White Feathers

by Susan Lanigan

  Eva’s first day, like every one that followed it, was long and hard. She rose at five-thirty, washed in cold water (the water heating was usually off), then walked to the bottom of the hill to catch a tram to the hospital. She would stand around with a clutch of girls, coats spotted with the early morning rain, watching tram after tram roll past, packed to the gills with dock workers coming in from the night shift. Finally, one of their number would give up and start walking, the rest following in a short, dismal line, carefully avoiding the passing dray carts that might splash their white uniforms with mud. An acrid stink of ordure, molasses and city detritus rose up from the Thames. Heads bent, headscarves flying in the wind, Eva’s companions did not speak to one another. Like her, they were not quite fully awake.

  They would walk for an hour and a quarter before reaching the hospital, Eva’s insides crying out for breakfast. But the cry was to go unheard. She would not eat for another four and a half hours. Nor was she allowed to sit down at any time, especially not on a bed. There seemed to be an infinite list of rules, all infinitely infringible. Her head span trying to take them all in on an empty stomach.

  On her first day, she was sent to the laundry, where she helped a small army of VADs and orderlies press and clean hospital gowns. For the first time since her arrival, one of the girls spoke to her. ‘You’re new here.’

  ‘Yes, I just got my orders.’

  ‘Why’d you join?’

  ‘Needed the money.’

  The other girl looked at her oddly, waiting for her to say more. Of course, she should have said that she wanted to ‘do her bit’. It wasn’t as if they were even paid that much, a miserly twenty pounds a year, that was all.

  ‘I know somebody out there,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you’ve a sweetheart?’ her colleague asked, sympathetically.

  ‘Not any more,’ Eva said, a twist of pain lying against her heart, like a blade in its sheath.

  ‘Is he dead?’ The girl’s voice was far softer than the pounding of the mangle and the noise of the machines and shouting, but Eva heard her clearly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied.

  Nonplussed, the girl turned back to her work with a twitch of her nose.

  Eva did not see her again after that first day. This was not uncommon, she learnt. Quite a few girls disappeared without notice. Family members, particularly parents, cultivated a sense of grievance at the loss of sisters and daughters who might otherwise be pressed into caring for elderly and infirm relatives. They would use any pretext to order the girls back home. After all, they weren’t men; it wasn’t as if they were doing real war work.

  Eva had last seen her own father three weeks before, when he turned down her request for money. She had been made to wait just inside the front door in the dim hallway, drops of November rain falling from her coat onto the doormat’s bristles. Then she was called in, as if she were one of the shabby-coated bankrupts he felt it his duty as an accountant to harangue, and he pulled that trick of his where he doodled at his desk to look busy. It was a ridiculous dance. Finally, when he lifted his pompous head, narrow as a ferret’s, she had asked him for the money. She had not told him she wanted rid of Cronin’s child. If she were fool enough to throw herself on his mercy and blurt that out, she had no doubt that either he or Catherine would lock her up until she gave birth.

  She would not forget his response in a hurry. Did she think he was made of the stuff, he thundered. That it grew on trees? After all the trouble she had caused him with her pride and intransigence, she wanted to bleed him dry with no explanation, no thought to the others in the household? Did she not know that Grace had never been the same since that dreadful day she’d had to persuade Eva to do the right thing about that unkempt conchie who had blackened their reputation?

  Through most of it, Eva stayed silent, counting to ten over and over on fingers held firmly behind her back. But there was one insult she considered it her obligation to address. ‘You say Mr Shandlin blackened your reputation because of his stance on the war. I disagree with you – do not interrupt, Father, you have more than had your say – I disagree, but it is hardly relevant. If we compare by character, side by side, it is obvious that Christopher Shandlin is a thousand times the man you are – in courage, in learning and in kindness. I will always be proud of him, no matter what he thinks of me’ – Eva lifted her chin – ‘and I’ll never stop being ashamed of you, Father.’ She turned on her heel and banged the study door behind her, so hard that Catherine’s little clock fell off the hall table. Ding, ding, ding, it exclaimed from the floor as her father, that wretched satrap, roared at her to come back – the nerve!

