by Clare Harvey
The world was a slowed-up roundabout, turning, turning. His eyes slid up and around to the Nottingham General, clinging to the near hillside, ambulances clustered like maggots feasting on decay. Everything continued its lazy spin. Eventually his feet would hit hard ground and he’d have to drop off the ride.
He was nearly home, now.
Splinters of glass in the pads of his fingers – a sharp, searing pain as he twisted the key in the lock. The cat appeared at the step. He saw it open its mouth: sharp, pink-white – but he could hear no mew. He went inside, slamming it out.
The house was as they’d left it. In the bedroom the bed was unmade, rumpled sheets like a mountain range. He threw his hat in the direction of the chest of drawers, not bothering to check where it landed, and sat down on the bed. His fingers stung as he fumbled with his laces. He kicked off his shoes, then unpeeled his clothes, suddenly aware of all the cuts and grazes that hadn’t hurt, until now.
Naked, he slipped under the cold sheets.
This was where they had lain, he and his wife. His jaws felt as if they were clamped in a vice as he lay, remembering. She’d been here. They’d been together, here, not more than a dozen hours ago. He nuzzled his face in the pillow, aching for the scent of her, but smoke clogged his nostrils and all he could smell was the staleness of spent flames.
Violet
The coughing wouldn’t stop: great heaves that made her feel as if her chest were being ripped open, her throat shredded. She opened her eyes. She needed something to drink, to quench the tearing roughness. She had the impression of something white and light, but with each cough her eyes screwed up again and it was hard to see. She could feel that she was in a bed, but the impression she got through her watery-eyed squint was that this was not the room in the hostel. The coughs subsided for a moment and she saw that there were other beds, white walls. Her head throbbed as she turned. A glass of water on the locker top, thank God. She reached out for it, but there was something on her hands, bound up like baby’s mitts, and the glass flew from her clumsy grasp, off the locker top and onto the tiled floor, smashing.
She tried to get up, to clear up the mess, struggling against the tight constrict of bed sheets, her bandaged hands useless. As she lifted her torso upright her head thudded and the room spun and the awful coughing started again, ripping down her throat, making her whole body spasm and jack-knife.
Something was shoved behind her, hands pushing her backwards. The coughing began to lessen, but the room was a dizzying rush. Then the cool feel of a metal beaker against her lips. It hurt, bee-sting raw as the water ran down her parched throat, but thirst was stronger than pain and she drank the whole glass, wincing at each gulp. How it hurt, how it soothed. She coughed a little more, sputtering water over the tight, white sheet. A hand rubbing between her shoulders.
The coughing stopped. The world ceased turning. But there was a noise in her head like bluebottles.
She could see where she was, now. Pale, quiet and vast: a hospital ward. Motionless lumps under other beds stretched away in ranks towards double doors at the far end. She watched the figure of a nurse crouch on the floor, sweeping up the shards of glass into the dustpan, taking out the big grey-headed mop and wiping the puddle of water away. There was the sweet-acid smell of disinfectant as she pulled the stringy tendrils over the wet tiles. The woman was small and contained, her cleaning was done with swift, compact movements. She checked the watch she had clipped onto her uniform and her mouth moved, but Vi couldn’t hear what was said above the buzzing sound inside her head.
The mop bucket banged against the nurse’s leg as she walked off. The windows were a line of identical blue rectangles, stretching away. Vi’s head felt as if it were stuck in a vice, but she found that if she moved her head whilst it still rested on the pillow, the dizziness didn’t happen. When she pressed her lips together it hurt, and there was something slathered on them, glutinous and medicinal. She swallowed – her saliva tasted odd: putrid. Where am I? What am I doing here? The nurse had gone. There was nobody to ask. At the far end, by the double doors, someone’s arms flailed, blankets jerked, and a sheet slid onto the floor. Nobody came, and the bed sheet stayed on the floor, like a white puddle.
She waited. A distant plane flew past the windows. She looked down at how her bandaged hands rested on the line where the sheet and grey blanket met. She tried to lift her knees but the bed sheets were pulled too tight for her to move properly. There was a clipboard attached to the bedstead at the far end, but she couldn’t see what was written on it, couldn’t reach it without risking the petrifying dizzy-rush again, probably wouldn’t be able to grab it properly if she could, what with these bandaged paws.
