Life Class
Page 26
‘I am yours.’ He was serious. ‘For ever.’ Her smile faded. ‘No, Paul.’
‘But it’s true. Why shouldn’t I say it?’
She got slowly to her feet. ‘So what are we going to do?’
‘Go on as we were?’
‘You mean go to bed.’
That was what he meant. He looked up at her and smiled.
‘You’re a disgrace.’
‘I’ve asked you to marry me. I can’t do more.’
‘No, I suppose you can’t.’
They got undressed slowly, unselfconsciously, like an old married couple, and lay side by side on the bed holding hands. It was a long time before he turned to her. Her eyes were huge in the half-darkness. For Paul, every gesture, every caress, every kiss was heavy with pain. He felt they were saying goodbye.
Afterwards she was silent for so long he thought she’d gone to sleep, but then she turned to face him. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I love you. But that doesn’t seem to be enough. Wait to see what happens, I suppose.’
‘What do you think’s going to happen?’
He shook his head. At the moment he thought they were two twigs being swept along on a fast current, now thrown together, now pulled apart. What happened next wouldn’t depend on what either of them desired. Perhaps there was wisdom just in accepting that. He started to speak only to realize she’d fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder.
Towards dawn, the pain in his leg jolted him awake. He slipped out of bed and limped across to the window. It was snowing. He’d thought it might be: something about the silence and the quality of the light. Feeling a flicker of the excitement he would have felt as a child he pressed his face to the cold pane and watched the heavy flakes tumbling towards him, grey against the white sky. He thought of Lewis in his grave under a thin covering of snow. Of the ambulance crews coming to the end of a long night. Of Sister Byrd, slipping and slithering on the duckboards as she left the Salle d’Attente and walked back to the hut where she slept alone.
The sooner he was out there again the better, he thought. He didn’t belong here.
God, it was cold. Chafing his upper arms, he went back to bed and slid between the sheets, snuggling into Elinor for warmth. After a while he stopped shivering and turned on to his back. The room was full of her quiet breathing. He looked up at the ceiling, as the light strengthened, waiting patiently for her to wake.
Acknowledgements
A number of biographies of artists who were at the Slade in the years before the First World War were useful in the preparation of this novel, providing, singly and together, a lively account of that remarkable generation:
First Friends by Ronald Blythe
Interior Landscapes, A life of Paul Nash by James King
Mark Gertler by Sarah MacDougall
Isaac Rosenberg, Poet And Painter by Jean Moorcroft Wilson
C. R. W. Nevinson, The Cult of Violence by Michael J. K. Walsh
All these artists, and many others equally distinguished, studied under Henry Tonks. In 1916, Tonks, who had been a surgeon before he became an artist, went to work with Harold Gillies, who was then pioneering the techniques of modern plastic surgery on the faces of mutilated young men. Tonks’s job was to make drawings of the patients before, during and after surgery. In addition he embarked on a series of sixty-nine portraits of facially mutilated men which are among the most moving images to have come out of any war. They were not exhibited in his lifetime, nor for many years afterwards.
Henry Tonks: Art and Surgery by Emma Chambers pays tribute to the man and his work while raising a number of interesting and disturbing questions about the ways in which the wounds of war are represented – or, more often, hidden.
Several writers recorded their experiences of nursing wounded men.
A Diary without Dates by Enid Bagnold
Chronicle of Youth, Great War Diary 1913–1917 by Vera Brittain, edited by Alan Bishop
The Forbidden Zone by Mary Borden
The Backwash of War by Ellen N. La Motte
Two books dealing with other aspects of the medical history of the war were particularly useful:
Gentlemen Volunteers by Arlen J. Hansen describes the work of American ambulance drivers at the front.
Doctors in The Great War by Ian R. Whitehead is an account of how the army medical services expanded to cope with unprecedented casualties until, by 1918, more than half the nation’s doctors were on active service.
Several books give an insight into the atmosphere on the Home Front:
The Enemy in our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War by Panikos Panayi
Ottoline Morrell by Miranda Seymour
Notebooks by Katherine Mansfield, edited by Margaret Scott
I would like to thank my agent, Gillon Aitken of Gillon Aitken Associates, and my editor, Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton. Above all, I am grateful to my husband, David Barker, for his unfailing love and support.
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HAMISH HAMILTON
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First published 2007
Copyright © Pat Barker, 2007
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ISBN: 978-0-141-90641-6