by H. E. Bates
The bottle was a dark claret bottle without a label and she came back with it on what was to him the left side of the bed. She held it out without concern. He did not even attempt to take it from her but lay with his right arm uplifted and dead still under the sheet, poised as his mind was poised in the oddest and most awful moment of his life. He was poised bodily as if he were going to overbalance and fall over sideways, like an aircraft without a wing. He knew in that moment that he had no left arm.
The old woman must have understood the moment. She stood quite still, holding the bottle but not speaking, waiting for the shock to pass. He did not move, partly through the shock but partly because of an absurd fear, acutely real, of falling out of bed.
‘You will feel better when you have used it,’ she said at last.
With some difficulty he raised his right arm above the coverlet. He still felt strapped down. He knew that the other arm was not there, but there was no sensation of emptiness, only of distrust. All of his body was stiff with caution. The fingers of his right hand outstretched themselves, stiffened and would move no further. The old woman was forced to put the bottle into it. He remembered then that he did not know what day it was, and wanted to ask her. ‘Merci, madame. Merci beaucoup,’ he said, but she had moved away.
She gave him two minutes, standing all the time by the window. He spent one of these minutes reaching over his right arm to the left side of himself. Where the left arm should have been there was a circular corset of bandage that wrapped over his chest; hence his feeling of being strapped down. It all seemed very clean and finished and neat. Feeling the shape of the bandage he thought, ‘I have to know some time’, and let his right hand slip down towards his waist. From somewhere about the height of his ribs there was nothing left. They had taken off the arm above the elbow.
‘M’sieu has finished?’
She was standing by the bed. He smiled and drew the bottle out with ironic triumph, like a secret drinker. She smiled, too.
‘What day is it?’ he said. She took the bottle, meditatively. She might have been thinking, it seemed, that he had done very well. He felt it too.
‘Wednesday,’ she said. ‘It was Monday when they operated.’
‘Everything is all right?’
‘With you? Yes,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not only with me. But with the rest. With everything.’
She shrugged her shoulders and looked at the bottle. ‘It is all right. If anything in France is all right’
‘I see,’ he said.
‘They say there have been riots up in the north. That will mean something.’
She moved away to the foot of the bed, talking a little more, in a low voice, half to herself. He saw her screw up her eyes, into crumpled pouches, greyish yellow against the light. You could not tell what suffering had made up her life, or if only time and sun had wrinkled the skin of her face below the stringy hair.
‘I am old enough to remember the war of 1870,’ she said. She opened the window and emptied the bottle over the sill.
He waited. The bottle seemed to empty very slowly. He heard the splash below.
‘As a little girl, in the Paris district, I saw plenty of arms cut off then,’ she said. ‘Plenty.’
He felt like a small boy; the distance gaping between them was part of history, half the earth. She held the bottle over the sill some time after it had emptied, and did not move. It occurred to him then that she, being so old, might have become happily confused in time, and that she did not even know which war it was. But he was disillusioned.
‘I saw plenty in the Great War too,’ she said. ‘That was butchery.’
What is she trying to tell me? he thought. He watched her give the bottle a final shake, and then she came over again. slowly, to the bed.
‘With a sword,’ she said, ‘that’s how they cut them off. I will put the bottle on the table now. So that it will be there when you want it again.’
‘I could drink,’ he said.
‘There is wine and water in the carafe,’ she said. ‘Can you drink it if I pour it out?’ She picked up the carafe and took off its muslin cover. The wine was red, watered down until it was slightly paler than vin rosé. The rosy brightness looked tranquillizing and very cool. ‘In the Great War they carted them about like animals. Dear God,’ she said. ‘Dear God.’
She poured out a little of the wine, the movement casual and meditative, as with the bottle.
‘Did you ever hear of the mutiny?’
‘Of the French?’
‘Of the French,’ she said, ‘in the Great War. How they rioted at the Gare du Nord and would not go. You have heard of it? And other things?’