  On her way out, Eva nearly ran straight into Grace, who was standing on the front step. ‘Eavesdropping, were you?’ she asked viciously.

  Grace said nothing, though a flicker of perturbation crossed her face. She was as pale as an alabaster statue. Eva looked down and realised that her stepsister was pregnant too – visibly so. Fast work there, Herbert. She hated her own spite, and the way Grace looked, so silent and fragile, like a Chinese vase held together with invisible hands.

  Eva went out the front door, still sailing on nerves and hunger, only to come to an abrupt halt from a sudden urge to vomit. Clinging onto the iron of the basement railings, she threw up the tea and dry cake she had eaten earlier that day when the train had stopped at Crewe, her guts heaving long after she had run out of anything to disgorge, her skirt and the pavement splashed with the sick, a map of some uncharted country in yellows, pinks and browns.

  She looked up at the sky, a coal-dusted nimbostratus that spat dirty rain. Her bravado had vanished along with the contents of her stomach. She was exhausted, starving, filthy; dizzy little turns corkscrewed around her head until every limb shook. And still she stayed pregnant. Joseph Cronin’s final revenge: Eva dared not think of the life inside her as anything more. She dared not think of its innocence. War did not care if you were innocent or not.

  By the time she shakily pulled the doorbell at Great Cumberland Place, Eva had already collapsed several times in the street. She had told Lucia Percival nothing more than the truth. Had Sybil not taken pity on her, she would have surely been dead by now.

  The nurses and VADs broke at midday for lunch. Four hours were allotted for the latter to return to the hostel for their daily meal, before another shift until nine. Four hours was barely enough; Eva hardly had time to bolt her dinner down before it was time to return to an afternoon spent cleaning spittoons and chamber pots. She wondered why they didn’t just serve the food at the hospital but was told that the food there was for the patients only. Eva couldn’t help wondering why the nurses could not be fed at the same time and in the same place. But rules were rules.

  She didn’t hate her duties. Mindless work could be a comfort sometimes, even if it involved other people’s excretions. She didn’t mind the bedpans, but she did object to the endless music. All the shopworn ballads for the ‘sodjer lads’ were played at top volume in every ward, and, since all the doors were left open, there was no escape from them even if one was not on ward duty. Perhaps Eva noticed it more than others, but a disproportionate number of the songs seemed to be about Ireland. If she had to hear about Irish eyes smiling (they didn’t) or how it was a long, long way to Tipperary (not halfway long enough) one more time, she would march right up to the men to tell them how those lovely, soft-spoken Irish hated their guts and liked nothing better than sucking up to the Germans and getting mixed up in gun-running with them. But she never did.

  By the end of the first week, she was more tired than she had ever been in her life. Even in Ireland, waking at a lightless hour, seeing to the hens and taking care of breakfast, not to mention washing Mrs Cronin and then rubbing olive oil and camphor into her slack, pale skin, Eva had not experienced such exhaustion. She slept deeply and blankly, hardly noticing the cold.

  Eva suspected that Sybil was secretly relieved she was gone. Her stay at Great Cumberland Place had over
lapped with Clive Faugharne’s return by just one day, and the viscount had not been the jolly-tempered man Eva remembered. He had seemed ill pleased to see her and barely acknowledged Sybil’s introduction. That evening, she heard the couple quarrel. Sybil’s voice was modulated only by the fear of being overheard; her husband audibly didn’t give a damn. ‘I give you certain freedoms,’ his voice flared up the stairs, ‘in exchange for certain conditions. I thought that was understood. This is a joke, Sybil.’

  ‘A joke?’ Suddenly, Sybil’s voice was as harsh as the chalk Christopher used to scrape down the blackboard whenever he suspected his students were not giving him their full attention. ‘I’ll tell you what’s a joke, shall I? When I go to bed and wait for my husband, and he—’ She was cut short, and Eva heard a loud crack and a scream. She leapt out of bed and pulled on her borrowed robe. She heard the servants’ muted conversation on the stairwell, then a creak on the floorboards as they went back to their own rooms. This had obviously happened before. Eva wanted to run down and explain, apologise, anything that would get Sybil off the hook. But she didn’t. She stood stock still in the middle of the room and realised for the first time how difficult it is to intervene in a domestic dispute. How would Sybil feel, knowing that she knew? She was a proud woman. The humiliation would hurt her worse than Clive’s hand. And if the servants weren’t going to get involved … From the back of Eva’s mind, as if at the bottom of a stream, she remembered Grace’s voice, quiet, undramatic, admonishing. Mama, Mama, I think you broke her arm. Her mind was made up: she would enrol with the Voluntary Aid Detachment the following morning and have done with it.

