“Yes,” Dr. Thornton agreed. “These men aren’t actually sick. This must be very different for you. Still, I would like to know—”
“Nurse Weekes is eminently qualified,” Matron broke in. I silently thanked her at the same time I admired her moxie. “Mr. Deighton hired her himself, while I was away for a few days on personal business.”
Dr. Thornton’s fork actually clicked down on his plate. “Did he!”
“Bravo,” said Dr. Oliver.
“You must tell me”—Dr. Thornton leaned forward across the crowded table toward me, his menthol scent wafting in my direction—“what you think of Portis House.”
Was it a trick question? Was he assessing my mental state? I hated trick questions. I put on a very serious face. “I wasn’t hired to give opinions, sir. I was hired to work.”
“Ah, that is very admirable. But you must have some opinion, Nurse Weekes. The food, for instance.” He gestured to the table between us. “The diet here has been scientifically designed to maximize the physical health of a fully grown man. What do you think of it?”
I should have been afraid of him, of both of them; everyone else was, even the men. Part of me knew I should be afraid. But when, at sixteen years old, you’ve been held down on the dirty linoleum by a man twice your size, the blade of a kitchen knife put in your mouth as he tells you to be quiet or he’ll cut out your tongue, something inside you shifts. It wasn’t courage—far from it. Being afraid like that made you understand, as you moved through the world of men, just how very afraid you should be. But I found in that moment that my fear had an edge to it. It came, perhaps, from a thin slice of anger.
“I don’t know anything about it,” I told him. “If someone offers me a meal, sir, I just eat it. I’m no fool.”
Dr. Oliver laughed, but Dr. Thornton leaned back in his chair, a thoughtful smile on his face. Perhaps I had pleased him. Although I’d been cursing the work of polishing bedsteads an hour earlier, I wished I were doing it now.
“My goodness,” said Dr. Oliver, an interminable time later. “Dr. Thornton, I must remind you of the hour. It’s time for the afternoon sessions.”
“Yes, of course.” Thornton dabbed his napkin over his lip. “Matron, please have the men assembled as we discussed. We’ll go upstairs and begin.”
We all pushed back our chairs and stood. Boney moved to lead the doctors from the room; Matron rose to assemble the men; the rest of us prepared to clear the dishes and go about our afternoon work.
“Nurse Weekes,” said Dr. Thornton.
I put down my dishes and turned.
He smiled at me. “I would like you to accompany today’s sessions. I believe it will be instructive for an experienced nurse such as yourself. She does have clearance, of course, Matron?”
There was a beat of strained silence.
“Yes,” said Matron from the doorway, her sharp eyes staring at me like chips of stone. “Of course.”
“Very good,” said Dr. Thornton. And he and Dr. Oliver left the kitchen, Matron hurrying behind.
I glanced around at the others. Nina was amazed; Martha shooed me toward the door with one hand. But it was Boney who drew me. She stood aside from the door and stared down at her feet, her gaze furiously fixed, her bright yellow hair garish under its cap. Her lips had lost their prim, important line. Dark red spots flushed high on her cheekbones, as angry as a fever. Hurt crossed her face, but she fought it off. She was so damned easy to read.
Then she blinked hard, and her expression shuttered over again.
I dropped my napkin on the table. It was more important to her than to me; it was everything to her, and it was nothing to me. She had experience and I had none. I didn’t even like these men. And yet, when the doctors told me to go, I went. Because when someone offers me a meal, I eat it.
And I tell myself I am no fool.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
So that the doctors could come and go in an afternoon, the patients were seen in small groups. “We really must be away by supper,” Dr. Oliver explained to me as we climbed the stairs.
“And what do I do?” I said.
“Be ready,” he replied. “Sometimes the patients get upset, and sometimes they need assistance. We don’t allow orderlies in the room—what is said is far too confidential. But there should be one posted outside the door. If things go smoothly, you simply sit. And observe.”
His tone told me I was lucky to have the opportunity. I said nothing.