‘Vaguely,’ he said. He raised himself up, with some difficulty. on his right elbow. She stood holding the wine.
‘It would be vaguely,’ she said. ‘It was never in the papers.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It never is in the papers.’ This war was after all the same as others.
She held the glass on his lips and he guided it with his own hand. Movement had drawn the entire strength from his fingers, leaving them like flaky shells of dry flesh. He felt they would crumble to pieces. The wine was cold and a little tart on his lips, and as he swallowed it he discovered how sour his mouth had been.
‘That was when France was beaten,’ she said. ‘Not now. In this war. But then. We were never the same after that.’
The light from the window beat on his eyes. He lowered them and drank again. His strength had practically gone. The last crust of feeling peeled away from his fingers.
‘Thank you very much,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
‘We were no good in this one,’ she said, ‘because we were butchered in the last. Too many of us were butchered.’
Holding the carafe and the glass, not quite emptied, she stood looking at him and yet past him, inconceivably sad and at the same time not flickering the immeasurably stoical colourless eyes. She shook her head several times and then slowly poured the wine back from the glass into the carafe. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. You are very lucky.’
I don’t quite see it, he thought. If the Jerries come now I shan’t be very lucky. His thoughts were incongruous, but not bitter. The bouncing, slamming beat of blood in his head had gone. But from now on, he thought, I have to get my trousers on with one hand. Why am I lucky?
She set down the carafe on the table, slowly, so that he saw in the movement, like a revelation, bitter and reproachful, all the trial and weariness of her life. She seemed in that moment very, very old. He could not bear the age and anguish of her eyes staring past him, and he knew in another moment why he was lucky. It was because, if the Jerries came, it was not he but they who would suffer. They would take him away and put him safely, somewhere, in a hospital. They would take the rest away, the father, Pierre, the old woman, and the two doctors, and shoot them. They might even, because they liked thoroughness, shoot the horse, too. And they would shoot Françoise.
He remembered her suddenly with alarm. Oh God! he thought, this is a mess. This is the bloodiest mess I ever got myself or anyone else into. Where is she? He looked up to see the old woman walking back across the room, her face not less anguished than the wooden face, dirty with time and blood, of the Christ on the wall. ‘Where is Françoise?’ he said. For about ten seconds she moved on without speaking. She crossed into the window square of blue sunlight, ready to sit down. Jesus, he thought, Jesus, something has happened. They’ve done something to her. He felt something greater than his own strength flare up through his body and blow away with its frightened beat all his weakness. Christ Almighty, he thought, if they’ve done anything to her! ‘Where is she, madame?’ he said. ‘Where is she?’
Her answer came back as she sat down, slowly, her body terribly reluctant to bend. It shocked him by its infinite calmness. She seemed to be much more occupied with bending her stays to the shape of the chair.
‘She is digging worms for fishing,’ she said.
He had no answer. Well, God, he thought. The French are wonderful. Amazed, he stared at the ceiling. Fishing? He seemed to see her sitting on the stones below the mill race, with calm and lovely assurance, watching the float still in the dark pool. The image of her strengthened, the sunlight poured across it, and the tenderness he felt for her made it finally real. This tenderness, growing and softening, lifting his amazement into wonder, was so fine and sharp that he could not suppress a comparison. You’d catch Diana doing that. Yes, you’d catch her. Twice, he thought. Diana digging worms and her mother, in the bedroom, emptying the bed-bottle from the window.
