Life Class

by Pat Barker

  The rain that rains on you also rains on us, and it makes things devilish difficult. All the paths between the huts are lined with duckboards now and even so we sink. The mud bubbles up through the slats. I’ve taken to getting right away on my days off, can’t stand the place, can’t work (draw, I mean, the other sort of work I do in a trance). I managed to get an ambulance driver to take me up to the front line, promising if he was full on the way back I’d walk. He’s called Guy and he’s a Canadian, very dark skin, furrowed cheeks, he looks too old to be here, but here he is. And taciturn in the extreme, which suited me. I didn’t want to talk, I wanted to look.

  The first part of the road I was familiar with, because I’ve walked along it before, but after that there’s open country. Very strange, mad feeling as you go further out, away from the town, because there are fields and farmhouses and it all looks normal until you see that the farmhouse has a hole in the roof and the corn’s still standing in the fields, beaten flat of course in lots of places, but in others, where it’s more sheltered, still standing. I remembered a cornfield I walked through last summer, how restless it was. How it whispered all the time though there was hardly any breeze and I thought about the farmer who planted this field last spring, with no idea he wouldn’t be there to harvest it. And then after that a stretch of normal countryside: tall, spindly trees, willows – some with yellow leaves still clinging to their branches, bending to meet their reflections in the canals. Everything end-of-year and stagnant, but beautiful too in its own way.

  The road was clogged with limbers and motor vehicles and men marching towards the front. They look like a machine: all the boots moving as one, shoulders bristling with rifles, arms swinging, everything pointing forwards. And on the other side of the road, men stumbling back, trying to keep time, half-dead from exhaustion and with this incredible stench hanging over them. You get whiffs of it when you cut the clothes off wounded men, but out there, in the mass, it’s as solid as a wall. And they all look so grey, faces twitching, young men who’ve been turned into old men. It’s a great contrast, stark and terrible, because they’re the same men, really. It’s an irrigation system, full buckets going one way, empty buckets the other. Only it’s not water the buckets carry.

  Further on the road dipped down then levelled out again and that was where the sense of strangeness began. What I didn’t know – though it’s obvious enough when you think about it – is that companies in a column of marching men take synchronized breaks, so, at a given moment, all the men fall out and sit by the roadside, blending into the muddy ground. So for a time the road looks empty. I’m not explaining this very well, but I saw it happen and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I don’t quite know why. It’s the feeling of an empty, desolate landscape that isn’t empty at all, but teeming with men.

  We were crawling along most of the time, edging past columns of men in wet, gleaming capes and helmets, like mechanical mushrooms. Now and then somebody looks up, and you get the sense of an individual human mind among the bundles of soaked misery. All this is in semi-darkness of course. Close to the front people move only after dark, with dawn and dusk the most dangerous times. That’s when the heaviest bombardments are. Nothing dramatic happened to us though. It rained all the way there and all the way back – I didn’t have to walk.

  This will sound heartless, and perhaps it is, but close to the front line where the land on either side of the road is ruined – pockmarked, blighted, craters filled with foul water, splintered trees, hedges and fields gouged out – I realized I felt the horror of that landscape almost more than I feel for the dying. It’s a dreadful thing to say, I know – a flaw in me – but the human body decays and dies in some more or less disgusting way whether there’s a war or not, but the land we hold in trust.

  Sorry! This has got awfully deep and I didn’t mean it to, but it leads up to some good news at least. When I got back I found Lewis in the hut almost bouncing on the beds with excitement. The nurses – the fully qualified ones who, we were beginning to think, were as mythical as the nine muses – are on their way at last, so it can’t be long now before we get our transfer. I want to be up there. I don’t want to be stuck here in comparative safety doing a job that a woman could do equally well, and in the case of a qualified nurse, BETTER!

  Elinor to Paul

  I’m pleased for you, Paul, I really am – since it’s what you seem to want. I wonder whether you know how hard it is to answer your letters? A week has gone by since I received your last, though I meant to sit down and reply at once. I know you say you want to hear about all my doings but I can’t help feeling that my doings are terribly trivial compared with yours and that this may even may be part of their attraction for you. It’s like looking through the window of a doll’s house, isn’t it?

