by Pat Barker
The face of a middle-aged woman in a nurse’s cap bent over him. He opened his mouth to ask her what the bloody hell she was doing here, but then the clackety-clack of the train reasserted itself and he couldn’t speak. The train juddered and shuddered and shook and rumbled through the night, displacing darkness that thickened again in its wake. Now, only one other man was awake: Mason – ‘Boiler’ Mason – though why so called Neville didn’t know. Boiler looked raw, underdone. Sunburnt skin stretched tightly over his cheekbones gave him a hyper-awake look, like a bird of prey. His eyes were china blue, doll’s eyes, hard and cheap. Neville had taken a dislike to him, and that was unfortunate since Boiler was another of Brooke’s stretcher-bearers. SBs, they were called. Silly buggers, they called themselves.
Towards morning he slept and woke to find the train still limping along. At this rate the war might be over before they got to the front. There were frequent stops: you could jump down on to the tracks and stretch your legs a bit. During these breaks the men sometimes sat back to back, leaning on each other, and passed round copies of the Daily Mail. They were free, one to every ten men. Neville was rather amused. Here he was at the front – well, more or less – reading about the war in the Daily Mail, and not believing a word of it either. He walked the length of the train and saw the officers’ accommodation: four to a carriage. As every reader of the Daily Mail knows, there are no class distinctions at the front.
Once, the train stopped just before dawn, after an unusually long stretch without a break, and everybody clambered down on to the track to relieve themselves. Steam from three hundred jets of piss rose into the cold, clear air. What a sight. Remembering it, he felt his own bladder start to leak, his piss pleasantly warm at first, then cold and wet. A hand went down and fumbled with his cock, then, finding it moist and sticky, drew back with a little tsk of disgust. A moment later the hand was back, small, cool, cramming his prick unceremoniously into the neck of a bottle. In or out? Bugger it, had to let go. A satisfying warmth spread over his groin.
‘Oh, God,’ a girl’s voice said. ‘Now I’m going to have to change the sheets.’
The train had stopped again. Neville pressed his muzzle to the gap between the slats, sniffing the dawn wind, and found himself looking straight at Brooke. He was standing at a distance from the other officers and smoking a cigarette. At that moment, as if he felt himself being observed, Brooke turned and looked straight at Neville, an unresponsive stare that struck a slight chill. It felt like a rebuff, until Neville realized he was invisible inside the darkness of the truck. A second later Brooke dropped the stub of his cigarette and ground it out under the toe of his boot.
Grey skies, darkening. It was raining when, at last, the door at the end was thrown open and they jumped down on to the track. One man fell because his legs had gone to sleep; others walked up and down stamping their feet to get the circulation going. Neville was quickly off to one side, trying to imprint it all on his brain: lumbering figures in the gloomy light, water streaming down rain capes, round helmets gleaming. Running a little way up the slope, he looked down on metal mushroom-heads and ached to draw them. Too late. The command ‘Form Fours!’ ran along the track. They’d arrived, then, though this place looked no different from any of the other places they’d stopped.
They marched off, heads lowered into the wind that threatened to snatch the breath from their mouths. Neville was second from the right, shielded, therefore, from the worst gusts of rain that swept across the column. Soon the fitful singing fell away and they trudged in silence, except for the swish and rustle of capes and the slushing of boots on muddy ground. In one place the steep banks on either side had produced a river. They splashed through and emerged drenched to their knees. ‘Bloody hell!’ he heard somebody say, but for the most part they saved their breath.
At either end of the column, lanterns on poles threw shadows of marching men over hedges and fields and the gable ends of farmhouses. Shadow-giants sixteen feet tall leapt over walls into the nothingness beyond. Once they passed through a wood where overhanging branches dripped water on to the backs of their necks, another small discomfort added to the general misery. Intimate misery. Neville hadn’t been able to wipe himself properly after his last shit and his arsehole was getting sorer by the mile. And then when they arrived, hoping for decent billets, there were only barns with bales of straw and the roofs had holes in them and most of the straw was wet.
