorrow that the peaceful surroundings of home seemed, surprisingly, to pressurize. He would be reading, or trying to write, and suddenly the tears would flow.
The scar from the bullet wound in his side was badly puckered, but the two in his chest had healed nicely, and the scars on his legs were not so bad. But he suffered from a continual sensation of being out of true, which he was, and although he had long imagined himself fully recovered from Hill 70, the doctors warned him that internal injuries from that blast might yet develop into kidney and liver problems. Even now, in the spring of 1924, climbing stairs made him gasp for breath and he walked with a tentative, measured gait entirely unbecoming to a young man. It was difficult for him to turn his neck, so that if something off to one side caught his attention he had to turn his entire body to attend to it. In the scheme of violence visited upon the bodies of war victims, he had got off lightly. But he felt unready for the world, that he needed yet more time in the peace and quiet of his father’s house—weeks and months to think, to gather himself back together, and above all to write.
Before being shipped back home, he had made extensive but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to retrieve Mac’s manuscript and look after it, as he had promised. Since Mac had been writing about the war, partly by way of homage to his fallen comrade, Quentin set out to do the same. After many false starts and many setbacks he had little more than a hundred pages to show for his efforts, and those hundred seemed to him entirely inadequate. The problem was not discipline exactly. He sat himself down at the desk every day and put in several hours, but for most of those hours he wrote nothing. Almost immediately he would sink into a kind of nether zone—not daydreaming exactly—where he remained in a strange paralysis of non-thought.
This particular day he had set himself the task of describing his last few weeks overseas.
* * *
—
After two months in the hospital at Étaples he had been evacuated out of France and deposited at Woodcote Park Convalescent Hospital in Epsom, sixteen miles southwest of London.
Woodcote Park had once been a grand estate but, despite its bucolic-sounding name, looked like any other army camp. A hundred huts clad in galvanized steel had provided beds for as many as five thousand patients, but as the war wound down, their numbers had dwindled to some fifteen hundred by the time Quentin arrived.
His head wound turned out to be the most minor of his injuries, being the work of a ricochet that plowed a three-inch-long furrow in his scalp but broke no bone. The bullet that had sliced its way into his left lung had necessitated a complicated and dangerous operation at the casualty clearing station. This had saved his life but left him battling pulmonary infections that threatened him with slow drowning as he convalesced. Shell fragments that had hit him after he lost consciousness had broken the tibia, fibula, and femur of his right leg.
“Another quarter-inch,” the field surgeon informed him, “and it would have severed the femoral artery and you’d have died in the muck. You’re a lucky man.” War, Quentin had often noted, tended to rearrange one’s ideas about luck.
His foot-to-thigh cast was removed soon after his arrival at Woodcote, but he was so weak, and his leg so unreliable, that he spent most of his time lying in bed listening to the English rain hammer on the roof of the hut, an unsettling sound that seemed never to stop. The men called the place, none too affectionately, Tin City.
As a convalescent hospital, Woodcote offered an aggressive program for rehabilitating shattered limbs. The nurses took stern delight in fitting Quentin into a Victorian-looking contraption of weights and straps that pulled and squeezed his leg into positions it would have been unlikely to adopt even before his injury. He had only been cast-free for a few days before he and several other “gimps,” as they called themselves, were ordered to take daily “strolls” with a cheerful and voluble NCO who was himself a patient.
Quentin was just beginning to think himself truly on the mend when he came down with the flu that raged through the camp, killing nearly three hundred men who had managed to survive the combined efforts of Messrs. Krupp, Vickers, and Shrapnel to murder them. Quentin emerged from the illness fifteen pounds lighter and half-suffocating with yet another lung infection.
By the time the spring rains eased off he was better. Just keeping down the awful food seemed a signal accomplishment, and his mood grew brighter as his physical strength returned. A period of uncharacteristic sunshine did more than anything to cheer him, and soon he was able to enjoy stumping along the green hills of the park on his own. For a week or so he even began to feel optimistic, an emotion with which he had grown unfamiliar.
It didn’t last. As the days wore on, he found himself slipping into a kind of numbness. The nurses and doctors, the support staff and his fellow patients, seemed to drift in a plane quite apart from his own and from which they could not touch him. It was not entirely unpleasant—there was enough aggravation at the camp to make numbness welcome—but it felt “wrong,” in an almost physical way, as if a veil were hanging between him and everyone else. A disquiet, a detectable sense of dread, had set up a low drone in his consciousness.
