But now it was just the first day of autumn. She slipped on her shoes and began running, right under the great beeches. They made a great shingling in the breeze as if to welcome her, as though they had missed her and were welcoming her back. Under their huge boughs were flickerings of sunlight; the whole ground was freckled with shadow and sunlight. She would paint that too, she thought, and she imagined capturing the colour of those flashes of sunlight – gold with an edge of red.
She looked up and there he was, as though she had known he was there. Acorn the red squirrel, balancing on a branch as he swayed backwards and forwards in the breeze. Aunt Isobel had laughed and said he would make a good sailor; he would have run up any rigging there was. And Annie laughed now; she clapped her hands and Acorn was off along one branch and leaping away to another. Sometimes he sat and chattered to her, and she liked to imagine he was bringing squirrel gossip, all the stories his paws could carry from the local village.
But today he was away like a flame, up into the rigging of the beeches, and had no stories for her at all. She had drawn him once for her art teacher in school, in the ten minutes at the end of the lesson when they had nothing else to do but could practise on scraps of paper with their charcoal. Old Grump had gone to the headmaster with it later the same morning. He had knocked and gone in and put it down on the desk in front of him, and let the sketch by Annie Gilmore speak for itself.
*
And the headmaster, who didn’t like being interrupted by anyone, child or teacher, looked up at him with open blue eyes. There was no doubting where Annie was destined, if she kept her hand to the plough and didn’t look back. For they knew what a weight of sadness she carried; the smallest child who had been given the biggest burden. But they couldn’t bring her parents back; they could only give her the tools to carry into the world that lay ahead of her. Old Grump never actually said anything to her about the drawing, of course, though he may have been a little gentler when she came forward to ask for more paper that last Friday before the holiday began.
Then the wind was still and Acorn was gone. She turned round as if she knew for sure, and there was Aunt Isobel’s face at the window, smiling, and Annie began running, because she knew there would be white rolls for breakfast and that the fire would be lit. Most of all, more than anything, she knew it was still the holidays for another nine and a half days, and that felt like the sweetness of butter on her tongue.
The Skylarks and the Horses
It was only a day after he arrived that they were brought to the hospital. It was late October and children were getting ready for Halloween; their piles of branches and leaves had melted into pathetic lumps in the woods. There was flooding all round the hospital; at least one road was impassable. In fact that’s why they arrived so late that night; it was navigating the back roads that took so long.
John Aitken was still up reading case notes. He wanted to finish the notes of the last two patients before going to bed, but he also wanted to know when the men arrived. But by half past ten his eyes were blurring, and at twenty to eleven he got up and opened the window. It was an old trick he had learned when an undergraduate at Queen’s, working on essays that had to be delivered the following morning: an open window and coffee.
He opened the window now despite the rain that was still coming down in stair rods, and it was at that moment he heard the car whining up the hill. The porch was suddenly flooded with light and there was Savage down below, all five foot two of him and the moustache bristling.
The car stopped and a couple of nurses bustled out into the half-dark beyond the porch. There was the muffled sound of voices; theirs and those of the men or the driver. John Aitken kept standing at the open window; they had returned from the trenches to this.
Savage was already making his speech, about the fine traditions of the hospital and how some of the best in the land had worked here on troubled minds for more years than he cared to think of. The four of them were in a line, beyond the porch and still in the full force of the rain. He could see one of them, on the left-hand edge and closest to him, all bent over. He must have been a foot and more taller than Savage and suddenly he began weeping; he started this uncontrollable weeping and it threatened to drown out the words of the doctor. Without warning, Savage turned and struck him full across the face. After that everything was confusion; Savage’s speech ended, nurses bustling about and everyone talking over each other. The half-light of the porch was a blur of shadows.
John Aitken closed the window and kept standing there. The fountain pen lay below him across the page, useless and empty. The last two sets of case notes lay unread. He went to bed and lay in the darkness, asking questions to which he had no answers.
*
One of them wasn’t able to get out of bed, not without help. He lay there as though constantly freezing cold, shivering uncontrollably. He always lay in a certain position on his back, facing just slightly to the right; his head raised as though he was trying to get up. That was how he was the whole time he was awake.
Beside him was a man who seemed almost not to be there at all, as though everything that had been inside him was gone. It was only a shell that was left. He reacted to nothing, not even Savage’s commands, and no one knew what had happened to him. Yet the irony was that he looked whole; the skin of his face shone and there was an absolute serenity in his eyes.
The third man spoke, but not when he was spoken to. He talked into thin air, about his brother who had a garden and kept chickens, who had a bicycle that was missing the bell. He talked about Brenda who had always liked him and who was waiting for him to come home, who would be there on Friday when he got off the bus and gave her the flowers. And he talked about his brother who had a garden and kept chickens. He never listened to what anyone else said to him and he fell asleep as though someone had cut the strings that supported him, slumped right over and was gone.
