by Simon Mawer
“Right, dearie?” asked Maud, turning to her with the rubber tubing in her hand. “Are we ready?”
Diana was determined to make no noise. She’d seen so many people, victims of the bombing, suffering in shocked silence. She would behave like them, almost as though none of this mattered, nothing mattered, neither the destruction of a house nor the destruction of a child. So she lay on her back on the kitchen table and looked upward at the stained ceiling and the single, bare lightbulb, and made not a sound as Maud groped around between her legs and inserted her tubing. Diana’s very soul seemed pierced by it. The fluid flooded her, and the tide of pain flowed and ebbed and flowed again. It was an interior pain, the agony of her soul being damaged, maybe even destroyed. She closed her eyes and thought; oh, she thought of dozens of things: her room at home, walking in the Yorkshire Dales, Meg and Eric and the others, her parents, her various family. She tried not to think of Guy Matthewson. She tried not to think of whatever it was that was inside her. She tried not to think of the death and destruction that was all about her.
“There we are, dearie. Just wait a few moments before you sit up.” Maud was coiling up the tubing and putting it away. Mrs. Warren was mopping up.
Diana asked: “That’s it?”
The woman gave a dry chuckle. “No, dearie,” she said. “That’s not it. It’s only just beginning.”
There was an ominous pause, a kind of truce, enough time for Diana to go on day watch at the first-aid post. “If nothing happens, we’ll have to have another go,” Maud had said before she left. Her tone was that of an adult warning a child not to be naughty.
Diana waited. Sensitive to every stirring within her body, she waited. It was like a pause in the raids, an unnatural silence in which no aircraft sounded in the air above and no bombs fell, but the all-clear hadn’t sounded: it was peaceful, but you knew it wasn’t peace. At the post they had to tend to a few minor injuries, cuts and bruises gained in the aftermath of bombing: a couple of children who had hurt themselves playing with bits of shrapnel, a woman who had fallen while searching through the rubble of her house to salvage her paltry possessions.
When she went to the lavatory, she passed a liquid that was stained pink with soap or blood, she couldn’t tell which.
“You don’t look well, Nurse,” said Dr. Dewar when she emerged. There were two people waiting to be treated, one with a cut from trying to open a tin and another who had scalded herself. It seemed ridiculous that among all the deliberate damage, you could suffer an accident in the kitchen.
Diana smiled vaguely at the doctor. “I’m all right. I think I’ll be getting home though. Once we’ve got these done.”
There was some kind of pain there now, like a period pain. And she felt like vomiting. What had nausea got to do with it, except by proximity? How were these things linked up inside? How could one symptom spill over into another? As she put bottles of disinfectant back into the cupboards, her head swam with the smell of phenol, the same smell that had pervaded the Warrens’ kitchen, the smell of the carbolic soap that spread through her memory and etched itself like acid into her mind.
She collected the instruments that had been used and put them into the sterilizing kettle. Then she scrubbed down the sink and collected the bag of discarded dressings. You wore uniform when you were on duty at the post — the white apron and starched hat. As she went out with the bag to the incinerator, she caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the glass of the medicine chest: an efficient, sterile figure looking older than her nineteen years.
There was a sudden stirring within her abdomen. She paused and closed her eyes against the pain, and it suddenly seemed to her that her baby was in there, fighting for its life, drowning in carbolic. A shudder passed through her body, and someone grabbed her arm.
“I say, are you all right, Nurse?”
The room moved. As though it had been hit by a bomb. They said that happened if you were near a blast — the walls would shift and sway like a ship in a storm. Often you never heard the sound of the explosion, so they said. “I’ve got to get home,” she said.
“Not for the moment, you haven’t.” A Scots voice. “You’d best lie down.”