The war had been over for months but the patients at Woodcote had yet to be demobilized, were still soldiers, still subject to military rules. Morale was appalling, the atmosphere that of a train station when service has been delayed without explanation and with no hint of when it might resume. The men snapped at the nurses and snarled at the NCOs and especially at the few military police on site. Some blamed British bureaucracy for the delay, others blamed a shortage of Canadian ships. Whatever the reason, Woodcote Park was housing fifteen hundred agitated souls who wanted to go home. Extensive efforts were made to keep them entertained. Every night saw a film or musical revue or some other performance in the recreation hut. The men were allowed into town between 1600 and 2130 hours every day. They weren’t prisoners; they just felt like prisoners.
When they went into town they could not ignore the fact that the British had fallen out of love with Canadians. Appreciated as they ha
d been for coming early and decisively to England’s aid, beloved as they had been for their heartbreaking sacrifices at Passchendaele, and worshipped as they had been for their costly breakthrough at Vimy Ridge, by the late spring of 1919 it was clear the colonials had outstayed their welcome.
Former British troops, many of them jobless, were not happy to see well-paid Canadian soldiers buying drinks and trinkets for their women. Accusations were made that the Canadians were not casualties at all, they were only venereal cases. Many were, although these were a minority at Woodcote and had to wear a Saxe blue uniform to distinguish them from the “real” wounded.
One warm June night two Canadians were arrested in the Rifleman pub and hauled off to jail. Quentin had spent the evening in a different pub with a hut mate named Sam Hawsey. They were heading back to the hospital to make the nine-thirty roll call, both limping, when the sea-like sound of an angry crowd flowed over the crest of a hill near the high street, soon followed by the men themselves—hundreds of Woodcote patients. Quentin and Sam were pulled into the crowd and whirled along with it into Ashley Road. They ended up at the front of the mob that now pressed up against the wrought iron fence surrounding the Epsom police station.
No plan or organization was discernible, and yet the crowd seemed to move and breathe like a single organism. They wanted the two jailed Canadians released at once. Over and over, the men chanted, Let them go! Let them go! Let them go! and even Quentin tingled with excitement—you couldn’t not feel it, despite its distinctly unwholesome tang. He recognized several men from his hut—men he knew to be sober, serious individuals—yelling, laughing, their eyes shining. But when he called out to them, they just kept yelling and laughing and paid him no mind.
More and more men flooded over the hill, filling the road, far more men than the local police could hope to handle. Four constables emerged now from the ivy-covered station and stood in their blue uniforms and ridiculous helmets halfway between the iron gate and the front door. One of them, a sergeant, stepped forward and tried to reason with the crowd. He yelled, but the mob drowned him out with Let them go! Let them go!
Some of the Canadians clambered over the fence, dodged around the sergeant, and charged the other three constables, who began swatting at them with their billy clubs. That enraged the crowd, and now men swarmed through the gate. Quentin was pressed up against the fence so that his chest wound screamed.
“Best get out of here,” he yelled to Sam.
“Hell, no!” Sam yelled back. “Fuckin’ imperials—who do they think they are?”
The front yard of the station was a full-blown riot scene. Two of the soldiers now sported police helmets. The constables were submerged, bareheaded, in the chaos. The crowd surged past them and flowed around to the back of the station. Windows were smashed. One man wrestled with a constable on the ground and came up with his club. For no obvious reason he came back toward the fence and poked the sergeant with it. When the sergeant turned around, the man swung the club into the side of his head. The sergeant crumpled. It was clear by the way he fell—no hands thrown out to break his fall, legs folded beneath him in impossible positions—that the injury was grievous. Even the man who had clubbed him saw this. He stood staring, his mouth a black circle, then backed away. He dropped the club and pushed through the crowd, his blue uniform vivid against the churning sea of khaki.
Quentin had lost track of Sam—he might have been inside the police station or helping others to attack it from the rear. He clutched the arm of the man next to him and pointed to the sergeant. “We’ve got to get him out of here.”
“Right.”
Quentin went through the gate but the man held back.
“Come on, man. Get over here and grab his arms.”
The man did as he was told. Two other men, perhaps shaken into sense by this new level of violence, joined them. Together the four of them carried the policeman to a nearby house. Another man was sent to summon an ambulance. The terrified neighbour—a pasty woman in housecoat and slippers—was in no rush to let them in.
“Please,” Quentin shouted. “We have an injured policeman.”
The curtains of the front window parted an inch, and a moment later she opened the door.
“He needs a cold compress,” Quentin said as they lowered the sergeant to the sofa. When she didn’t move, he said, “Hurry—a dishtowel in cold water.”
