Life Class

Seventeen

Everything stinks: creosote, bleach, disinfectant, soil, blood, gangrene.

The military authorities say uniforms must be preserved at all costs, but that means manhandling patients who are in agony. Cut them off, says Sister Byrd, and she’s the voice of authority here, in the Salle d’Attente, not some gold-braid-encrusted crustacean miles away from blood and pain, so cut they do, snip, snip, snip, snip, as close to the skin as they dare.

On either side of Paul as he cuts are two long rows of feet: yellow, strong, calloused, scarred where blisters have formed and burst repeatedly. Since August they’ve done a lot of marching, these feet, and all their marching has brought them to this one place.

Sister Byrd’s tough, tougher even than she looks. Auburn hair tarnished with silver; fine, pale skin mottled red on the cheeks; harebell-blue eyes — she must have been pretty once — but now she’s barrel-shaped and dour, and amazingly good at her job.

Every few minutes the door’s pushed open and the stretcher-bearers shuffle in with their load, standing like carthorses between the shafts, waiting to be told where to set it down. They’re there now, waiting. Sister Byrd pulls the blanket over the face of a man who’s just died and his yellow ankles seem to get longer. Strong calves appear, fuzzed with black hairs, the muscles prominent from all the marching he’s done in the last few weeks. She bows her head, but only for a second. All right,’ she says, in French. ‘You can put him here.’

In bad weather, as now, the rain pelts down on the corrugated-iron roof with the rattle of machine-gun fire. At the moment it’s a real downpour. Waking from their half-sleep, the bundles in the blankets began to stir and cry out in fear. One of the head wounds throws off his blanket, clambers to his feet and, naked, runs between the rows of beds. Two of the orderlies give chase and eventually grab hold of him, one by each arm, and hold him like that, his arms outstretched, a blood-soaked bandage slipping down across one eye. They soothe him, stroke his arms, tell him there’s nothing to be frightened of, it’s the rain, only the rain, no guns here, and perhaps he believes them, but more probably he doesn’t understand a word, only the tone of voice and the touch. But he lets himself be led along, the strength that terror gave him ebbing with every step, until, by the time they reach his bed, he’s walking with the slow, shuffling steps of a very old man.

At last Sister Byrd signals that it’s Paul’s turn for a break. They drink their cocoa in the sterilizing room, all of them, dressers, orderlies, nurses, surgeons, surrounded by hissing and bursts of steam. The cocoa’s hot. It delineates his gullet as it goes down. Only his hands around the mug and the hot fluid in his mouth and stomach are real. The light over the dressing table blurs; he makes an effort to straighten up and focus on his surroundings. Swaying on his feet, and still four more hours to do. Sister Roper’s saying something to him. He has to strain to hear her quiet voice above the roar and hiss of the boiler. Somebody new, a volunteer, arriving on the eight o’clock train. Will he go and meet him? ‘Take him to the huts first — he’ll have luggage with him, I expect.’

‘Which hut?’

‘Yours. It’s the only spare bed.’

Paul wants to point out that the bed in his hut isn’t exactly spare, that the ambulance drivers sometimes use it, but it’s already too late for that. They’re all moving off again, back to the scrubbing room and from there into theatre. He understands, or at least nobody contradicts the idea, that he’s to leave what he’s doing now and go to the station — a ten, fifteen minutes’ walk away — and meet the eight o’clock train. It’s a break, at least. He has no quarrel with that.

Outside, in the darkness of the yard, there’s an ambulance crew, also drinking cocoa, leaning against the canvas side of their vehicle. He passes close by, grunts in acknowledgement of a raised arm, and heads off to the station. It’s muddy underfoot, and cold, but fresh after the hot, steamy air of the sterilizing room. Rain falls on his face. He shivers, and a cold sweat starts up. Within minutes his armpits and groin are drenched, his feet swimming inside his boots. Nothing to do with illness or even change of temperature, this sweat; everything to do with being plunged into the normal world. He stumbles, nearly falls. Every step now brings him further out of the trance. He pauses. Lets his shoulders relax: He’s waking out of his trance into the real time of the outside world.

On his left, there’s a goods train — its doors gaping open — and that shields him from the worst of the wind and rain. He walks along beside it, until, straight ahead, he sees the station and hears a man’s voice making announcements. All the time he’s coming back to himself.

The blue-painted lights of the railway station loom out of the dusk. He remembers the streets of London, walking through them that night with Elinor. All Europe now, he supposes, exists in this indigo twilight. Going into the station, he finds the platform crowded. Men, women, children — all waiting for the train. Eight hours he’s been on duty. Long enough for the sound of a child’s voice to be shocking.

Five to eight. If the train is on time, he won’t have long to wait. He stands near the ticket barrier, stamping his feet to restore the circulation. A little girl stares at him and he smiles at her, but she clasps her mother’s hand tighter and walks on, looking back at him over her shoulder. Perhaps pain, even other people’s pain, becomes a smell you carry round with you?

A rumble in the distance, the light on the line shivers and a single blue eye appears, advancing towards them. Mothers pull their children back from the edge. A belch of smoke and steam and then the engine roars past, snorts, sighs several times, subsides into silence.

All along the train’s length doors open and people spill out. Passengers greet friends, kiss, shake hands, ask and answer questions, pick up bags, begin to drift towards the exist. Soon the platform is almost clear and still no sign of the man he’d come to meet. Then, out of the darkness and the drifting smoke, a figure emerges and strides towards him.

Paul’s first thought was, he won’t last five minutes. He was looking at a gangly boy, all arms and legs. A sprinkle of freckles all over his face gave him a slightly surprised look, like somebody caught in a shower. Close to, there was something about his expression — not just youth and inexperience, something else — that made Paul uneasy. He felt irritated. He’d become rather good at coping with the work, but having a hut to himself had been an important part of that process. Now, he’d have to share it with this freckly-faced schoolboy — deal with his questions, his incomprehension, his shock. Everything that Paul had felt when he first started, and no longer permitted himself to feel.

He held out his hand. ‘Hello, I’m Paul Tarrant. Sister Roper asked me to meet you.’

‘Hello. I’m Richard Lewis.’

A deep baritone — surprising, it didn’t go with his appearance. Lewis was staring at him. Paul looked down at his tunic, which had bits of blood-stained gauze stuck to it. He picked off the bits and let them drop.

‘Good journey?’

‘Not bad.’

Lewis was pink and excited, not at all tired from the journey, swinging a big, heavy bag from hand to hand.

‘I expect you’ll want to get rid of that.’

‘How close are we to the hospital?’

If Paul had been capable of smiling he’d have smiled then.

‘Not far.’

They walked along beside the track, in silence. The path was thronged with weeds. Their boots swished through the long stalks, shaking off raindrops that flashed silver in the moonlight. Even with the moon it was hard to see the way ahead.

‘I hope you’ve brought a torch?’

‘Yes, in here.’ Lewis swung the bag to his other hand. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘A month.’

‘Oh. So you know the ropes, then?’

Paul didn’t bother to reply.

Five minutes later they were approaching a row of huts. He stopped at the third one along. ‘Here we are.’

The door opened straight into the only room. Inside there was a puddle of wet footprints where somebody, one of the ambulance drivers probably, had come in and gone out again. Because he’s showing the hut to Lewis he’s forced to see it again himself. Two iron beds covered in brown blankets, a table with an oil lamp, two chairs. Nothing else, except a candle on the floor between the beds.

The huts had been assembled quickly, not intended to last more than a couple of months. Like everything else around here, they reek of creosote.

Paul groped his way across to the table and lit the lamp. The flame fattened. Walls, chairs, table, beds seemed to take a leap upwards, as if the hut was startled by its own squalor.

Lewis, looking puzzled, stared around him.

‘You’d best take that bed.’

Paul pointed to the bed nearest the door. The draughtiest and least comfortable of the two. Nothing like round-the-clock attendance on wounded and dying men to expunge the last traces of altruism. The bed was tightly made up in the hospital style, the ends of the coarse, brown blanket neatly mitred and tucked in.

Lewis swung his case up on to the bed. ‘It must have been rather nice having it to yourself

‘I don’t mind. It’s not as if I spend a lot of time here anyway. Do you want to have a rest now, before you go over?’

‘No, I’d rather get stuck in.’

‘Right, then. Off we go. Your first sight of the Shambles.’

Lewis looked blank.

‘The hospital.’

‘Oh, I see. Sorry.’

He thought it was a joke. Despite his eagerness to get going, he lingered for a moment by the door, staring from table to chair to bed and back again, willing it all to go away, so he could start again and have the experience he’d been expecting. He looked lost, standing there in his smart uniform.

Again the wave of irritation.

‘You didn’t think of enlisting, then?’

‘I’m a Quaker.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t realize.’

‘Why should you? We don’t wear uniform. What about you?’

‘Tried, wouldn’t have me.’

‘Were you very disappointed?’

‘At the time, yes. Not now. I mean everybody I know who’s enlisted is still in England.’ He turned the lamp out. ‘Strange, isn’t it? The only reason we’ve got this close to the front is because I can’t fight and you won’t.’

That came out hostile, though he hadn’t meant it to.

‘How close are we?’

‘About two miles.’

‘I thought I heard the guns.’

‘Probably. It’s a bit like the trains, after a while you don’t notice them.’ For a moment he was back in bed with Teresa, listening to a goods train rumble past. ‘You can tell if it’s really bad, the lamp jumps up and down.’

‘So it’s quiet now?’

‘So-so.’

‘I volunteered for ambulance driving.’

‘Me too. I think they must be short of ambulances. I don’t really know, nobody tells you anything.’ He moved towards the door. ‘Let’s talk later, shall we? I ought to be getting back.’

‘Wait, I’ll get my torch.’ Lewis was almost stammering in his eagerness. ‘Oh, where’s the …?’

‘Behind the hut.’

Paul waited again, none too patiently, while Lewis disappeared round the side of the hut, no doubt expecting to find another similar hut containing the bathroom facilities.

A minute or so later he was back, head down, fumbling with buttons.

‘If you get desperate for a bit of civilization, there’s a hotel in town where you can get a bath.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What don’t you understand?’

‘This.’ He looked around at the gulf of darkness, the dull blue lights of the station quavering as they always did on windy nights. ‘Where’s the hospital?’

