Life Class

by Pat Barker

  One day as he was going off duty, Paul was asked to go to Sister Byrd’s room. This room was really no more than a little cubbyhole off the boiler room, but she’d made it comfortable. She had her tea, her cocoa, a tin of biscuits, a kettle and a blue-and-white mug with a painting of Edinburgh Castle on the side. Paul waited. He guessed what was coming and resented it. Was he Lewis’s keeper? Evidently he was. Somehow or other this had been decided, though whether by accident – because the only vacant bed happened to be in his hut – or because Sister Byrd thought she discerned in him a particular talent for lowering new arrivals gently into scalding water, he didn’t know. He only knew nobody had consulted him.

  ‘Come in, Paul.’ She had a deceptively gentle Scottish accent that made him think of pale spring sunshine on grey granite terraces. ‘Sit down.’

  She poured hot water from the kettle on to the cocoa in their mugs.

  She was … what, fifty? Something like that. A professional nurse with several decades of experience in civilian hospitals, unlike many of the other nurses who were really lady-volunteers with minimal qualifications. She wore her professional status like an external corset. Unbending, efficient, detached, halfway to being a monster, perhaps, but she got the job done.

  She sat down facing him. ‘How do you think Lewis is settling in?’

  ‘All right, I think. It’s early days.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, a little too quickly. ‘I hope he’s not getting over-involved?’

  He waited.

  ‘With the man who tried to kill himself

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He sits with him a lot, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, I believe he does.’

  ‘You know I’ve had to tell him to go off duty once or twice. And he comes in on his day off.’

  ‘He’s young. He’ll get over it.’

  ‘It’s so easy to let the work here grind you down. If he goes on like this he’ll be no use to anybody in a month’s time. I was hoping you might have a word with him, and … I don’t know. Get him away from the hospital. I don’t want to see him on the wards on his day off. Get him out, show him the country.’

  He wanted to say, Why should I spend my days off nursemaiding Lewis? But then he remembered a number of occasions after he’d first arrived when Hickson, for example, had knocked on the door of the hut and almost dragged him into town. ‘All right. I’ll see what I can do.’

  He went back to the ward and found Lewis sitting by Goujet’s bed again. ‘Come on,’ Paul said, touching him on the shoulder. ‘He’ll still be here tonight.’

  Sister Byrd approved of Paul because she mistook his surface composure for real detachment. In fact he was every bit as moved by Goujet’s predicament as Lewis, but hid it better. It would be better for everybody, he thought, if Goujet died. But at the start of Paul’s next night duty, Goujet looked, if anything, stronger. His colour was better, and he was waving his arms at the orderlies as they walked past. Close to, though, he didn’t look so good. His skin felt hot and dry, and the mangled words didn’t seem to be directed at an audience.

  By two in the morning he was running a high fever. He kept making movements in the air with his right hand, brushing something away perhaps. At last, going across to him for the umpteenth time, Paul realized he was trying to convey that he wanted to write. He couldn’t make himself understood in any other way. Part of his tongue and the roof of his mouth had gone.

  ‘Paper? You want to write?’ Paul made scribbling movements in the air.

  Goujet nodded. Paper, Paul thought, looking round. They had the record sheets they filled in hour by hour, but nothing else. Over in the hut, he had whole pads of the stuff.

  ‘Can you spare me a minute?’ he asked Hickson. ‘I just want to go back to the hut and get something.’

  He walked out into the night. Always this shock of cool air on the skin, the moist smell of earth and wet grass. The moon was full, riding high and magnificent in a clear sky. From the road came the roar of motor lorries going to the front, and further off, in the distance, the bickering of artillery.

  The open door set an oblong of moonlight across the beds and the jumble of papers on his side of the table. He grabbed a writing pad and pencil, paused in the doorway to light a cigarette, and set off across the waste ground to the shed at a half-run. The air was fresh and crisp. The puddle that lay in the hollow ground by the ambulances’ turning circle had a grey film of petrol across it, like a cataract. He stopped to draw breath. An incongruous moment, standing there in the darkness, bracing himself to go back on to the ward, thinking like a painter. Deep breaths, one, two, three. A final drag on the cigarette and he pushed the door open.

