by Louisa Young
Rose might not be able to tell the truth but she was not going to lie.
Replied: ‘He took A Tale of Two Cities with him when he first went out in 1914. I suppose he didn’t get round to reading it then. He used to enjoy R. L. Stevenson. I don’t suppose I would know what he would like now. How is Julia?’
Rose thought, Sweet girl, to ask about Julia
*
She liked washing them, dressing their wounds, being gentle with them, as they would soon be out of this sick, sick world. She didn’t like to see them die, the shuddering, the sheet-plucking, the ever-shorter breaths – but she liked it when they were dead. After a while she stopped discouraging it. Death had a happy ending every time. Peace. She liked their poor corpses, safe on their way to a named and numbered grave among their friends, cosy within the system built and created for them. Not lying out there, in the dark, alone.
How lucky for their sweethearts, she thought, who will not have to deal with any messy aftermath, who will never have to know what ‘died of wounds’ means. Lucky girls, with just plain grief. Just simple, pure death, and a photo of a hero to weep over and be proud of. Because death was what it was all for, wasn’t it? All the bombs, the shells, the snipers, the aerial torpedoes, the submarine torpedoes, the liquid fire, the trench mortars, the artillery, the bayonets, the grenades, the chlorine gas, the mustard gas, the tanks, the planes for dropping bombs from the sky, the tunnelling and laying bombs under the ground … endless list … well, it is endless … all the things that were being invented – were being invented! That men were inventing, and women were making – all those things are for killing you. And if they don’t kill you they wound you, and when they wound you, you get patched up – by me! – and sent out again until they do kill you.
The other girls – the bored, the sex-mad, the curious, the sentimental, the power-seekers, the thrill-seekers, the poetry writers, the bovine, those who would do anything to get away from home, even the sanest, sweetest, densest, cleverest, best-adjusted girls, long coats and jerseys, cup-of-tea-and-a-fag girls, even the cheerful, who brayed about the Yanks coming in – Nadine could see that they were all crazy by now.
She did not ask herself what she was doing there. She knew. She was helping. Every lantern in the windswept dark, each phosphorescent gleam, flapping canvas and snapping doors, the rattling of steel and glass in the sterilising room, the galvanised cauldrons boiling day and night, camphor oil, strychnine, caffeine, morphine, saline and yellow soap, temperature pulse and respiration, sweat mud dirt blood sweat piss tears, die now or die in an hour or so. He loved a girl in Paris; he didn’t want her; he had done what he swore he would not – he had loved her and left her – and her mother was right and she was betrayed and …
Ah, but who cares?
It would be obscene, out here, to care for such trifles.
*
When no one was looking she kissed the dying, their cheeks, their foreheads, their mouths. Sometimes they kissed her back in the dark, in the silence but for groans and calls for Mother. They whispered, ‘I love you.’
‘I love you too, darling,’ she whispered back. Because in the face of death, really, who cares about love?
*
A card: ‘Stevenson a great success! It keeps him calm and in decent spirits while waiting for his surgery, which you will be glad to know should come off soon.’
More surgery! Well, Mademoiselle will have something to deal with, won’t she?
She had been picturing a pert little Parisienne with tiny feet and fancy knickers, a temptress, a houri, a spy, a snake in the grass with the qualities that not even the best man could be expected to resist, a scented, lipsticked creature with a mouemoue mouth and a mouemoue accent …
Or the peasant girl he’d been with before, some deep, sexual, animal allure that could not be gainsaid …
No.
If she hadn’t seen it in his own writing …
*
Some patients were so impatient that Gillies felt obliged to rush their treatment, lest their frame of mind affect their recovery – but this one was the opposite. The apathy was the danger, but it could be put to good use. They had been able to wait for complete healing. There was no point in trying to race ahead with a graft under the scalp, tempting though the design was. Gillies had decided after all on a vulcanite jawbone. There it sat: ready, beautiful, pink, sterile, made to measure, in a kidney basin. And there lay the ruined face, with its gaping lack, swathed in white sheets like an ancient statue’s head half buried in a mossy grove.