We used the common room, where the chairs had been set in a rough circle. I was directed to an extra chair off to the side by the wall, where I would not intrude on the conversation. I sat, crossed my ankles under my chair, and smoothed my long skirts over my legs.
Jack Yates arrived with the first group.
There was silence as the men filed in: Archie, Creeton, Captain Mabry, and Mr. MacInnes. Jack had shaved, combed his hair, and put on shoes. He looked at me as he entered, his dark-lashed blue eyes registering quiet surprise, and then he turned to the others and sat in the chair with his back to me.
Dr. Thornton cleared his throat. “Ah. We do have someone new with us today. I hope no one will find this too disruptive.”
The men shuffled their feet and glanced at one another. They said nothing.
“This is, ah, Mr. Yates,” Thornton tried again.
They knew. All of them. I looked at their faces and understood that the doctor wasn’t telling them anything they hadn’t already known, probably from the first. It was Archie, after all, who had warned me about the clearance to see Patient Sixteen. I’d been right; there was no hope of privacy in the close conditions these men lived in, not after being here six months. The happy little fiction that no one knew Jack Yates was here was just that: a fiction.
But the men said nothing, and Dr. Thornton and Dr. Oliver continued to look pained at this supposed breach in the rules.
The tension stretched unbearably. Creeton opened his mouth, a smirk on his face; then his gaze traveled over the other faces and he closed his mouth again. Finally Mr. MacInnes nodded. “How d’ye do,” he said.
“Yes, hello,” said Archie.
Thornton looked relieved. “Let’s begin.” He pulled a leather-bound notebook and pen from his briefcase, crossed his legs, and prepared to write. “Dr. Oliver, which patient is first?”
Oliver consulted his own list. “Mabry, sir.”
“Mabry.” Dr. Thornton made an obvious note of the name. “Please proceed, Mr. Mabry.”
Captain Mabry—Matron and the doctors called him “Mister,” but the rest of us couldn’t help but call him “Captain,” he was so obviously a captain—swallowed and nervously pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “I’ve been doing much better,” he said.
“Is that so?” Dr. Thornton regarded him. “I seem to recall, Mr. Mabry, that you were having hallucinations, though we had seen improvement in recent weeks.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I see. And what are you requesting?”
“I would like to see my children.” Mabry sat stiff and brittle, as if a single tap would shatter him.
“I’m sorry?” said Dr. Thornton. “Would you repeat that, please?”
“My children,” said the captain, a little louder. “I would like to see them—please, sir.”
“Your children.” Dr. Thornton wrote in his notebook. “Yes, you’ve made this request before.” He turned in his chair. “Dr. Oliver?”
As Dr. Oliver riffled through his papers for something, I watched Captain Mabry’s face, so plainly stamped with contained emotion, and I understood what Archie had told me the day before. We have to be well for the doctors.
Dr. Oliver handed Dr. Thornton a piece of paper, and Dr. Thornton looked it over. “I have here,” he said, “an incident report written by Matron. It states that you had one of your delusional attacks only a few
days ago.”
That day at supper, Mabry lying in my lap with a nosebleed. The room was painfully quiet.
“Sir,” said Mabry.
“Well? Was it an attack? Or is Matron lying?”
“I had a nosebleed, sir. That was all.”
“A nosebleed.”
Captain Mabry’s gaze flicked to me for the merest second; then it flicked in front of me, to Jack Yates. Jack leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, looking down at the floor as if tuning out the scene around him. He raised his head, looked at Mabry long enough to catch his eye for a second, and dropped his gaze again.
“I have a request here,” said Dr. Thornton, “from your wife, Mr. Mabry. She has applied to visit you, along with your children. If you are still having attacks, you must understand that for the safety and well-being of your family, as well as of yourself, I would not be able to allow this visit. Do you understand?”
Mabry did, with agonized clarity. “Yes, sir.”
“Do you still maintain you had a nosebleed and not a delusional attack?”