‘There isn’t a hospital.’ Paul felt weighed down, resenting the need to explain. ‘Look, there’s a lot of huts built round a covered goods yard. I suppose the wounded were dumped there initially because it was the end of the line. I can’t think of any other reason. When the Red Cross took over there were over a thousand men lying on straw in their own shit. Half a dozen orderlies, no medicine, no bedpans, no anaesthetics. You name it, they hadn’t got it. They weren’t even being fed. They hadn’t had their wounds dressed, some of them, for a fortnight. So however primitive you think this is, remember it’s been a hell of a lot worse.’

Lewis nodded, soaking it in.

‘And you did volunteer.’

His head went up immediately. ‘I’m not complaining.’

They walked on in silence. When they reached the ambulances’ turning circle, Lewis stopped and stared longingly at the three parked vehicles. In the moonlight, the red crosses stood out black against their pale canvas sides. No sign of the drivers, who’d be over in the canteen having coffee, waiting for the next call.

‘Come on,’ Paul said. ‘You can look at them later.’

He pushed hard against the hut door. Warm air tainted with gangrene gushed out to meet them. Behind him, he felt Lewis take an involuntary step back.

‘We’re in a quiet patch,’ Paul said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘You’re lucky.’

Eighteen

Sister Byrd greeted Lewis briskly, then turned to Paul. ‘You’d better take him round with you. Show him the ropes.’ She pointed to a man a little way along the row. ‘Start with him.’

After fetching scissors from the sterilizing room, Paul led Lewis across to the patient. Pulling back the blanket, he saw that the man was naked from the waist down, his groin padded with a heavily stained dressing that was stuck to the skin. He set to work with the scissors, aware of Lewis watching him. Lewis was breathing with his mouth open, his rather full lips cracked and dry. Easing the lower blade under the bandage, Paul snipped close to the skin, trying to disturb the area as little as possible. Inevitably the scissors tugged and every time the man twisted and writhed. Paul stopped for a moment. He noticed Lewis had put one hand on the man’s wrist, a firm, steady pressure.

After a moment he began cutting again. A few minutes later he’d reached the point of pulling the dressing away. This had to be done slowly and carefully. Speed would have been more merciful, but risked doing further damage. He clenched his teeth as if he were in pain, though the pain was not his and never could be. He eased the dressing off. Shrapnel had come through from the back and severed the penis at the base. As they watched, urine welled up from the hole in his groin, hot acid spreading over raw flesh. The man arched his back and groaned again. Morphine. ‘Stay with him,’ he said, standing up and looking around for Sister Byrd. She was quick. She was always quick. Lewis watched her filling the syringe, flicking it, preparing to inject, with as much eagerness as if the pain had been his.

When the patient had settled a little, she said, ‘It’s gone through the intestines. He won’t last.’

‘Will they operate tonight?’ Lewis asked.

Sister Byrd looked at him consideringly. How much use are you going to be? was the question written on her face. ‘There’s not much they can do.’ Beat. ‘Once the morphine takes effect we’ll clean him up and see what Mr Burton says.’ She waited, watching Lewis closely. ‘Would you want to live?’

‘If it was me?’ For a second he stared into the abyss, then shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

It was what passed for a quiet evening. Three men died but they’d been expected to, and did so quietly and without fuss. Mess tins full of grey stew were carried up and down the rows of stretchers. Lewis fed several patients who couldn’t feed themselves. He kept yawning, more from shock than tiredness, but Sister Byrd chose to regard it as the effect of his long journey.

‘Look, why don’t you go across to the huts and get settled in? We can manage.’

Lewis blinked, from surprise, probably, that this experience had an end. Paul knew the feeling. When you first started a twelve-hour shift could last for ever.

An hour later Paul followed him across to the hut, the weak, sickly circle of torchlight playing across thronging weeds and stacks of abandoned sleepers. There was no light under the door. Cupping his hand round the beam of the torch he opened the door on a smell of damp socks and unwashed blankets. Lewis was awake. He could see the whites of his eyes among the flickering shadows but then with a squeal of springs he turned away.

Paul undressed quickly and got under the blanket before the slight warmth of his clothes could evaporate. He lay with his arms clasped across his chest, fingertips tucked into his armpits, doing everything possible to conserve heat. Sleep would come anyway — he was worn out — but it would last longer and stand a better chance of being dreamless if he could keep warm. He was aware of Lewis, breathing quietly, awake in the darkness. The pressure of that other consciousness was intolerable. Resigned, he turned heavily on to his side and set the candle on the floor between them.

‘How many of them die?’ Lewis asked.

‘Thirty per cent.’

‘Per cent?’

Paul was puzzled, then realized Lewis was questioning his coldblooded way of talking about it. ‘That’s good. When the Red Cross first arrived it was much worse than that. Now seventy per cent survive.’

‘You know the very young one who died?’

Paul frowned into the darkness. No, he couldn’t remember any of the three who’d died. Not their faces. He could remember their positions in the hut, because he’d taken note of where the spaces were so that he could direct stretcher-bearers to them as quickly as possible, when the next batch came in.

‘Sister Byrd said he had gas gangrene, but I thought the Germans haven’t used gas?’

‘They haven’t. It’s when tiny organisms in the soil get into a wound, they produce gas.’

‘And that’s the smell?’

‘You get used to it.’ Paul was struggling to keep his eyes open. This was no time for a tutorial. ‘Look, there are three ways you can tell if it’s gas gangrene. One, the smell. And then there’s a kind of crackling under the skin. It’s … It’s quite hard to describe, but you’ll know it once you’ve felt it. I’ll show you tomorrow if I get a chance.’

He was turning away as he spoke.

And the third?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You said three things.’

‘Did I? The third thing is they die.’

Despite his exhaustion, Paul couldn’t sleep. He was too aware of Lewis, now lying on his back in the darkness with his arms folded behind his head, not even trying to sleep. Eventually Paul nodded off, then woke, and spent the next hour wandering along the edge of sleep, afraid of plunging in, in case the freshening-up process that Lewis had started should extend to the deeper layers of his mind and reawaken the nightmares. During his first fortnight on the wards every horror had followed him into sleep. During the day he managed to lower a safety curtain that protected him from the worst of it, but at night it failed him. Then gradually — he didn’t know how because no conscious effort would have done it — he’d somehow extended that protection into his sleep. Now he was afraid that wounds and mutilations would start pursuing him again.

After a while he started to drift off again, but time and time, found himself pulled back from the brink. Lewis was asleep now, but the quiet breathing from the next bed drove Paul into a kind of rage. Only now, when he’d lost it, did he begin to realize how much he’d valued the peace and solitude of this hut where, in his off-duty hours, he could read or write letters or draw. Whether he could do any of these things with Lewis around, he rather doubted. He’d never willingly shared a bedroom with anybody, except a lover. There was something about physical intimacy without passion that he found distasteful. Of course, this was a trivial matter in comparison with the great events of the war, but he’d already learned that the war was a compendium of trivial matters, and anyway, this wasn’t trivial to him. He needed space and solitude to go on working. Perhaps it would be possible to rent a room in town? He was always on call, but it might still be worthwhile to get a room and go there on his days off. Just to have somewhere he could draw and think. A cupboard would do.

Meanwhile … Sighing, he turned over again, and finally just as the threadbare light of dawn made itself felt through a crack in the door, he fell into a deep sleep.

Nineteen

Next morning, when Paul opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Lewis sitting on the end of his bed, fully dressed, smoking a cigarette. Several butts lay scattered on the floor, suggesting he might have been awake some time.

‘What time do we have to be over there?’

Paul looked at his watch. ‘Forty minutes.’

Lewis seemed almost feverish, tensed up to face the day. No sign of the enthusiasm of the previous night. It made Paul feel nervous and irritable to look at him. Reaching for his clothes, he started to get dressed. Lewis got up and paced up and down, though there was hardly enough room for it: three paces either way and you had to turn.

‘You could do that outside.’

Lewis stopped, but his tension was visible in every muscle. He was straining to start work.

‘Breakfast?’ Paul said.

‘I can’t eat.’

‘All right. Watch me.’

Outside it was still dark, the furthest sheds just beginning to show through the thinning grey. Far away, a train whistled. As they set off, Paul felt Lewis veering in the direction of the Salle d’Attente; his feet seemed to head in that direction even as he tried to keep pace with Paul. He kept stumbling. Under the weeds the ground was full of holes.

Paul touched his arm. ‘You’ll feel better for a coffee.’

The dining room was another hut. The food came in huge vats from somewhere off site and was almost inedible, but the coffee, made on site, was good and Paul drank three huge cups of it before forcing himself to eat. Lewis pushed his croissants to one side, but drank the coffee, cupping his hands round the mug. In the strengthening daylight he looked odder: frizzy hair; eyes, that clear pale Viking blue that make their owners look capable of anything; skin so freckled it was almost a deformity. You thought of leopards, snakes, toads. Lewis put down his cup. Mouth as always slightly open, he was staring at Paul, a question on his face. Paul looked quickly down and away.

Burton came over and introduced himself. In the chill morning air, his nose was pinched, his eyes red-rimmed with tiredness. Lewis looked up at him, eager to be impressed. Burton welcomed him ‘on board’, recommended several good restaurants, and then, exactly as Paul had done the previous night, told him where he could get a hot bath and a shave. We’re a disappointment to him, Paul thought, watching Lewis’s politely smiling face, with our talk of percentages and our concern for our own comfort. He’s looking for somebody to hero-worship, and we’re not it. But then he wondered what gave him the confidence, the arrogance, to think he could understand Lewis on the basis of such a slight acquaintance. He might be tougher than he appeared on the surface. He’d better be.

Burton, who’d been the last to arrive, was the first to leave, and his departure signalled a general move across to the sheds. As they walked over the open space, Paul took Lewis to one side and pointed to the road that led away from the station.

‘There, you see?’ A convoy of motor ambulances was churning up the hill. ‘That’s the first of them.’

Paul stared at the road, trying to see it through Lewis’s eyes. Motor lorries, horse-drawn wagons coming back from delivering the rations, a column of men marching. All along the horizon, guns rumbled and flickered. Occasionally a flare went up, illuminating a bank of black cloud.

‘Can you get up there?’ Lewis asked.

‘Not easily. I suppose an ambulance driver might give you a lift.’

‘I’d like to go.’

‘Drive an ambulance and you will. Meanwhile …’ He put his hand on Lewis’s shoulder. ‘There’s work to be done.’