Beyond the wards was a long corridor, roofed with glass and with glass windows. Beyond that lay the garden. There were four wicker seats there. It was in the fourth of these, the one furthest away from the entrance to the corridor, that Ruary preferred to sit, looking out into the garden. He seemed somehow even bigger there; that great head and the blue eyes, watching the garden. As though something was there or would be coming soon. But he was calm, as long as no one was in front of him blocking his view. Otherwise he would search past them, not interested in what they offered or wanted. He had to see into the garden.
*
‘Dr Savage?’ Aitken, the new doctor, stood in the doorway.
He came in, whether he was welcome or not; clicked the door shut. Savage motioned towards a chair and moved a mountain of paper on the desk.
‘I’ve been working with nervous conditions over the last year, mainly with men sent home from the Front. Some of the changes have been remarkable. We’re still learning but it’s been exciting.’
‘So you’ve been sending them back in their droves to fight?’
A slight pink to the cheeks; a shifting of the feet.
‘No, that’s not what I meant and it’s never been my intention. My hope is to get them well. Above and beyond that . . .’
‘So what do you see here, Dr Aitken?’
‘Well, I wanted to say that I’ve found it best to work with one patient intensively at a time. To devote complete attention to that individual. Find out as much as I possibly can . . .’
Savage leaned over the desk towards him.
‘I haven’t had the luxury of that kind of time! Perhaps you in your city hospital were able to work like that, but this is a different world.’
He paused, sat back in his chair again. He had been there once upon a time, in the seat Aitken was in now – literally and proverbially speaking. It was easy to forget.
‘Ideally you may be correct. But this war is hardly giving us time like that, when cattle-loads of shattered men are being sent
home day on day. You can’t even talk about weeks now. It’s every day: every single day.’
They agreed on that, but there were no two ways about it.
A silence; the sound of Joan’s voice half-muffled in one of the corridors. That was Joan’s voice. He shifted in his old chair.
‘There’s one patient I’d like to work with in particular, Dr Savage. Ruary MacLennan. I’m not about to let that concentration of attention have any kind of impact on everything else I’m doing . . .’
‘Well, I don’t think there’s a blind thing you’ll be able to do for him, but I can’t stop you. As long, as you say, that it doesn’t affect the rest of things . . .’
Aitken got up, nodding – a brightness in his face. ‘Thank you, sir – I appreciate that.’
‘And, Aitken, one other thing.’
‘Yes?’ He had his hand on the half-open door.
‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’ The eyes were grey.
*
It was a week later the snow came in earnest. All across the Highlands so the roads closed. They filled in one by one and it was as though the world went back to what it once had been. Everything was far away again. The power went, snuffed out by fallen telegraph poles and broken branches. He sat at his window one Sunday morning, blowing warm breath onto the patterning of ice on the inside of the glass, until he could see the world. That silence which comes with snow, which is even bigger than silence itself. And he thought of his nephew on the Western Front, and how the snow would be falling there, across the pointlessness of another winter of war. But it was as if the skies beyond his telescope’s view had no news; they were utterly still and there was no news.
A gentle tap at his door and words he couldn’t hear. He shook himself from his reverie and got up, called that he was coming.
‘Joan.’ He had learned her name because she was pretty. Well, he knew everyone’s name now but hers had been the first.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Dr Aitken.’
Should she not have been at church? He thought he and Savage were the only ones who absented themselves from the church pews on a Sunday. Perhaps it was the only thing that united them.
‘You asked us to tell you if there was anything we knew about Ruary.’
He nodded, letting her speak. He would have asked her in, but that would have been folly. It was brave of her to come to his door.
‘I didn’t know if you knew that his first language would have been Gaelic.’
He nodded, not because he had known, but because he agreed. It mattered, it made a difference. Ruary MacLennan was from South Uist, an island whose population was almost entirely Catholic – well nigh a piece of Ireland that had floated off the map. Of course he would have grown up bilingual, yet sometimes after a crisis a person would revert to their mother tongue. Was that where Ruary hid now?
She was silent, still looking at him from the shadow of the corridor.
‘Well, thank you for coming to tell me, Joan,’ and he smiled, beginning to shut the door.
‘There’s something else.’
She looked at him as though that was all she could say, as though she had brought him something he would have to translate. Her eyes . . . her eyes full in the shadow of the corridor.
‘Come in, Joan!’
He made toast and tea, stirred the fire to bring from it an orange glow. He said small things to settle her, gave her a plate, let her spread the butter. The tea so hot it burned the mouth. And then she looked at him again and he leaned closer. She had to begin; he could not do this for her.
‘It’s my brother, Dr Aitken. The brother who was here – Iain.’
He nodded. He remembered him. He had come with a food parcel for Joan from the Isle of Skye. And he wasn’t long back from the Front. He’d been quiet; hardly said a word.
‘He saw Ruary.’
