When the Sky Fell Apart

by Caroline Lea

  ‘I see. You are doctor, yes? But you wish medical advice from me?’

  The Commandant still wasn’t smiling, but his eyes glinted.

  Carter frowned. ‘No, no, ah, thank you. But I have reached the limit of my own and the hospital’s capabilities. The patient requires advanced medical procedures, for which we have no trained staff, and medicines which we do not possess and have no hope of obtaining in the…current situation.’

  ‘This is unfortunate.’

  Carter felt a swell of relief: the man understood him.

  ‘Yes. Quite. Unfortunate. So, as I’m sure you understand, it is vital that my patient receive medical care on the mainland.’

  At this point, the Commandant leant back in his chair and stretched his pinched mouth into a wide smile.

  ‘I have said, Doctor, this is unfortunate. But medical care from England? This is not possible. We are at war, nichts? And we have very good English doctor here, yes? We do not want Doctor to return to England. He will be useful here; he has said it.’

  Was this a threat or was the Commandant being deliberately obtuse? Carter wet his lips.

  ‘But…but I’m not asking to return myself. Nor am I requesting any sort of communication with England regarding the war. I’m simply entreating you to save a man’s life. If we do nothing then the prognosis is horrifying. He simply must be evacuated.’

  ‘Impossible.’

  Carter blinked. ‘Forgive me, Commandant, but I believe you misunderstand the magnitude of the situation. Without the correct medical care, this man will certainly die.’

  ‘Unfortunate, yes. But this cannot be helped.’

  ‘But why, for God’s sake? This is ludicrous!’

  Carter’s voice cracked with anger. Surely the Commandant couldn’t be such a brute? How was it possible to deny medical care to a dying man, regardless of the political situation?

  The Commandant banged his hand upon the table, his fleshy face suddenly hard. ‘Enough! You do not question or you will regret this! This is dangerous for you. You will stop now.’

  Carter was dimly aware of the shortness of his own breath, of a tingling in his legs. He swallowed but his mouth was dry. He wanted, desperately, to rectify this confusion, to make the Commandant understand… But in the German’s rebuke, he felt the shadow of a gun levelled at his forehead.

  ‘You will not ask this again. No?’

  Carter bit the inside of his cheeks, then shook his head.

  The Commandant leant forward and whispered, as though he were imparting a great secret, ‘I have said it, Doctor: we are at war.’

  Carter was then dismissed. A guard came to escort him from the building. Despite the weakness in his legs, Carter managed to stand and turned to leave, fear and rage simmering in his gut.

  Before he reached the door, the Commandant called, ‘Wait please, Doctor.’

  Carter’s heart skipped: he had finally understood; he was not a monster.

  But the Commandant only said, ‘Your nails. Show me.’ He held out his hands.

  Carter almost hid his own hands behind his back like a child, then thought better of it and let the German examine his fingers. The Commandant smiled, fully then, although it was strange to watch: cracks creeping up a wall.

  His touch was cold and his skin had a fleshy, slippery feel to it, like the scum on a dead fish. Carter forced himself not to snatch his hands away, although something possessive in the man’s touch made his skin crawl.

  ‘Your nails are very clean. How do you say, immaculate, yes?’

  A strange detail to focus on, but Carter was so desperate to leave the room that he gabbled an agreement.

  ‘Yes. I cannot afford to introduce bacteria to any of my patients. I am most fastidious.’

  ‘That is good. I like that in a man. Dirt, I do not like. It is a sign of laziness. I do not like lazy men, Doctor.’ His voice was smooth.

  Carter thought of a flat-eyed snake. His stomach turned over, but not before the German dropped his hand and turned away.

  EDITH couldn’t lie: it had stolen her peace, watching them marching down the streets, setting up guards and patrols. Telling folk what to do. Edith had never been one for following orders, and didn’t take too kindly to being told to stay in her house before sun-up and after sundown. So she didn’t, and the Germans be jiggered—what could they do to an old woman like her, in any case?