An hour later the black clouds are overhead. The wind rocks and shakes the roof; rain pelts down, sending waves of turbulence around the room. Outside, ambulances roar, cough, hiccup, splutter, stop, unload the wounded and drive off again, churning the mud in the turning circle to thick brownish-black cream. By mid-afternoon every available space in the hut’s been filled. Paul, Lewis and three other orderlies move up and down the rows of stretchers, cutting men out of their uniforms, washing them, ignoring their pleas for water if they’re going to the operating theatres, letting them have it if they’re slight wounds who can wait, or beyond hope. The most severely wounded moan on the edge of consciousness or lie in ominous silence. Continually, throughout the day, the procession of wounded comes. Each time the leading stretcher-bearer holds the door open, a current of cold air rushes in, damp and brackish-smelling, as if even the outside world’s underground. And the gust of wind flutters the papers in Sister Byrd’s hand and lifts the edges of the blankets.

Lewis follows Paul round, watching and copying everything he does. Once his shadow falls across Paul’s hands at a crucial moment and Paul swears at him and sees him flinch. He learns quickly though, his hands are strong and deft, he doesn’t tire, or anyway shows no sign of it, though he must be suffering from backache now, as they all are, bending and lifting the stretchers hour after hour. No, Lewis’s problems are all in his head. Some of the things Sister Byrd says — ‘Take that stomach in next, and then the head’ — visibly shock him. ‘Look,’ Paul imagines saying to him, ‘Leave your fucking compassion at the door, it’s no use to anybody here.’

He’s roused from his trance by a commotion at the door. Another stretcher’s just been brought in. Hearing raised voices, Sister Byrd goes to investigate. The man on the stretcher waits till she’s leaning over him and spits a gob of blood into her face.

Paul’s on his way over, before she calls for him. Lewis, as always, follows. Paul turns to tell him to go on washing the patient he’s just left, but Sister Byrd says, ‘No, it’ll take two.’ The man’s bucking and rearing against the straps that bind him. ‘You’ve got a right one there,’ the front bearer says, jovial now he’s succeeded in dumping the problem on to somebody else. Wiping the blood from her face, Sister Byrd turns to the driver, who, unusually, has come in with the bearers. ‘He tried to jump out of the back of the ambulance,’ the driver says. ‘We had to tie him down.’

Blood wells from the man’s mouth, great thick black gobbets of blood. As he turns his head in the direction of their voices, his left eyeball swings against his cheek.

‘Will he live?’ Paul asks.

She shrugs. They carry him through into theatre, Sister Byrd hurrying ahead to warn the surgical team. Paul takes the front of the stretcher, Lewis the rear, though they have to keep stopping, because the man kicks and struggles so much he’s in danger of tipping himself on to the floor. His eyeball swings with every jolt.

The hot air of the operating theatre hits them, a solid wall Paul has to push against. There are three tables in operation. Burton, Mercer and Browne, wearing red gowns, or so it seems, are chatting to their teams and flirting with the younger nurses, unconscious of the stench of blood. The door into the sterilizing room swings open belching steamy air as a nurse carries a tray of instruments into the room.

‘Oh, my God, what’s this?’ Mercer says, looking down.

‘Shot himself,’ Sister Cope says.

Mercer purses his lips, ‘Why for God’s sake? A million Germans getting paid good money to do the job and he has to go and shoot himself. Oh, well. Get him on.’

Easier said than done. He spits, curses, struggles, finally lands a kick on Sister Cope’s breast that makes her go white. It takes six of them in the end to bind him to the table and two to force the mask down over his face. Even as the ether takes effect, he’s still straining against the straps, a torrent of mangled words spewing from his mouth.

All right,’ Mercer says. ‘I think we can start now.’

He’s standing well back, pulling irritably at the ties on his gown. He keeps glancing at the clock and pulling his mask down to wipe away the moustache of sweat that constantly forms on his upper lip. Paul doesn’t like Mercer, not that liking or disliking matter much here. He doesn’t like the pale, large, doughy face or the way his features, individually rather small and delicate, cluster together in the centre as if for safety. Mercer notices an amputated leg that hasn’t been cleared away fast enough and, in a sudden burst of fury, kicks it across the floor.

‘I need this place kept clear!’ he shouts.

Sister Cope, still white from the kick, scurries across and removes the offending limb.

Paul and Lewis watch from the back, ready to step in should the man come out of the anaesthetic fighting, as patients often do. Between other people’s shoulders, they catch glimpses of the operation. Mercer locates the bullet, extracts it, drops it, with a small, disgusted clink, into a kidney bowl and then manoeuvres the eyeball back into its socket.

‘All right.’ He straightens up, presses one hand hard into the small of his back, leaving a red print on the white cloth. ‘What’s next?’

He’s marginally better tempered now because he feels he’s done a good job, as no doubt he has. Paul and Lewis come forward, unbuckle the straps and lift the man on to the stretcher.

‘Through there,’ Paul says, nodding at the door behind Lewis.

Lewis backs out into the cold corridor. Immediately, they both begin to shiver. Within a few seconds Lewis is shaking uncontrollably, whether from cold or shock it’s hard to tell. If it’s shock, Paul doesn’t want to know. Keep the patient warm, that’s all that matters. ‘Move,’ he says. Lewis backs away down the corridor.

They deliver their unconscious burden to the recovery ward, his restored eye gazing sightlessly up at them, and leave him there.

‘What’ll happen to him?’

‘He’ll be shot.’

Lewis gapes. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘’ Course he will, suicide counts as desertion.’

‘But that’s mad. Why not just let him die?’

‘Pour encourager les autres.’

They’re standing in the weed-thronged yard, by the pile of railway sleepers.

Paul looks at Lewis with a mixture of pity and exasperation. ‘I think you’re allowed a cigarette before we go back.’

Lewis shakes his head, then lights one anyway, remembering, a second later, to offer the packet.

‘No, I won’t, thanks.’ Paul waits, watching the dry, fleshy mouth drag on the cigarette. ‘Look, that was a bad business in there. But it’s not typical.’

‘What I don’t like is that we’re part of it.’

‘Of what?’

‘Sending him back to be shot.’

‘What’s the alternative? Let him die?’

‘It’s what he wants.’

‘Well, if you’re going to start letting them do what they want … Most of them want to go home.’

‘And I’d let them.’

‘Then it’s just as well you’re not in charge.’

Lewis is already stubbing out his half-smoked cigarette. ‘Come on, we’d better be getting back.’

He sets off at his loping pace across the waste ground, his boots flashing silver drops of rain. Paul follows at a slower pace. He hasn’t had time to sort out his own reactions. He’s been too busy coping with Lewis. Now he finds it difficult to tell which are Lewis’s feelings and which his own. He feels as if he’s been crowded out of his own mind.

But then, that’s the question. Should you even pause to consider your own reactions? These men suffer so much more than he does, more than he can imagine. In the face of their suffering, isn’t it self-indulgent to think about his own feelings? He has nobody to talk to about such things and blunders his way through as best he can. If you feel nothing — this is what he comes back to time and time again — you might just as well be a machine, and machines aren’t very good at caring for people. There’s something machinelike about a lot of the professional nurses here. Even Sister Byrd, whom he admires, he looks at her sometimes and sees a robot. Well, lucky for her, perhaps. It’s probably more efficient to be like that. Certainly less painful.

Throwing his cigarette away, he follows Lewis into the building.

Twenty

Elinor to Paul

You say you don’t want to burden me with the horrors but you mustn’t hold back because of me. I want to know everything and anyway, why should I be sheltered? I feel the same kind of guilt when I tell you about the Slade and painting and parties in Gordon Square. (Where I’ve been invited twice now.) You have so little time and probably by the end of the day so little energy and nobody to talk to about the things that really matter and I have so much of all these things. Are you managing to do any work at all? You know what I mean — your own work? If you’ve got the hut to yourself isn’t it possible to do a bit in the evenings?

I carry your photograph around with me everywhere. At home — ‘home’ meaning Gower Street — it’s on the bedside table where I can see it when I wake up but here I have to keep it in a drawer in case Mother comes in. She’s always on the lookout for what she calls ‘the One’. She wants me to go to her bandaging class with her this afternoon so I can witness her triumph over Mrs Bradley. Toby has received his commission and been gazetted. I’m not sure I can face it. The thought of Mrs Bradley in her camisole reclining on a chaise longue while the whole twittering first-aid class clusters round and tries to diagnose her! I’ve had enough of Mrs Bradley to last me a lifetime. She’s the one who kept making snide remarks to Mother because Toby hadn’t enlisted yet, really made her life a misery. There was a lovely moment last week when Mother got flustered and attempted to apply a tourniquet to Mrs Bradley’s neck. ‘What a stupid, stupid mistake,’ she kept saying all the way home. ‘I can’t think why I did it. I know perfectly well you don’t apply a tourniquet to a neck wound.’ Mother’s one of life’s innocents, I’m afraid. She doesn’t know ‘mistakes’ sometimes have inverted commas round them.

Paul to Elinor

You should never be afraid of telling me about your work — or the parties. The thought that there are some people out there still painting and drawing, still thinking art matters more than anything else, is one of the few things that keeps me going. That and remembering the Slade. I close my eyes sometimes and see you and Catherine walking around the quad, Catherine with her arm around your waist. How I used to envy her. And I hear Tonks shouting: ‘I suppose you think you can draw?’ That’s not so good! How is Tonks? And yes, I do manage to do a bit of drawing when I’m off duty. Or rather, I did.

The trouble is, I’ve acquired a room mate. Hut mate, I suppose I should say. He’s perfectly pleasant, young, enthusiastic, full of admirable qualities — and he’s driving me mad. Partly it’s that I don’t take kindly to sharing a bedroom with anybody — only child, didn’t go to boarding school, etc. I find the sound of somebody else’s breathing intensely irritating. It stops me sleeping. Oh, and everything’s new to him. Every impression of the hospital, the wounds, the gangrene, the amputated limbs stacked up outside — so of course I start seeing it all again through his eyes, whereas most of the time I go around in a kind of dream state. Like being inside a rubber glove that covers all of you, not just your hands.

I’ve been made more or less responsible for him, I think. And I can’t complain because when I look back now I can see how kind people were to me when I first arrived, how patiently they answered idiotic questions and redid jobs I was supposed to have done.

But. But I can’t draw with him in the room. He looks over my shoulder all the time — pretends not to, but he does. And I can’t lie on my bed, in the evening after we’ve all come back from the café, and say goodnight to your photograph. Can’t talk to it either. All such indulgences are at an end.