The post had once been a butcher’s shop, and the inner room was the cold store. Now there were half-a-dozen hospital beds with iron frames and bare mattresses, but there were still the pipes along the walls and the rails from which carcasses of beef had once hung. The doctor helped her onto one of the beds and bent to take her shoes off, a strange and touching gesture that almost made her weep. She’d a hole in her stocking, her big toe showing through. A potato, that’s what her mother called holes like that. And thinking of her mother brought on the weeping, so that she lay there with her skirt pulled primly down and Dr. Dewar taking her pulse and her big toe poking through her stocking and the tears flowing. One of the other nurses was hovering uncertainly in the background. You didn’t leave a woman patient alone with a male doctor. “Is it your time of the month?” Dewar asked.
“Maybe that’s it.”
He placed a hand on her forehead. His touch was cool and dry. “Maybe. But we’ll take your temperature and see if you’re sickening from something. It’s probably all brought on by exhaustion. I’ve seen you working, Diana, and it’s enough to stop a man in his tracks.”
He’d never used her Christian name before. Among the waves of nausea flooding up from her abdomen, she noticed that fact. How did he even know it? she wondered. She closed her eyes and swallowed something. “I think…”
“What is it?”
“I think I want the bathroom.”
He called the other nurse to help her. In the bathroom she vomited and she bled. Later she must have fainted, because when she came to she was sitting on the floor and someone was hammering on the door and she vaguely heard Dewar’s voice coming through the wood paneling. He was saying something about taking the bloody locks off; it was bloody lethal to have locks on doors in a bloody clinic. She noticed the way he said bloody, the Scottish intonation. Shortly after that they broke the door open, but she was beyond caring by then. She heard a call for towels and felt hands picking her up and his voice telling them to go carefully, for God’s sake. There was blood on her legs — to go with the bloody in his language, she thought. There was pressure on her stomach, someone leaning and pushing. Then they hurried her outside, and there was the motion of the ambulance, and then a stretcher and doors banging and bright lights in a long corridor and a room with a sink and a sluice and a glass-fronted cabinet. There was more pain and the pushing on her abdomen and the sound of water flowing. And then they transferred her to a gurney and wheeled her into a ward full of women. “Where am I?” she asked one of the nurses.
“The Royal Free.”
They put screens around her bed, and a male face looked down at her. He reminded her of Mandeville. He had a stiff collar and a thin black tie. His hair sprouted gray wings above his ears, like a gull’s. That was even his name, she discovered later: Dr. Gull. “Do you understand that you could face criminal charges for this, young woman? This ought to be reported to the police.”
“Have I lost it?” she asked. How was it possible to want the answer to be twofold, positive and negative at the same time? How was it possible to hold contradictory ideas like this, to want death and life, to feel both relief and pain, happiness and misery at the same time? The doctor looked down on her with the pinched and sententious expression of a priest. “Yes, you’ve lost it. It was a girl,” he added, “but I don’t expect you care, do you?”
“Of course I care.”
“Then why did you do it?”
She turned away from him to stare at the plain gray cloth of the screen. There was no answer to give really. Dimly she was aware of the man rising from his chair. “We’ll have to do a small operation to clean things up,” he said as he turned to go.
She felt a sudden panic and turned to look at him, to grab his arm. “Will it damage me?” she asked. “I mean,
will it stop me from having babies?”
He paused, measuring his answer, wanting, no doubt, to be able to deliver worse news: “Let’s hope not.”
Later the ward sister looked in on her and asked if there was a number they could phone. “You’ll be out the day after tomorrow, and you’ll need looking after.” Diana gave Meg’s number. There was no one else. There was a whole city out there, but her knowledge of it was limited to the ambulance unit, the first-aid post, the Warrens, and Meg — fewer people than you’d know in a village.
The sirens went that evening. They had to evacuate the ward. Women in dressing gowns and slippers trooped down to the basement. Those who couldn’t walk were pushed in wheelchairs. One or two had to be taken down on their beds. They sat in the half darkness beneath the central-heating pipes and the water pipes and the ventilation ducts and listened to the distant concussion of high explosive. Diana thought of the ambulance unit, imagined Bert driving through the littered streets and Dr. Dewar at work with the wounded in the first-aid station. The all-clear sounded at three o’clock in the morning, and everyone went back upstairs, grumbling and complaining.
