by Pat Barker
Neville raised his glass in a toast.
‘What are we drinking to?’ Paul asked.
‘Elinor.’
Immediately, Paul felt a strong sense of her presence sitting in the empty chair between them.
‘Do you hear from her at all?’
‘Yes, now and then. Do you?’
He knew Neville didn’t. Elinor had said they’d lost touch.
‘Now and then. And Catherine keeps me in touch with what’s going on.’
‘How is Catherine?’
‘Bloody awful, I should think. How would you feel if your father was locked up?
‘I thought you and she were… ?’
‘No point, old chap. Can’t decide anything like that while this bloody war’s dragging on. So, you hear from Elinor, do you?’
Did he know she’d been here? He couldn’t know, unless she’d told him and she wouldn’t do that. Though she might have confided in Catherine and Catherine might well have mentioned it to Kit. The more he thought about it, the more probable it seemed. But then Elinor had said she’d told nobody except Ruthie. She’d also said she didn’t write to Kit. God, what a muddle, and he was being dragged into it. Even not mentioning her visit was a lie. Well, stop that.
‘Yes, I do. She writes quite frequently.’
They stared at each other, the earlier effusion of friendship forgotten. Paul knew there was something in this situation he was failing to grasp, and that made him uneasy. It didn’t help that his head was full of cotton wool. He couldn’t think.
Suddenly Kit laughed, a great wheezing belly laugh that turned into a cough and came embarrassingly close to tears. God, he was drunk.
‘Shall I tell you something?’ Neville said.
‘About Elinor? I think I’d rather you didn’t. If it’s something she wants me to know I expect she’ll tell me herself.’
He was afraid of being told she’d slept with Neville. Neville was just about drunk enough to say it.
‘For Elinor men come in twos. Always did. Right back when I first knew her at St Martin’s, it was two brothers then, can’t for the life of me remember their names, anyway, doesn’t matter. Point is, she wouldn’t fancy either of us if it wasn’t for the other.’
‘I don’t think that’s true.
‘I know it is. Those brothers she ran around with, playing one off against the other, she didn’t give a damn for either of them. That’s it, you see.’ He was leaning forward, blinking those muculent eyes of his, ‘I don’t think Elinor actually loves anybody. Her brother, of course, but that’s different. And Catherine.’
Paul made a sudden jerky movement, scraping his glass across the table.
‘Yes, Catherine,’ Neville said.
Leaning across the table like that, he looked like something Breughel might have painted. He was enjoying his little feast of drunken malice, but how much pain there was underneath. Clown he might be, but he was a talented clown, and his love for Elinor was real. Now, with an enormous effort, he raised his glass to the empty chair. ‘Elinor. Our Lady of Triangles.’
Paul thoughts were scattered across the table like spilled pins, every one of them sharp enough to hurt. He needed to get away from Neville as fast as possible and since Neville was sinking rapidly into a morose stupor it wasn’t difficult to disengage. Paul left him sitting there, scarcely capable of raising a hand to wave farewell.
Outside a sleety rain was falling. He raised his face to it, enjoying the cold splashes on his skin. The town was in almost total darkness. The streets were chasms where nothing moved but a car slinking along the gutter. He was feeling so ill now he wondered if he should return to the hospital, but the room was so much closer and he wanted to lie down. The thought of walking all that way in the cold wet night was more than he could bear. He turned his coat collar up, thrust his hands deep into his pockets and strode on through the dark. His footsteps ringing out across the cobbles proclaimed his loneliness. If only Elinor was there waiting for him, but she was miles and miles away, never further than tonight. Triangles, what nonsense, Neville was jealous, that was all.
A light still burned in Madame Drouet’s living room, but it was too late to put his head round the door and say goodnight. He trudged upstairs until he reached the room where his draped painting waited on the easel. He mustn’t look at it. Not now, not tonight. He was too afraid of finding out that it was rubbish, that he’d been deluding himself in thinking there was something there. Meeting Neville had done him no good. Quite apart from his slur on Elinor, Neville had thrust him back to those evenings in the Café Royal, where Neville was famous and he was an unknown art student, and an unsuccessful one at that.
Sitting on the bed, he took off his shoes and socks. He meant to undress completely, but he was feeling weaker by the minute and ended by crawling under the eiderdown still half dressed. With an effort he turned off the light. The easel immediately took a step closer. He turned over on to his right side to avoid seeing it, but that made him feel even more uneasy. It was ridiculous of course, but he felt the need to keep an eye on it. In some mysterious way it become menacing. Like the faces he’d seen in the wallpaper when he was a small boy confined to bed with pneumonia. He shivered, thinking of deep, cold, dirty water, but then gradually his eyes closed. For a long time he hovered on the edge of sleep, dimly aware that the shrouded mummy in his painting had stepped out of the frame and was standing by his bed.
