A Nightingale in Winter

by Margaret K Johnson

  “I don’t fancy going to bed yet,” said one. “I think I’ll go and see what Alice and Jean are up to. Fancy coming?”

  “No,” said the other one. “I’m dead on my feet. It’s bed for me.”

  “All right, see you later.”

  “Do try to be quiet when you come in, won’t you?”

  “Aren’t I always?”

  “No!”

  There was the sound of laughter, then the two girls parted, Dirk quietly following the one who’d said she was going to bed. When she went inside the building through another door, he stopped and settled down to wait again. There was, of course, no guarantee that Eleanor and Kit were based in the same sleeping quarters, but it seemed his best option. In fact, he was in luck. Less than five minutes later, he heard a door open and close quietly, and then footsteps came his way. And she was there.

  “Eleanor?” He called her name softly, not wanting to frighten her, but when she stopped, he heard her swift intake of breath, and he was right back on board The Sussex, watching her staring at Jimmy, her eyes wide and her face deathly pale.

  Stepping forward quickly from the shadows, he spoke to her softly. “Eleanor, it’s me, Dirk. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  He saw her swallow and put a hand up to her throat. Then she closed her eyes briefly, trying to pull herself together. What an idiot he was. He’d rushed over here without a thought to what he’d say when he saw her, or of what she might make of his sudden appearance. Even for an American, it was not the done thing to be so alarmingly obvious that you liked a girl.

  She was looking at him now, her hand still at her throat, and it seemed to him that they were starting all over, just as if that companionable conversation at the café had never taken place, as if they had never exchanged letters that had lifted his heart in the bleakness of the past few weeks.

  Clearing his throat, Dirk gave an awkward little laugh, passing his motorcycle goggles from one hand to the other. “I got your letter,” he said finally, as if that in itself was explanation enough for his presence there, but Eleanor said nothing, silently watching him through the darkness. Although she no longer looked terrified, he couldn’t tell what she was thinking at all. But at least she was looking at him, and that gave him the courage to be honest.

  “Look,” he said, taking his courage into his hands. “I’ve just had one of the lousiest days of my entire life, and I…” He broke off, looking at her. There was a subtle change in her expression, something that gave him the confidence to persist. “Is there anywhere we can go to talk? I don’t want to get you into trouble with Sister Palmer.”

  She nodded, giving him a small smile. “Yes,” she said. “Follow me.”

  At first when the new sound came, Leo was too engrossed in his drawing to notice it. Then it grew louder, and he froze, listening, becoming aware that the battle noise had diminished slightly.

  The sound came again, like something being dragged along. Then he heard someone groaning. When a face appeared at the edge of the shell hole, he grappled for his knife in the mud in case it was another German.

  But it wasn’t another German. It was his commanding officer. “Lieutenant Montague!” Leo said as Montague peered in at him. He seemed to be breathing with difficulty.

  “For God’s sake, help me in, man,” he grunted.

  The knife was still in Leo’s hand. For one crazy moment, his fingers tightened around its handle, but then he dropped it to reach up and haul Montague into the shell hole.

  Montague lay winded for a moment, one bloodstained arm pressed against that of the German’s corpse, and Leo quickly closed his sketchbook and stuffed it into his pack. When he looked up again, Montague was staring at him. Leo stared right back. The officer had never liked him, and the feeling was mutual. Perhaps he ought to have given in to that impulse to use his knife.

  “Got a cigarette?” Montague asked at last, and only then did Leo look away, reaching once more for his pack.

  He placed the cigarette between Montague’s waiting lips and lit it, noticing as he did that Montague’s legs were badly injured and that his good arm was braced to take the weight off them.

  Montague saw him looking but made no comment. Instead, he drew several times on the cigarette, and then indicated with a movement of his head that Leo should take it from his mouth. He did so, and Montague coughed, closing his eyes against the pain the movement brought him. After he’d recovered a little, he turned his attention toward their dead companion.

  “How long’s he been here?”

  Uninvited, Leo placed Montague’s cigarette in his own mouth and inhaled, bringing Montague’s gaze flipping angrily back in his direction. He looked as if he wanted to snatch the cigarette away, but knowing the lieutenant couldn’t do so because of his injuries, Leo inhaled again, taking his time to answer.

  “I don’t know. He was here before me.”

  “Already dead?”

  The lie was easy. “Yes.” And he took another drag from the cigarette as they settled down to wait.

  Chapter Thirteen

  IT WAS ALMOST DARK. Leo had no real idea of how long he’d been in the shell hole; time had begun to lose any meaning. All he knew was that the battle had petered out long ago, and that Montague was seriously getting on his nerves.

  Only minutes ago, the stupid man had shifted his body and brought the dead German crashing down onto his injured legs. Montague’s resulting screams of pain had reverberated around No Man’s Land, and Leo had felt sure a sniper would pick them both out at any second. And when Leo had risked his own life to attempt to pull the corpse off Montague’s legs, the man had cringed away from him as if he thought Leo was going to plunge a knife into his belly.