Later that morning, they did the operation. D and C, they called it. They gave the impression that she ought to know what the letters meant, but she didn’t and she was too afraid to ask. When she came around from the anesthetic, she was back in her bed. This time there were no screens: she was immersed in the noise of the public ward, people coming and going, stretchers trundling along, patients complaining, exchanging diagnoses, prognoses, disasters. Her next-door neighbor looked across at her with a wry expression. “Up the spout were yer, love?” she said. “Always the way. There’s dozens of ’em in ’ere for that.”
She discovered her own nightdress and dressing gown beside the bed. “Who brought these?” she asked a nurse. The girl swept past in a rustle of starched apron. “Some doctor. Scotsman, I think. Never seen him before.”
Visiting time was in the afternoon. Diana sat up in bed and watched the people come in, the husbands with bunches of flowers, mothers with things to bring comfort, no visitors below the age of twelve. Sometimes you saw a young child being held up at the door of the ward to wave at its mother in a distant bed. The noise in the ward got louder, a railway-station noise, the noise of the public. Only after the first rush were there two visitors for Diana, each eyeing the other warily, neither knowing who the other was, how much the other knew. “I’ve brought you chocs, darling,” Meg said. “Black Magic. Cost a packet.”
Dewar had brought a bouquet of flowers. “They’re from the unit,” he was careful to explain. A note attached to them said Knocked off from a bombed-out florist and was signed Bert and the rest. She smiled. She recognized it as the first smile since the loss of the baby, the first smile for days. The shadow, perhaps, of the baby’s smile that would never be.
There was desultory, difficult conversation before Meg leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Must fly, darling, and I don’t want to be a gooseberry. I’ll give you a tinkle.”
They watched her clip her way down the ward. She managed to impart a measure of glamor to her Women’s Auxiliary Air Force uniform, even wearing issue stockings. Men followed her with their eyes, watched the swing of her slender legs and the movement of her backside. “She’s an attractive girl,” Dewar said. He rolled the r’s as though he was savoring the words.
“That’s what they all say.” There was an awkward pause. “Was it you that went round to get my things?”
He nodded. “Aye, I did. And I met the lovely Mrs. Warren.” There was another silence; pregnant this particular one, Diana thought. She surprised herself almost smiling at the idea. Dewar kept his voice low so that he wouldn’t be overheard: “Did she do it?”
“Do what?”
“Whisht, Diana. You know very well what. When I knocked she was terrified that I was the police.” He made two syllables of the word — pol-is.
Diana shrugged. “If you’re going to interrogate me, you can go.”
“I don’t want to interrogate you. But it was a terrible thing to do.”
“It’s done,” she said. Her finality surprised her. “There’s no use looking back. And I’m not sure it’s any of your business, Dr. Dewar. You were very kind. You looked after me and all that, but that’s only what any doctor would do.”
Dewar nodded. He picked at a button on his jacket. Harris Tweed, the jacket, of course. There was even a gingery thread in the cloth to go with the ginger of his hair. “I spoke to the Matron. You’ll be out tomorrow morning. Where will you go?”
She shrugged. “Back to the Warrens’, of course. Back to the unit. Where else?”
“You should rest up a bit. Go home, maybe.”
“And brood about it? And have to evade my parents’ questions? No thanks.”
“My invitation still stands,” he said.
She smiled. He seemed almost comic, with his Scottish manner and his Scottish turns of phrase — what the devil did whisht mean? — and his awkward shyness. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.”
“That’s the same answer as last time. Can’t I have a more definite one?”
“I suppose you can,” she said. And suddenly she found herself overwhelmed by the fact that this man, who despised what she had just done, still wanted to see her. The understanding brought her to the brink of tears. Which wasn’t hard to do in her present state. “Yes,” she said.
Part Five
1
I SUGGESTED TO EVE that she come, but she refused. It was not an easy conversation.
“I don’t want to go, and I don’t want you to go either. I don’t want you to climb mountains, and I don’t want to be sitting there at the bottom when they bring your body down.”
