But as he opened his mouth, the house slid under their wings and away behind them, and soon they were over the town and then out above the open country. And though he craned his neck around to see, he couldn’t catch sight of it again.
WHEN THEY LANDED just outside Châlons, it was almost evening and Edward went straight to the depot to see if the supplies had come in yet. The cameras (thank God) were there. He examined them and they seemed to be in working order. The plates and paper were scheduled to arrive early the next morning; he could take a truck from the depot back to Épernay then, and he could have a bed—Cundall, too—for the night in Châlons.
“Will you go back then or stay?” Edward asked Cundall.
“I think I can stay until tomorrow; they don’t need me. Right now it’s a lot of hurry up and wait for you fellows. I’ll fly back when you leave in the morning.”
“Good; it will be nice to have the company.”
“Yes; a change of scene is always welcome. And Châlons is just big enough to have one important advantage over Épernay.”
“Which is?”
“Girls. Beautiful, young, French … and old Madame Breillat has a personal fondness for aviators.”
“You seem pretty familiar with the institution in question.”
“Let’s get some supper. I know this lovely little restaurant in town. Then we’ll have a drink and then …”
“Oh, I think I’ll have to excuse myself from this one.”
“What for?”
“Just …”
“Come now. Even married men can’t be expected to endure for so long away from the comforts of home.”
“No, really. I’m not being noble. It just doesn’t appeal to me.”
“You’ll change your mind. I’ll convince you.”
They walked into town as the sun dropped toward the horizon, their boots clacking on the road, the quiet intermittently broken by the approach of a motorcar, or the far-off boom of the guns. Cundall talked about flying, about the adventures he’d had in his short time at the front. He swung his long arms at his sides as he walked; Edward liked him, his easy manner, his good spirits and carelessness. But he knew already that he would not be convinced to go with him to the girls. Perhaps he couldn’t, especially at this point in his life, have explained what he wanted from women. He only knew that was not it.
So they dined, and then over a whisky Cundall put the case in favor of whores very convincingly and earnestly, and then they parted ways outside the café and Edward went back to the lodgings that the major in charge of the depot had arranged for them, and Cundall went off to Madame Breillat’s, shouting to him as he went that he was a prude and puritan and that he was denying honest women a living, until he was out of earshot and then he waved and loped off down the street.
LATE THAT NIGHT, Edward was woken by the sound of footsteps and shouting outside his room. He climbed out of bed and felt his way to the door. Outside in the corridor, he saw men running, pulling on overshirts and jackets as they went.
“What happened?” he asked, his eyes still unfocused with sleep.
“The hospital’s been shelled,” someone called as they rushed past. He lit a lamp, struggled into his clothes, and made his way down the stairs as quickly as he could. From the supply depot a stream of men were moving down toward town, their progress lit by hovering lamps and the headlights of tenders and cars that roared by them on the road. He fell in with the others, following the road through the houses to the outskirts of Châlons, where the hospital had been set up in an abandoned school. As he approached the main building, he saw what looked like streamers or long white fingers hanging from the trees. He blinked and stared, but he couldn’t make out what they really were; he was still half-asleep and they seemed like part of an unfinished dream. He shook his head to wake himself more fully and kept walking.
Outside the front doors one of the doctors was giving instructions. The shell had hit a storeroom at one end of the building, he said, causing a wall and part of the roof to collapse. The electricity had gone out, too. The patients were being moved from that end of the building to temporary shelters on the old sports field. Some of the men could help put up tents, some could carry patients out of the damaged wing, those that could be moved. Those who could not be moved would have to stay and take their chances.
Inside, the front entrance was dimly lit, and the air smelled of burning. Edward followed the doctor down the hallway to a ward where men were being taken from beds and put onto stretchers. One near him cried out in pain as he was lifted, two orderlies moving his body from the bed to the stretcher waiting on the floor. The long high-ceilinged room magnified his shouting. The orderlies set him down gently, and a nurse who’d been standing beside them knelt and passed a hand quickly across the man’s forehead. She beckoned Edward toward her.
“Take his head,” she said. “Be as gentle as you can, but move him quickly.” Another volunteer took the man’s feet. They counted three and lifted the stretcher to their waists. Then they set off down the ward out of the doors and around the building to where the tents were being set up.
“Over here,” one of the nurses shouted, and pointed them toward an empty space on the ground. They lowered the man down and again he shouted in pain. In the darkness, they had no way to tell where he had been wounded, no way to even see his face clearly. They put him onto the ground and left him. They went back to the hospital.
For hours Edward ferried wounded men out of the building and up to the tents. The man who’d helped him move that first stretcher fell into a rhythm with him and they worked steadily, never speaking but lifting, carrying, placing down in tandem, then returning together for the next one. He lost count of how many times he made the journey. Some of the men cried out in pain, or asked for a loved one by name again and again. Some let themselves be lifted without stirring and then lay silently on the ground, their open eyes shining in the dim light. Others stayed dreaming through it all, their nerves hollowed out by morphine. Occasionally, these men shouted in answer to the cries of others, half-articulated words in an alien language; but they were calling back from the other side of a veil that saved them from their own flesh. They didn’t understand what was happening to them; it must be better that way, he thought. He picked each one up as gently as he could, hypnotizing himself with the task so that he could ignore the dark blood on their clothing and sheets where the dressings came away, the bandages around their bodies and heads, the hoarse struggle of their breathing, the heavy, almost sweet smell of decay that hung over everything. At last, near dawn, they’d emptied nearly the entire wing.