His thoughts, almost for the first time unobscured by pain and free to go, went back to England. They took him out of the bedroom on an excursion many times more swift than the movement of the old woman, getting up from the creaking chair and going out at the same time. He thought of Diana. Her other name was Forester. In the days before the revolutionary breaking of an airscrew above the Alps she had been his girl. She seemed, as he looked back, an unreal person, as all experience before that moment seemed also unreal. His life with her had been the life of a thousand pilots. Because it hung on a thread, which you were not sure if the night would break, it was brave to swing it violently. Drinking a lot, dancing, being rather brutally foolish in hotel bars, you persuaded yourself that this happy riot successfully held back all your ideas of apprehension and pain. Like a child, you did not like sleeping in the darkness alone, and after an operation or two over Germany you were glad to sleep with the light burning. It was less terrifying that way. And since you constantly needed light to counteract the darkness you found someone like Diana. It was not right to call her popsie. Clean and bright and smooth, with her bleached blonde hair and reddened fingers and her clear breasts that seemed purposely uplifted, she was much more like a light than a girl. And looking back now he felt that she might have been extinguished just as simply, and without pain.
She will not want me with one arm, he thought. Of the injustice of this, since it was pure speculation, he did not think. He knew only that the life behind him had gone. He thought of various screaming nights in the local towns, crashing traffic lights, with girls screaming in the back of the car, everyone having a wizard time. Wizard: the word had grown crusts on it. What fun! A few more operations, perhaps, and he would have won the DFC. That, too, would have been a wizard thing. She would have liked me with the medal, he thought, more than without the medal; but not without the arm.
Of England, his other thoughts were simple. He wanted a cup of tea. Since it must now be mid-afternoon he found himself. alone in the room, listening for the encouraging, clean, beautiful sound of rattled tea-cups. But as he lay there he could hear nothing but the deep and audible silence of the full summer day, so strong and drowsy that it seemed to press both his mind and body deeply back into the bed. Diana and tea and England: all of them like small and faintly unreal clouds, far distant and at the point of evaporation, on the horizon of the present world. A long time before they come any nearer, he thought. Ah well!
Then he shut his eyes, and the moment of first depression came. It’s no use, he thought. The arm has gone and I feel as sick as hell about it, bloody sick. I can get most things back, but not the arm. They can’t stick that on again. When the depression lifted slightly, swam before his eyes like a moving and darker shadow, and then halted a little distance away, he thought there was something curious about it, and opened his eyes.
The girl was standing by the bed. She did not evoke in him a single thought. He felt only, with his whole body, the bright and serious calmness of her young face. It seemed in fact younger than ever, its youth having a fresh and lovely brilliance, and her eyes, as always, the bright and almost shocking assurance that he had noticed on the first morning. He had nothing to say, and she did not speak either. She gave one short smile and then bent down, reaching towards the bed, putting her face against him. The sunburn of her dark face was very warm, first against his face and then his hand. She let her face remain very lightly against him, and he put his hand on her neck as he kissed her. In the obsession of the moment it was only dimly, and only with small bitterness, that he remembered he would never embrace her again with both hands.
‘Everything is all right?’ she said.
‘Everything.’ He smiled. His great surprise about her seemed to uplift him.
‘Is there anything you want?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘nothing at all.’
Smoothing with his right hand the whole length of her bare, brown arm he said: ‘You’re very brown. You’ve been in the sun.’ She smiled. No, there was nothing he wanted: except this, the moment of being fully aware, the brownness of her arms, the secure, beautiful relief of living. She smiled again and pressed her face against him. No, there was nothing he wanted.
‘How is the situation?’ he said. ‘The war?’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said.
‘Bad?’
‘It’s always bad,’ she said. ‘But don’t worry about it.’
‘Have they given up looking for me?’
‘They never give up looking for anyone,’ she said.
How soon can I get well? he thought. I ought to be walking. How long does an arm take? An arm you haven’t got? He tried to remember somebody to whom something like this had happened. Buddy Saunders, a rear gunner, had a foot shot off by tracer. They kept him on his back three months. Too long. He remembered others. Robertson, a second dicky, with a flak-hole in this thigh big enough to take a cricket-ball. They had stuffed the hole with foreign tissue or something, sealed it and then let it ferment. This lasted two months. During this time the hole gave out, with a stench of rotten fish, all the putrefied elements: the bone, the shrapnel, the threads of cloth and a gallon or so of unholy rottenness. It was four months before Robertson could walk.