Tidy the edges; snipping. Leave enough border to sew on the new. There’s a fair bit of muscle remaining – room for recovery there, with any luck.
The little jut of surviving ramus, like a misplaced tooth in the red flesh on either side … the twists of wire for attaching the vulcanite.
The drill, the forceps, the gauzes.
The poor long-suffering tongue, clipped away to the side for the moment.
The head newly shaved. The iodine and Lysol.
The flap drawn like a sewing pattern on the fine skin, quite far back so he’ll look all right with a hat on, though with hair growth like his he’ll be fine, comb it this way or that – shame you can’t just stretch skin … though you can stretch leather, so why not? Expand hair-bearing skin somehow, fewer follicles per square inch but even so … for burns, alopecia … have to think about that.
The scalpel. Cut cut cut, slide underneath with the blade to release: lift. Not much give – good. Slide over forehead, swing down, twist, position under the new jaw. It’s so simple – beautiful. The pedicles are already curling in on themselves – tack them, swiftly, carefully, into tubes.
Stitch into place.
Turn the edge for the lower lip.
Clean.
Dress.
Good.
Next …
*
A card:
March 17 1918
In haste – the surgery went off well. The weather is not the best at the moment but that doesn’t matter as he cannot move around so very much until he is better healed.
He cannot move around much?
And so Nadine wrote a letter:
My dear Rose,
I have hardly time to write a proper letter but I wanted to tell you how very much I appreciate you writing to me about Riley. It makes so much difference to me out here just to know that he is in good hands. But forgive me, I am confused. Why is he still there? He said his wound was not serious. You said his wound was not serious. Has something else developed? When do you expect him to leave? I hope you do not mind me asking these questions but I am haunted by what he wrote to me, torturing myself you may say but there is nothing I can do about it …
And in reply came this:
Dear Nadine,
I am so sorry but it seems I am not to write to you about Riley any more. It seems there is a conflict of interests, an invasion of privacy, a – I don’t know quite what, but the Powers That Be here deem it inappropriate, for us as VADs, to go into details about a patient’s condition and treatment and so on, which of course we must understand, though it seems hard – I’m sorry. It doesn’t mean that we can’t write though. Just not about one individual patient.
It half relieved Rose to know that she need no longer skate between lying and truth.
It shocked Nadine.
Dear Rose, and whoever else is reading this,
individual patients passed through my ward last night; through the hospital. That makes about this month. of them died. It seems a shame that I cannot have news of who I have known since we were years old and who has escaped the final release. tell me their last orders of the day were backs to the wall and fight to the death; tell me they never got those orders because the only leader they have seen out there is Colonel Chaos.
Oh, I am sorry. I know it must be so. ‘Things have been very busy here’, with the charmingly named Spring Push, i.e. the Germans pushing everybody back through us, and us pushing
back like god knows what. I can’t write about it. I can’t write at all.
The black marks of the censor looked like the mourning stripes for words that cannot be spoken, that may not live.
*
Fourth year of the war, if not yet four years. It was all hotting up, quite a show: lots and lots of injured men, lots of death. Three weeks of constant shelling. Sunsets lurid and ancient, burning like blood and sugar. Screaming of shells. Lovely little white puffs of anti-aircraft fire. Temperature pulse respiration: keep it up, nurse, good work.
The ghosts of the men killed in 1916 were rising up on the battlefields of the Somme, apparently, side by side, fighting back.
Four years. She would have finished art school long ago.
Six months she had been out here. She would carry on until she exploded, and what form her explosion would take was not her business, not under her control. She would continue, her body jerking and rattling, like a machine out of order. That first letter: I do not exist … be there when I come back out …
The nights were shorter now. More daylight. Sunshine, from time to time. Pale folded leaves on trees. Blossom. She just did as she was told. Physical exhaustion leading to physical pain. Étaples was bombed! Keep scrubbing. Sleepless weeks. In May they ended up spending the sleepless nights in trenches, in the woods. Once, she did sleep, sitting up on a canvas stool, her cheek against soil like a dead woman’s. And when she woke that first morning, she saw above her an almond tree in bloom, a twisty branch against a pale, dusty blue sky, waxen white blossoms.