Miraculously, it seemed, hot stew was produced and served on tin plates. In civilian life, he’d have sent it back to the kitchen with a few choice words; now he not only scraped his plate clean, but sucked his teeth afterwards, savouring every last lingering morsel.
Afterwards they pulled straw out of the bales and made themselves nests. Nobody had the energy to say much, so overwhelming was the longing for sleep. Neville found a space between two bales where he felt safe. As he settled down, he became aware of a desire to scratch himself. At first he attributed this to the sharp ends of the straw, but then realized he’d been invaded by lice. For ten minutes he itched and clawed, thinking he’d never get to sleep, but then fell, abruptly, into a sleep so deep and dreamless that when he woke no time at all seemed to have passed, though it was beginning to get light. A silver wall of rain fell steadily beyond the open barn door.
He wouldn’t get to sleep again now – not with this bloody itching starting up again – and anyway he needed a fag. Clambering over recumbent figures, he made his way to the barn door. Hollyhocks and foxgloves still grew in the farmhouse garden though the people who’d owned it were gone. A cockerel and three hens, disgruntled by the downpour, fluffed out their feathers and throatily, morosely, clucked. They wouldn’t last long. Foraging was strictly forbidden, but it was amazing how many chickens fell victim to enemy shelling even this far behind the line. Roast chicken for the officers; soup for the stretcher-bearers, if they were lucky. Stopping by the water butts, he lit a cigarette, then crossed the yard and wandered down a narrow lane to where scrubby willows fringed a small pond.
Out in the middle, beneath the scum of dead leaves and weeds, some kind of disturbance was going on. The water suddenly boiled and broke around a wet head and glistening shoulders. Mad, whoever he was, swimming in all that muck. Green turds of duck shit lined the edges of the pond; you’d need to walk through that just to get in. Something about the figure – he was wading out now, wiping water from his eyes – compelled Neville’s imagination. Perhaps it was the silence and the dim light. The furthest ripples were only now beginning to break against the reeds. Neville backed away into the shadows, watching as the naked, gleaming man teetered across the duck shit and began scraping his feet clean on the grass. Elinor Brooke’s brother, emerging from a farmyard pond with duckweed in his hair.
Nineteen
As the hospital came into view, Elinor heard a rumble of engines and saw two motor ambulances turning into the drive. She stepped on to the grass verge and watched them go past, before following along behind them in a fug of petrol fumes.
By the time she reached the main building, their doors were open and a cluster of white-coated doctors and nurses were supervising the unloading of the wounded. One young nurse was struggling to support a patient who had bandages wound round the lower part of his face and some kind of metal contraption on his legs.
‘YOU!’
Elinor realized this was addressed to her.
‘Help Nurse Wilson take that man to the ward.’
‘But I’m not –’
The sister had already turned away. Elinor threaded her way through groups of men to where Nurse Wilson was holding on to the man with callipers. He seemed to be asleep on his feet. There was oil in his hair, and the blood that had seeped through his bandages was as black as the oil. On his chest was a label: ‘Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup, Kent.’
‘Can’t we get him a stretcher?’ Elinor said. ‘Or a wheelchair?’
‘They’ve all gone, I think.’
Elinor took the ma
n’s other arm and draped it across her shoulder. ‘Where are we taking him?’
‘Ward One. Admissions.’
They set off. The man kept tripping over his feet, and every time his head jerked forward the area of blood on the bandages increased. Elinor made soothing noises, got only grunts in reply. Nurse Wilson’s childishly round face was rigid with effort. At last, they turned the corner of the building and Elinor saw before her row after row of huts: raw, almost brutal, in their uncompromisingly square functionality. This, she realized, not the graceful building behind her, was the real hospital.
They staggered along a covered walkway that linked the huts, their footsteps clumping along wooden boards. Everything smelled of creosote. ‘Not far now,’ Nurse Wilson kept saying. Somewhere near by a gramophone was playing. Your nose, your mouth, your cheeks, your hair,/ Are in a class beyond compare./ … You’re the loveliest thing I ever knew … Elinor fought back a desire to laugh. Her arm had gone numb. At this rate, she might easily topple over and bring him down with her.