I was shocked. Thornton had no superior powers, no higher insight. This wasn’t medical treatment; it bore no resemblance to medical treatment. It was bartering, pure and simple. I wanted to scream.
“Yes, sir,” said Mabry.
“Nurse Weekes.” Thornton turned in his chair and suddenly all eyes were on me. “The incident report lists you as witness. What is your assessment?”
My face grew numb, and for a second my voice wouldn’t work. “I’m not familiar with Captain Mabry’s attacks, sir.”
Thornton closed his eyes briefly, as if greatly tried. “First of all, he is not a captain here. We have no ranks at Portis House.”
Except for you, I thought. But I said, “Yes, sir.”
“Please explain, in your capacity as a medical professional, what Mr. Mabry experienced.”
“Cap— Mr. Mabry experienced a nosebleed, sir.”
“It seemed to spontaneously bleed?”
“Yes.”
“And when it spontaneously bled, did Mr. Mabry ask you for assistance?”
“No.”
“And why was that?”
I could feel something closing in on me, like the drawstrings of a bag tightening over my head. “He wasn’t speaking.”
“He chose not to speak? Or he could not speak?”
I said nothing.
“Answer the question, Nurse Weekes.”
I looked around the room. Mabry was staring straight ahead, at nothing; the others gazed down at their laps. Even Creeton was subdued. They all had their own requests to make, their own cases to plead. Jack Yates still leaned forward on his elbows, his body somehow coiled and tense in his casual pose. He was, I thought, the only man who could have helped—if he had been in the dining room to witness it, and not shut in his room.
I’d be dismissed if I lied, and everyone knew it. I choked out the words. “He couldn’t speak.”
Thornton’s gaze drilled into me. “Because he was lying on the floor barely conscious—is that correct? Precision is the most important part of diagnosis, Nurse Weekes. Please be precise.”
I gritted my teeth. I could not look at Mabry again. “He was lying on the floor, unable to speak.”
Thornton turned back around in his chair and wrote in his notebook. “This request is denied, Mr. Mabry. And next time, don’t try to lie to me.”
It was hard to understand, the feeling that settled downward on my shoulders and my chest, the feeling that I could be sick if only I had the ambition to move. I’d done as I’d been asked; I’d told the truth. I’d avoided getting sacked, my only goal in this job. I risked a glance at Captain Mabry, who had not moved, had not spoken, and yet his entire demeanor had sunk into despair. Thornton had taught me a lesson, intentional or not: You are not their friend. You are not ever their friend. Not ever.
It had to be public, of course. We’d had a supervisor in the wool factory who always chastised girls in public, in the middle of the work floor. He’d fired girls in front of us, sending them out the door in tears as we watched. It was the same with these sessions; nothing—no humiliation or lesson—could be private. I’d never cared about being fired from the wool factory—which, of course, I was. But I cared about keeping my job at Portis House. I cared.
“We’ll move on to you, Mr. Creeton,” said Dr. Thornton now.
Creeton shrugged. “There’s nothing to say about me, gov.”
“Your parents have filed an application to visit you.”
For a second, sheer surprise crossed Creeton’s face; then he lit up with a gleeful smile. “Wouldn’t you know!” He turned to Captain Mabry. “Sorry about that, old chap. Looks like you can’t see your family, but I can see mine.”
“Leave him be,” said Mr. MacInnes. He was whip thin, with graying hair and a close-trimmed mottled beard. “Just leave him be.”
Creeton turned on him. “You changed bedpans in the war, you drunken old sot. They won’t let you see your family, either.”
“I did change bedpans,” MacInnes shot back as if grateful the tension had finally broken, “and I wiped the bums of men better than you.”
Archie laughed; Creeton turned on him next. “Shut it, you idiot. I shouldn’t even be in here with the likes of you.”
“Gentlemen,” said Dr. Oliver.
“Tell them,” said Archie. “Tell them about—about the nightmares and see if they say you’re not crazy. Do it—do it.”