Twenty-eight
Richard Lewis to Elinor Brooke
I’m afraid I have rather bad news. You must be wondering why you’ve had no reply to your last letter. Please don’t be alarmed. Paul is ill but is being well looked after. What happened was that he accidentally cut through his glove while dressing a badly infected wound. He washed his hands as soon as he noticed the cut, but the trouble is he’s got chilblains rather badly at the moment – we all have – and although they itch like mad they also make your fingers feel quite numb and so he didn’t notice immediately. (They also make you rather clumsy, which is how the accident came to happen, I suppose.) Infected fingers aren’t unusual. All our hands are in a real mess. But Paul developed a high temperature and has had to spend several days in bed, the last two of them on the ward, so he’s having the unusual experience of seeing the ward from both sides. Everybody’s making a tremendous fuss of him so he’s thoroughly spoiled. Whenever one of the other orderlies has a spare moment they go and sit with him. They are a thoroughly decent set of chaps. I don’t think you could find better anywhere.
I have very happy memories of the evening the three of us spent together, even though it did come to a rather dramatic end. I hope you’re keeping well and once again don’t be too concerned. Paul is in good hands and I’m sure he will soon be on the mend. Which will be a relief to all of us since he makes a far better orderly than he does a patient!
Elinor Brooke to Richard Lewis
Thank you for letting me know about Paul. It was a great shock to get the news, though I was beginning to suspect he was ill because I hadn’t had a letter from him for almost a week. He is such a reliable correspondent despite being so busy (whereas I am a rather bad one, despite leading what some might call an idle life). Give him my love and best wishes for a speedy recovery.
I too have very happy memories of that evening in Ypres, though it seems a long time ago now. Perhaps one day we can all meet again in more peaceful circumstances. I would like that.
Paul to Elinor
I expect by now you’ve had Lewis’s letter. He’s been very kind to me throughout, fussing over me like a mother. (Not that mine ever did, but you know what I mean.) Before I was transferred to the ward he was always racing back to the hut to make sure I was all right. What a stupid accident. And such a small cut too. I went off duty and into town quite cheerfully, feeling no ill effects. The following day was my day off and I wanted to spend the night in the room so I could start painting as soon as it was light.
There was a particular painting I wanted to fi
nish. It shows a gowned, masked, capped, gloved (ah, yes!) figure, standing by the bed of a man with gangrene, getting ready to do one of those awful hydrogen-peroxide dressings. The face is of a particular patient whose wound I used to dress – now dead, poor chap. I should have left it till morning when my mind would have been clearer, but no, I had to get it out and look at it by gaslight, and the longer I looked the more menacing the figure became. Though it’s clearly a nurse or a doctor so I don’t know where the sense of horror came from. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it needed more work or not, so in the end I put it away and went out for a drink.
By now the cut was throbbing, but after a few glasses of wine it felt better. I was drinking in a cellar – several of the cafés that were hit during the bombardment have opened again, but many of them use their cellars.
I was drinking on my own, but then I happened to bump into Neville. I’m suppose it’s surprising it hasn’t happened sooner. After all, we’ve never been more than five kilometres apart. We raised a glass to your good self, had a little chat about this and that – he’s nursing German prisoners, did you know? – and parted. A few minutes later, back in the room, I could hardly believe he’d been there at all. The whole meeting seemed like some hallucination from the past.
By morning I was really quite ill and, after trying and failing to work on the painting, I gave up and went back to the hospital where I was promptly put to bed by Lewis. The hours drifted past in a blur after that, except that the throbbing in the finger increased. By the middle of the night it really hurt and next day, after breakfast, Lewis summoned Sister Byrd who summoned Mr Burton and I was transferred to the ward. All the patients who were well enough to take an interest thought it a huge joke. And there I lay and sweated and mithered. Every so often I caught a glimpse of my finger, which was swollen out of all recognition and didn’t seem to belong to me. By this time it was stiff, hard, pink, shiny and drooling pus from a cut near the tip. I thought I’d caught the infection from the brush while painting the gangrenous patient who died. I also at one point thought I was dying, but it didn’t seem to matter very much.
And then the lancing of the wound, lavish dressings of antiseptic paste – there’s a new one out, Sister Byrd swears by it – and gradually my temperature started to come down. I came round to find myself shivering in cold wet sheets with Lewis sitting by my bed.
It’s been quite an experience. The odd thing is that though I know now that it was cutting myself while dressing an infected wound that caused all the trouble, part of me still believes I caught it from the brush. The true belief and the delusion sit quite happily side by side.
Today Lewis took me to the room to see the painting – which is finished. If I’d worked on it any more I’d have ruined it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done and yet I don’t like it. It reeks of some kind of Faustian pact. No, that’s ridiculous – and pompous. I’m not expressing myself very well. I need to see you face to face to tell you what I mean. Oh, yes, desperately, desperately, I need to see you face to face. But it’s not possible. Write soon, my dearest love. Ever your Paul.