  Leo was still sorely tempted to do just that. No stretcher-bearers were likely to come to their aid out here; they were too far away from the British lines. His own injuries were few, and just as soon as it was completely dark, he intended to trust his luck and attempt to crawl back across the pock-marked wasteland. But there was no way Montague would be able to do any such thing with his legs in the pulpy state they were. The only way Montague was going to get back to the British lines was if Leo helped him, and Leo wasn’t at all sure he cared to do so.

  “We should try to get back,” Montague croaked at him now, and Leo read the statement as the cautious appeal for help that it was. The man obviously didn’t quite dare order Leo to help him, because he wasn’t entirely sure that Leo would obey any such order. If Leo left Montague here, it wouldn’t take the man very long to bleed to death. And yet, if by some complete freak of chance a stretcher-bearer did make it out here after Leo had abandoned Montague, and Montague survived to tell the tale, then Leo would face a court martial. A court martial would lead to a firing squad.

  No, better to play the hero. It would be a novelty after all, and another new thing to paint about.

  “We’ll go after dark,” he told Montague, smiling slightly to himself at Montague’s sigh of relief.

  “Right,” Montague said.

  They sat on in silence for a while, with Montague slipping in and out of consciousness and Leo thinking of a giant canvas with himself sitting in a throne in the center and Lieutenant Montague and Captain Blenkinsop on their knees before him, honoring him with gifts of veneration.

  Finally it was dark, and Leo reached forward to nudge Montague awake. “It’s time,” he said.

  Eleanor had been submerged in reflections about her day when Dirk had surprised her. She was enjoying her work in theater very much indeed—so much so that she found the time flashed past as she watched the doctor’s nimble fingers at work. Time after time, she’d been there while he completed a challenging operation only to look up to see his next patient being carried into theater on a stretcher. And time after time, she’d seen him crank up sufficient energy to be able to give his all once again.

  This evening, before she’d come off duty, she’d watched him quickly and skillfully remove a mangled kidney
from a French soldier who’d been wounded in the back. Afterward, there had been a good deal of stitching up to be done, and while he worked, the doctor had spoken to her across the unconscious patient.

  “He is lucky, this one, as long as he does not get an infection. Out of the war and still with the use of his limbs.”

  Deeply interested, Eleanor had struggled, but failed, to recall the French word for kidney. “He will be well?” she asked less specifically instead, and the doctor nodded.

  “Yes, fairly well. It is possible to function with one kidney. Of course, he will always have to take care of himself. I will speak to him of this tomorrow.”

  Without the skill of the surgeon’s knife, the man would have been dead by now from internal bleeding, but now he had his whole life ahead of him. This was what Eleanor found so thrilling about the work: the results could be so dramatic, so worthwhile.

  When she came off duty, she continued to think about the events of the day all the way through her meal, and she was still deep in thought when she ventured outside into the darkness on her way to her sleeping quarters. The male voice, calling her name, took her utterly by surprise. It was only a matter of moments before she’d realized it was Dirk, but those moments had been moments of blind terror. For a few seconds, she inhabited the world of her nightmares—someone was staring at her, and if she only turned her head, she’d see who it was. Even after she saw the man was actually Dirk, she couldn’t completely comprehend it at first. She’d so expected to see someone intent on doing her harm that her brain struggled to adapt.

  “Hey, it’s me, Dirk. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “I got your letter.” And then he started to tell her why he’d come, and when she saw how visibly upset he was, some of her confidence returned. For this was Dirk, and the provision of comfort and support—which was what Dirk clearly need right now—was home territory for Eleanor. Besides, she was pleased to see him. It gave her a kind of glow to think he had sought her out.

  “Come,” she said, leading him quickly away from the hospital buildings so they wouldn’t be observed. The courtyard garden would have been the perfect place to talk, but the only way to get to it was from inside the building. She took him instead to a group of fir trees, and they sat down on a log a short distance away from each other. He smiled at her, looking more relaxed, and she smiled back, her busy day in the operating theater drifting away from her mind.

  “If I hadn’t turned up to disrupt your plans, what would you be doing now?” he asked. “Sleeping?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “I like to do something before bed. A little reading or perhaps some mending. I find I need some activity before I try to sleep. But tell me, what’s wrong? What’s been so terrible about today?”

  He looked away from her and began to play with his motorcycle goggles again. “Oh,” he said, “it’s nothing really, nothing but the war. You don’t want to hear about it after a long shift.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said, and he sighed.

  “Like I said, it’s just the war. Things are just so awful on the Front, you wouldn’t believe.” He looked at her, then laughed humorlessly. “Hell, what am I saying? Of course you’d believe it. You deal with the effects of it every day.”

  He was silent again. While Eleanor waited for him to speak again, she heard the sound of an engine starting up outside the abbey. Female voices chattering. Laughter. Somewhere in the trees, an owl gave a long, mournful hoot.

  “You know,” he said when at last he spoke again, “I thought I was lucky being invited to work with a bunch of journalists for a while, but, honestly, Eleanor, those guys have given up. They might just as well write their articles in London. The whole thing’s a charade. They aren’t allowed to write the truth. And if you can’t write the truth, then what’s the point?”