Toward the collapsed end of the building were a couple of small rooms that hadn’t yet been cleared. Edward made his way down the corridor toward them; the fire in the storeroom had been put out, but the smoke from it still simmered in the interior air. He looked in through the glass pane in a door to his left; the beds in the room were full. He pushed open the door and went in, scanning the room for a nurse or a doctor, someone to tell him what to do. All the beds had been pushed up to the opposite end of the room away from the damaged part of the building. A nurse sat by one of them, a lamp burning near her. She was holding the hand of the man who lay in it, his top half propped up on pillows, his mouth working in a ceaseless murmur. The words drooled away down his chin, whispers, too vague to be heard. Edward approached the woman by the bed.
“Do you need help to move these patients?”
“No,” she said. “These ones should stay where they are.” She turned around, quickly, and peered at him. He heard her draw a sharp breath, saw her raise a hand to cover her mouth: she had recognized him a moment before he knew who she was, because the darkness disguised her features. Then she stood up, and he could see her more clearly in the light from the bedside lamp.
“They won’t make it if we move them,” she said quietly so that none of the men sleeping fitfully around them could hear. It was Marion Beckett.
For a minute they stood
looking at each other without speaking.
“What are you doing here?” he asked at last. “I thought you were in Arras.”
“I was reassigned.” She watched him steadily, her eyes pools of black, their pupils swollen in the dim light until the irises were blotted out. “I guess it must have been a few weeks after I sent that letter to you,” she went on. “I asked to come here because I knew the region from before the war. What are you doing here?”
“I’m stationed at Épernay. I just arrived, a couple of days ago.”
There was the sound of movement in the hall outside, and the door opened. Two men looked in.
“Do you need any help?” one of them asked.
“No,” Marion said, looking past Edward to the face in the doorway. “But there may be some left in the ward across the hall. You had better go and see about them.”
“Will do,” said the man. He went out, and the door swung shut behind him. Marion opened her mouth to speak, but the man in the bed beside her groaned and she turned back to him. She began to clean his arm inside the elbow, to tie off above it with a thin band of rubber. Her movements were quick and businesslike. Edward stood at the end of the bed, watching her as she took an ampoule of clear brownish liquid from the tray beside the bed, rolled it between her palms and snapped the glass seal. She took a syringe, drew off the morphine ready to inject it.
“Look,” Edward said. “Are you all right? I mean, have you heard any more about the court case?” His words sounded strange and out of place. They came from another world where people had time for frivolities like the law. Marion didn’t turn around.
“I have to finish this.” She spoke without pausing from what she was doing. Gently, she pushed the needle in and held it steady, pressing the drug into the man’s veins, letting it slide away into his blood.
She glanced over at Edward, at the fact that he was still standing in the middle of the room. She said: “I haven’t had any more news. The action is suspended until I finish my service here; it will go ahead when I go home. I’ve decided to stay until my tour of duty is done. Beyond that, I don’t know.” She finished the injection, withdrew the needle and swabbed the man’s arm with cotton. She took a fresh piece, leaned across to wipe his chin.
“If Clara goes through with this,” Edward went on. “I will do anything I can to help you defend yourself. I’ll testify, if it comes to that.” Marion hesitated for a moment before answering him.
“Thank you,” she said. “I am very grateful.” She looked up at him, just for a second, with an expression that was an apologetic half a smile, a quizzical tilt of her eyes toward him. It was instantly familiar, and it brought a flood of memories rushing to the surface of his mind. Their return was like blood coming back into frozen hands. He felt the sting. He felt that he had been waiting to see that very look on her face and experience the rush of warmth that it caused in him for four years. He couldn’t believe that in this place and after all the time that had passed it could affect him so much.
She crossed to the next bed and laid her palm across the patient’s forehead, her back to him again. She took a thermometer, put it into the man’s mouth. Edward stood rooted to the spot, watching her, wanting to find some reason not to leave yet. It was too little, these few words, and he tried to think of something to say to make this moment seem less like a dream.
“I …” he began. “I would like to see you, somewhere else, not here. How can I reach you?”
“I think you shouldn’t try. I’m sorry. If we are seen together, even if we write letters, that makes things more difficult for me.”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“Yes. It is. Please,” she said. “You’d better go. There isn’t anything you can do here.”
Edward went out silently, closing the door behind him. In the hallway, he was surprised to find that he could see without a lamp. A cold blue light fell through the windows, illuminating the length of the corridor. It was almost dawn. He could hear his footsteps echo down the nearly empty wards.
Outside he found Cundall and some of the other officers from the depot collapsed on the front steps: they were waiting for a spare tender to drive them back to their billets.
“I met someone in there. One of the nurses,” Edward said. Cundall looked at him, his eyes rimmed red.