Twenty-nine
Paul to Elinor
Ambulances at last. I’ve left the hospital. So has Lewis, we’re here together in a ruined village in what used to be the school. All the houses are in ruins, but the school is untouched except for a hole in the roof. I’ve realized something about ruins. When it first happens they’re shocked, like patients coming out of theatre, then gradually they start to get over it, they don’t mind so much and acquire a raffish, anarchic air, flowers and weeds sprouting from improbable places like trimmings on a hat. We’ve raided the houses to make the school comfortable, chairs, beds, sofas, even rugs. We are very comfortable indeed and you needn’t worry about me. We have good supplies of wood for the stove. In fact the smell of woodsmoke and tobacco is so powerful it reminds me of the life class at the Slade. When I’m sitting dozing in an armchair in the middle of the afternoon, I half expect Tonks to walk in. Is that really the best you can do? He grows in my memory. Isn’t that strange?
‘Dozing in an armchair in the middle of the afternoon?’ I hear you say. Yes! We work at night and even then not every night. I’m amazed how much easier this is than working in the hospital. We do twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, but in quiet times the hours off can extend to days. (Equally, of course, in a bad patch we’re on duty all the time.) There’s much more time for drawing than there used to be. I’m doing a lot – I daren’t think how many drawings I’ve got – but there’s also cards and football. We kick a ball around every morning to keep ourselves fit. Then after breakfast we work on the ambulances, who are a bevy of extremely demanding ladies, I can tell you. I’m not much use at that, I can do the basic emergency repairs but nothing complicated. Fortunately there are two chaps here who can strip an engine down and reassemble it in record time.
Yesterday we had our first snow. As evening was falling, we walked out into it. All the heaps of rubble and the furniture that had been blown or dragged into the street were coated with snow and the cobbles in the road glittered. I slept long and deep, as people do in snow, but now it’s begun to melt. We’re all sorry to see it go. Nobody here minds the cold, even in the trenches, because you can cope with it. It’s this endless, drenching rain we don’t like.
Life here is so uneventful I really can’t think of much to write about. It’s not at all what I expected, and not what I wanted either. But there’s certainly no need to worry about me. I am perfectly, disgracefully safe.
Elinor to Paul
Yes, I know. No letter for a long time. Yours has been lying on the table beside my bed reproaching me for I don’t know how long. It’s so hard to imagine where you are. I can put you in that little room overlooking the roofs and in the restaurant we went to together, but I know you’re not there now. I liked your description of the ruins though. I wonder where the people have gone?
I’ve been working hard day after day, so hard my head feels bashed in. When I can’t stand it any longer I go up to the Heath and watch people swimming, which they still do even in the middle of winter. Pallid creatures, some of them decidedly plump, and they splash and harrumph about like porpoises and their skin turns mottled blue and red and we’re supposed to find it beautiful but it isn’t. And then you see the wounded men in their blue uniforms being pushed along the paths in wheelchairs. They seem to congregate in the Vale of Health as if the clean air might make their stumps sprout. And back at the Slade where I spent so many happy girlish hours being patted on the back – oh platonically of course – by Tonks and winning prizes and scholarships and all that sort of rubbish, some portly madam is even now mounting the dais and a new class of young ladies prepares to contemplate the Human Form Divine and I think –
But that’s the problem, Paul. Always was. I don’t think, I only see.
I expect all this is really about Ottoline and her friends. She kisses me now whenever we meet and introduces me and shows me off and I spend most of my time feeling inferior – rightly, for so I am – and trotting out my little tale about being in Ypres during the bombardment, a tale which has grown so stale in the telling that even I no longer believe it happened.
But I have been working, Paul, and I think at last I’ve done something good. In the ladies’ cabin on the night crossing there was a woman breastfeeding her child and her whole body seemed to be a wax candle feeding the child’s flame. It made an enormous impression on me. Anyway it’s the first thing I’ve ever done that doesn’t reek of Sladery and winning prizes and wanting to be praised.
I do miss you so much, but it gets harder and harder to keep you in my mind. You’re like a ghost almost, fading in the light of dawn. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to summon up your face and I can’t see you any more. Then at other times I hear your voice so clearly I turn round expecting to see you standing there, and every time it happens there’s the same pang of loss. Can’t you send me a sketch of where you are? It
would help me a lot if I could picture you somewhere definite, not just have letters dropping in from outer space.
Paul to Elinor
A sketch of where I am might help you, young woman, but it would very likely get me shot! I don’t think our letters get censored very often, but it does happen. We have to hand them in with the envelopes open. Still, I do see what you mean. I was quite shocked when you said you were thinking of moving and leaving the Slade. A large part of my survival strategy is going back (in my mind, obviously!) to known places and finding you there. Anyway, a sketch would be difficult – to say the least! – so I’ll have to do the best I can with words.
The most important place isn’t a place at all. The bus. You saw ambulances like her in the square – red crosses, canvas sides. She takes five stretcher cases or ten walking wounded – and that’s about all the good you can say of her. She regularly stalls and her crank handle could break a man’s wrist. So picture me then in darkness and driving rain, up to my knees in mud and slush, pleading with her to start first time. All the time going round and round in my head there’s a couple of lines of verse.
A red cross knight forever kneel’d
To the lady on his shield …
I can’t remember where it comes from and it’s driving me mad. The only way I can chase it out of my head is to sing very loudly. One night I was bellowing ‘God Save the King’ at the top of my voice when a column of French soldiers marched past. They obviously thought they should keep their end up and broke into ‘La Marseillaise’.