Why was she here? Why and how? She remembered running down a dark wooden staircase. Had she fallen? No, it wasn’t that. She remembered sprinting blindly in the darkness, the incandescent splashes of incendiaries. Then, nothing. And now she was here, in hospital.
The woman in the next bed rolled over and looked at her with large, sad, cow-like eyes. ‘Is this the sepsis ward?’ Vi said aloud, clarity like a bursting bubble. But her voice was just a vibration, even though she could feel the warm air rushing up her throat as she spoke. The woman blinked and turned away.
The double doors at the far end banged open, and the nurse came back, scurrying up towards her bed, mouthing empty words. She smiled as she got close: crooked front teeth and eyes that turned down at the corners.
‘Is this the sepsis ward?’ Vi said, every syllable an effortful hiss.
The nurse shook her head, made a nervous gesture and came in very close. She is younger than me, Vi thought, noticing the pimple on her chin, her unlined features. Violet lip-read: ‘This is the burns unit.’ The nurse bit her lip, smoothed an invisible wrinkle from the bedcovers above Vi’s belly and straightened up: ‘Your baby is fine, Miss Smith.’
Chapter 22
Laura
Despite it all, they carried on. Canvas had been jimmied up to cover holes in the roof and walls. Cables snaked from a buzzing generator to enormous standard lamps.
‘Remarkably intact, structurally – but that’s sometimes the way with the delayed devices because they come in cleanly. The machinery’s all gone for a burton, of course,’ Laura heard a man in a hard hat say to another with a white coat, as she passed by. Neither man seemed to notice her, and nor did anyone else, as she floated like a ghost through the rubble and debris. It was only when she perched on a pile of broken pallets and took out her sketchbook that heads turned. She glimpsed hands held up to whisper behind, nods in her direction, and, eventually, they began to approach, leaving their tasks of sweeping or wiping tools or heaving broken equipment to one side. They came to see what she was doing, and to talk.
She only had chalk, charcoal and her miniature watercolour set with her, but it was enough. Throughout the night faces swam in and out of focus, pale and weary against the backdrop of mangled metal and dust. Voices were urgent, disjointed, not seeming to match the lips that mouthed the words:
Is that you, Dame Laura?
So lucky you missed it!
I’d had to miss me shift because Jimmy was ill, thank God.
You don’t expect it, do you, not here – meant to be safe – they even sent evacuees to Nottingham.
I’ve not seen ’owt like it since ’41.
I heard she’d just married Mr Handford in secret – you know they were engaged – they were in the canteen just before, Mrs Hoyden said.
He’d taken leave for their honeymoon. Such a shame.
They said it could have been worse. If that delayed whatsit had been a few feet further over it would have had the whole shelter, not just the entrance.
It’s just a shock!
The beginning of the end of the war, they said on the wireless, and now this.
Isn’t it terrible?
And your painting, too. They said she was going back for it, that other girl, the one who survived.
Violet Smith, wasn�
��t it?
Shifting in and out of her vision, faces like waxing and waning moons, the equipment silent for once, as if hibernating, the voices coming and going, lapping like waves on the shore. Laura kept her hand moving over the paper, flicking the page after each sketch and on to the next, drawing on and on, capturing the disbelief and fear: the crumpled faces, the broken machines; the crumpled machines, the broken faces. Sheet after sheet she filled, as if somehow the magic of her charcoal lines could cast a spell over the grief and destruction. But like the good fairy at the end of Sleeping Beauty’s christening, there wasn’t much she could do, no matter how rapidly she waved her wand, no matter how good her intentions; the damage was done, the curse was set, and the only cure would be time.
She was almost down to the last sheet in her sketchpad when a short, dark-haired girl sidled up. ‘Terrible,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know the others that died, but I knew Miss Fitzlord. She was a kind lady, so she was.’ Laura began to draw the girl, almost reflexively, although by now her arm was aching and her wrist stiff.
‘You knew Miss Fitzlord?’