  Goujet stared at the writing pad and pencil in apparent bewilderment, so perhaps it wasn’t what he wanted and the waving of his hand in the air meant something else entirely. Paul left the pad by his bed and, by the time he’d reached the end of the row, Goujet had reached for it and begun to write. He didn’t seem to be keeping to the lines, but then the poor devil could hardly see. Paul brushed the incident aside, turning his attention to another patient who’d just been brought in from theatre.

  The new patient woke everybody with his screams. Sister had her hands full trying to settle him. What had been a relatively quiet shift became busy. Paul and HIckson attended to the other patients as best they could. As Paul passed his bed, Goujet offered him a sheet of paper. There were no words on it and no drawings either, it was meaningless scribble as far as he could see. But he smiled and nodded. ‘Merci.’

  It happened again, and again, at intervals as the night wore on.

  ‘Merci.’

  ‘Merci.’

  ‘Merci.’

  Mercy, he started to translate it after a while. Precious little of that round here, he thought, looking at the body of a young man who hadn’t recovered consciousness, and wouldn’t last the night.

  Up and down. Up and down.

  Goujet became more insistent as the night wore on, more obviously deranged. As far as you could tell. But it’s difficult to know whether somebody’s mad or not if he can’t speak. What he wanted, and he made this very clear, was for Paul to take the paper from him and keep it. By the end of the shift, the pockets of Paul’s tunic and breeches were stuffed full of folded pages, every one of them marked by lines and lines of scribble. Only when the pad had been used up, did Goujet lie back, apparently satisfied.

  Lewis didn’t appear that morning. No doubt Sister Byrd had talked to him. His absence was rather disconcerting. Paul had grown used to seeing him there.

  Going off duty, he stood for a moment in the doorway, smelling the dawn wind. Two miles away, no more noticeable than the beating of his heart, the guns thudded: the usual early-morning intensification of fire. He took the sheets of paper from his pocket, bunched them together and tore them into tiny pieces. Released on to the wind, they whirled high above his head then slowly, bit by bit, drifted down till they lay on the bare ground. A driver was bending down, turning the crank handle of his ambulance. Soon, within a minute or two, the big wheels would force the scraps of paper deep into the mud, but before that could happen Paul had already turned away.

  Twenty-three

  Elinor stood in the stern of the ferry, looking out over bile-green water streaked with foam. It was growing dark. Soon she’d have to give in and go below deck like everybody else, but meanwhile she was enjoying the mixture of spray and drizzle blowing into her face.

  The forbidden zone.

  It was by no means certain they’d let her in, though she’d done everything in her power to make her story credible. Under her coat she wore a nurse’s uniform, borrowed from Ruthie, who worked in a hospital now. Ruthie, who disapproved of this trip, who’d called it selfish and trivial and irresponsible. Ruthie, who’d given up painting and thought everybody else should do the same, but loved her too much to deny her anything. She’d used Ruthie – and not for the first time. She ought to stop doing it, and of course sh
e would; but not yet. In her handbag, she had letters typed on hospital paper taken from her father’s desk, recommending her to the chief surgeon at Paul’s hospital. Oh, she’d worked hard to get everything right. Appearance, too. This old-maidish felt hat, a scrubbed and shining face, short-clipped fingernails, long skirt, sensible lace-up shoes. They ought to let her in. She believed her story.

  A sailor walked past and stared at her. A young woman travelling alone, unchaperoned, would always attract attention and she couldn’t afford to do that. She ought to go down below deck and find herself a group of nurses to tag along with. Cautiously, she went down the narrow stairs into the passage with its wet footprints and puddles of water, and then, bracing herself against the rolling of the ship, edged along the wall till she reached the ladies’ cabin.

  A fug of warm bodies greeted her, that female smell of talcum powder and blood. It always reminded her of the time when, as a little girl, nine or ten years old perhaps, she’d opened the drawer of Rachel’s dressing table and found a pile of blood-stained rags waiting to go into the wash. Mother had been furious with Rachel for leaving them where Elinor could find them. ‘It might have been Toby!’ she’d shouted, her voice edging up into hysteria. Elinor had looked from one to the other and tried to work out what the fuss was about.