What all this has done is to bring forward a little plan I was hatching anyway, which is to hire a room in town. All the tourist trade’s gone. The brass hats are accommodated in hotels or in posh houses overlooking the main square, but in the back streets there are plenty of rooms that used to be let out to summer visitors going very cheap indeed. I think I could get somewhere for about five shillings a week in English money, so that’s my new project. It’s what keeps me going.

I liked your story of your mother and Mrs Bradley and the tourniquet.

Have to go now. I’m writing this early in the morning with Lewis snoring in the next bed — actually he doesn’t snore, he whistles — and he’s showing signs of stirring. It’s time for breakfast anyway. I’m hungry!

Elinor to Paul

Things aren’t good at home. Toby’s gone off to officer training, Mother’s taken to her bed and everybody — by which I mean Father and Rachel and even Toby — thinks I should throw everything up and go home to look after her. I’m the one who isn’t doing anything important, you see. Rachel’s pregnant, Toby’s in the army, Dad’s got his work. All I’ve got is painting, which doesn’t matter and specifically doesn’t matter now. You’d be amazed how many supposedly intelligent people think of art as some frivolrous (sorry, can’t spell it!) distraction from things that really matter. By which of course they mean the war the war the war. Since I’m not involved in any way with that, why can’t I go home and look after Mother?

How’s Tonks? Thinner, gloomier, snappier — at the same time rather splendid, I think. You’d never get that art-doesn’t-matter nonsense out of him. As for the rest, well, the Slade’s almost deserted. Difficult not to speak in a whisper sometimes, you get such a strong sense of people who should be here and aren’t. The men’s life class limps on, but I don’t see how it can keep going much longer. Even the women are beginning to drop away. Ruthie’s nursing — she volunteered the same day as her three brothers enlisted — Marjorie’s talking about leaving, Catherine’s gone. Her father’s been interned, but at least it’s in London and not on the Isle of Man, where a lot of them are sent.

Doesn’t summer seem a long time ago? When I try to think back all I can see is a huge blue-black cloud chasing its own shadow over the shining fields. And I see us on the lawn — Catherine and me — drinking disgusting warm cider from a bucket under the sink that never really kept it cool. All those lovely golden bubbles streaming to the surface and our thoughts flowing with them, though really when I think of the things we talked about. Why do angels wear clothes when they’re free from original sin? Do they have private parts? What do they need them for? Do they even have to have wings? There’s that strange bit in the Bible where two angels come to visit Lot and a crowd gathers outside shouting for them to be brought out so they can ‘know them’. I didn’t realize at first that means ‘have sexual intercourse with’, but of course it does. So obviously they didn’t have wings. They must have been just two extremely beautiful young men. If the Parish Council could have heard us talking about naked angels they’d have thought Catherine’s being a German was the least of their worries. That still makes me angry.

Oh dear, this isn’t a very good letter, I do try. I think what gets in the way is the sense that whatever we do here is so much less important than what you’re doing over there. I can’t imagine your world. You can pop your head back inside mine any time you like, it hasn’t changed much, though now it must feel like a doll’s house to you. Is she still going on about that? you think. But that was ages ago — decades.

There are changes. When I look down into the quad — where you say you remember Catherine and me walking up and down with our arms around each other’s waists — I see wheelchairs. Men in blue, some with missing legs. Arms as well sometimes. They wheel them here from the hospital on fine days — it’s still quite warm — though I think some of the men look cold. They can’t move around to keep the circulation going and they’re sometimes left out a long time. I walk past them on my way in and again on my way back, and either I walk quickly with my head down or extra slowly and give them a big cheery smile and say hello. I watch them watching me noticing the missing bits, looking at the empty trouser legs or, equally awful, not looking at them. And I feel ashamed. Just being what I am, a girl they might once have asked to dance, is dreadful. I feel I’m an instrument of mental torture through no fault of my own. And then I’m ashamed of feeling that because after all what do my feelings matter? I think the world’s gone completely mad.

I’m looking out of the window now. If I narrow my eyes and make a rainbow with my lashes the men in wheelchairs disappear and I see you as you were last winter in that long black coat of yours. I used to call it your cassock, do you remember? (That was before I knew you better!)

I hope you find a lovely room. It’ll make all the difference to have somewhere quiet where you can draw or read. Paint even.

Write soon. Love, Elinor.

Twenty-one

The woman who came to the door looked to be in her early forties, with a clear brown complexion marked by two lines of force from the nose to the corners of her mouth. She kept her left arm folded at the waist, under her pinafore so it bulged out in front of her like a pregnancy.

‘I’ve come about the room,’ he said.

She stood aside to let him in. ‘For you?’

‘Yes, but I wouldn’t be here all the time. I live at the hospital. I’m looking for somewhere to paint.’

If she was surprised she didn’t show it. Instead she led the way upstairs.

‘A lot of steps,’ she said, unnecessarily, on the third floor. He was gasping for breath and they were still climbing. The stairs ended in a door, which opened to reveal a narrow corridor. The floor was covered in dingy brown linoleum and the row of small windows on his left gave hardly any light. He was getting ready to explain why the room was unsuitable when she threw open the door at the end of the corridor. The room was full of light.

As he followed her in, he realized why. They were above the rooftops and there were two windows: one at either end of the room, which was long and narrow, running the width of the house. He went straight to the back window, admiring the sloping roofs, the angles, the sheen of light on grey tiles, the warmth of red brick. He opened the window and a moist green smell came rushing in. Far below was the garden, handkerchief-sized from this height, with a row of outbuildings leaning against the far wall.

Madame Drouet directed his attention to the bed, the chair, the wardrobe, the washstand with its blue-and-white jug and bowl and matching chamber pot in the cupboard underneath. No running water — a major defect — and the privy was at the foot of the garden. But the room was beautiful: though the walls were limewashed, the rugs threadbare, no-coloured, and the curtains so skimpy that even drawn they’d let in most of the light, none of it mattered.

‘How much?’

In English money she was asking five shillings a week, half what he’d have had to pay for a studio in London. Though this wasn’t exactly a studio.

‘Yes,’ he said, at once. ‘I’ll take it.’

He walked away from the house excited, full of joy. He knew he could paint there, but it was more than that even, it was privacy, normality, his own mind back. He was almost hugging himself as he pushed open the door of a café, planning how he would go back to the hut after lunch and move a few clothes and books and his drawing equipment. He’d send for his paints, make it a proper studio, or as close as he could get. His happiness was almost painful, like circulation returning to a dead leg.

Over his coffee, he pulled out a writing pad and started to tell the one person who’d understand what the room meant.

It’s nothing, really. The sort of room that would be given to a maid, very plain and bare, and the door has a stable latch, not a proper knob like the rooms downstairs. Curtains and rugs a bluish grey, though only because they’ve faded to that colour, I don’t think they started out that way. The bed takes up most of the space, which is rather a pity since I shan’t be using it, but I can push it back against the wall. Even dismantle it, I suppose. I don’t think the landlady minds what I do. She’s only too glad she’s got a taker.

The café overlooked the main square. It was market day, the busiest of the week. Paul loved this scene and often sat in the window to watch it. Most of the women of the town were out doing their shopping with bags or baskets over their arms, looking at the food on the stalls, still quite plentiful, their eyes shrewd, fingers shiny from long immersion in hot water, rubbing the coins before they parted with them. They enjoyed their marketing, the little haggles they had with stallholders, the small triumphs, the stopping for chats and gossip. The younger women had children hanging on to their hands, whining for things that couldn’t be afforded. Now and then you saw an impatient tug or a slap, but mainly it was a happy scene.

At the edge of the square ambulances roared past. Only a layer of thin canvas divided the men inside from the people in the square. The stallholders and the shoppers couldn’t see the men inside, but surely they must be able to hear them, the cries torn out of them at every bump and hollow in the road. Perhaps they’d switched off. Perhaps they didn’t hear the cries any more than they noticed the flicker and rumble of guns. It’s the hardest thing in the world to go on being aware of somebody else’s pain. He couldn’t do it, so he was in no position to criticize others who couldn’t either.

Two miles up the road to hell. No point blaming those women because they can’t imagine it. He can hardly realize it himself, sitting there by the window, stirring his coffee, bubbling with excitement about his room, the work he intends to do there and the new idea that’s beginning to take root in his mind.

On the other side of the glass, a woman is walking along the pavement with her child, a toddler. Every few steps she stops and waits for him to catch up. He’s tired, he keeps pulling at his ears and whimpering, but he won’t let his mother pick him up, he’s a big boy now, too big to be carried. He dances on the spot with rage, not knowing what he wants. Exasperated, his mother scoops him up and carries him off, the boy crying as if his heart will break.

Watching the small everyday drama, Paul thought, If it’s safe for that woman and her child …

I’ve had an idea. Why don’t you come out here? Oh, not to nurse — I know you’d hate that — but just for a few days. The town’s full of women and children, it’s never been shelled, I really can’t see there’d be any risk, and you’d be interested. It mightn’t be possible to get here, though. We’re in the forbidden zone. Which sounds awfully dramatic, but really just means civilians (other than residents) aren’t allowed, except on approved business. For women, approved business means nursing. (Though there is one other profession that’s welcomed, or at least tolerated. I expect you can guess what it is.) It’s the wives and mothers they want to keep out. Too big a reminder of other responsibilities: heavy work needing to be done on the farm, roofs leaking, boys running wild, etc.

Don’t reject the idea out of hand. I know it sounds preposterous, but I do think you’d enjoy it. You could stay in my room. Please, please, consider it. You probably won’t be able to manage it — in fact the more I think about it the less likely it seems — but at least give it a try. Honestly, I look out of the window now and the place is full of women and children and they’re in no danger at all.

There must be masses of other things to tell you, but I can’t think of any of them now. I can only think about you coming here and I want to get this in the post as fast as possible. Obviously, I’d have to keep working, but I could swap shifts if necessary so we’d have every evening together, and I could arrange to take my day off while you were here. So we would see quite a lot of each other. And on your terms, of course. I hope you don’t feel there’s any pressure. I can always sleep in the hut. Do please say yes.

Ever your Paul.

Twenty-two

Lewis impinged on him more and more. His breathing, his habit of humming while he shaved, the way he tapped the razor on the edge of the bowl … Every second of the time they spent in the hut, Paul was aware of him as a physical presence. He even caught himself watching Lewis while he slept, and the longer he stared the odder Lewis seemed. That blotched skin, it didn’t look human. Once, as Paul bent over him, Lewis’s eyes opened unexpectedly. They were pale blue, with flecks of another colour, brown or green. For Christ’s sake, even his eyes were freckled.