‘She was covering my shifts for me, so’s I could come back to work. I was off – off sick with my glands.’
‘You weren’t here when it happened?’ She had a sharp little face, the girl, all angles and shadows, but there was a melancholy dulling her eyes.
‘No. I only came back to work tonight – to this!’ She gestured around, taking in the flapping khaki canvas, the scaffolding struts, the jagged hole in the floor, cordoned off with canteen chairs, and the piles of rubble and shrapnel in the corners, waiting to be carted away. ‘Though they say they want to start production again soon – for the war effort. Anyways, I only came by because I found this when I was sweeping up over there and I thought you might want it, seeing as it’s yours.’
Laura put down her sketchpad and charcoal to see what the girl held out. It was a triangular scrap of canvas, no bigger than a folded napkin, rough cloth on one side and smooth, dried oil paint on the other. The edges were charred. It took a moment for Laura’s eyes to re-focus as she looked: something painted pale cream and a black smudge – it was an eye, the eyebrow arching like a wing, the eye itself such a dark brown that it was hard to make out where the pupil ended and the iris began.
Zelah: all that was left of her.
Laura thanked the girl, who went back to her sweeping over the far side of the factory. Laura put the scrap of painted face in her skirt pocket. She packed her sketchbook, chalk and charcoal in her bag and prepared to leave. Nobody noticed her go.
Outside, on the factory steps, the sun had already risen, a golden ring, struggling up through the wan skies above the Meadows. It was tomorrow already, and there were things to do.
Was she in the right place? The room stretched out, vast, in front of her: lines of metal bedsteads and windows too high to see anything from except oblongs of sky – pale grey and empty. She began to walk, passing the immobile mounds under bed sheets, faces pink daubs and eyes dark dots, one after the other, after the other, as she went on. Keep on going, Laura. On, on.
The far end, they’d said, near the fire escape. The yellow heads of the daffodils trembled in her right hand and her bag dragged down her shoulder on the left-hand side. She tried not to look to the left or the right, not to catch any glimpse of raw crimson, oozing ochre, scabbed burgundy. The sharp scent of surgical spirit was in her nostrils, and something else, too, dank and sweet.
On the far right, by the wall, that would be her: brown hair spilling onto the pillow. It was impossible to see her face from here, impossible to see the extent—
See her, and then go. Do what you need to do and then get away from this tragedy, this unholy pain.
There was a wide aisle of lino between the ranks of beds, but Laura felt as if she were walking along a thin plank of wood, like she had that time at the Regent Theatre, that time when the stage manager had convinced her to climb up above the stage, to draw the performance from up high. She remembered the bare and narrow board, and just a wobbly iron rail to cling to, and then a gap in the planking a whole yard wide, right above the centre of the stage where the play was going on (‘The Barretts of Wimpole Street’, wasn’t it?). She must have been twenty feet above the performers, in her slippery shoes. How did she ever cross that gap? How had she found the courage to step over the void?
Don’t look left, don’t look right, and whatever you do, don’t look down, Laura.
She was close to the end of the ward now. Violet had turned on the pillow to watch her approach. Laura’s chest felt tight and hard. She lifted her mouth at the corners and waved the bunch of daffodils, feeling the old newsprint they were wrapped in begin to tear soggily apart in her palm. Violet waved back. Her hands were bandaged, like boxing gloves. Laura could see that although Violet had hair on the left-hand side of her head, the right side was bald, and a huge dressing cut across her forehead. And her face, her pretty china-milkmaid’s face, how had that fared?
Closer now. Almost there.
Stride out and bridge that gap, Laura.
Violet’s face on the right-hand side was blush-red as a pot of rose madder pigment. But not damaged. Not disfigured, just raw. Laura let out a breath. Thank God. Her footfalls came to a halt at the bedside.
‘Hello, Violet, dear.’ Laura leant across and kissed the girl on her left cheek – the good cheek. There was the smell of dirty hair and disinfectant. Laura pulled away.
There was a jug on the bedside locker, so Laura put down her bag and busied herself with ripping the paper from the flowers and putting them in water, fiddling with the blooms so that they splayed out symmetrically. ‘If you can’t get out into the open air, then I thought I should bring some of the spring in to you.’ False cheer. Distraction. But what else to do except keep going, Laura. Keep on going.