“You think I won’t beat you stupid just because you were in the infirmary?” Creeton’s beefy hands curled over the arms of his cheap wooden chair. “Do you?” I started wondering whether Paulus Vries was outside the door as promised.
No one moved.
“Creeton,” said Jack Yates into the silence. “Enough.”
Jack’s elbows were still on his thighs. He raised his head, his hands still dangling between his knees, and the pose immediately went from casual to that of a man ready to spring. He and Creeton exchanged a long look I could not read.
“I don’t have nightmares,” said Creeton at last.
“We all have nightmares,” said Jack. “It doesn’t matter.”
The other men exchanged alarmed looks. “Not me,” said MacInnes.
“No,” said Archie. “No.”
Jack looked at all of them and sighed.
Dr. Thornton finally broke in. “Right, then, Mr. Yates. Do we have the session under control now?”
Jack leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest. “Go ahead.”
“Thank you,” said Thornton, his voice cool. He turned back to the room. “Gentlemen. Let’s continue, shall we?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
By five o’clock the day felt endless, as if it had begun far back in a tunnel I could no longer see the entrance to. My head throbbed and a sinister pulse of pain had started behind my eyes, growing with bloody force with each successive heartbeat. I blinked my sandpaper eyes and tried to keep focus.
We had finished all the groups; every patient at Portis House had been evaluated, or at least checked off a list. Dr. Thornton spoke the name of the man; the man mumbled something about how he was feeling much better; Dr. Thornton told him what request had been made by family, if any, and publicly told him whether it was granted or denied.
Jack Yates simply said he had not been sleeping. No one had requested to see him.
Thornton had made notes in his small book all afternoon, his pen scratching busily, but Dr. Oliver had had to remind him of the names of each of the men. I’d sat quietly in my corner as instructed, rousing myself only when voices were raised.
There had been a single nightmarish moment when Somersham had spoken about his dead sister—he became hysterical and had to be sedated. Thornton had turned to me with a simple barked command
: “The syringes in my case, Nurse Weekes.” I’d grabbed the small black bag and unlatched it with damp fingers, but when I hesitated, Dr. Oliver reached in, removed a syringe, and quickly injected the patient as I stared in panicked nausea. It had taken me half an hour afterward, sitting in a corner with my hands pressed into my skirts, to stop shaking.
It was a long afternoon of misery. Patients were a means to an end, part of my job—not my friends, as Dr. Thornton had demonstrated. Lunatics. And yet as I heard a man plead to see his mother or his sweetheart, or burn with shame as he admitted to uncontrolled vomiting or the inability to sleep with a simple blanket touching his arms, I felt the stirrings of a burning, angry dissatisfaction. I started trying to understand.
I’d spent the war in London, going from shared flat to factory shifts or shopgirl work. The war had loomed large and encompassing, yet in the background. It was the topic among the girls at the lunch counter or the pubs, sweethearts shipping out, sweethearts home on leave. It was felt in the rationing, in the black-blazoned headlines that shouted at me from newspapers left in discarded trash bins or on park benches in early dawn on my way to work—stark, angry words like Mons and Passchendaele and Ypres, incalculable numbers of dead, ships sunk, blurry photographs of battles.
My brother, Sydney, had enlisted in the first weeks of war and had never sent home a single postcard. The first few months after he’d gone were the worst of my life; then I’d left home myself, and the war had sunk into a miserable background din, and I was certain he was dead. I had enough problems of my own to worry about what happened in France anymore.
Or so I had told myself.
But these men had been there. They had experienced something so otherworldly, so catastrophically horrible, that I would never know what they saw when they closed their eyes at night. Or what they heard when a plate banged on a table. They’d washed off the mud and the blood and been sent home, unlike Syd, and it had been so bad they couldn’t cope with it. They’d ended up here. Something sounded in me, deep down like a bell being struck in the depths of the ocean, something that saddened and frightened me and made me exhausted in the same way one is exhausted after vigorously, repeatedly vomiting up one’s supper.
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