At last they reached Ward One. Nurse Wilson shouldered the door open and a blast of institutional smells met them: carbolic, custard, disinfectant, sweaty socks. Toby’s school used to smell like that. A sister met them at the door and pointed to a bed at the far end. It looked miles away. By the time they got there Elinor was gasping for breath. She attempted to steer the grunting man towards the bed, but Nurse Wilson seemed to be pulling the other way.
‘Chair,’ she said. ‘They’re not supposed to lie on –’
‘Oh, bugger that.’
Elinor caught a startled glance, but Nurse Wilson was too well trained – too resigned to being bullied – to argue. They heaved him into a sitting position on the bed. He sat there, swaying, for a long moment and then slowly toppled over on to his side. It was easy, then, to lift his legs, straighten them out and pull a pillow down under his head. The bandages were now a sodden mass of red and black. The face above them, the eyes especially, looked vaguely surprised, as if he couldn’t believe what was happening to him.
‘Right then,’ Elinor said. ‘I’ve got to go.’ She touched the man’s arm. ‘You’ll be all right now, they’ll look after you.’
His head turned in her direction, but he gave no other sign of having heard.
Tonks was waiting outside his room, carrying a bundle of files under one arm.
‘I’m so sorry, Professor Tonks. I got a bit caught up with the new arrivals.’
‘That’s the third big intake this week, God knows what’s going on out there. Oh, and by the way, it’s Harry.’
Harry? ‘Henry’ she might just about have managed, but ‘Harry’? Harry was five stones overweight and sporting a codpiece.
‘Harry,’ she said.
They set off to walk to the huts.
‘I didn’t realize how big it was,’ she said. ‘You don’t get much of an idea from the front.’
‘There’ll be a thousand beds when it’s finished. We’re not far off that now.’
So: a thousand young men with gouged-out eyes, blown-off jaws, gaping holes where their noses had been, crammed in here to be patched up and sent on their way with whatever the surgeons had managed to supply in the way of a face.
Tonks opened the door to the third hut along. ‘Well then,’ he said, in a chirpy medical tone she didn’t recognize. ‘Shall we get started?’
A nurse was feeding the first patient on the list. She stood up when she saw Tonks.
‘No, you go on. We’re a bit early anyway.’
She was holding a tube linked to a small duck-head-shaped container into which she spooned some gloopy greyish stuff: gruel or thin porridge. As she raised the duck-head there was a gurgling sound, then choking, a lot of dabbing and wiping. An awful lot of it seemed to be coming back up.
While they waited, Elinor made herself look round the hut. This was the post-operative ward and many of the men were asleep. The few who were awake looked at her and then quickly away. She turned her attention back to the bed where the nurse was now clearing away the feeding apparatus. As soon as she’d gone, Tonks pulled the curtains further open and bent over the patient, whose face was now in full light. Very gently, Tonks began to ask him questions, more to establish a connection, Elinor thought, than because the answers were relevant to the task in hand. How had he got this? Couldn’t remember, it was all a bit of a blur. As he spoke, you could see his tongue through the hole in his cheek, muscular and hideously long, threshing up and down as he struggled to form the words.
Tonks started to draw. Elinor forced herself to keep looking from the face to the drawing and back again, but she found meeting the man’s left eye difficult, not because it was damaged but because it was intact and full of fear. This was a complete waste of time: she already knew she couldn’t do it. Confronted by this mess of torn muscle and splintered bone, nothing she’d learned about anatomy, whether at the Slade or in the Dissecting Room, was the slightest use. ‘Drawing,’ as Professor Tonks never tired of telling his students, ‘is an explication of the form.’ Well, you can’t explicate what you don’t understand.
