Meet Me in Bombay

by Jenny Ashcroft

  He stood in Peter’s ward now, which still bore the clocks and vast glass windows of the station waiting room it once was, but was filled with patients instead of passengers, rows of beds surrounded by screens. Peter was at the very end of the cubicles, in the far corner. For all the thousands of amputations Guy had done, it jarred painfully to see the neat flat space where Peter’s left leg should have been. That memory of him larking on the polo field …

  “How is he?” he asked the nurse in charge, Sister Owen. (“Very pretty,” said Peter mournfully, once Guy joined him. “Far too lovely to be in a place like this.”)

  “Devastated,” said Sister Owen. “He keeps talking about a Luke.”

  “They were friends,” said Guy. “Good friends. Here together from the start.”

  “He’s definitely dead?” Sister Owen asked.

  “Yes,” said Guy wearily, thinking again of that naik’s words, and Maddy, all her letters. “Why do you ask?”

  She looked toward Peter’s bed. “He keeps saying he thinks he saw him.”

  It didn’t surprise Guy. He’d had too many men through his hospital who’d imagined brothers and cousins in the beds next to them to read anything into it. It only broke his heart that the ghosts were never real.

  “He just seemed so real,” Peter said, a few minutes later, as Guy sat beside him. Someone had washed his fair hair, combed it in a side parting. He wore a pair of smart striped pajamas, presumably sent from home. They were too big; he’d lost a worrying amount of weight. “He was killed, right in front of me,” Peter continued. “The men buried him with his picture of Maddy and Iris, but I still saw him getting into an ambulance on the Menin bloody Road.”

  “How much blood had you lost by then?” asked Guy.

  “I didn’t measure it.”

  “A fair amount, is my guess.”

  “He saved my life, Guy.” A tear ran down Peter’s wasted cheek, then another. “He didn’t need to die.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Guy, wishing there were something more, something better, he could say.

  Peter’s face folded. Guy didn’t flinch at his tears, or tell him to toughen up, as some other doctors might. He did the only thing he could, and sat there by Peter’s side, letting him know he wasn’t alone, waiting until he was spent.

  When he was, Guy asked him what he would do now.

  “Not go back home so my mother can look after me,” Peter said, and his lips twisted, in a macabre approximation of his old smile.

  Guy, who couldn’t have felt less like laughing, nonetheless mustered up a short one, realizing it was what Peter needed. “Then?”

  “It’s a rehabilitation hospital in London first,” Peter said, “as soon as they’re happy I won’t hemorrhage on the boat. I’ll visit Ernest Aldyce, once I learn how to walk on wood. Luke would want that.”

  “Yes,” said Guy, who knew all about Ernest. Diana had written, asking him if it was really as hopeless as she’d been told. Darling Guy, is there anything you can do to help? It’s so very lonely for me now. I feel like a widow. And I keep thinking of poor old you all by yourself somewhere in France. Perhaps we could meet when you come back on leave, and you could give me some wonderful advice. He’d read her letter on a break from a particularly bad day in theater, and been rather short in his reply. Count yourself lucky you’re not a widow, he’d said. I can’t advise, I’m afraid it’s not my area of expertise. But Dr. Arnold has an excellent reputation. Please give your husband my best. Diana hadn’t written again. Clearly it hadn’t been what she’d wanted to hear.

  “Della’s still in Bombay,” Peter went on, “and not going anywhere, if this Jeff character is sensible.”

  “He is,” said Guy. “Alice told me about him and Della. I don’t know him well, he only arrived as I left, but I liked what I saw.”

  Peter nodded, as though that at least was good news. “Richard’s said my job’s waiting,” he said. “I might risk the U-boats, go back and give little Iris her father’s best. Be there for poor Maddy.”

  “You won’t tell her, will you?” said Guy. “About thinking you saw Luke.” That would be all she’d need.

  “No,” said Peter, “I wouldn’t do that.” He turned, the pillow crackling beneath him, staring at the ceiling. “Della’s written about all her letters.”