Paul arrived on duty to find a patient just being brought back from theatre. He’d had his left leg amputated three days ago but then further surgery had been required to try to eradicate gangrene. The stump had to be irrigated with hydrogen peroxide. Not the pleasantest of jobs. Gloved, gowned and masked, Paul concentrated on trying to work fast. He couldn’t bring himself to say any of the soothing anodyne things people did say, It’ll soon be over. It wouldn’t ‘soon be over’ and even when it was there would only be a few short hours before the next dressing. Once the man arched his back, but he made no sound. Not a groan did he utter from beginning to end.

As he took off his mask Paul became aware of Burton standing beside him, still in scrubs though he must have finished for the night. He was pulling at his chest and arm hair, something he often did, either a constant irritable tugging or sometimes a fastidious fixing of the hair between index and middle finger like a barber lining it up for the scissors. Somewhere inside Burton was a hairless pre-pubescent boy who’d never got over the shock.

‘Well done,’ he said.

The words jarred. The patient wiped sweat off his upper lip, his only small concession to the pain. There was never enough morphine. It was a disgrace what these men had to endure without anaesthetic, and this one was going to die anyway.

They walked to the end of the ward together. Burton seemed inclined to talk. You often found that on night duty, people opened up in a way they wouldn’t dream of doing by day and there was less awareness of rank. With the wards darkened and night pressing in around the huts, people clustered round whatever light they could find.

‘What we really need to do is operate sooner. Very few of them, you know, are on the operating table within twenty-four hours — that’s what we need to look at. You can pour hydrogen peroxide and carbolic into the wound till you’re blue in the face, but if the infection’s well established you’re not going to shift it that way. Browne was saying, in the Boer War he’d seen men with terrible injuries — sometimes they’d lain out in the veldt for days with no medical attention whatsoever and yet they survived. But that was on sand. You know, everybody talks about machine guns and shells, but it’s not bullets and shrapnel that are killing the men in there. It’s the soil.’

‘So what can you do?’

‘What can I do?’

‘No, generally.’

‘Turn the Casualty Clearing Stations into theatres. At the moment they just patch them up to get them here, but that’s no use. You’ve got to do the surgery there. Excise the wound. And if a shell lands on your head while you’re doing it, too bloody bad. As to what I can do … Oh, God knows. Get out of here.’

‘Why?’

Burton looked surprised. ‘It’s not much fun, you know, day after day doing amputations, when you know they could have been avoided.’

‘So what would you do?’

‘Research, I suppose. There’s got to be something we can do that’s better than pouring hydrogen peroxide into a wound. Or I could join the army, but then I risk getting stuck in a base hospital. They might think I’m too old for the front line’

‘And the whole point is to get to the front?’

‘Oh, yes. A base hospital would drive me mad.’ He looked into his mug as if he suspected it of emptying itself. Ah, well, better be getting back.’

Paul was unsettled by this conversation, and not merely because applying hydrogen peroxide to an infected wound now seemed pointless as well as unpleasant. Burton was thinking about the war and how he could best make a contribution. He saw alternatives. Paul had been plodding along like a donkey for weeks. Now and then something would catch his eye and he’d reach for a drawing pad, but that was as natural and unreflective as breathing. He hadn’t allowed himself to think how long his present way of life would go on.

The next two hours were busy. He went round the ward, dispensing sleeping powders, fetching bedpans, straightening sheets, taking round the bedtime cocoa. The tattooed man lay still. The other patients drank their cocoa and one by one slipped into a drugged sleep. The guns were loud, rocking the water in the glasses by each bed.

At last the ward settled down. Paul’s eyelids were drooping. The change from day to night duty was always hard until the body adjusted. He filled in the hourly record, summoned Sister Roper to give a morphine injection, changed the sheets on a bed where a patient had vomited coming out of the anaesthetic, and then sat for a while with his head in his hands, his mind simultaneously blank and busy.

When he looked up, Lewis was sitting by one of the beds. At first he thought he must be hallucinating: Lewis ought to be asleep in the hut, but, no, there he was. It would have been natural to go and ask him what he wanted, but something made Paul hold back. He recognized the patient now. It was the suicide, the one who’d fought them all the way to the operating table and when he recovered faced a firing squad. Now and then his head jerked and he shouted out. The other patients, dragged out of their heavy, drugged sleep, yelled at him to shut up.

What on earth did Lewis think he was doing? What could he hope to achieve, without even a language in common? Still he sat there. An hour, two hours. Eventually Paul made tea and took it across to him. He started to say, ‘You know you shouldn’t be here, don’t you?’ but then stopped. Lewis was drenched in sweat. Not the light sweat that follows exercise, but a drenching that darkened his shirt and made it stick to his chest. His skin was white under the golden-brown freckles. Even his eyes looked paler than usual.

‘I think he’ll sleep now,’ he said, taking the cup.

Over the next few nights Paul became steadily more aware of Lewis’s obsession with the suicide, whose name was Goujet though nobody ever used it. Lewis would arrive at the beginning of the night shift and sit with him, and again at the end. Nobody else paid Goujet any attention. The truth was his presence depressed them. The patients resented him because he was noisy and demanding and because he had tried to escape from circumstances that they had also found unbearable, and gone on bearing. The staff resented having to nurse somebody back to health in order for him to be shot. Obviously this might be the fate of many of the patients, but only on the battlefield. It was the firing squad that made the irony of their efforts inescapable.

Goujet lay with one eye closed and the other, blind eye, wide open. As the hours passed this eye seemed to shrink deeper into its socket, to become small, white and shrunken. The sun in winter looked like that seen low in the sky over frosty fields. It was hard to walk past the bed and not meet this eye that stared out oblivious to your presence. In his rare moments of clear consciousness he seemed full of hate, though he never said anything, not even beyond the few mangled words he spat at them whenever they tried to get him to eat. He wouldn’t take food. If he accepted water it was only a couple of sips, and then he’d turn his head away.

Lewis would sit beside him, clasping his wrist. At first Goujet struggled to free himself, but then abandoned the attempt, though more from weakness, Paul thought, than because he found the contact acceptable. Something had to happen to stop this. If he’d noticed this then Sisters Byrd and Cope would certainly have noticed it too.

One day as he was going off duty, Paul was asked to go to Sister Byrd’s room. This room was really no more than a little cubbyhole off the boiler room, but she’d made it comfortable. She had her tea, her cocoa, a tin of biscuits, a kettle and a blue-and-white mug with a painting of Edinburgh Castle on the side. Paul waited. He guessed what was coming and resented it. Was he Lewis’s keeper? Evidently he was. Somehow or other this had been decided, though whether by accident — because the only vacant bed happened to be in his hut — or because Sister Byrd thought she discerned in him a particular talent for lowering new arrivals gently into scalding water, he didn’t know. He only knew nobody had consulted him.

‘Come in, Paul.’ She had a deceptively gentle Scottish accent that made him think of pale spring sunshine on grey granite terraces. ‘Sit down.’

She poured hot water from the kettle on to the cocoa in their mugs.

She was … what, fifty? Something like that. A professional nurse with several decades of experience in civilian hospitals, unlike many of the other nurses who were really lady-volunteers with minimal qualifications. She wore her professional status like an external corset. Unbending, efficient, detached, halfway to being a monster, perhaps, but she got the job done.

She sat down facing him. ‘How do you think Lewis is settling in?’

‘All right, I think. It’s early days.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed, a little too quickly. ‘I hope he’s not getting over-involved?’

He waited.

‘With the man who tried to kill himself

‘I don’t know.’

‘He sits with him a lot, doesn’t he?’

‘Yes, I believe he does.’

‘You know I’ve had to tell him to go off duty once or twice. And he comes in on his day off.’

‘He’s young. He’ll get over it.’

‘It’s so easy to let the work here grind you down. If he goes on like this he’ll be no use to anybody in a month’s time. I was hoping you might have a word with him, and … I don’t know. Get him away from the hospital. I don’t want to see him on the wards on his day off. Get him out, show him the country.’

He wanted to say, Why should I spend my days off nursemaiding Lewis? But then he remembered a number of occasions after he’d first arrived when Hickson, for example, had knocked on the door of the hut and almost dragged him into town. ‘All right. I’ll see what I can do.’

He went back to the ward and found Lewis sitting by Goujet’s bed again. ‘Come on,’ Paul said, touching him on the shoulder. ‘He’ll still be here tonight.’

Sister Byrd approved of Paul because she mistook his surface composure for real detachment. In fact he was every bit as moved by Goujet’s predicament as Lewis, but hid it better. It would be better for everybody, he thought, if Goujet died. But at the start of Paul’s next night duty, Goujet looked, if anything, stronger. His colour was better, and he was waving his arms at the orderlies as they walked past. Close to, though, he didn’t look so good. His skin felt hot and dry, and the mangled words didn’t seem to be directed at an audience.

By two in the morning he was running a high fever. He kept making movements in the air with his right hand, brushing something away perhaps. At last, going across to him for the umpteenth time, Paul realized he was trying to convey that he wanted to write. He couldn’t make himself understood in any other way. Part of his tongue and the roof of his mouth had gone.

‘Paper? You want to write?’ Paul made scribbling movements in the air.

Goujet nodded. Paper, Paul thought, looking round. They had the record sheets they filled in hour by hour, but nothing else. Over in the hut, he had whole pads of the stuff.

‘Can you spare me a minute?’ he asked Hickson. ‘I just want to go back to the hut and get something.’

He walked out into the night. Always this shock of cool air on the skin, the moist smell of earth and wet grass. The moon was full, riding high and magnificent in a clear sky. From the road came the roar of motor lorries going to the front, and further off, in the distance, the bickering of artillery.

The open door set an oblong of moonlight across the beds and the jumble of papers on his side of the table. He grabbed a writing pad and pencil, paused in the doorway to light a cigarette, and set off across the waste ground to the shed at a half-run. The air was fresh and crisp. The puddle that lay in the hollow ground by the ambulances’ turning circle had a grey film of petrol across it, like a cataract. He stopped to draw breath. An incongruous moment, standing there in the darkness, bracing himself to go back on to the ward, thinking like a painter. Deep breaths, one, two, three. A final drag on the cigarette and he pushed the door open.