Spring Push.
*
Six weeks after his second operation, Riley was healing. He had a chin, and within it a jaw, of the same hardened rubber as the pink plate of his mother’s false teeth. He tapped it, under his peculiar new skin, under his bandages. It was an unlikely, unnerving weight, a strange new sling, under his face. He had, he realised, got used to having no chin.
His scalp, where it had had been scalped, itched appallingly beneath the dressing. He could not scratch it. Bare red living skull. As if his head were a very small world and Gillies had carefully cut a strip of turf from it, to be rolled up and used elsewhere in the garden.
He tapped it repeatedly with heavy fingertips, hitting it almost, seeking relief. He scratched his chin instead: it felt as if he were scratching his head. ‘Nerve endings,’ said Gillies. ‘They think they’re still on your scalp.’
The chin was the first to be released from the dressings. There it was, the roll, tucked under his face like a pack under a saddle, sliding lipless where his lower lip had once been. Fresh air would help the healing. Riley slid his fingers gently between his pedicles and his cheeks – there was his little mole, hidden away – and fingered the flattened tubes of flesh draped in front of his ears. They felt like very tough pancakes, leathery, spongy, and they stuck out at the side where they were folded down. They seemed to flare back like mad horns, or weird handlebars. Intestines, he thought. Taxi horns.
They were already sprouting head hair, in a direction not entirely concomitant with a natural beard.
Rose was very gentle when she cleaned his face.
Riley did not look at it; neither did he go among the other men.
*
April
Dear Nadine,
When I think it is four years since I was in France, and that it has all been going on since then, I can hardly bear to think it. But it must end, Nadine, think only of that, it will end, and we will win. We’ve known that since the Americans came in … bit by bit.
I shall write to you whether you write to me or not, because here I am helping to mend and rebuild, and life is much easier than it is for you out there. Stay strong, Nadine.
Rose
April
Dear Rose,
Thank you. I think sometimes I would rather die than ever see a broken boy again.
May
Dear Nadine,
If it helps you at all I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to let it out in your letters to me. I know it is almost impossible to talk about such things over there. Write it all to me, I can take it. If there is one thing I have learnt in this place, it is that talking – or writing, when they can’t talk – vastly improves a fellow’s chances of recovery. Some stay silent and it is like a wound uncleaned, an abscess undrained. There is a girl, Dorothy, who comes up in the afternoons bringing cigarettes for the men: she chats to them, whether they can talk back or not. The same with Mr Scott the barber, and his boy Albert (who also doubles as the men’s bookmaker, though I’m not sure I’m meant to know that), always chatting. We always keep the notebooks handy. Sometimes, when someone talks who has not talked before, or picks up a pencil when previously he has looked on it as an enemy, a badge of his disability, it makes me want to laugh and cry and kiss them. Lady Driffield comes by every week now to work with the men writing down their stories. It is so restorative. They have even set up a newspaper! Did I tell you about the Christmas show? Several of the surgeons appeared in it, and some are also on the football team. Of course it is not all good news. Jock Anderson celebrated his fiftieth operation by getting what Major Fry calls Incurably Cheerful, and breaking every window in the hospital. But then an officer came back to visit who has a two-inch piece of rib in his jaw, and he was breaking brazil nuts for us with his teeth. Sometimes I can hardly believe their courage. Major Gillies inspires them so, and makes it possible for them to believe that they can have a future despite the problems.
Some, of course, still do not want to communicate.
She means Riley. She does. That’s her way of telling me he is still there. She would have found a way to tell me if he weren’t. He hasn’t gone to Paris. I suppose they write to each other. The girl must speak English then – his French wouldn’t get them very far. Perhaps she is English. Why wouldn’t she be? She’s English. They’ll marry and have babies and I will see them all strolling down the Broad Walk together on Sunday mornings and I’ll have to say hello – STOP IT.