  The early morning just before dawn had always been her favourite time for gathering plants. When her husband, Frank, was alive, he used to complain when he woke and she was gone. Off rummaging in bushes for berries. Stuff and nonsense.

  He never put much stock in her remedies, even though she’d cured his headaches and his gout. Once, she’d bound up his broken arm with a herbal poultice, which took all the pain and helped knit the bones. But he laughed away the thought that it might have healed him. He said that he’d always mended well and had the constitution of a prime Jersey bullock. It didn’t serve him very well in the trenches, mind. But there you are.

  She never could face remarrying. She had no heart left to give after they brought her that envelope. Black-edged, as if the tidings it bore had scorched at the very paper. Sometimes she felt they must have buried the cinders of her still-beating heart with him in some field in France. The years living alone since had moulded her the way a prevailing wind will shape a stubborn tree into the most fantastic of fixed shapes. Independent, she was (Bloody-minded, Frank used to say), and that wasn’t going to change for anyone, least of all for a gaggle of foreign soldiers.

  They had always wanted children, Edith and Frank. Sometimes it still struck her that it would have been wonderful to see her husband’s eyes in a young child’s face, in the set of the jaw or the angle of the nose. The quick shout of his laughter, buffeting on a breeze. But then, she’d have been raising a child alone. Besides, there was a freedom in solitude. She could be out of bed in the middle of the night, ready to be rooting through bushes when the sun was up, and there wasn’t a soul to tell her she should be elsewhere scrubbing bedsheets, or doling out the breakfast, or running herself ragged chasing grandchildren.

  It was a week after the Germans had arrived and she had just discovered a wonderful patch of belladonna when Dr Carter found her. Not too much of the stuff around these days: most folks dug it up and burned it—a terrible shame and a waste. It was only poisonous if someone was fool enough to eat too much. Consumed in just the right amount it was a marvelous painkiller, even for the strongest birthing pains. It also made a truly excellent poultice for broken bones or burns and a wonderful tincture when steeped in hot water.

  The previous doctor used to bemoan all manner of suspicious potions she made and plants she used, no doubt for nefarious means. Witchcraft, he’d called it. One of the things they had quarrelled about was that she kept belladonna in her garden.

  Dangerous, he’d said. Potentially lethal.

  She told him the truth: if folk will let their children run wild and dig around in other people’s gardens and eat what they find there, then they’re asking for trouble. She’d given the boy in question a good dose of warm salt and mustard water and he had vomited up all the berries, right then and there. All over her good bed of sorrel and sage, if you please. That was the fool mother’s complaint: Edith had made her boy sick. He was bawling like she’d stuck pins in him, and when Edith told the pinch-faced mother that he was better off sick than dead, the child let out an almighty howl. The nit-witted woman shrieked at her and wouldn’t believe that the salt and mustard mixture was actually the medicine her foolish child needed. So she took him to Dr Laird. He, of course, stuck his big beak in and told the mother Edith could have killed her boy.

  They had tried to make her dig up the belladonna and burn it. The whole island was whispering witchcraft. Fires in their eyes, gleaming from the shadows like packs of hungry wolves. She couldn’t go anywhere without people sneaking sideways glances at her and making the sign against evil behind her back. Rowan branches
nailed above their doors, for heaven’s sake. No one smiled when she said they’d be better off boiling up the bark and saving the liquid for winter coughs.

  She’d said to Laird, ‘I’ve put a label next to it that says Deadly Nightshade for a reason, you know, Doctor. The name is quite clear and in my best writing. See, the word dead is plain as your face or mine.’

  But he’d stirred the island up against her. She had angry fathers hammering her door at three in the morning, which was an ungodly hour even for her (and she didn’t sleep much of a night in any case). Folks threatening to torch her house. And friends of years refusing to meet her eye. Silence like a stone dropped from a cliff when she walked past. Eyes sidling slyly at her, noses upturned as if she were a rotten shank of mutton on the butcher’s block.

  It calmed down for the most part, though, after Dr Laird left to go back to the mainland because of an odd rash and vomiting illness, which kept bothering him as long as he was in Jersey, but disappeared whenever he left the island. Frightful luck. Edith had always thought it: belladonna was a marvelous plant.