  Guy nodded slowly. “Maddy’ll be glad to have you back,” he said, and this time it was his voice that was unsteady. Fool that he was, he couldn’t help but wish that it was he who was going to her. “You can talk to her. Help her … believe.”

  “Yes,” said Peter, his cheeks working again.

  “Tell her how sorry I am, will you?” said Guy. “I’m so sorry, Peter.”

  “I know,” said Peter, and choked on it. “We all are.”

  Guy couldn’t stay long after that. He had to be back on duty for the night shift, and had been late arriving, as the train that had brought him had had to stop constantly for shellfire. He remained long enough to take a quick look at Peter’s stump, assure himself, as well as Peter, that it really was healing well, and promise Peter that he’d take him for a drink, just as soon as he, too, was back in Bombay.

  “I’ll hold you to that,” said Peter, and raised his hand.

  Guy shook it, forcing himself not to betray his shock at the frailty of Peter’s grip.

  He spoke to Sister Owen again on his way out. She stopped him just before he reached the ward doors, handing him a piece of paper with the address of a CCS on it, not too far from his.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “It’s where Peter was,” she said. “I’ve been thinking … Well,” she flushed, “well, that perhaps you could stop by, ask them if they had any admissions matching Luke Devereaux’s description.”

  Guy gave her a long look. Was she being serious?

  She colored more, but held his eye, certainly seeming to be.

  “Sister Owen…” he began.

  “I know, I know.” She held up her hands. “It’s probably hopeless.”

  “More than probably. He was killed, Sister Owen. I met the man who buried him.”

  “Peter sounds so sure sometimes.…”

  “I don’t think he’s sure at all,” Guy said.

  “But is there any harm in asking a few questions?” Sister Owen said. “Just this morning, a sergeant who we all thought was going to be well enough to travel home to his mama tomorrow, he died. A clot none of us knew was there.” She stared up at him. “In all this hideousness, wouldn’t it be nice to think there might still be some good surprises left?”

  He hesitated, weakening.

  “I gather Colonel Devereaux had just had a daughter,” she said, pushing her advantage. “Would you do it for her?”

  He wavered a second longer.

  She continued to stare.

  “All right,” he said heavily, pocketing the address. “All right.”

  He really did have every intention of doing as he promised, pointless as he knew it was. But when he got back that night to his own CCS, it was to find that there’d been a fresh assault on the British line; he had to pick his way through the queues of chugging ambulances, horse-drawn carts and stretchers, just to get back into the grounds. He didn’t leave theater that night, had just a few hours’ sleep, then didn’t leave again the next day, or the day after that. He worked without stopping, sharing the canvas theater with three other surgeons, his eyes dry, legs fluid with the effort of standing for so long, up to his arms in spleens and ruptured livers, torn lungs and intestines, hands moving, repairing tears, tying arteries, doing whatever he could before the next man was placed on his table. By the time the rush of wounded finally quietened, and he got a spare hour to call at the mobile unit Peter had been at, it had already moved, to Artois, preparing for the inevitable casualties of the next planned offensive.

  He stayed on in Ypres that spring and summer. There was no major action, but still artillery fire between the trenches every day, and a steady stream of bul
let and shrapnel wounds, hemorrhages and amputations to keep him grimly occupied. In September, they were all sent to Loos, a vast attack that was whispered to be the beginning of the end of the war, but that failed to end anything, other than tens of thousands of lives, too many of them on Guy’s operating table. As autumn drew in, and rumors abounded of brewing mutiny in the Indian ranks—units who refused to fight, or abandoned their positions; men who’d finally had enough of being led to their deaths, losing the officers they trusted and being placed instead under the command of boys who didn’t understand their language or anything about them—the generals decided it was too much after all to ask the sepoys to endure another freezing winter. Much better send them to Gallipoli. Guy went east as well. He boarded a ship for Egypt, a hospital in Alexandria, in November, seven months to the day after he’d visited Peter. Only by now he’d forgotten all about Sister Owen.