  Anyway doll’s house or not, here goes. I’ve been to tea with Lady Ottoline Morrell! I never thought I’d live to see the day. I met her at the Camden Street Gallery and she looked at me very intently for a long time and then she said in that vague way of hers, wafting a jewelled hand about above her head, You must come to tea some time. Do come to tea.

  I thought that was fairly meaningless really – no time, no date – and immediately forgot all about it, but yesterday morning I came downstairs and there was the invitation on the mat and so this afternoon I set off, wearing one red stocking and one blue as a reminder to myself not to be nervous though of course I was. Close to, in broad daylight, she really is quite extraordinary. We sat in a red room overlooking a walled garden and the rainy afternoon light fell full on her face which was heavily rouged with purple shadow on the lids and in a way she looks quite beautiful and in another almost grotesque. She’s obviously decided that being ordinary is not an option for her and she’s right. So although she’s very tall – six foot if she’s an inch – she wears thick cork soles that add on another two inches. Her dress was brightly coloured green silk with an intricate web of gold embroidery – very beautiful, but for afternoon tea? My pathetic little gesture with odd stockings was nowhere, I can tell you. She’s not easy to talk to, though she is interested in everything you say. You feel she’s listening, not just waiting for the chance to make some clever remark herself like most of that Bloomsbury crowd. Only – now I’m going to carp and I shouldn’t – there isn’t much humour, and it’s all very intense. She seems to be drawing your soul out of your body. It’s a kind of cannibalism. I felt I had nothing to offer her. Not enough meat on my bones. We talked about the war. Oh my God, yes, the war, I’m so heartily sick of it but it seems to be unavoidable even with people like her who hate it as much as I do. She said she was totally opposed – a point in her favour – but had decided that it was pointless trying to stop it. I was trying not to laugh. The vanity of these people! – thinking they can influence the fate of nations when it takes them all their time to organize their own lives. But then she said she’d switched her energies to trying to help the wives and families of German internees who’ve been left with no income, dependent on charity handouts. Even when the wife is English she can’t get even the most menial work, not even doorstep scrubbing, which is the lowest-paid work there is – or so Lady O says. I sort of half promised I would go and hand out parcels with her but all the time I was thinking about Catherine and how I ought to have done more for her. She’s a friend for goodness’ sake and that matters more than charity, or ought to, but when I got her letter about her father being interned I was so excited about going to see you I didn’t do anything. I should have gone to see her then. Made time. It was wrong of me not to. Lady O meanwhile was trying to move the conversation on to a more personal plane. She wants something from you – not in any crude material way – something emotional. Or intellectual perhaps, but she must have guessed there was no point expecting anything like that from me! I told her about Catherine and how worried I was about Toby and it was all true, every word of it was true, so why did it sound so false? But these were just bits of gristle, not real juic
y flesh. So then I bethought me of my trip to see you, and I told her about that – she’s the first person I’ve told – which is wrong, because what is Lady O to me, or I to her? I haven’t told Rachel. I haven’t told Mother. But I did tell her and she was ecstatic. It became quite embarrassing and I’ve no doubt she’ll repeat the story with embellishments all over London and I shall acquire a reputation for – I don’t know what – recklessness, romantic passion – something.

  But I enjoyed meeting her. In the end I wasn’t nervous or intimidated at all. And yet I came away with a bad taste in my mouth in spite of her lovely cream cakes and her real genuine unaffected kindness. It all seemed so false somehow but the falsity was not in her but in me.

  When I got back, I started decorating. I’d intended to put it off because it’s so time-consuming. I was going to live with the Victorian wallpaper – huge green roses that look like cabbages – perhaps they are cabbages – but I can’t live with it, Paul, I simply can’t. It all has to come off and then I might be able to work again. So you must think of me wielding that horrible triangular scraper thing that hurts your hands, moving along the paper row by row, murdering cabbages. I’m sure you’re much more usefully employed.