Goujet stared at the writing pad and pencil in apparent bewilderment, so perhaps it wasn’t what he wanted and the waving of his hand in the air meant something else entirely. Paul left the pad by his bed and, by the time he’d reached the end of the row, Goujet had reached for it and begun to write. He didn’t seem to be keeping to the lines, but then the poor devil could hardly see. Paul brushed the incident aside, turning his attention to another patient who’d just been brought in from theatre.

The new patient woke everybody with his screams. Sister had her hands full trying to settle him. What had been a relatively quiet shift became busy. Paul and HIckson attended to the other patients as best they could. As Paul passed his bed, Goujet offered him a sheet of paper. There were no words on it and no drawings either, it was meaningless scribble as far as he could see. But he smiled and nodded. ‘Merci.’

It happened again, and again, at intervals as the night wore on.

‘Merci.’

‘Merci.’

‘Merci.’

Mercy, he started to translate it after a while. Precious little of that round here, he thought, looking at the body of a young man who hadn’t recovered consciousness, and wouldn’t last the night.

Up and down. Up and down.

Goujet became more insistent as the night wore on, more obviously deranged. As far as you could tell. But it’s difficult to know whether somebody’s mad or not if he can’t speak. What he wanted, and he made this very clear, was for Paul to take the paper from him and keep it. By the end of the shift, the pockets of Paul’s tunic and breeches were stuffed full of folded pages, every one of them marked by lines and lines of scribble. Only when the pad had been used up, did Goujet lie back, apparently satisfied.

Lewis didn’t appear that morning. No doubt Sister Byrd had talked to him. His absence was rather disconcerting. Paul had grown used to seeing him there.

Going off duty, he stood for a moment in the doorway, smelling the dawn wind. Two miles away, no more noticeable than the beating of his heart, the guns thudded: the usual early-morning intensification of fire. He took the sheets of paper from his pocket, bunched them together and tore them into tiny pieces. Released on to the wind, they whirled high above his head then slowly, bit by bit, drifted down till they lay on the bare ground. A driver was bending down, turning the crank handle of his ambulance. Soon, within a minute or two, the big wheels would force the scraps of paper deep into the mud, but before that could happen Paul had already turned away.

Twenty-three

Elinor stood in the stern of the ferry, looking out over bile-green water streaked with foam. It was growing dark. Soon she’d have to give in and go below deck like everybody else, but meanwhile she was enjoying the mixture of spray and drizzle blowing into her face.

The forbidden zone.

It was by no means certain they’d let her in, though she’d done everything in her power to make her story credible. Under her coat she wore a nurse’s uniform, borrowed from Ruthie, who worked in a hospital now. Ruthie, who disapproved of this trip, who’d called it selfish and trivial and irresponsible. Ruthie, who’d given up painting and thought everybody else should do the same, but loved her too much to deny her anything. She’d used Ruthie — and not for the first time. She ought to stop doing it, and of course she would; but not yet. In her handbag, she had letters typed on hospital paper taken from her father’s desk, recommending her to the chief surgeon at Paul’s hospital. Oh, she’d worked hard to get everything right. Appearance, too. This old-maidish felt hat, a scrubbed and shining face, short-clipped fingernails, long skirt, sensible lace-up shoes. They ought to let her in. She believed her story.

A sailor walked past and stared at her. A young woman travelling alone, unchaperoned, would always attract attention and she couldn’t afford to do that. She ought to go down below deck and find herself a group of nurses to tag along with. Cautiously, she went down the narrow stairs into the passage with its wet footprints and puddles of water, and then, bracing herself against the rolling of the ship, edged along the wall till she reached the ladies’ cabin.

A fug of warm bodies greeted her, that female smell of talcum powder and blood. It always reminded her of the time when, as a little girl, nine or ten years old perhaps, she’d opened the drawer of Rachel’s dressing table and found a pile of blood-stained rags waiting to go into the wash. Mother had been furious with Rachel for leaving them where Elinor could find them. ‘It might have been Toby!’ she’d shouted, her voice edging up into hysteria. Elinor had looked from one to the other and tried to work out what the fuss was about.

Stepping inside the cabin, she closed the door quietly behind her. Most of the ladies had already become lumps under blankets, but a few were still undressing, placing hats carefully into hatboxes, covering them with tissue paper, lining shoes up neatly side by side. In the centre of the room a girl with straggly dark hair was feeding her baby, a wizened little creature whose hand clawed at her breast.

The nurses in the far corner were still wide awake and chattering. All very young and fresh and pink-looking. Volunteers, she thought, not professionals. Professional nurses didn’t look like that. She found herself a couch close to them and sat down. No point undressing properly — they were due to dock before dawn, but she took off her hat, coat and boots and wrapped herself in the blanket provided. Pulling it tight up to her chin, she peered over it at her fellow passengers and knew at once that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. The lumpy figures in the sepia light; a woman’s face sagging with exhaustion as she twisted and turned on her folded-up coat; the chattering, innocent, ruthless girls screeching like jays; and the woman at the centre of the cabin who seemed to melt into her child, as if she were the wax that fed its guttering flame. There was just enough light to see. She propped the sketchpad against her knee and worked steadily for an hour, screening the page so that anybody glancing casually across at her would think she was writing a letter. Only when she felt she’d exhausted the possibilities did she put the pad away.

Still sleep wouldn’t come. She thought about Paul and what might be going to happen. In London she’d come close to sleeping with him, but in the end she’d drawn back. It seemed such a ridiculous way to take such a decision, because the night was warm and dry and wherever you looked there were couples twined round each other, some of them actually making love on the grass. So easy to let herself be swept along, but it would have felt as if the war had taken the decision for her. So in the end, no, she’d pulled back and they’d gone to their single beds alone.

But her imagination had been busy ever since.

Her only worry was that she hadn’t told Kit she was coming and he was stationed at a hospital just five kilometres outside the town. But Paul hadn’t seen Kit in all the weeks he’d been there, so it wasn’t very likely she’d bump into him. She couldn’t consult Paul about it because Paul didn’t know she was still writing to Kit. Neither of them knew how close she was to the other. If only she could bring herself to tell the truth, it was always better in the end, but short-term, the lies were so convenient. Toby said she’d begun by lying to Mother, because that was the only way she could have a life of her own, but now she lied reflexly pointlessly to absolutely everybody. Including herself.

She closed her eyes. The smell of tar and talcum power in the hot dark was making her queasy. The ship shifted and rose beneath her. Oh God, don’t let me be sick was her last conscious thought before she slept.

Next morning she woke with a crick in her neck. She forced herself to sit up on the edge of the shiny leather couch; her mouth tasted foul, her eyelids seemed to be glued together. It was like a hangover, though she’d had nothing the night before except a small cup of black coffee. She grabbed her washbag and joined the queue for the bathroom, standing in line behind two middle-aged women who were complaining loudly about the behaviour of the nurses last night. When she finally got a place at the basins her face looked small and white and sick. She washed in cold water, brushed her teeth, combed her hair, straightened her clothes as best she could and was ready to go ashore.

Back in the ladies’ cabin, they were all completing their packing, stuffing articles of clothing into bulging bags and checking under the benches for lost possessions. That curious, dislocated atmosphere you get in travelling when a small fragile community fragments. Elinor got away as fast as she could and stood looking out over the harbour, where a light breeze pimpled the surface of the water.

Once on shore she began to feel better, though even on the short crossing her feet seemed to have forgotten where the ground was. She discovered that the nurses too were bound for the railway station and, since there was a spare seat in the second cab, she was invited to join them. A small, ginger-haired girl with red-rimmed eyes asked which hospital she was going to and she gave the name of Paul’s hospital. It seemed to mean no more to them than it did to her, but they accepted it without comment and that encouraged her. Several of them had brothers who’d joined up, one or two of them sweethearts, and so of course they had to do their bit too. It was all represented as duty and patriotism, but even after an almost sleepless night, their eyes were still shining with excitement. Elinor produced a neatly matching story. Yes, she had a brother who’d joined up, and yes, a sweetheart too. Oddly enough it was Kit’s face that flashed into her mind at this point, though he hadn’t joined up exactly and he certainly wasn’t a sweetheart. Before all this, she’d been an art student, she said, but of course now …

Everybody agreed. Yes, of course, now.

Elinor was left wondering why, when her story was accurate in almost every respect, it should be so far from the truth. The difference, she decided, was that these girls needed the war and she didn’t. The freedom they were experiencing on this trip to Belgium she experienced every morning as she walked into the Slade. Though some people might say — and Ruthie was one of them — that she was simply too selfish to set aside her personal concerns and make some contribution to the common cause. Well, yes. She was selfish. She needed to be. She intended to summon up as much selfishness as she possibly could.

At the station they all went for a coffee together. The café was a long narrow room with dingy lino on the floor. A phlegmatic-looking woman stood behind a counter flanked by glass shelves lined with curly sandwiches. One of the nurses tried out her French; the woman replied in English with a look of dull contempt. Elinor got her coffee and croissants and was walking carefully back to their table when the door burst open and the room filled with soldiers.

Instantly they took possession of the place, laughing and joking and punching each other playfully in the chest. They were ushered to the tables, where they caught the eye of the little waitress and flirted with her, winking, nudging, egging each other on. So much prime male beef, so much muscle under their uniforms, thighs like tree trunks lolling apart, so much fresh sweat, so many open red-lipped mouths. The whole world belonged to them because they were on their way to die.

Elinor kept her nose in her coffee cup as much as possible, looking, she knew, old-maidish in her felt hat and shapeless coat. She hated the way the women in the queue deferred, accepting that now they must wait longer to be served. She forced a croissant down with gulps of hot coffee and was glad to get on the train.

For the last part of the journey she had a lump of fear in her throat, though the worst that could happen was that she would be refused entry. Nobody was likely to think she was a spy and bang her up in gaol, and even if they did, a call to the British Consulate would surely put things right. Only, she dreaded having to face her father, whose comments on this reckless and — as he would see it — self-indulgent excursion she could easily imagine.

As if to spite her, the train crawled along, sometimes stopping altogether. Rain-drenched fields. Reflections of grey-white cloud drifting slowly across flooded furrows. She tried to imagine this land churned up by wheels and horses’ hooves and marching feet, but she couldn’t. And why should I? she thought, hardening again, when this was the reality. Grass, trees, pools full of reflected sky, somewhere in the distance a curlew calling. This is what will be left when all the armies have fought and bled and marched away.