  In the horror and exhaustion of the summer that had been, he’d ceased to remember they’d ever talked of such a thing as good surprises, or that he’d been handed a piece of paper by her at all.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  King’s Fifth Military Convalescent Hospital/Bombay, 1915–16

  He arrived just before luncheon, on an arctic November morning, all the agonizing operations in France and London to repair his broken body, his battered skull, mercifully behind him. Physically, he’d been pronounced fit. Only his mind needed fixing now.

  “These roads,” said his ambulance driver, gloved hands like vises on the wheel, her face pressed so close to the icy windshield that her breath fogged the glass.

  “You’re doing very well,” he said.

  “You know there’s talk it’s haunted,” she said, eyes fixed on the sandstone building ahead. “Used to be a lunatic asylum.”

  He raised a brow. “I gather it still is.”

  Her chilled cheeks twitched in a smirk. “You have a welcoming party anyway,” she said, and pointed through the semicircles left by the wiper blades, toward where a frozen nursing sister waited on the hospital’s front stairs. “Looks the worthy sort, I’m sure she’ll be having you making friends and playing billiards in no time.”

  “Excellent,” he said, and rested his head against the cabin wall, tired, so very tired.…

  They ground to a halt.

  “Thanks be to God,” his driver said, pulling up the hand brake. She got out and exchanged a few words with the nurse.

  “Nothing a cocoa won’t fix,” he heard the nurse say.

  Definitely worthy, he thought.

  “I feel like my toes have fallen off,” said his driver (not worthy at all).

  He stood as she came to throw the doors of his cabin wide, sending icy air rushing in.

  “Ready?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “No,” she said, “I’m not sure I would be either.”

  He nodded, grateful for her candor.

  “I hope you’re not here too long,” she said.

  “So do I,” he replied, making his way out of the cabin. She wished him luck, and he took it with thanks. He’d take anything, if it would only mean this place would work.

  He paused on the cabin step, arching his neck, staring through the snow at the hospital’s dusted walls, refusing to consider the possibility that it mightn’t. He couldn’t let himself do that. If he did, gave rein to his dread that he’d find himself one day old and alone, still chasing his dreams, waiting hopelessly for his broken mind to help him back to the life he’d so carelessly lost, he was afraid the fear would destroy him.

  So he stepped down. And although it jarred when Sister Lytton called him Officer Jones (he couldn’t abide the name), he said nothing; it was obvious she was kind as well as worthy, and he didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. When all was said and done, what else was there for her to call him? He went along with her tour, found himself staring at the masked captain in the drawing room (“What happened to him?” he asked Sister Lytton. “Ernest?” she said. “I’m not sure”), managed not to react when she showed him the billiards room, and then, at last, met Dr. Arnold, whom he was relieved to find he liked a great deal.

  He took the journal Arnold gave him, picked at a silent supper, not even attempting the trifle, then went to his bed with its hot-water bottle inside, and slept. When, in the middle of the night, he woke in the blackness, sweating and panting, desperate to return to the woman in the lemon dress he’d just left, he reached for his journal and wrote in it for the first time (toothless man; noise; a market?), then threw his head back on the pillow because he had no idea what any of it could mean.

  * * *

  November passed. He went for walks, escaping into the white gardens, sometimes for hours at a time, then sat by the fire, feeling his cold skin sting in a way that made him nostalgic, although for what he still couldn’t say. “Patience,” said Arnold, whom he saw for an hour every day, “patience.” He didn’t play billiards, because he hadn’t forgotten his driver’s jest, but did (much to Sister Lytton’s hand-clasped pleasure) make a friend of sorts, with poor, stuttering Ernest. It wasn’t that he enjoyed their stilted daily introductions, or Ernest’s agonizingly enunciated, oft-repeated comments on the noise of the fire, the difficulty of eating soup with his mask, his damned shaking hands. He simply felt compelled to keep him company whenever he spotted him sitting alone.

  “You don’t need to spend all your time with him,” the VAD Poppy said, one December morning, flumping down beside them in one of the drawing room chairs. “You could always come for a walk with me instead.” She leaned toward him, whispering confidentially. “I promise to be much more fun than Sister Lytton.”