‘How d’you mean, Joan – I don’t follow. Tell me.’
He had asked them to tell him anything. It was like finding keys to a door that was locked in many places. To find a way in.
‘He saw Ruary out there. He remembered him. When he walked through the corridor he passed him, and he knew he had seen him before. Then someone came out and said his name.’
‘What did he say, Joan? Tell me everything he told you.’
‘My brother was coming back; he couldn’t remember the name of the place. A ridge. They’d been there all day just getting ready for some big attack. They were coming back – Iain said it must have been about six o’clock and they were so hungry. They were trying to take a short cut through this bit – I’m sorry I’m telling it so badly, Dr Aitken – I wish Iain were here to tell you himself.’
He wished that too but he shook his head. ‘You’re doing fine, Joan. None of this I would have known. All of it matters!’
‘Well, they passed this point where Iain says they were pulling a man back from no-man’s-land. It was raining, really pelting rain, and they were dragging him backwards, dragging him by the heels – and they were saying his name the whole time. That was how Iain remembered, because he’d never heard that name in his life. And the man was just weeping and weeping.’
She looked into the golden core of the fire, her hands curled together in her lap. He nodded, thinking and searching.
‘And what was he doing? Why was he out there?’
‘Iain said there was a horse. He couldn’t see properly because it was getting dark, but he could hear this horse. It was crying. It was out there crying and he had gone out to try to rescue it.’
‘How did he know all that, Joan? How could Iain know if they were just passing through?’
‘I’m not sure, Dr Aitken. I wish he were here to tell you.’
He shook his head. There was no point pushing. He had to help. It was a kind of translation. She had brought it to him.
‘All right. So perhaps the way was blocked and they couldn’t get through. They had to wait and that was when they brought Ruary out, because he must have seen him properly if he recognized him the other day.’
‘Yes,’ she said, looking up. ‘They were talking all around him, the men who were bringing him out. Talking and laughing. Saying that was all he cared about. The skylarks and the horses. That he wasn’t interested in anything else. That he just wanted to rescue everything he could.’
She was pleased. He could see that she was pleased it had come back, that she had found it. They had found it.
‘Thank you, Joan,’ he said softly. ‘Thank you for the courage you had to tell me.’
*
That night he had a particularly vivid dream. He was on a hillside and he knew that he was desperately thirsty. He blundered into a ditch and began walking its length, until suddenly he realized it was the bed of a dried-up stream. He hadn’t noticed it before; he had blundered on, thinking about nothing but his burning thirst, kicking stones and anything in his path to one side. He stopped and looked down at the trench, the trench that was actually the bed of a dried-up stream. He bent forwards and saw that a whole world lay before him.
There were tiny fern-like plants that had curled in on themselves; there was the pattern of where the water had run through a silt of tiny stones and fragments of silver that were mica. He found himself bending right down until he was actually kneeling in the stream, looking in wonder at all of it.
He woke up and lay thinking a long time, until he was aware of a chinking sound around him. This old part of the hospital was never silent: the pipes, the floorboards and the doors – all of them seemed possessed by spirits. But there was something else and at first he couldn’t decide what it was. A chinking that became a kind of song as he listened.
And then he realized what it must be. He was hearing drops of water from all the corners of the roofs outside. The snow was melting at last. And then he remembered that he was thirsty.
*
The room had a glass window, a single square pane of darkened glass – a kind of spy-hole. It was a place from which to watch; a kind of eyrie. The air was bad in there, almost thick, he thought. And when you looked out of the window it was like peering out through some kind of early diving helmet. It felt underwater in there, and the world beyond had a darkness about it, a thick darkness, and all sounds were muffled. You couldn’t hear voices properly.
And suddenly he thought of what his nephew had told him of the gas attack; the fumbling for helmets and the under-sea world they swam in. The strange sounds of voices beyond; the swimming forwards through yellow fog.
He sat up, brought himself back. He watched the man outside, the tall young man who sat in the fourth chair in the corridor, looking out into the garden. As though he was waiting, waiting and watching.
You wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong with him as he sat there serenely this mild morning. The blue eyes in the wide face; the big hands on each arm of the wicker chair. He was all right; as long as his vision was not blocked, or anyone tried to move him. Savage had done it; two days ago they had been on their rounds and Savage had wanted to get him up so he could be taken for a bath. He began pulling him, pulling him up from the chair and talking all the time – insistently, fiercely. Ruary had curled away from him, putting up his hands to protect himself and to go on looking ahead, whimpering all the time.
Savage lost his patience and slapped him. ‘Get up, man! I’ve asked you three times and I’m not asking you again!’
Ruary curled away from him, one arm trying to shield his face. He slid deeper into the chair, as though that way he could escape, as though that way he could become smaller.
‘What seems to be the matter?’ John Aitken had been in the ward and came out; couldn’t ignore it any longer.
Winter Tales Page 2