  Twenty-seven

  He knew he’d cut himself, the minute he did it. He felt a sharp pain as the scalpel sliced through his glove, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He was cutting the dressing from a twitching stump of amputated leg at the time, and needed both hands, one to cut, one to keep the leg still. Gangrene had set in and the discarded dressing was yellow with pus.

  As soon as he’d finished, he scrubbed his hands, the peeled-off gloves lying by the side of the sink like sloughed-off skin. Blood flowed from the cut. It was at the top of his right index finger, not big, but deep. A quotation was teasing the fringes of his mind. What was it? Not so wide as a church, door, nor so deep as a well, but t’will serve. Morbid bugger. He scrubbed his chilblained hands till the flesh stung, stuck a wad of cotton wool over the cut and hoped for the best.

  The following day was his day off. When he reached the end of his shift he decided to walk into town and stay overnight in the room in order to be able to start work at dawn. He was nearing the end of a painting and so excited he couldn’t bear to be away from it. Even woke up in the middle of the night and lay thinking about it, unable to get back to sleep. It was a tricky time, though. At the end of his last painting session, a week ago now, it crossed his mind that it might be finished. At any event, he was aware of the danger of doing too much. This was when somebody else’s eye would have been invaluable. Elinor’s, or better still, Tonks’s, though what Tonks would have made of it he hardly dared think.

  At last he was free to go. His cut finger was throbbing, but it had been painful for the last few days because of the chilblains, so that was nothing new. He felt tired and sweaty, but he felt like that at the end of every shift. Unusually, he changed out of his uniform before going out and the cool touch of clean cotton on his skin soothed him and persuaded him that he didn’t feel too bad after all. Nothing that a good night’s sleep wouldn’t cure. He always slept more deeply in the room than in the hut, though he’d long since become accustomed to Lewis’s presence and even welcomed it. Something about the proximity of the wards and the theatre kept him on permanent alert. He woke if a mouse ran over the floor.

  The walk into town in the fresh clear air, stars pricking overhead, revived him. He turned the key in the familiar lock, brimming with excitement and hope. The room was not so powerfully full of Elinor’s presence as it had been even a week ago. Now it was the figure on the canvas he hurried up the stairs to meet, but once in the room he didn’t go immediately to the easel. Instead, he sat down on the edge of the bed, unconsciously cradling his right hand in the left. When he became aware of what he was doing he made a conscious effort to separate the hands. He was treating it like a real injury and that was ridiculous. Children playing in a playground get worse cuts than that everyday.

  The easel had a cloth draped over it. Ideally, he shouldn’t look at the painting at all tonight. The gaslight flickered, its bluish tinge changing every colour and tone in the room. No, no, it would be a complete waste of time. But the painting seemed to call to him. At last he could stand it no longer. He jumped up and pulled off the cloth.

  My God. It looked as it had been painted by somebody else. That was his first thought. It had an authority that he didn’t associate with his stumbling, uncertain, inadequate self. It seemed to stand alone. Really, to have nothing much to do with him.

  He’d painted the worst aspect of his duties as an orderly: infusing hydrogen peroxide or carbolic acid into a gangrenous wound. Though the figure by the bed, carrying out this unpleasant task, was by no means a self-portrait. Indeed, it was so wrapped up in rubber and white cloth: gown, apron, cap, mask, gloves – ah, yes, the all-important gloves – that it had no individual features. Its anonymity, alone, made it appear threatening. No ministering angel, this. A white-swaddled mummy intent on causing pain. The patient was nothing: merely a blob of tortured nerves.

  It shook him. He stood back from it, looked, looked away, back again. It must be the gaslight that was so transforming his view of it. And he was no nearer knowing if it was finished, though at the moment he felt he wouldn’t dare do anything else.

  Cover it up. Once it was safely back behind the cloth, he relaxed a little, even began to wonder if he were not flattering himself a little. Perhaps it was his own feverish state that accounted for the painting’s impact. He raised a hand to his brow and wiped the sweat away. Probably he should have an early night, but the thought of lying in that bed, alone, with only the painting for company, was not attractive. He’d do better to go out and get some food. Not to any of the usual places, though. He wasn’t fit for company tonight.