She brought him a face-cloth in a basin. Quentin squeezed the water out and pressed it gently to the sergeant’s head. The depression in the temple region was deep enough that he could feel it through the wet cloth. If he regains consciousness, Quentin thought, he’ll be lucky to remember his own name, let alone how to count. His skin, already pale against the dark hair and moustache, turned paper white. His breathing grew shallower and irregular and then stopped altogether. The other three men muttered their excuses and left. Quentin sat in an overstuffed armchair, easing his leg, while the lady of the house eyed him from her seat at her dining room table, where she was smoking furiously.
Seeing a photograph on the mantel, Quentin said, “Your son?”
The woman nodded, and took a long pull on her cigarette, making the tip glow.
“Artillery?”
She exhaled a jet of grey smoke and said, “He died at Vimy.”
“A hero, then. Anyone who got through Vimy owes it to British artillery and men like your son.”
“You wouldn’t know it—way your lot is always going on about it. ‘Canadian miracle’ and all.”
“I know it.”
She stubbed out her cigarette with some violence.
“High-explosive shell. They say he didn’t suffer.”
“That’s a mercy, then.”
Parents of men roasted alive in tanks, or screaming as they tried to gather their intestines back in, were told the same thing. Nobody suffered.
The ambulance men finally got through the crowd and confirmed the death. Quentin gave them his name and information, and they carried the dead sergeant away on a stretcher.
“So why’d they want to do that, then?” the woman said. “Kill a p’liceman only trying to keep order. I thought we was all on the same side.”
“I don’t know why,” Quentin said. “War doesn’t bring out the best in people.”
“Can’t blame the bloody war. The war’s over.”
“Yes,” Quentin said. “Yes, I heard that too.”
Over the next few days he was questioned thoroughly and repeatedly. He told the police everything he had seen but he could not identify the man who had killed their comrade. Their skepticism, at first sulphurous, eventually gave way. In the end, they arrested every Canadian soldier who showed billy club injuries and a man was charged with murder—the only one of the injured men who was wearing a blue uniform.
* * *
—
Quentin tried several times during his convalescence to contact Margaret Morley. It seemed decades ago that they had danced in the crowd at Étaples. He wrote three letters care of the Canadian Army Medical Corps but received no reply. It was possible she was still on duty. She had given him her parents’ address in Bracebridge, Ontario, but he didn’t want to intrude on them when he was only an unfamiliar name. He asked one of his Woodcote nurses, a Miss Jenkins, for help locating her fellow nurse but she kept forgetting his request. It was frustrating, but he could hardly blame her, overworked as she was and surrounded by bad-tempered soldiers.
“I’ve given up,” he said to her one day as she strapped him into the leg extension apparatus. She was a plain girl, awkward and graceless, and with an all but affectless bedside manner.
“You can’t give up. Only another month of this and your leg will be fine.”
“Not that. I’ve given up waiting for you to locate my nurse friend. I’m writing to her parents today.”
“Well, if you know her parents…”
“I don’t, but she gave me their address. Ouch!”
“Sorry.” She readjusted the hip st
rap. “All right. You get to work and I’ll be right back.”
He flexed his leg, then extended it. Flexed, and extended. It hurt much less than it had at first, but his rate of progress had slowed, making it hard to stay interested in such a repetitive task. And Nurse Jenkins still had not got the strap right. It chafed every time he straightened his leg.
She came back clutching a piece of paper, and when he stopped for a breather, she thrust it into his hands. It was a typed notice, curled at the edges and with pinholes in the corners. The date at the top indicated it was months old. Quentin would have still been in the field hospital in France, barely out of the anaesthetic.
A memorial service will be held on Thursday morning for our gallant nursing sisters killed last week on the hospital ship Laurentian. As you know, the ship was clearly marked, and yet the Germans saw fit not only to sink it but to attack the lifeboats. All 210 souls perished, including the following three sisters: Florence Harper (Toronto), Jeanine Watts (Markham, Ont.), Margaret Morley (Bracebridge, Ont.). Service will take place at 11:30 a.m. All patients and personnel may attend save those handling any emergencies.
Quentin looked at Nurse Jenkins. “You knew all along.”
“Not all along.”
“Good God. It was months ago. I wish you’d told me.”
“Yes. Well.”
“Could have saved me writing all those letters.”
“You’ve been very unwell. I thought it was for the best.”
“No one wants to live in a fantasy.”
“I do,” she answered with an uncharacteristic note of passion. “I spend a great deal of time imagining I’m someone else in some other place—even at another time.”
She rattled on about movie stars she worshipped, and Quentin stopped listening. He thought about the cancelled future of Margaret Morley, the thousands of people she would have helped, and how her parents, who had already lost their sons, would grieve for their lost daughter. He thought about the loss to himself. It was odd. He had not had time to fall in love with her, but now that she was dead he covered his eyes and wept.