The next one wasn’t so bad. He had been a remarkably handsome man; still was, on one side of his face. If anything, his injuries threw the beauty of his remaining features into sharper relief. He reminded her of some of the ‘fragments’ they used to draw at the Slade where so often a chipped nose or broken lip seemed to give the face a poignancy that the undamaged original might have lacked. It disturbed her, this aesthetic response to wounds that should have inspired nothing but pity.
‘It’s worrying, isn’t it?’ Tonks said. ‘When it makes them more beautiful.’
She was surprised he’d detected her uneasiness, particularly since it had been partly sexual. Sex was inescapable here. All the patients were young, some hardly more than boys. You knew, just looking at them, that they lay awake at night wondering what their chances of getting a girl were, now, in their altered state. Tonks, they trusted. He was gentle with them, fatherly, all the things Tonks was never given any credit for being. They didn’t trust her: she was dangerous.
By mid-morning, she was exhausted. Tonks took her back to his room and started to explain the filing system. Some of the patients’ files were almost book length. It wasn’t unusual, Tonks said, for the number of operations to reach double figures. Twenty, thirty sometimes.
‘A life sentence,’ she said.
‘Well, not quite.’
‘You know, there were times in there when I – I just couldn’t understand what I was looking at.’
‘I can help you with that.’ He waited for a reply. ‘I wasn’t disappointed, you know. Not in the least. In fact, I think you did remarkably well.’
‘My drawings were rubbish.’
‘There’s some room for improvement, but they certainly weren’t rubbish.’
Praise from Tonks was so rare she felt a gush of schoolgirlish pleasure. Only later, walking down the main corridor, did she realize how bizarrely inappropriate that response was. Drawing, here, was not about self-expression; there was no room for vanity. No room for individual style, even. But no, that wasn’t quite true. However subordinated to the surgeons’ need for precision and accuracy Tonks’s drawings might be, they were nevertheless unmistakably his.
She felt exposed walking down the corridor alone. It was a relief to reach the dining room where a pot of weak tea and two slices of bread and jam did something to revive her, though chewing and swallowing seemed to have become hard work, as if she too lacked the basic equipment for the task.
Two nurses were talking at the next table: pink-faced, excited, bursting into giggles – it was something about a party they’d been to last weekend. The banging and clattering of pans in the kitchen cut off more than half the words, but she was fascinated by their faces and, above all, their eyes, the way the speaker glanced at her friend, checking she had her full attention, and then effortlessly, unselfconsciously looked away. The listener looked at her friend mo
re directly and for longer periods, now and then she made interested noises, but it was mainly that steady gaze that said: Yes, go on. Then it was the other girl’s turn to speak and the complex pas de deux of glances began again, but with the roles reversed.
That was what you forgot on the wards: how to look at people. To begin with, Elinor had made the mistake of gazing at the patients almost unblinkingly, afraid that any turning away might be interpreted as revulsion. But nobody stares at another person like that: it’s a threat. And so she’d tried to work out a more natural way of looking. No movement of the eyes was innocent here. Watching the two nurses, she realized how fatuous the attempt had been. Even if you worked out exactly what those girls were doing it wouldn’t help you in the least, because the interplay of glances had to be spontaneous, and on these wards you left spontaneity behind you at the door.
Before going back to the wards, she went to the small cloakroom next door, bit her lips and patted her cheeks to give herself a little colour, before running a comb through her hair. Even this small amount of prinking and preening seemed obscene. But she needed to summon up her courage and these small, familiar routines did help a little. She was going to see Kit. From the beginning, she’d intended to see him again as soon as she was free, but now the moment had arrived she felt nervous.
Ward Nineteen, they told her in reception. It took her five minutes of clumping along wooden walkways to get there. Two nurses who were busy filling water jugs looked up as she entered. Rather warily, Elinor thought; probably afraid she was about to have hysterics at the sight of the man she’d promised to marry.
‘I’m looking for Mr Neville,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I know it’s not visiting time yet, but I’m working with Mr Tonks and this is really the only time I can get away. And Mr Neville … well, he’s an old family friend. He served with my brother.’
That did the trick.
‘He’s along at the end there. Don’t stay too long though, will you, he’s not so good today.’