  The night air restored him. By the time he reached the café he was feeling almost normal again. It was very strange how this thing came in waves. He sat down and ordered a carafe of red wine feeling almost elated, but no sooner had he drunk the first glass than he was starting to sweat again. The café that had seemed so welcoming when he pushed open the door now looked yellow with dark dancing shapes all over the walls. Nothing was the right size. The barmaid’s face loomed and receded, all bulbous nose and fish eyes like a face seen in the back of a spoon. There was a ringing in his ears and the French being spoken at tables all around him had suddenly become incomprehensible. A man with a drooping moustache and eyes to match asked him a question. Was this chair taken? Was that it? Paul stared blankly back at him, unable to attach meaning to the words.

  There was a cellar underneath the bar, no doubt opened up since the bombardment to give customers somewhere to shelter should the worst happen again. He’d go down there. It might be quieter there. Draining his glass, he picked up the carafe and stumbled down the stairs.

  It was slightly quieter and there were alcoves where you were secluded from the general crush. He made his way towards one of them, thinking it was empty, but then, there at the back, in the shadows, he saw a smudge of white face. He was turning away, not wanting to intrude on the solitude of somebody who’d clearly chosen to drink alone, when something about the breadth of the man’s shoulders, the pudgy, truculent features staring up at him, as if daring him to occupy one of the vacant chairs, struck a chord. Kit Neville.

  Simultaneously, Neville’s expression changed and he jumped to his feet. They shook hands and then, finding that inadequate, pulled each other into a bear hug. So much back-slapping and smiling and hand-pumping, and all of it sincere, and yet they’d made no attempt in the last two months to seek each other out, though the hospitals where they worked could not have been more than five kilometres apart. Ten, at most, Paul reminded himself, sitting down.

  ‘Well,’ said Neville.

  After greeting each other like long-lost brothers, there was an immediate awkwardness of not finding anything to say.

  ‘How are you?’ Paul asked.r />
  ‘Oh, pretty well. The old rheumatiz is playing up a bit.’ He probed his left shoulder as if for confirmation. ‘And you?’

  ‘All right. Have you been doing any painting?’

  ‘Not much. I’ve got masses of drawings, though. I’ve got to get back home and do some serious work.’

  ‘Are you still at the same hospital?’

  ‘No, they’ve put me in charge of the German wounded at another hospital. Like a fool, I admitted to speaking German.’

  ‘What’s that like?’

  ‘Not bad. Some of the younger ones come in fighting mad, but I generally manage to get them on my side. I help them to write home. Oh, and I met one who used to be a waiter at the Russell Square Hotel. He was working there when I used to drink there so he must have poured me many a glass of whisky, though I can’t say I remember him. But he speaks good English so I’ve more or less recruited him on to the staff. It’ll be a blow when he has to leave.’

  ‘I thought you were going into ambulance driving?’

  ‘Bloody shoulder put paid to that. I only lasted a week. The steering’s so heavy you wouldn’t believe. When you come off shift you don’t feel you’ve been driving. Feels like you’ve gone fifteen rounds with an all-in wrestler. By the way, that’s strictly between the two of us, you understand?’

  Paul was puzzled until he realized that nursing enemy soldiers, however necessary, and even admirable, the work might be, didn’t fit in very well with Neville’s desire to present himself as a daring war artist risking his life daily on the front line.

  ‘You won’t tell anybody?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘You see, the thing is, I was a rotten ambulance driver, but I seem to be pretty good with the wounded, only …’

  ‘I won’t say anything.’

  How strange to find that Neville possessed the qualities needed in a good orderly, and how typical of him to be ashamed of them. He seemed to be under enormous pressure. Even in this short exchange it was possible to tell that he was drunk. Oh, not incapable, far from it, he had an immense capacity, but his speech was just beginning to be slurred. Certainly, his inhibitions were gone. He belched several times loudly and made no attempt to apologize or cover his mouth. Since the carafe in front of him was still almost full, it was evidently not the first. He was staring at Paul, almost aggressively. Pale fish-eyes, caught in a net of red veins.