  So she was up to the elbows in a nice healthy patch with plenty of good, dark berries when the new doctor (Carter, she remembered) happened upon her. He seemed pleasant enough, but you never could tell. Besides, she liked her own company when she was gathering plants; it helped her to mull things over. Put the world to rights. She hoped that if she ignored him for long enough then he might move on.

  But after a moment, he coughed loudly and she couldn’t very well disregard that.

  ‘Good morning to you, Doctor. Nasty cough there. Shouldn’t you take something for that? It can’t be good for business when the doctor himself is ill.’

  ‘Ha, yes.’ Carter paused, then said, ‘Marvelous colours in the sky today.’

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

  She didn’t turn around; she had just spotted a very nice patch of ragwort. The farmers hated it because it poisoned the cattle, so she didn’t often happen across it, which was a crying shame—it made for a most relaxing tea, in the right quantities.

  She waited for him to be on his way. But she could see him from the corner of her eye, shuffling his feet in those fancy English leather shoes of his, and she sighed.

  ‘Well, as long as you’re going to be standing there, you might as well make yourself useful. Hold this, will you?’

  She heaved her basket up. Carter staggered a little under the weight.

  ‘You, ah—you do know that’s…ragwort, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, if I didn’t then I wouldn’t be gathering it. Dangerous to pick plants you don’t recognise. They could be poisonous.’

  ‘So you’re aware, then, that this is nightshade?’

  ‘Why do you imagine I put a blanket at the bottom of the basket? You don’t want the stuff on your hands or clothes, that’s certain. Even a little of the juice can give you the runs for days.’

  He laughed. But when he saw she was serious, he fell silent. She carried on digging while he stood staring out over the sand dunes and towards the sea.

  The island was like a beautiful jewel: formed by years of pressure and compression, shaped by the elements and then constrained and combed and ordered by the metallic tools of man. The result was a savage, wild and rugged land with the long grasses gusted about by the wind, toothed rocks jutting from the soil, crusted with lichen: thousands of attentive gold and black ears, gaping at the slightest whisper of the wind.

  Further inland, the precise hedgerows and straight lines of the farmer’s fields, geometric crafting of grass and plough. And then the sea, the endless, gasping sea: when the tide swept away, the rocks jutted out of the mud like teeth from a smashed mouth. Stippled in limpets and winkles, heaving with seaweed: rock pools bubbling with life. To the east, picture-perfect houses, like clutches of crafted eggs, nestling by the golden beaches. To the west, the vast mudflats where children could pour salt into a hole in the mud and a razorfish might pop out like a conjuror’s trick. The steady breaking and wombing of the sea, metronomic measure of seeping time.

  But nothing ever the same: everything sharp and fresh, as if it had been cut out of paper new each day.

  Now the land had Germans swarming across it, hacking into the landscape, roving over the hills, lounging on the beaches. The islanders didn’t look at them, if they could help it: Edith had seen the way everyone’s eyes slid from the soldiers practising their marching drills on the beaches where tourists usually sunbathed.

  Edith liked to gawp at the scenery as much as the next person, for all she’d lived on the island more years than she’d care to count. But Dr Carter’s eyes had a glassy look about them. Away with the fairies, Edith’s mother used to say, and she’d give her a smart clip around the ear to bring her back sharpish.

  ‘What do you want from me then, Doctor?’

  He pulled his eyes from the view. ‘Nothing in particular. That is to say, I don’t know what I need, really.’

  By Crie, by the time the man had come around to saying his piece they’d both be dead and buried.

  ‘Well, Doctor, I can’t help you then. À bétôt.’

  She made a great show of struggling to heft her basket again.

  Carter took it from her. ‘Please. Allow me.’

  He fell in beside her as she walked. She set off, briskish, said not a word. Most folk would crack and say something in the end, given long enough in silence with a stranger.