But they were legs, he thought. This is an arm. I don’t even have to swing it because it isn’t there to swing. Therefore I could do it in a few days. He held with his only hand the girl’s warm upper arm, involuntarily tightening his hand. In fact, I have to. I’m pretty fit really. It will take more than this to knock me back. I have to do it. I must.
Lying there, touching her arm, feeling the good warm flesh, so tender and smooth, living with sun, he felt new life flow into him. Because of this vibration of new feeling, free and without pain, he felt that there was nothing he could not do if he wanted to do it enough.
He became aware, at the same time, of someone in the room. He looked beyond the girl’s black hair and saw the old woman move, quiet as ever, across the sunlight. The girl raised her head. She spread her hands across the counterpane, smoothing it in a gesture of smiling embarrassment. The old woman simply and, he thought, with some irony, said ‘Pardon’, and came on towards the bed.
He saw that she was carrying a cup and saucer. He tried to think of the French for ‘sitting up and taking notice’, or some such phrase, having an idea that he would like to show them that he was a man of humour, rapidly getting well. But he could not translate it. He only smiled instead. Both the girl and the old woman smiled in reply, and as he worked himself slightly upright on the pillows, the old woman bent down with the cup.
As she lowered it he saw at last what it was. It was a cup of tea: French tea – pale, creamy, and hot. As it came towards him he made the involuntary attempt to grasp it with both hands. Nothing happened, and he could not bear it any longer.
He suddenly broke down and began to cry.
CHAPTER 12
HE lay there for several days before he realized that August had gone. The constant sunlight, Untouched by anything that in England would have been called cloud, had made him think that summer was Eternal. On the fourth day after the operation the doctor came in from the town. His hands were very cool on The hot stump of arm above the wad of bandages. The doctor did not undo the bandages, and did not even talk of the arm. Objectively, Franklin looked at himself. Much blood had soaked through the
lower end of the Stump, coagulating black, so that it looked as if the arm had been charred away. The doctor talked of fishing. From him Franklin learned that Françoise took the boat upstream every evening. ‘She seems to be Trying every pool for about four miles upstream,’ he said. It struck Franklin, long used to girls who Desired evenings with more excitement, that it was an odd occupation for a girl
On the fifth day he got out of bed. He was determined to begin walking as soon as possible. Lying in bed, making plans, considering the problems of how to button his trousers, fix his stud, and tie his necktie with one hand, was rather like the theoretical part of flight. The anticipation of putting it into practice was marked by a feeling of terror in case you should fail. He got out of bed fully expecting to fall down. His feet were very cool on the bare wooden floor, and the feeling was delicious after the clammy heat of the bed. He did not fall down, but walked steadily but slowly to the foot of the bed. He counted the paces: there were twelve. He took ten more to the window and hung on to the sash. As he looked out on the plain and the solid slab of brilliant sky beyond it there was nothing to tell him that August had become September except that the last of the fields of corn were empty now.
After standing a few moments he walked diagonally across the room to the other window. There were sixteen paces. This window looked over the orchard and up the river. He stood there for several moments and wondered about O’Connor and Sandy and the two boys. Things seemed so much less complicated now that he was alone. He took another fifteen paces back to the bed. Twelve plus ten plus sixteen plus fifteen: the triangle was beyond his dreams. Much less complicated. He felt very glad. If he could work on the theory of doubling the length of the first walk and then the third, and then the fourth and so on, he could walk a mile in a week. In theory, he could leave the place in fifteen days.
Even that was long. He got back into bed. He felt something of the feeling of relief, mingled with subdued pride, that he had had after taking his first solo. There did not seem to be anything, in theory, to stop him from multiplying his progress. The feeling of lopsidedness worried him a little, but it was, after all, not unlike flying with one engine. He would get used to it. He was at any rate not going to be depressed about it. He was delighted to discover in himself, instead, an unexpected exhilaration at the idea of being able to walk successfully at all.