The nurses had gone quiet. Even their high spirits couldn’t be sustained indefinitely, and perhaps, like Elinor, they’d started to feel nervous. Finally, the train crawled into the station, burped apologetically, once or twice, like a drunken husband arriving home late, and fell silent. There was a moment when nobody said or did anything, then the red-haired girl jumped to her feet and got her bag from the overhead rack.

On the platform the soldiers, no longer laughing, shouldered their kitbags and marched off. The civilians left behind looked fragmented and shabby after the uniforms and the disciplined vigorous movement. A porter told them to go into the waiting room, where an officer sat behind a table checking papers.

Elinor positioned herself towards the rear of the line of nurses, making sure, though, that she wasn’t the last. Her mouth was dry, but she could see that the officer was bored doing this routine, unglamorous job and perhaps a little soporific too after a good lunch. A coil of expensive blue smoke rose into the air above his head. His colour was high. He looked as if he liked wine and cigars and women. Boredom and resentment might make him aggressive, but not when there were young women to be flirted with and impressed. She saw him pull his stomach in as soon as he noticed them, and had to stifle a giggle, though it was more from fear than amusement. He kept the first girl — a bank manager’s daughter from Bradford — chatting. Her blushing face and schoolgirl French did make her entrancing. The second girl got much the same treatment, but then a third, a fourth … He looked at the row behind, asked the first girl if they were all together, and when she nodded he stood up and waved them through. Looking back, Elinor saw him settling down again, disconsolately, to face an old man, a married couple and two middle-aged sisters laden with suitcases.

Paul was waiting just inside the arch that led out of the station on to the open muddy street. Whenever she’d tried to imagine this scene he’d always been wearing the long black coat he’d worn last winter at the Slade, but of course he was in uniform, breeches, puttees, tunic, peaked cap, with a Red Cross armband on his right arm. He was looking away from her so that she saw his face in profile, and felt, for a moment, quite detached. A response to his own stillness, his own detachment.

He looked Egyptian, she thought, and not just because of his olive skin. Something about the nose and the heavy-lidded, slanting, dark eyes. It was a face made to be seen in profile, and the straight shoulders and narrow waist reinforced the impression. Perhaps that was why, when, lying in bed at night, she tried to think of him, he was always looking away. Surely you ought to be able to remember a close friend smiling, looking straight into your eyes? But she never could, and she didn’t know whether this detachment came from him or from her.

‘Paul?’

He turned, then, and his face flashed open in a smile that made him immediately look ordinary. She started towards him, but he shook his head, holding up a card he carried with her name on it. In the story they’d concocted, he was merely somebody from the hospital sent to meet a young woman he didn’t know. She drew back, scanned the crowd, eventually allowed herself to notice him standing there, walk forward, greet him and shake him warmly by the hand.

‘There you are.’ He took her bag. ‘This way. I’ve got a cab waiting.’

He took her arm as they crossed the road, but no more than a light pressure on her elbow.

‘We could walk, but I thought with the bag … And you must be tired?’

A quick sideways glance. He seemed shy with her, but then she’d hardly looked at him, except at his profile in the station. Her mind was full of what was to come. Or not. Somehow the theoretical possibility she’d been entertaining that they would spend a few days together as friends had vanished. They’d met as lovers, though awkward, insecure, self-doubting lovers.

Since she couldn’t look at him, she felt she ought to at least raise her eyes and take in the town, but that too seemed to be beyond her. All she could see was muddy boots and swishing skirts and shopping baskets dangling from meaty arms.

Out of the corner of her eye cab wheels appeared. He opened the door and the step tilted as she got in. He gave the address to the driver and walked round to the other side, his weight balancing the vehicle as he sat down beside her. The driver clicked his tongue, lashed the bony horse, and they lurched forward. Paul had been leaning out to close his door when the cab started, and the movement threw him back heavily against the leather seat, and he slid into her. He tried to push himself away. She was afraid they were about to have a stilted conversation about her journey, but then they looked at each other — his eye whites were startling in the gloom of the cab’s interior — and they were kissing, jolted against each other, teeth jarring, losing the other’s mouth and finding it again. She was afraid to stop because then she’d have to look at him and see a stranger. At last they separated, and it was a stranger, white-faced, breathless, black-eyed, Paul as she’d never seen him. She clutched his hand with slippery fingers and they smiled at each other; a brief respite from terror.

‘I’ll have to go back to the hospital. Just for a few hours. You’ll be all right?’

She nodded. ‘Yes.’

Trying to calm herself, she turned and looked out of the window. They were rattling along a cobbled road, tall white houses on either side, their walls dazzling in the late-afternoon sun. Soldiers kept passing on either side. For a time the cab ran along by the side of a canal with tethered barges and tall spindly trees that had begun to strip for winter, their bright yellow leaves twirling down to lie on the brown, smooth, reflecting surface of the water. She took it all in, indelibly; she’d remember those leaves in ten, twenty, forty years’ time, though if she’d been asked fifteen minutes later to describe them she couldn’t have done so.

‘I think you’ll like the room,’ Paul said. ‘It’s a good room to paint in.’

She nodded, though painting was so obviously not what he had in mind that she wanted to laugh, and had to turn aside to hide a smile.

At last they stopped. Paul got out, helped her down and paid the driver. She found herself staring at a narrow doorway in a tall narrow house. Paul knocked and a few seconds later the door was opened by a woman in a blue apron with bare arms as muscular as a man’s and a cloud of fine dark hair lightly streaked with grey. This was Madame Drouet. She greeted Paul with obvious delight, Elinor with considerably more reserve, then led the way upstairs, her broad backside swaying massively from side to side under a dark blue skirt. A caryatid’s backside, Elinor thought — not that you ever saw such a thing — built to hold up the world.

Her room — their room? — was right at the top of the house. The doors to the other rooms stood open and seemed to be storerooms, as far as she could tell. She glimpsed a mattress propped against the wall, and a dolls’ house with two green bay trees painted on either side of the front door. Madame Drouet stopped, turned the stable latch and opened the door on to a white-painted room that was full of light. Elinor went straight to the window. Far below was a narrow back garden, but she was looking out over angled roofs and attic windows. Turning back into the room, she saw a big bed — a bed that seemed to be getting bigger by the minute — a chair with a rush seat, a marble-topped table with a blue-and-white bowl and jug, and a wardrobe with a tarnished mirror set into the door.

‘It’s lovely’ she said, in English.

Paul translated, but it wasn’t necessary. Madame Drouet’s face had already cracked into a smile. ‘I hope you will be very happy here.’

As she spoke a shaft of sunlight reached the brass knobs on the bed, and they winked, knowingly, at Elinor. She had a vague, but vivid, sense that the room was more than a room, that it contained her future. Madame Drouet was still smiling. She likes it that we’re not married, Elinor thought. She likes the idea of illicit sex on the top floor of her house, or perhaps she likes the idea of Paul having illicit sex in her house. Madame Drouet closed the door, still smiling, and, like the Cheshire Cat, seemed to leave her smile hanging in the air after the rest of her had gone.

As soon as they were alone, they kissed again, trembling and laughing, trying to recapture the impersonal passion that had gripped them in the cab, but not quite managing it.

‘I have to go, I’m afraid,’ Paul said, taking out his watch as he spoke. ‘I’m late.’

First the Cheshire Cat, now the White Rabbit, Elinor thought. She pinched the skin on her left wrist hoping the pain would restore the material world, but she continued to feel that the afternoon had become unexpectedly bizarre, and that she hardly recognized the self who was standing there.

They kissed. He went. She followed him to the end of the corridor and watched his head and shoulders descending the stairs, leaving her behind, going off about his business of which she knew nothing.

Back in the room she sat on the bed and tested it. The clanging of springs was so noisy she felt everybody in the house must hear, but that was nonsense of course. The room next door was used only for storage. She heaved her bag on to the bed and began unpacking. The wardrobe was so shallow she had to push the hangers sideways to get the door to close, but the wood smelled of something dry and sweet. Then she was at a loss. She stood at the window looking out over the roofs, as the sinking sun cast angular shadows that had not been there when she first looked out only half an hour ago. At one point she got up and fetched her sketchbook, but she couldn’t settle, couldn’t see anything. Her eye glided over surfaces, taking nothing in. Perhaps she should try to get some sleep, but then, looking down into the garden, she felt a blaze of energy. There’d be time enough to sleep when she was dead.

Quickly she poured water into the bowl, washed, ran a comb through her hair, grabbed a sketchbook and went out into the street.

Twenty-four

Elinor found a café in the main square, where she sat for an hour, lingering over her coffee and watching passers-by in the market. Three men at the next table were waiting impatiently to be served. At last Madame appeared, a tall, heavy, dark-haired woman with premature creases in her upper lip, perhaps from the cigarettes she constantly and surreptitiously smoked or perhaps from her habit of clamping notes and even coins between her teeth while she negotiated the till, a shark of a machine that seemed determined to have her fingers off.

This was a small town. In her imagination it had swollen to the size of London or Paris, a vast anonymous city where you could move from place to palce and never bump into anybody you knew. Now the town had shrunk to its real dimensions she expected to see Kit at any moment, and what would she find to say to him? How could she explain her presence here when her last letter had been full of what was happening at the Slade with not a whisper of any projected trip to Belgium? He would be hurt, and rightly so. She waited until the shadows started to lengthen. Then she walked rapidly back along the little side street she’d discovered, reaching the house just as the white bowl of the street began to fill with darkness, from the pavement upwards, like somebody pouring tea into a cup.

She lay down on the bed and, although she felt she wouldn’t be able to sleep — too much whirring round inside her head — in fact she dropped off almost at once and when she woke again it was dark. She changed into the only dress she’d brought with her and had just finished brushing her hair when somebody tapped on the door. ‘Come in,’ she called, thinking it would be Madame Drouet, but no, it was Paul, still in uniform, looking tired and excited and unsure of himself in a way that made her stomach melt.

They looked at each other, aware of the angled roofs framed by the window and the moon staring in at them. The rumpled bed looked huge and white.

Paul laughed. ‘Come on, let’s go and eat. You must be famished.’

They went into town a different way, walking side by side, not touching, though she would have liked to take his arm. Just as they entered the square, they had to pause to let a crowd of nurses and men in wheelchairs cross the road. Drained, Elinor thought, as if somebody had pulled the plug and let their lifeblood run away. One man had bandages round his ears, with two red stains on the white gauze. She’d been telling Paul about her little trip to the café in the square. He’d said, ‘That’s where I go to write letters. You were probably sitting at the same table,’ but after the wounded were wheeled past they walked on in silence till they reached the restaurant.

