by Louisa Young
Miss Waveney shook her head very quickly.
Ah.
‘Miss Waveney,’ said Rose.
‘Please call me Nadine,’ she said. ‘I don’t know who Miss Waveney is. She’s a sort of stranger.’
Rose smiled. Then stopped smiling. Arranged the professional face. ‘Captain Purefoy has requested no visitors,’ she said.
Nadine was like a jumpy loving dog, wriggling, trying to sit when told, couldn’t do it, wriggling while sitting … ‘Tell him it’s me.’ She smiled.
You of all people, Rose thought. You beautiful, odd-looking, yellow-eyed girl, whose letters so leaping with life and love he puts away unread. ‘I’ll see,’ she said, stood and walked out of the room. She stopped a second, to breathe, and went back to the ward, where Riley was propped, his face newly dismantled, a new mandibular support under his remaining scrap of jaw. ‘Captain Purefoy,’ she said, ‘I know you said no visitors, but there is a young lady here for you who wants to visit you very much.’ She always said ‘visit’. She never said ‘see’.
He looked up at her.
‘It’s Miss Waveney,’ she said.
His eyes froze. His whole body was still. Time paused.
Other people, Rose thought. Other people and their bloody love.
Almost imperceptibly within his metal frame, Riley shook his head. Raised his hand. Rose passed him the pen and notebook.
Tell her gillies says no
Rose read it, and nodded. ‘Probably for the best, for now,’ she said.
Riley glanced up at her. He blinked.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Rose said to Nadine. ‘You should really have enquired before coming all this way. I spoke to his surgeon, and Major Gillies says he really isn’t fit to be visited at the moment. If you want to write to him, I can find—’
Nadine had slumped down on to the seat. Silent tears were pouring down her face, pouring.
Rose’s heart clenched for her. You never get used to it, you mustn’t get used to it. She was too used to it already. ‘Major Gillies is a brilliant surgeon,’ she said. ‘He’s in the very best place. They do really wonderful work here. It takes time but the results are often excellent …’
Nadine was weeping, weeping, weeping.
‘The first operation was a success,’ Rose continued, almost pleadingly. ‘We can do a really good job for him. He’ll look all right.’ Damn this girl.
‘It’s not that!’ Nadine said, lifting her head, like a child outraged by an injustice. ‘Can’t you see? I just want to see him!’
She stared at Rose, and then she gave a split-second sort of apologetic look. Then she leapt up and she ran – she hurled herself – down the way Rose had come.
Rose took off after her, boots slapping the wooden boards of the walkway. ‘Miss Waveney! Miss Waveney!’
Oh God, oh God.
An orderly grabbed Nadine’s arm, and was swung round by her impetus. Rose shook her head at him as she careered up.
‘Come on, Nadine,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and have a cup of tea.’ She was making calming noises, ssht ssht ssht, like you might use to a dog, or a horse, or a baby. To something unsocialised and immediate. Nadine, rigid in the orderly’s embrace, rolled rigid into Rose’s, a sudden shocking intimacy. Rose took her, folded herself round her and enclosed her, holding the flying pieces of her together.
She propelled her to the parlour – a child with a giant doll – and when it came to putting her on a chair, Rose found herself holding on to Nadine’s body, hugging her, feeling in its bones and flesh a profound shuddering comfort of her own, so strong that she felt obliged to break away.
‘Miss Waveney,’ she said, over-compensating with professionalism. She turned to the urn to get tea. Lots of sugar. She would have a cup too. ‘You’re a necessary part of your hospital, a member of your team. Pull yourself together.’
Nadine had collapsed into the wooden chair, breathing very shallowly. She seemed now half the height and size she had been when she was stiff.
‘I really, really, really want to see him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if you can understand this but the idea that he is – there—’ she gestured vaguely ‘—and I can’t be with him, is – it’s – it’s not right. It’s very, very wrong. And unlike most of the very, very wrong things,’ she said, as if the sense of it were unfolding before her, ‘which we are surrounded by, I can make it right – by going to him. I can make it right. So why are you stopping me?’