  Stepping inside the cabin, she closed the door quietly behind her. Most of the ladies had already become lumps under blankets, but a few were still undressing, placing hats carefully into hatboxes, covering them with tissue paper, lining shoes up neatly side by side. In the centre of the room a girl with straggly dark hair was feeding her baby, a wizened little creature whose hand clawed at her breast.

  The nurses in the far corner were still wide awake and chattering. All very young and fresh and pink-looking. Volunteers, she thought, not professionals. Professional nurses didn’t look like that. She found herself a couch close to them and sat down. No point undressing properly – they were due to dock before dawn, but she took off her hat, coat and boots and wrapped herself in the blanket provided. Pulling it tight up to her chin, she peered over it at her fellow passengers and knew at once that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. The lumpy figures in the sepia light; a woman’s face sagging with exhaustion as she twisted and turned on her folded-up coat; the chattering, innocent, ruthless girls screeching like jays; and the woman at the centre of the cabin who seemed to melt into her child, as if she were the wax that fed its guttering flame. There was just enough light to see. She propped the sketchpad against her knee and worked steadily for an hour, screening the page so that anybody glancing casually across at her would think she was writing a letter. Only when she felt she’d exhausted the possibilities did she put the pad away.

  Still sleep wouldn’t come. She thought about Paul and what might be going to happen. In London she’d come close to sleeping with him, but in the end she’d drawn back. It seemed such a ridiculous way to take such a decision, because the night was warm and dry and wherever you looked there were couples twined round each other, some of them actually making love on the grass. So easy to let herself be swept along, but it would have felt as if the war had taken the decision for her. So in the end, no, she’d pulled back and they’d gone to their single beds alone.

  But her imagination had been busy ever since.

  Her only worry was that she hadn’t told Kit she was coming and he was stationed at a hospital just five kilometres outside the town. But Paul hadn’t seen Kit in all the weeks he’d been there, so it wasn’t very likely she’d bump into him. She couldn’t consult Paul about it because Paul didn’t know she was still writing to Kit. Neither of them knew how close she was to the other. If only she could bring herself to tell the truth, it was always better in the end, but short-term, the lies were so convenient. Toby said she’d begun by lying to Mother, because that was the only way she could have a life of her own, but now she lied reflexly pointlessly to absolutely everybody. Including herself.

  She closed her eyes. The smell of tar and talcum power in the hot dark was making her queasy. The ship shifted and rose beneath her. Oh God, don’t let me be sick was her last conscious thought before she slept.

  Next morning she woke with a crick in her neck. She forced herself to sit up on the edge of the shiny leather couch; her mouth tasted foul, her eyelids seemed to be glued together. It was like a hangover, though she’d had nothing the night before except a small cup of black coffee. She grabbed her washbag and joined the queue for the bathroom, standing in line behind two middle-aged women who were complaining loudly about the behaviour of the nurses last night. When she finally got a place at the basins her face looked small and white and sick. She washed in cold water, brushed her teeth, combed her hair, straightened her clothes as best she could and was ready to go ashore.

  Back in the ladies’ cabin, they were all completing their packing, stuffing articles of clothing into bulging bags and checking under the benches for lost possessions. That curious, dislocated atmosphere you get in travelling when a small fragile community fragments. Elinor got away as fast as she could and stood looking out over the harbour, where a light breeze pimpled the surface of the water.

  Once on shore she began to feel better, though even on the short crossing her feet seemed to have forgotten where the ground was. She discovered that the nurses too were bound for the railway station and, since there was a spare seat in the second cab, she was invited to join them. A small, ginger-haired girl with red-rimmed eyes asked which hospital she was going to and she gave the name of Paul’s hospital. It seemed to mean no more to them than it did to her, but they accepted it without comment and that encouraged her. Several of them had brothers who’d joined up, one or two of them sweethearts, and so of course they had to do their bit too. It was all represented as duty and patriotism, but even after an almost sleepless night, their eyes were still shining with excitement. Elinor produced a neatly matching story. Yes, she had a brother who’d joined up, and yes, a sweetheart too. Oddly enough it was Kit’s face that flashed into her mind at this point, though he hadn’t joined up exactly and he certainly wasn’t a sweetheart. Before all this, she’d been an art student, she said, but of course now …

  Everybody agreed. Yes, of course, now.