  Choosing the right hospital proved a tricky task. There were two hundred military hospitals in the Greater London area. Mile End was out. Eva had liked Lucia, her bluntness, her bravery, but Lucia, Eva’s rescuer, would be a constant reminder of the dire straits Eva had fallen into, and she didn’t feel quite strong enough to face that. So, after discounting the specialist VD unit at Tooting Grove and the Special Neurological Hospital in Kensington (‘Loonies!’ Sybil had cried dismissively), she played it safe and plumped for Queen Alexandra’s Military Hospital, which she had a reasonable chance of getting into.

  When she said goodbye to Sybil on the steps of Great Cumberland Place, she did not mention the bruise on her friend’s cheek.

  ‘So, it’s official then. You’re off.’

  Eva nodded. ‘Got my orders yesterday. I have to come down to Victoria Station tomorrow at six o’clock for the night ferry over to Boulogne.’

  Sybil uttered a low, ladylike whistle. ‘They don’t hang about, do they?’ They were sitting in an Aerated Bread Company tearoom on Bond Street, drinking watery, bitter coffee. Nowadays, Eva was always careful to meet Sybil on neutral ground. A place where women could sit quietly and chat over tea was ideal, not that all the women who came here were quiet; the window’s upper pane was still cracked from the time a suffragette had hurled a brick at it.

  Eva had never mentioned what she had heard between Sybil and Clive that night. In the months that followed, she saw less of her friend anyway, owing more to lack of time than inclination. When they did meet, she noticed that Sybil never mentioned Clive’s name. She herself had run into him coming out of a club near Oxford Circus. He had nodded at her in a manner so cold it was worse than a dismissal. Eva had blanked him completely. He had no cause to be so haughty, and him a cad who beat his wife.

  Sybil had followed Eva’s lead and had enlisted for hospital work, though in true Sybil fashion she had managed to get a rather more exclusive billet in a small convalescent home in Chelsea with only thirty officer patients and nearly as many nurses. It was a rather gentler introduction to the realities of war and hard work than Eva’s, though her sewing abilities, she wryly remarked, were being put to good use. ‘They’re terribly behind the times. I caused a ruckus when I told them they needed to get a proper electric machine. Roma tells me I should pick my battles, but do I ever listen to her? No, I do not.’

  Sybil could never mention Roma in a casual way, Eva noticed; it always sounded forced. When Eva met Roma, she had found her very low-key. She was not a stone casting ripples in a stream; rather, she was the stream itself, slow-moving but determined to become a river in good time, whether the surrounding terrain liked it or not. But whenever Sybil spoke about her, and sometimes to her, she adopted a tone of forced gaiety. Eva had never seen Sybil try so hard to impress someone before. And she had given up smoking. After all her fine speeches on the topic, urging Eva to give cigarettes a try. ‘Oh, Roma said my clothes stank of the smoke,’ she said when an astonished Eva pressed her on it.

  Eva wondered what it was all about. She remembered Patricia Arnason: that long, confident stride off the pitch as the sun burned and set, and Sybil’s refusal to acknowledge her. Something similar was going on here. Eva guessed, too, that Sybil had signed up to the VAD because Roma had volunteered for the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and was going over to Dunkirk.

  Roma had announced this news under the bandstand in Regent’s Park. Sybil had not taken it well.

  ‘Dunkirk!’ she exclaimed. ‘But … I shan’t see you!’ Then, recalling Eva’s presence, she pulled herself up a bit. ‘And how did you get in? You’re not even a Quaker – or are you? Last I heard, you were a roaring Papist. Surely there’s rules about that?’

  ‘Sybil!’ Eva said reprovingly.