‘It’s my duty,’ said Rose. ‘What would you do, nurse?’
Nadine smiled. ‘Yes yes yes,’ she said. ‘But you see I’m not here as a nurse. I’m here as a girl. Are you a girl sometimes, Miss …’
‘Rose Locke,’ said Rose.
‘Rose Locke. What a beautiful name. And are you locked? Are you a locked Rose? Oh, God, I’m sorry. Sorry. None of this is your fault. I’ll try to be good. I know, I know. Do you have any idea, Miss Locke, Miss Rose, when I will be able to visit my darling?’
‘I can’t confirm, I’m so sorry,’ Rose said, and before she could finish, suggesting phone calls to the front desk, letters perhaps to the patient, and so on, Nadine had said, ‘I’ll come tomorrow then. Or this afternoon?’
*
Later on that day Rose saw her, walking away from town, wandering, clearly wasting time, in the countryside. She went across a lush field with a few cows in it, carefully climbing the gate on the other side in her long, heavy skirt. Rose had forbidden herself sympathy, as an emotion detrimental to efficiency, but for this girl, the careful way she climbed the gate, weighed down, she felt it, she just did.
*
Riley lay as usual, propped up, eyes shut.
Later, before going to the bathroom, he paused to fossick in his kitbag. He took a small shaving mirror from one of the pockets.
He walked through his ward, seeing the others out of the corners of his eyes. He glanced, in passing, at the other wards off the walkway, and continued up to the big house. A few fellows were sitting about on the flagged terrace in the autumn sun, chatting, reading. As best he could, without causing the particular pain of observation, he looked at the variety of heads he passed, sticking out of the hospital blues of the men, the uniforms of the officers. He imagined what was beneath the bandages, and he made himself look at the various stages of dismantling and reconstruction, of healing and scarring, of swelling and adhesion, of skin pulled this way and that, cut and replaced, puffed up like bacon fat, promising, healing, ugly, terrifying, eyes pulled sideways, noses twisted, the clear, shining skin of burn scars, pedicles dangling, keloids puffing, thick black horsehair stitches, pads and lumps of semi-healed flesh. He looked at the eyes in those heads: moist slits, some of them, crooked, or empty, slack without muscle, a couple of eyelashes stuck in any which way. He considered the souls behind those eyes. As best he could, without being seen to look, because being seen to look would cause pain … He didn’t know how to look, any more than anyone else did.
People will not know how to look at me … Children will scream at the sight of me.
I am angry. I am bewildered. I am scared. I am disgusting. I am embarrassed. I am embarrassing. I can’t talk. I can’t chew to eat. I will be looked at, judged, rejected, pitied. Pitied.
Pitiable. Self-pitying.
Men, pitying me. My mother, pitying me. Nadine, pitying me. Me, pitying me.
Disgusting.
He ambled delicately back down the wide steps, moving silently into the grounds. In the wooded area beyond the pond, he tried to move his tongue in his mouth. He made the tiny soft snorting noise in the back of his throat: the only noise he could make.
His hands were heavy when he lifted them to unwrap the dressing.
He propped the mirror in the fork of a branch, and carefully, consciously, determinedly, he looked at his face.
He was both ridiculous and grotesque. He didn’t look like a face at all. His own wide brow with his hair cropped like a prisoner’s, his own grey eyes, with their lashes and fold
s of skin, their iridic rings and the tiny black holes into the inside of his skull. His own flat cheekbones, his little mole, sitting quietly undisturbed by his left temple where it had been all along. His own strong broken nose, with its pores and its nostrils. His upper lip, shaven, and clean, the dent where, his mother had told him, God had pressed his fingertip to mark him finished, perfect, ready to be born.
The top lip of his mouth, still there, the upper lip Nadine had kissed and sworn was so beautiful to her.
And, underneath, the biggest mess … He looked like a scarlet crater rimmed with a half-formed pile of earthworks, a fallen-over pile of dirty sandbags. Grey bruising and purple swelling and black scab, hanging loose over nothing. The metal chin support, like revetting. Seams between pads of flesh running across his face like trenches, swellings like sandbags. A few loose stitches like barbed wire.