  “I’m fine,” Jones told her, “we’re fine.”

  “D-d-do I kn-kn-know you?” Ernest said.

  “How about a nice cup of cocoa?” said Sister Lytton, sweeping across the room. “Ernest, I’ll fetch you a straw.”

  * * *

  Christmas came. No one played any carols, because of Ernest, but in the arts and crafts room several patients made paper chains to decorate the hallway and drawing room. While Jones refused to be lured into the festive cutting and sticking (on the principle that he mightn’t know much, but he did know that he wasn’t a child), he wrapped himself in his greatcoat, pulled on some boots, and went with four of the orderlies—all too old, or flat-footed, to fight—for a hike into the mist-shrouded forests to cut down a fir. He went for the exercise, for something to do; he didn’t expect to enjoy it. (Truthfully, he fought enjoying anything at the King’s Fifth. “Why?” said Arnold. “It would be like accepting I’m staying,” he said.) As he and the others trekked across the fields, the oldest of the orderlies cursed because he’d forgotten to order the Christmas turkey for his wife. Jones offered to mark a reminder for him to go to the butcher’s in his journal, to which the man laughed and said, “Better yet, let’s make a detour now, and stop by the Bull for a drink, too.”

  The village pub was packed, woody with smoke from the open fire, warm and noisy, full of men who had sons at the front, saw Jones’s blues, and insisted on buying him beers. He protested at first, “I have no money to buy the next round,” but they all told him he’d paid more than enough already.

  “Take the beer,” the turkeyless orderly hissed, smiling through the side of his mouth, “take it.”

  So he did. And got drunk. They all got blind, and didn’t return to the King’s Fifth until nightfall, dragging a fir they lopsidedly hacked down on their way back, falling over themselves as they clambered back into the hospital’s echoing, oil-lit hallway.

  “You look perky,” said Poppy, coming down the wide front stairs, as though she’d been watching, waiting for them at the top. “We got word from the pub you were having a nice time.”

  “No repeat performances, please,” said Sister Lytton, once she, too, had appeared from the drawing room, and scolded Jones for how worried she’d been before the pub’s landlord had telephoned. (For which he told her he wa
s very, very shorry.)

  “Take me next time?” said Dr. Arnold the next day, not scolding, rather happy, pronouncing it a good sign that Jones had made such a break for freedom.

  I don’t know if it’s a sign at all, Jones wrote, not in his journal, but on a piece of paper: one of the many letters he’d now written to the woman he was trying so desperately to remember.

  It’s a relief, though, to have had a different day in this place that is so relentlessly the same. I felt myself, being out like that. I felt as though I knew who I was for the first time since I got into that ambulance on the Menin Road.

  I remember that road. I can see the driver who helped me. I can feel the ruts beneath the ambulance wheels. I can picture the CCS I was taken to, and taste the blood in my mouth, my fear as I lay in the middle of that stretcher-covered field, wondering whether I was going to die, or remember. A nurse came, and she put a tag on my shirt, then sent me straight to a train, the hospital in Dieppe where they were kind and tired and removed the shrapnel in my skull, my body, and set my broken ribs. I know all this, because it has all remained in my mind. Yet I don’t want those memories. I don’t need them.

  I need you.

  Where are you this Christmas? Are you sitting outside, with heat on your face? Your face I can never see. Are you smiling? Are you happy? I want to think that you are.

  Are you waiting for me, though, as I am waiting for you?

  Are you thinking of me, in this moment?

  He set down his pen, and sank his aching head in his hands.

  Are you even there at all?

  * * *

  Maddy stared up into the bright Indian sky, the sun on her cheeks, cradling a now eight-month-old Iris on her lap. She held Iris’s hand absently, restraining her from pulling at the lace neck of her gown, and thought of Luke, as she always did. Her eyes watered in the glare of the afternoon light, and she tried, really tried to do what everyone kept telling her she must, and believe that he was gone.