“That’s ridiculous — ”
“Is it? How many has that bloody mountain killed? Thirty, forty?” Her eyes glistened. She didn’t weep — she was too tough for that kind of thing — but she walked dangerously close to the edge of tears. One false step might have thrown her over the precipice. “And then there’d be Ruth, wouldn’t there?”
“Of course.”
“Well, can’t you understand that I don’t like her? Can’t you get that into your head? Can’t you grasp the fact that I hate to think of you and her fucking together — ?”
“That’s past — ”
“Is it? Is a thing like that ever past?” She managed a laugh. “You’d like it, wouldn’t you? The pair of you, I mean. You and Jamie. You’d like to have the little women waiting for you to come back from the war. Well, I’m not playing. I have other battles to fight.”
So there were just the three of us in Jamie’s battered old camper van when we set off on the crosschannel ferry to Calais. The vehicle had a Ban the Bomb sign on the back and the slogan Make Love Not War across the front, and flowers painted by Ruth along the sides — gentians and edelweiss, as well as daisies. It stuttered across Europe with the three of us taking turns at the wheel.
We spent the first night in a farm near Soissons, and in the morning we were woken up by the farmer’s daughter, who was standing at the door of the van and holding out a plate with three fresh eggs on it. “Pour le petit déjeuner,” she said. What did she make of the three inhabitants of the van? Ruth with her lean breasts and angular shoulders sitting between the two men — a tense little trio of jealousy and desire. Perhaps she thought nothing of it. Adults occupy a different world from the young, and foreigners a different one still.
That day, we drove on to Switzerland and reached Interlaken in the afternoon. The weather was gloomy. Clouds hung down over the twin lakes and shrouded the mountains. The world beneath was gray and green. Ruth took the wheel for the final leg. I lay in the back on the pile of climbing gear, and Jamie sat in the front because he knew the way. “Used to come here on family skiing holidays,” he said.
The van rattled up the Lauterbrunnen Valley, hemmed in by the mountain walls, winding between the cliffs. Waterfalls crashed down through the t
rees anywhere they pleased, as though the whole place had only recently been hastily slammed together and the fine detail still hadn’t been worked out. Rain spattered against the windshield and turned into sleet as we climbed. We debated how long it had been like this, how much longer it would last, the usual futile weather debate that climbers always have, as though talking about it might change it. “Just as bad as bloody Wales,” I protested. Jamie reckoned we might as well turn around and go home, reckoned we might as well forget the whole fucking thing.
“You’re just trying to tempt fortune,” Ruth said dismissively “What will be, will be.”
“That’s your bloody Welsh fatalism,” Jamie cried. “That’s why you ended up with all those English castles.” You could feel his energy, bound up and caged inside him by the mindless fact of weather and circumstance.
Ruth swung the van onto a side road where the sign pointed to Grindelwald. The engine clattered away at the back of the vehicle. We swung around curves, swerved to avoid a mail bus, crawled behind a tourist coach; then the narrow confines of the hillside opened out into the basin where Grindelwald sits, and there was the sensation that we were out of the claustrophobic ditch and could breathe again. The air was chilly, and there were streaks of old snow in the sheltered slopes. We pulled into a turnout to get our bearings. The meadows above the town lapped up to the base of the rock, but the cloud was down to two thousand feet and you couldn’t see anything of the mountain. “Oh, damn you bastards!” Jamie shouted at the clouds.
Cows stood morosely in the damp like extras for a tourist postcard waiting for a photographer who hadn’t bothered to turn up. A train grunted up through the meadows, past picturesque chalets. It was a brightly painted little thing, like something out of Toyland. Jamie turned on me as though I was the final court of appeal. “You’ve not been here before. Believe me, Rob, believe me: up there” — he flung an arm upward toward the gray pall directly overhead — “is the whole Northeast Ridge of the Eiger. And there — just there, for crying out loud — is the dreaded, the ghastly, the murderous Nordwand itself, the Mordwand, the Murder Wall. Gets your blood up just to think about it.”