I look like fucking no man’s land.
*
An orderly found Riley asleep in the woods, his unravelled bandages around him, his face cradled in his arms in the dead birch leaves of the previous year, and the mirror in the fork of the tree staring down at him. He woke him gently, and took him back inside, and when Riley wrote in his notebook that he would like a screen around his bed, Rose spoke to Sister, and Sister spoke to Major Gillies, and Rose, they decided, should keep a special eye on him.
She came to him that night after supper, when everyone had been cleaned up, and the ward was quietening. She handed him the notebook and pencil.
He shook his head, as best he could, rebandaged.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘You can’t keep it all locked away inside. We’ve plenty of experience of this.’
He glanced down, shook his head again, a tiny movement.
‘Please, Riley,’ she said. ‘How can you live in the world if you won’t communicate?’
He grabbed the pen and wrote:
How can I live in the world?
‘You can,’ she said. ‘You’re loved. Why would you want to die when you’re loved?’
Who said I want to die?
‘You did. You’ve made it perfectly clear.’
He was still for a moment. He had had so much time to think about all this.
I was a boy, I knew nothing, I was interested in art, I had a place, I loved a girl.
I became a soldier, trained to live and fight like an animal in circles of Hell.
I was made an officer, leading the animals.
I am a cripple so hideous my own mother screams and can’t stay in the room long enough to look at me.
My own mind lies to me and hides things from me.
After who knows how many years of pain, flesh-cutting, other people’s generosity, drugs, stuck here, incapable, I am to go back to … normality, with a plastered-on face made from my own sliced-up skin, a lying mind, a corrupted soul …
Rose was still there.
He wrote:
You met Nadine
‘I did. We had a cup of tea. She’s lovely and she loves you.’
Still. Then:
tell me if this is cruel enough
and he passed her a letter. She read it quickly.
My Dear
I wanted to tell you, but I have not been able to find a way. We know that war plays strange tricks. Briefly, whatever has passed between us must now be seen as in the past. I have met a girl, and I am in love with her. As soon as my wound is healed, which should be soon, I will return to the front, and when the war is over, if it ever is, and if I survive, I will return to her, in Paris, if it is possible. I do not flatter myself that this will cause you too much pain. We both always knew that if only for family reasons our friendship could not be anything more. However I feel it only fair to clarify matters. So perhaps it is for the best. Will you forgive me, and let it end here? With all good wishes, Riley Purefoy
Is that cruel enough?
Will she believe me?
Rose’s hand shook as she put the letter down on the bed. She swallowed. The …
Instinct number one: the monster. A beautiful living thing thriving in this strange sick world, and he does that to it … There are men here who are grasping their futures in two brave bare hands who would kill for the help of a girl’s love …
Instinct number two: how very much he must love her, to want to protect her at such a cost. How brave to make her hate him, because that’s the only way it can be done. How sad, my God, how sad …
Back to number one. He doesn’t trust her. He thinks she won’t be able to cope with it, so he’s making the decision for her. Patronising her. Or protecting her. But she is brave and strong, she’s been nursing all this time, she’s tough, that one … She’s not some pre-war girlie. He just doesn’t want to be nursed, he doesn’t want to be weak – he should bloody well fight then! Fight it!
And number two: how brave of him to recognise all that …
He wrote:
You see how I spend my time
She said: ‘I can’t tell you what to do. You’ll break her heart, but you know that. I think it’s very gentlemanly of you. I think you’ll regret it. I think it’s the saddest thing. I think you should wait and see how things develop. Of course you look a fright at the moment, but things will get better, and you can always send this later, if you decide you have to …’
He wrote:
pity is no basis for marriage
‘Pity isn’t all there is,’ she said. ‘Not everyone would pity you …’
He wrote:
you pity me
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said.