“Lucky you,” he said. “Aways nice to meet nurses.”
“No, I knew her already. She was … a friend of my wife.”
But he saw that Cundall was not really listening to him; he was too tired. The men sat or lay down, draped across the stone steps, not speaking. Edward found a space among them and slid to the ground with his back propped up against a wall. Exhaustion made his vision waver and the sunlight seemed too bright; it hurt his eyes. He put his head back and stared up at the sky, thinking of Marion, how she had looked in the darkened ward, how she had turned her back on him as though she was trying to pretend he wasn’t there.
Eventually, a truck came and they piled into the back. As they drove out of the grounds, Edward looked over and saw that he had been right the previous night: the trees next to the building were full of white streamers. He had not imagined it. There they were, flowing and rippling in the morning breeze.
“What are those?” he said to Cundall pointing.
“Bandages,” Cundall said. “I asked the doc in charge here and he told me that the shell hit a storeroom—all the bandages for the whole hospital were in it. I guess the explosion hurled them all up into the trees. Looks kind of festive, doesn’t it?”
Edward watched them until they were out of sight.
Rodin and Isadora Duncan at the Villa des Brillants. Meudon, 1905. Platinum print.
THE GATE HAS been left open. When Edward arrives, he finds it ajar, swinging unevenly, black and skeletal. It is a gray day, and an unsteady wind sends clouds down toward the city in the distance. Inside the fence, the house and garden are quiet. He can hear the sound of the gate whining as the wind pushes it back and forth on its hinges. How odd, he thinks. Rose is usually so careful about keeping it locked. He pulls the cord and hears the doorbell clang inside the house, but there is no response. “Hello,” he shouts. “Anybody there?” No one comes. He checks his watch. It is ten minutes before two—he’s only a little early; they should be expecting him. He hesitates, then slips inside.
At the door of the house, he stops and knocks and calls again. Still no reply, and there is no sign of life from inside, no movement at any of the casements. Rodin, he thinks, must be in his studio where he can’t hear the bell. But that is OK: he can go in by the back door and find his friend there. He knows the older man well enough now to be that familiar. He begins to make his way along the path that leads around toward the pale bulk of Rodin’s studio looming up behind, nearly as big as the house itself.
He is passing the greenhouse that leans against the western wall when he hears a voice. He stops and listens. After a minute he hears it again, a little different this time, not words but still articulate and varied, a sound somewhere between laughter and growling. It comes in short, erratic bursts as though someone is trying to stop it escaping. He has never heard anyone make a sound like that before.
He pushes open the door to the greenhouse and there she is, sitting on an upturned stack of terra-cotta plant holders. She starts when she sees him and immediately begins searching around herself with her hands, looking by touch for something that she has lost. Her eyes are red, her face run with water.
“Rose, dear, what on earth is the matter?” He comes to kneel down beside her and offers her the handkerchief from his breast pocket. She pushes his hand away.
“Nothing,” she says. “Nothing is wrong.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes, yes, really.” She wipes her cheeks with her fingers rapidly. “I’m so sorry to worry you. I picked up this dreadful summer cold. It’s making my eyes run terribly. I came in here to water these things, and I felt so light-headed I had to sit down for a second.�
� She indicates the table beside her, which is covered in the wiry stalks of tomato plants, marjoram and basil. She continues to feel around her on the floor, and finally she finds what she was seeking: a watering can, set down a few feet away from her.
“I found the gate open,” Edward says. He thinks how the noises he heard from the path outside did not sound like a summer cold.
“Oh, did I leave it like that? How silly of me. How forgetful. I don’t know where my head is. Oh, dear, let me finish these last couple of rows and then I’ll go and tell Monsieur that you are here.” She smiles at him and picks up the watering can. When she tilts its spout, the water vanishes into the black soil at the throat of each plant.
“Is he in his studio?” Edward asks, watching her make her way down the table. She nods.
“He has a visitor, a young woman. She’s a dancer, quite well known. Her name is Isadora.”
“Duncan? Isadora Duncan? She’s marvelous. I saw her perform in London last year. I’d love to meet her. Amazing, one really feels that she has liberated the body from the constrictions of convention …”
“Well, she’s here to see Monsieur’s studio,” Rose says, continuing her watering.
“You know what? I can show myself in. I’m expected, and that way you won’t have to bother. Especially if you are feeling unwell.”
“Oh no,” Rose says, “I don’t think …”
“Really, don’t worry about me. I’m sure I can find the door all on my own.”
And he goes out before she can say anything else, pleased that he has saved her the trouble of acting as hostess just for a little while. She has too much to do with all these visitors coming and going and, honestly, Rodin should arrange for her to have more help around the place now that his fortunes have improved so much. Clara said this to him one evening when they were returning from dinner here, that Rodin could certainly afford a femme-de-ménage and a cook as well if he wanted, and at the time he’d said that Rodin liked to live simply without frills like servants. But later he had seen the sense in what she was saying. Neither Rose nor Rodin are young anymore. They could use an extra pair of hands around the place.
The Last Summer of the World Page 12