  His voice was angry and resentful. As he gazed off into the trees, still brooding about all he’d told her, she took the opportunity to study him more closely, taking in the angles of his face and the dark hair, which had been cut short where he had been wounded. He was, she thought, an intense man—a man who felt things deeply and wasn’t afraid to show it.

  How very different he was from Arthur Ballantine, Kit’s brother, who had finally paid them both a visit the previous week. Eleanor had been off duty when he was due to arrive, so, since she didn’t want to offend her friend, she had duly gone to tea with Kit and Arthur in the village. It had been a strained affair, at least for Eleanor, for she had felt nervous and out of her depth, unable to think of very much to say. Somehow the difference between her background and Kit and Arthur’s seemed far more marked than usual, and she felt painfully gauche and uninteresting. To make matters worse, Arthur Ballantine had bombarded her with questions, one after the other—How are you finding your work? What do your parents think of you being here? Do the men ever make passes at you?—until the questions had begun to feel like machine gun fire.

  Dirk might well be intense at times, but it was still much more relaxing to be with him. In fact, despite the fact that he had frightened her to death when he’d loomed out of the darkness at her like that, it was hard to believe that this was actually only their third meeting. Perhaps this was due to the letters they’d written to each other, as well as the bond they had forged during that dangerous time on The Sussex.

  “It’s not that I don’t see the journalists’ point of view,” he was saying now, “because I do. Sure I do. I don’t want to put any lives in danger because I give away plans to the Germans. Of course not. But neither can I do nothing. Those poor devils fighting out there deserve better than that.”

  “How long have the other journalists been at GHQ?” Eleanor asked.

  Dirk shrugged. “A few of them since the war began. All of them more than a year.”

  “It could be that they’ve exhausted their energy,” she suggested.

  Dirk pulled a piece of bark off the log and threw it down on the ground angrily. “Well, they’ve certainly got plenty of energy for good food and wine,” he retorted. “Not to mention expensive cigars!”

  He sounded so bitter, and Eleanor paused to choose her words carefully, wanting to be of help to him. “When VADs first start to work and…and everything’s new to them, they can find it all dreadfully hard to take too,” she said. “It’s gets so very hectic here when the ambulances come in, you see. Sometimes the hospital is full to overflowing, and when it’s like that, we have to make some very quick judgments about which casualty needs the most urgent treatment. Usually it’s the doctor or a sister who does it, but sometimes if things are particularly hectic, we VADs just have to get stuck in. It can be quite a responsibility, and I should think it would be impossible to get it right every time.”

  She broke off, remembering a case earlier that day in theater: a badly injured leg that might have been saved if the doctor had been able to see the man in time. Even Doctor Rochelle hadn’t attempted anything more than an amputation, and Eleanor hadn’t felt guilty or ashamed that they didn’t deal with the leg sooner. The harsh fact remained, though, that if they had tended to the man earlier, he would still have his leg.

  “Sometimes it just isn’t a good idea for us to think about things too deeply,” she pressed on, “especially when we’re so powerless to change them. I suppose that’s the difference between the VADs who have freshly arrived, and those who’ve been working in hospitals for some time. Out of necessity, the old hands have grown an extra layer of skin.”

  He looked at her. “Is that what you’ve done?” he asked, and she shook her head.

  “Me?” she said. “Oh no, not yet. I suppose haven’t been here nearly long enough for that.” Then she remembered the feelings of despair and hopelessness that had swamped her when she’d heard the news about Lazare.

  “What?” he asked. “What is it?”

  She swallowed, hesitating for a moment.

  “Come on,” he encouraged, “you’ve listened to me.”

  “Well,” s
he said, “things have been rather bleak here too lately. Do you remember me telling you about Lazare?”

  Dirk nodded. “Yes, I remember,” he said. “He’s the guy who won’t let anybody but you change his dressings.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s him. Only…well, he took his life a few weeks ago.”

  He reached for her hand. “God,” he said. “I’m so sorry. That’s awful.”

  Despite the growing chill of the evening, Dirk’s hand felt warm on hers. Eleanor concentrated on it so that she wouldn’t start to cry.

  “Do you know why he did it?” Dirk asked.

  She shrugged. “I…I suppose he just couldn’t stand the pain any…any longer.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he said again softly, giving her hand a squeeze. “How awful for you. When did it happen?”

  “A…a few weeks ago.” She didn’t want to tell him it had been the same afternoon they’d been having a high time drinking coffee and eating cake in the village.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t mention anything about it in your letters.”

  “No.” Why hadn’t she mentioned it? She wasn’t sure. Except that to have spoken of her feelings about it to someone who was, despite any feelings to the contrary, almost a stranger to her wouldn’t have felt quite right. Besides, she would have found any sympathy he had given her difficult to bear, just as she was finding it difficult to bear right now.

  “Anyway,” she said briskly, changing the subject, “about the journalists. It could be that you might be exactly what they need. I mean, it’s possible that events have ground down over time, and now that you’ve come along…I haven’t been at Revigny for very long, but it’s still been long enough for me to observe what happens when a new VAD comes to work with us. Those who have been working in hospitals for a while can really benefit from the newcomer’s energy and fresh view of things. And you know, I think there’s a balance to be found, somewhere between being too callous and feeling everything too much.”