He wrote, and flashed his eyes up at her wryly:
should marry you then
And to that, her smile was tight. The jokes people could make – even him! – knowing she was unmarriageable. They didn’t make those jokes to pretty girls. With a pretty girl, at this moment, their eyes would meet, and meaning would fill the ward … not for her. But she was used to that. ‘You made a joke!’ she said gamely.
He wrote:
I suppose so
Then,
You’re right about everything, Rose
She said, with a little smile: ‘Nadine said, was I a locked Rose? Because of my name. Rose Locke.’
Riley looked at her. It fell into place like a mechanism: Locke. Sidcup.
He wrote:
Peter Locke?
‘My cousin!’ she said.
He wrote nothing.
‘Riley?’ she said. ‘Do you know him?’
Riley thought. Locke. He could feel a pull like thin hot wire through his bloodstream, wire, tweaking you, not leaving you alone, linking you to outside, to Over There, to them, to it, to all that he did not know how to face. To face. Ha ha ha. He wrote:
My CO
She said, ‘Oh, Riley. You were with Peter! Oh!’ She was so glad. It gave a reason, somehow, for the affection she already had for him. Of course she liked him: he was a friend of Peter’s! He was real. He had a place in the web. There was a web – connections, friendships, society, contact.
He wrote:
how do you do Miss Locke
‘My name is Rose,’ she said, smiling so wide. Then: ‘Riley, don’t send that letter. Don’t. Give it time. Things will improve and you will change your mind.’
He wrote:
Is she still here?
‘Yes,’ said Rose. ‘She’s taken a room at the Lamb.’
He wrote:
Give it to her. Please.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sidcup, November 1917
Rose was so angry with Riley. She didn’t feel she could discuss it with Matron or anyone else. She didn’t want to reveal his private life. But – but, but, but …
She was still angry when she called at Locke Hill the following day. She said to Julia, over tea, ‘You know the patient I mentioned, Captain Purefoy? The sad good-looking one, with the girlfriend?’
‘Mmm,’ said Julia.
‘Peter was his CO.’
‘Goodness!’ sai
d Julia.
‘They must have been serving together for two years,’ Rose went on.
‘Peter never mentioned him!’ said Julia.
Peter never mentions anything, Rose didn’t say.
‘Oh, gosh,’ said Julia, flustered. ‘Gosh. Do you think I should visit him?’ She didn’t want to. But – would it be right? Was it the CO’s wife’s duty? He was right there, after all … but … She remembered the man in the woods. She couldn’t inflict that on another man. Or was that an excuse? Goodness, she really should be able by now to look them in the eye and say good morning, like a human being.
‘He doesn’t want visitors,’ said Rose. ‘He’s – well, the sweetheart, and— Julia, tell me what you think about this. I don’t know what I think. It seems so utterly …’
Julia listened carefully, as Rose told her about the letter.
‘Were they engaged?’ Julia asked, when Rose had finished, passing her the plate of buns, and refusing one herself.
‘I don’t know. He said in the letter that they would never have been able to be together anyway. The girl, Miss Waveney, is well-spoken, but I think he is not a gentleman and that could be part of it … but, Julia, he’s given me the letter to give her – I just can’t bear the idea … ’ Saying it out loud, her reluctance swept up like tears. She couldn’t contribute to this.
‘I think he’s being jolly unselfish and brave,’ said Julia. ‘I think it’s unspeakably good of him. It’s for the best. Not just for her – for him. I think it’s jolly decent of him to take that responsibility.’
‘She loves him,’ said Rose.
‘Has she seen him?’
‘No.’
‘And will he talk again?’
‘Perhaps.’
A pause, while Julia thought about that. ‘How bad is he?’ she asked.
‘Honestly?’ said Rose. ‘At the moment, he looks awful. Awful. But with these tremendously handsome eyes, which makes it worse. And he’s terribly low. But that’s not the point. It’s not my decision … I just don’t want to be the one … The poor girl. She’s crazy about him …’
Julia pictured the girl, the boy, the wound. Could she love Peter if he came back wounded like that? Lie in bed beside him at night, with a warped and snarled face on the pillow beside her? Embrace him? Of course! But he was her husband …