  ‘Mr Nevinson fixed it for me,’ Roma said, pushing awkwardly at the diamanté bulldog clip that held her hair in place.

  ‘Mr Who?’

  ‘He’s a war artist I met at the Slade.’

  ‘A war artist?’ Sybil enunciated the words with the same incredulity as she might have said ‘pig breeder’.

  Eva felt in the middle of someone else’s quarrel and wished she could go off and feed the ducks. A bit like how Agatha must have felt, she thought wryly, back when Christopher had spent the whole afternoon sulking and she had nearly given up in despair.

  Roma said nothing else, but it was obvious that Sybil had wounded her. They had walked back to the park gates in silence. Two pigeons hopped along the walkway ahead, eating bits of bread thrown at them by a child with a mop of fair hair. The child laughed excitedly and threw some more.

  ‘When are you going?’ Sybil asked.

  ‘Two weeks’ time.’

  ‘And this Nevinson … Do you know him well?’

  Roma did not answer, and Eva found it hard to blame her. What business was it of Sybil’s, for God’s sake?

  And then, the day after Roma’s news, Sybil announced her intention to enlist for the war effort, just like Eva. It was too much of a coincidence, that was all.

  The field hospital in France to which Eva would be billeted was near Étaples-sur-Mer, a seaside village well over seventy miles behind the front line. During one spring afternoon in an office in Millbank, in an effort to explain the nature of their orders to Eva, two other VADs and a slightly older ward sister, the matron pointed to the map on the wall, where a snaking line crossed near the top of France. ‘That’s where we’re holding off the Hun, just there. Those little crosses are field hospitals and clearing stations for the wounded. You’re going to be here’ – she moved her finger down the coast – ‘just a little bit south of Calais. As you see, the front line is due east of there.’

  Eva looked at the ink-black, unbroken line, traced over several times to give the effect of solidity. Dunkirk, where Roma would be tending to injured men and perhaps mixing colours for Mr Nevinson; Loos, where Joseph Cronin had failed to make his last stand; tiny Neuve-Chapelle, where poor, happy-go-lucky Bo Destouches had been hewn to pieces by close-quarter bayonetting; Le Cateau, where Grace’s Captain Featherstone, majestic in his helmet and velvet braid, had fallen, one of the first victims of artillery fire, his horse lying alongside, its guts spilled open to the air. And, somewhere along that line perhaps, or nowhere at all, Christopher Shandlin.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I see it all right.’

 
; To her surprise, the men in the wards were sorry to hear of her departure. Roberts, a lanky private, missing an eye, put his hand on her arm as she made to dress the groin wound that had reopened after surgery. Eva hated this duty almost as much as Roberts, who bore the unbelievable pain with fortitude, determined that he would some day sire children. For her part, the days when Eva would have been embarrassed at tending such injuries were long gone. ‘Tell you one thing, chuck,’ Roberts said, ‘I’ll miss you. You were a real lady, you were. Always tried to make me comfortable.’

  Eva could hardly believe her ears. There had been weeks when she had barely noticed or cared about the men. Weeks when she had done her duty like an automaton, mopping up the piss, cleaning the suppurating flesh, sometimes indifferent to their howls of pain, sometimes so tired her very being ached, not just her limbs. Her mind had often been elsewhere. She must have done a very good imitation of caring.

  She spent the rest of the day packing. She had said goodbye to Sybil in the teashop. They had embraced awkwardly, and Sybil had murmured ‘Good luck, old chum’ into her ear. The other girls in the hostel were all at work, and she was due down at the station in an hour. None of them would miss her, nor she them. And she had nothing to say to her family.

  She took a cab to the station alone. The platform was mobbed with VADs and regular nurses. The men in uniform and parade caps with RAMC insignia on their lapels were the doctors. They would travel separately from the nurses – all the way to Étaples. From train to ship to train, the men and women would be strictly segregated and forbidden to communicate, on pain of dishonourable discharge.

  Eva held on to her ticket and passport. Then there was a tap on her shoulder. She was barely able to turn around in the slew of people. ‘Sybil! What the …?’ Gladness flooded through her, unstoppable.

  ‘Pleased to see me? Nice surprise?’ Sybil said, with her usual insouciance.