  Carter was no different from anyone else. ‘So, what is your opinion then, on our current situation? Our visitors, I mean.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can say, really. It’s only been a week or so. Wretched situation—that goes without saying. But one foreigner is like any other to me, and at least it’s not the bloody French, or the miserable lot from Guernsey invading us.’

  ‘I’ve been unpleasantly taken aback by the Germans, I must admit,’ Carter said. ‘They don’t seem to intend to be terribly agreeable.’

  Laughter swelled. ‘Agreeable?’ Edith barked. ‘Why ever did you dream they would be agreeable? We’re the enemy. Makes no sense for them to be anything but downright unpleasant, if you ask me. And I imagine they want to make their mark. It’s a war that’s dropped on to our doorstep, remember. A war. They’re not here for the sun and the fishing.’

  ‘That’s more or less what the Commandant said. I asked him, you see, if we could evacuate Clement to the mainland. Without the right treatment I’m convinced that he will die, slowly and painfully, I’m afraid—and soon.’

  ‘The Commandant said no, of course.’

  Carter nodded grimly. ‘He seems to think the whole situation a terrific joke. It’s horrendous.’

  She was puzzled by Carter’s bewilderment—not expecting such naïveté from an intelligent man. She stopped and put a hand on his arm.

  ‘How old were you in the last war, Doctor?’

  He stared at her hand, frowning. Then mumbled: ‘Fifteen when it ended.’

  ‘You’ve no memory then? How cheap men’s lives can be.’

  ‘I know of the terrible numbers of deaths and casualties.’

  ‘Of course. But at the time, it didn’t matter if five thousand men died, or five thousand and ten. Those ten men. What were they? Nothing. Not in the grand scheme of things, anyway. Only to those who loved them. Felt their absence like a lost limb.’

  ‘But this is an entirely different situation—’

  ‘Of course it isn’t!’ The sweet bafflement on Carter’s face baffled her, almost irked her, but Edith softened her voice. ‘What does it matter to the Commandant if ten men died in that bomb attack, or eleven? That extra man makes not a blind bit of difference to him. Only to Clement’s family. Those of us who know him.’

  ‘That’s a ghastly approach to human life.’

  ‘Right you are. But, Doctor, we are at war.’

  ‘Even so…’ He scrubbed his hand across his forehead and, for a moment she saw him for the kind-hearted, guileless boy he must have once been—and
still was, in some ways.

  ‘I simply cannot fathom it,’ he said. ‘A life is a life, after all, is it not? Would you justify letting a man die, simply because he was born in a different house to you?’

  He didn’t wait for her to reply but charged on, his words an urgent torrent.

  ‘No, of course not. Why, then, let him die because he harks from a different town? A different country? I cannot grasp it…’

  His eyes were wild and he was as impassioned as she had ever seen him.

  ‘Not everyone has your heart, Doctor,’ Edith said, gently. ‘It’s a noble thing: seeing the best in people, suffering to help them. It takes a great man. But it’s a damned gallant fool who imagines that every other man feels anyone else’s pain half as deeply as he does.’

  The wind whipped through the long dune grasses and blew up flurries of sand. They squinted at the sensation, like needles on their faces. Out above the sea, hungry gulls were wheeling.

  Carter fiddled with the plants in the basket. ‘Found some fish, I expect.’

  ‘Mackerel, probably.’

  They watched them shrieking and diving again and again. Each gull filling his own belly and to hell with the rest of them.

  ‘You’ve knowledge of health and medicine that supersedes that of many doctors I’ve seen,’ Carter said. ‘The way you revived Clement was really, well, it was…extraordinary. And I’ve heard other tales of how effective and impressive your remedies have been, in so many cases. As you know, the medication we are giving Clement is having little effect. So I, ah, I came to ask if you would…treat his burns and his fever. Try to, well…help me try to keep him alive.’

  So this was what he wanted.

  Edith nodded slowly. ‘And if I can’t?’

  ‘Well, you may not be able to help him, of course. But at the moment he’s dead without your help. So anything you can do, anything at all, would be…’

  ‘Impressive? Extraordinary?’ She grinned.

  He gave a tiny smile. ‘Precisely, yes… So, will you help?’