June
Dear Rose,
We are moving up to the front tomorrow, to be closer, to be more use. But I have come to the conclusion that you are braver than I, because you admit the possibility of recovery, and you fight and work for it every day, with your optimism and your cheerfulness. The German armies we are told are falling apart in the champagne cellars of the Marne and the chicken farms, eating and getting drunk and stealing hats and writing home, but there is still a constant supply of boys for me to do no good for. I just roll like a little cog in the machinery. No conscientious objector could do what I do. I am as bad as the Generals of the Somme and Passchendaele. I am as bad as Haig. I am not helping the boys to live.
June
Dear Nadine,
I don’t think you have had any leave yet – perhaps you have and I have not heard from you about it. I think you need some. You are getting morbid. At least get a change of scene – go to Paris or somewhere fun. If you do go, look out for my cousin Peter, Major Peter Locke. He’s been seconded to an office there after almost three years at the front. If you do, let me know how you find him. We haven’t seen him for such a long time and he is one of those types who when he is home says very little about what is really going on, and just wants to go out to jolly places and have fun. Julia worries about him, and to be honest so do I. I dare say he’s fine but he hardly writes and we haven’t seen him.
Leave?? Has Rose not looked at the papers?
*
His flap had taken. Clean, alive, good blood supply, no shrinking or shrivelling. His pedicles had been cut, flattened out, and reapplied to the side of his head, halving in one move the area of deforested scalp. And in the jaw, there was some movement. He could eat a little – not chewing, but he had developed a method of mashing soft food against the roof of his mouth. He could swallow. False teeth were talked of.
He could murmur and hum. His tongue had been traumatised for so long that it had forgotten what to do. Rose sat by him. ‘Say, la l
a la.’
He would raise an eyebrow.
‘Ba ba ba,’ she said. ‘You don’t need a jaw to talk. It comes from the throat. The Allies are counter-attacking. Did you see the paper? I’ll drop it by later.’
He tried it out, la la la, late at night, when she wasn’t there, when nobody could hear. His tongue lay like a dead thing, but a tiny little noise, creaky, ancient, came out of his tight, immobile mouth. He sounded disgusting and pathetic.
He practised the mashing movement against his palate. Lifting, collapsing. Pushing, letting fall.
*
A Colonel Masters was wounded. He was to go to Paris. A nurse was to accompany him. It was to be Nadine. ‘Why me?’ she asked Matron.
‘Because you, my child, are the one most likely to collapse on the job here. Don’t hurry back. You might try getting a night’s sleep, for example.’
*
She stared at the snoring colonel in the carriage. He didn’t need her. The train threw her body around.
By what authority do they do this to us?
*
Paris. Summer. Oh God, oh God. Leaves. Roses. Little dogs. Pretty hats. Children.
Faint remnants of things she had once been going to do lurched around the back of her memory. Galleries. Van Gogh. Sir Alfred. Papa’s friend Lady Scott, the sculptor, who had lived here ten years ago and used to say, ‘I’ll take you there one day, darling, when you’re a bit bigger, and we’ll go and have tea with Rodin. We’ll take him pomegranates.’
She delivered the colonel to a nursing home. She stayed at the recommended pension near the Pont Louis Philippe. She went to look at her mother’s childhood neighbourhood near the Place des Vosges, and wondered, looking around, about the past, and why her mother had said so little about it: but she was glad for the moment that if she had any unknown cousins in the neighbourhood they remained unknown. She took her uniform to a laundress. She ate two croissants with jam and drank a bowl of coffee so rich and milky it clagged her mouth. She slept for twenty-four hours in clean sheets, waking every hour or so, sometimes in tears, dreaming about flowers and fires intertwined. She found the number, and rang it, her heart beating strongly, and said: ‘May I speak to Major Locke, please?’