  Elinor was left wondering why, when her story was accurate in almost every respect, it should be so far from the truth. The difference, she decided, was that these girls needed the war and she didn’t. The freedom they were experiencing on this trip to Belgium she experienced every morning as she walked into the Slade. Though some people might say – and Ruthie was one of them – that she was simply too selfish to set aside her personal concerns and make some contribution to the common cause. Well, yes. She was selfish. She needed to be. She intended to summon up as much selfishness as she possibly could.

  At the station they all went for a coffee together. The café was a long narrow room with dingy lino on the floor. A phlegmatic-looking woman stood behind a counter flanked by glass shelves lined with curly sandwiches. One of the nurses tried out her French; the woman replied in English with a look of dull contempt. Elinor got her coffee and croissants and was walking carefully back to their table when the door burst open and the room filled with soldiers.

  Instantly they took possession of the place, laughing and joking and punching each other playfully in the chest. They were ushered to the tables, where they caught the eye of the little waitress and flirted with her, winking, nudging, egging each other on. So much prime male beef, so much muscle under their uniforms, thighs like tree trunks lolling apart, so much fresh sweat, so many open red-lipped mouths. The whole world belonged to them because they were on their way to die.

  Elinor kept her nose in her coffee cup as much as possible, looking, she knew, old-maidish in her felt hat and shapeless coat. She hated the way the women in the queue deferred, accepting that now they must wait longer to be served. She forced a croissant down with gulps of hot coffee and was glad to get on the train.

  For the la
st part of the journey she had a lump of fear in her throat, though the worst that could happen was that she would be refused entry. Nobody was likely to think she was a spy and bang her up in gaol, and even if they did, a call to the British Consulate would surely put things right. Only, she dreaded having to face her father, whose comments on this reckless and – as he would see it – self-indulgent excursion she could easily imagine.

  As if to spite her, the train crawled along, sometimes stopping altogether. Rain-drenched fields. Reflections of grey-white cloud drifting slowly across flooded furrows. She tried to imagine this land churned up by wheels and horses’ hooves and marching feet, but she couldn’t. And why should I? she thought, hardening again, when this was the reality. Grass, trees, pools full of reflected sky, somewhere in the distance a curlew calling. This is what will be left when all the armies have fought and bled and marched away.

  The nurses had gone quiet. Even their high spirits couldn’t be sustained indefinitely, and perhaps, like Elinor, they’d started to feel nervous. Finally, the train crawled into the station, burped apologetically, once or twice, like a drunken husband arriving home late, and fell silent. There was a moment when nobody said or did anything, then the red-haired girl jumped to her feet and got her bag from the overhead rack.

  On the platform the soldiers, no longer laughing, shouldered their kitbags and marched off. The civilians left behind looked fragmented and shabby after the uniforms and the disciplined vigorous movement. A porter told them to go into the waiting room, where an officer sat behind a table checking papers.

  Elinor positioned herself towards the rear of the line of nurses, making sure, though, that she wasn’t the last. Her mouth was dry, but she could see that the officer was bored doing this routine, unglamorous job and perhaps a little soporific too after a good lunch. A coil of expensive blue smoke rose into the air above his head. His colour was high. He looked as if he liked wine and cigars and women. Boredom and resentment might make him aggressive, but not when there were young women to be flirted with and impressed. She saw him pull his stomach in as soon as he noticed them, and had to stifle a giggle, though it was more from fear than amusement. He kept the first girl – a bank manager’s daughter from Bradford – chatting. Her blushing face and schoolgirl French did make her entrancing. The second girl got much the same treatment, but then a third, a fourth … He looked at the row behind, asked the first girl if they were all together, and when she nodded he stood up and waved them through. Looking back, Elinor saw him settling down again, disconsolately, to face an old man, a married couple and two middle-aged sisters laden with suitcases.