The newsprint had left inky marks on her hands so she rubbed them together. Then she took off her hat. ‘Windy out,’ she said, putting a hand up to her hair to check that her ‘earphones’ hadn’t come loose. She put the hat on the bed knob by Violet’s feet.
‘Thank you.’ Violet’s voice was barely more than a whisper. Laura thought of waves raking a pebbled beach.
‘Not at all, dear. How are you feeling?’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear very well. It’s coming back, but you’ll have to speak up.’
Laura perched on the side of the bed, taking care not to jostle any part of Violet’s body. Who knew what the extent of her burns were? ‘They say you’re recovering well,’ she said, leaning in so Violet could hear. ‘They tell me that the baby is going to be fine.’
Violet didn’t answer. At least the girl was alive, and she wasn’t on the sepsis ward. One had to be thankful for such things.
‘Has anyone visited?’
‘Mr Simmons.’
‘But not Mr Handford?’
Violet shook her head.
‘And Mr Simmons told you—’
‘About Zelah? Yes, he told me.’ Violet looked away. Her voice was just a breath.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Laura said. She wanted to embrace the poor girl, or at least hold her hand, but everything was either red-raw or swaddled up. ‘You must be gasping for a ciggie,’ Laura said, looking at Vi’s bandaged fingers. ‘Want me to help you with one?’ Laura began to fiddle with the catch on her handbag – she had a fresh packet in there somewhere.
‘Not allowed,’ Violet whispered. ‘My lungs.’
‘I see, yes, silly me. Inhaling all that burning air must have caused some damage—’ She broke off, shifted on the bedcovers. ‘Still, it won’t be long before that changes, I’m sure. And you’ll get more visitors, during your convalescence, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Fractured ribs, burns, lung damage from breathing in the boiling air and smoke. But Violet had got off lightly, all things considered. Of course if she hadn’t been so late for her shift she would have been in the shelter with the others. She should have been there. So should Zelah �
�� why hadn’t she been in the shelter?
‘You saved me.’ Violet’s hoarse voice interrupted her thoughts. Laura looked at her, the scabbed lips mouthing those words. ‘I was going back for the painting when the delayed device went off. That’s what saved me from going the same way as Zelah, and the others, Mr Simmons said.’
Violet started to cough, then, a hacking wheeze. And there was no water to be had, because Laura had stupidly put the daffodils in the jug. You silly old woman, Laura. It’s all your fault. She tried pouring some of the daffodil water into a beaker and helping Violet to sip at it, but she must have tipped the water at too acute an angle, or the daffodil stems had tainted it, or something, because Violet choked even more, spraying water and spittle all over the bed sheets.
‘Nurse,’ Laura yelled, pushing herself off the bed and beginning to run back along the ward towards the nurses’ station. ‘Nurse!’
A scowling, angular woman emerged from the nurses’ station, elbowed her aside and bustled along to Violet’s bed. Laura followed on behind, and by the time she reached the bed the nurse had already done something, and Vi’s coughs were subsiding. ‘Who put those in there?’ She waggled a skinny forefinger at the daffs.
‘I’m sorry.’
The nurse tutted and scissored away up the ward.
‘Are you all right?’ Laura said.
‘Not supposed to talk.’
‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have come.’
‘I’m glad. Wanted to see you.’
‘I’ll just ask yes or no questions from now on.’
Vi nodded, and Laura sat back down on the very edge of the mattress, towards the end of the bed. ‘Are you going to go back to work when you’ve recovered?’ A nod. ‘Is the factory paying all your medical bills?’ Another nod. Then Laura shifted further up the bed, closer to Violet, smelling again the dirty hair, disinfectant smell and seeing the red and yellow stains on the dressing on her forehead. ‘What about the baby? Will you keep it, now?’ From the corner of her eye Laura could see the nurse returning, carrying a fresh water jug and a clipboard. ‘Violet, are you keeping the baby?’ Violet nodded, then shook her head, opened her lips and drew breath as if to speak, then closed them again.