They ordered beef in red wine with potatoes and beans and a carafe of red wine. Paul could hardly wait to pour it out. He drank two glasses quickly, like lemonade on a hot day, caught her watching him, and said, ‘Sorry! I’m not human till I’ve had a couple of drinks.’ But then, immediately, he poured himself another. The sight of his Adam’s apple jerking as he gulped the wine down was shocking, not like the Paul she knew at all. She was afraid he was going to sit there and get drunk, but no, with the third glass the rate of drinking slowed. After the food arrived, he drank very little. He looked better too, not so white.

‘You haven’t changed at all,’ he said.

You have, she thought. There were lines around his mouth and eyes that hadn’t been there the last time she saw him, but he’d gained weight.

‘You look a lot better.’

‘I feel better.’

‘No cough?’

‘No-o.’

She shrugged. ‘I was worried, that’s all. When they said about your mother and TB.’

‘My mother?’ For a second he looked blank. ‘No, she didn’t have TB. That’s on my father’s side.’

She tried asking him questions about his work at the hospital, but he obviously didn’t want to talk about that. Soon she was chattering on about her life in London, presenting it to him as more light-hearted, more like the life they used to share, than it really was. Trying to be honest, she mentioned Toby’s rows with her father about enlisting, which for a time had made every weekend painful, and about Catherine’s problems. There’d been riots, would you believe, in Deptford. Bricks through windows, houses set on fire, women and children joining in, not just the men, and the police watching.

‘What about your work?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I keep going. I had three paintings accepted for the New English Gallery.’

‘Three?’

‘Yes, I was surprised.’ She held up a hand to stop him refilling her glass. ‘What about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘Are you finding time to do any work?’

A brief smile, noting that what he did at the hospital apparently didn’t count as work. ‘A bit.’

She waited for him to go on, sensing that he both did and didn’t want to talk about this. ‘Sketches mainly. It hasn’t really been possible to paint, though of course now I’ve got the room it might be different.’

‘It’s a lovely room.’

‘Yes, I’ve been going there on my days off.’

She finished eating and pushed her plate away. ‘What do you draw?’

‘Oh, people at the hospital. Patients.’ His tone hardened. ‘That’s what I see. Though I don’t know what the point of it is. Nobody’s going to hang that sort of thing in a gallery.’

‘Why would you want them to?’

‘Because it’s there. They’re there, the people, the men. And it’s not right their suffering should just be swept out of sight.’

‘I’d have thought it was even less right to put it on the wall of a public gallery. Can’t you imagine it? People peering at other people’s suffering and saying, “Oh my dear, how perfectly dreadful” — and then moving on to the next picture. It would just be a freak show. An arty freak show.’

Silence. They’d become surprisingly intense and were wondering whether to go on with the conversation or stop now before it became too confrontational.

‘Anyway’ she said, ‘I thought you didn’t do people. Do you remember Tonks saying some of your nudes didn’t look human?’

‘That wouldn’t necessarily be a disadvantage here.’

‘You can’t use people like that.’

‘I’m not using anybody.’

Silence again, louder this time.

‘What’s your solution, then? Ignore it?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Totally The truth is, it’s been imposed on us from the outside. You would never have chosen it and probably the men in the hospital wouldn’t either. It’s unchosen, it’s passive, and I don’t think that’s a proper subject for art.’

‘So, what is?’

She lifted her head. ‘The things we choose to love.’

‘Hmm. No, I’ll think about it. I didn’t really mean us to argue, you know.’

‘It’s better than the attitude you get at home. Most people seem to think art should stop for the duration. Inherently trivial. Like buying a new hat.’

‘They should have met one of our patients. You’d have liked him. He was an apache.’

‘An Indian?’

‘Not that kind. He was a criminal. The French have special regiments for criminals to … I don’t know, pay their debt to society, I suppose. They’re supposed to be very good on the battlefield — born killers — but not so good at sticking it out between times. But the point about him was, he was covered in tattoos. Not his face and hands but literally everywhere else, every inch. And they were good. They were art. He’d used his own skin as the canvas, that’s all. Now, that man was probably born in the gutter, knocked from pillar to post… But he didn’t think art was irrelevant. Or trivial. He suffered for it.’

‘Ornamenting himself. Is it the same thing?’

‘In his case, yes, I think it was. Oh, and by the way, he didn’t need ornament. He was extraordinarily beautiful.’

Something deep inside Elinor pricked up its ears. Beautiful was not a word pre-war Paul could ever have brought himself to use about another man. He was changing, in all kinds of ways, probably. They both were.

‘Right, then,’ he said, raising his hand to summon the waitress. ‘Coffee. Would you like something to go with it?’

She shook her head. He was pleating the edge of the tablecloth, smoothing it out, pleating it again. ‘My mother didn’t have TB,’ he said at last. ‘She killed herself

‘Oh, Paul, I’m sorry, I had no idea.’ She stared around the café as if there were help in waiters and chattering diners. ‘How old were you?’

‘Fourteen. She was in a lunatic asylum for the last two years, in and out before that.’ He made himself stop fiddling with the cloth. ‘I don’t think about it much.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No. Well, a bit, I suppose, when the anniversary comes round, but it’s got all mixed up in my head anyway. I think I remember the first time they took her away, I remember seeing the van drive away with her inside it, but I know I can’t have seen that, because I was sent away from the house so I wouldn’t see.’

‘That must have been awful.’

‘The worse thing is I think part of me was relieved when she died because it meant I didn’t have to go on visiting that place.’

There was nothing she could say to comfort him. She reached across the table and folded his hands in hers.

They came out to find the whole street lit up by a magnificent full moon, which looked down on the town and seemed to deride its blue-painted street lamps. Even the shiny road surface reflected a blurred white light back at the sky. Elinor looked up and saw how slack-bellied and stretch-marked it was, really, a mad old woman who’d decided to follow them home for reasons no sane person could guess at.

There were no people on the streets and the only sound was a mutter of guns in the distance and closer at hand the rumble of vehicles going up to the front.

‘Let’s walk a bit, shall we?’ he said.

She knew he was trying to change the mood of the evening, to effect the transformation from friends to lovers before they got back to the house. Above all to erase the memory of his mother’s suicide. She wanted to ask more but she daren’t. She felt he’d given her a key and done so very deliberately, but she’d no time to think about it. He put his arm around her shoulders, and they walked on. A misshapen blotch of darkness, they must have seemed from the outside. Part of Elinor had detached itself and was now sitting on a rooftop somewhere watching them cross the square. She seemed to see the whole town spread out below her.

‘It thinks it’s safe, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, the town thinks it’s safe. It’s really quite a smug little place.’

‘Well, it is safe. Safe as you can be with a war going on up the road.’

‘I like it. It doesn’t seem to care about religion or the state or anything much except itself

‘Making money.’

‘No, I mean like Dutch painting, you know? It loves its own life. This life. It doesn’t need anything outside to give it meaning. And the armies can march all over it, and it doesn’t care.’

They walked on, feeling their hips jostle as they tried to match their strides. ‘Do you miss me?’ he asked.

‘Do you miss me?’

‘Yes, but it’s different for me, because I’ve never been with you here, so there isn’t a gap. And I don’t get much time to think.’

‘No, in other words.’

‘I wouldn’t have asked you to come.’

‘Why did you?’

‘I needed you. A bit selfish, I suppose.’

‘Oh, you’re allowed a little bit. You’re doing more than most.’

She shivered and he put his arm around her shoulder. ‘Come on, let’s go back.’

He had a key. She hadn’t been expecting that, and it made everything easier. Stumbling along the top corridor, they saw a line of orange light underneath the door, and opened it to find that a fire had been lit in the tiny grate. Flames and their shadows chased each other all over the walls.

He reached for the switch. She said, urgently, ‘No.’ They undressed in the circle of light, throwing their clothes into two dark heaps on the floor. He got into bed first, with a theatrical chattering of teeth, burrowing down into the cold sheets and pulling back the covers on her side. She felt unshelled, goose-pimply anything but seductive, but in bed they shuffled closer together and pulled the covers up to their faces until only their cold noses stuck out over the top. The firelight had got into his eyes.

It was different from that time in London, the last evening they spent together before he went to Belgium, when they’d come so close to making love. Then, she’d been excited by the sight of her own breasts against a man’s chest, rather than by anything Paul did. Tonight, she lost herself. She looked up once and saw him watching her. When he climaxed, he hid his face in her neck and then slid sideways on to the pillow, gripping the cloth between his teeth, snorting and pulling and tearing. In those last few seconds, he couldn’t have been aware of who he was with. Perhaps it was the shyness of their first time, which he might feel as much as she did, though he’d shown no other sign. But no, she thought, she’d discovered something about Paul that she hadn’t known before and couldn’t have found out any other way. Lovemaking for him would always be communion with a private god.

Then, almost immediately, the perception was lost. They were laughing with triumph, pushing the bedclothes back, not cold now, not cold at all, trampling the counterpane down to the foot of the bed, admiring the shadows the firelight cast on the hills and valleys of their bodies.

Then he talked for the first time about the hospital. She lay on his chest and felt the vibration his voice made, not listening; not wanting to know. One word kept recurring: Lewis this, Lewis that, Lewis the other.

‘Am I going to meet this Lewis?’

He seemed surprised. ‘Yes, I suppose so. Yes, why not?’

This is where his life was now. She remembered how he’d smiled as she talked about her life in London, the painting, the exhibitions, the Café Royal, the Slade — like somebody looking through the windows of a dolls’ house.

‘I’m sorry if I’ve gone on a bit. It’s just there’s nobody to talk to here.’

‘Lewis?’ she said, her tone now frankly ironical.

‘You don’t talk about the hospital when you come off duty.’ He lay and thought, started to say something, ended by laughing. ‘Do you know, at the end of a shift we sometimes just sit in silence?’

‘You could always paint.’

‘What, a man peeing out of the hole where his penis used to be? Oh, yes, a great demand for that.’

‘No, other things. Landscapes. The things you used to paint.’

‘No, it’s all a mess, I don’t know what to do with it. Anyway, we’d better get some sleep.’

He rolled over and kissed her, and they made love again, more gently, lingering, taking time. Only at the end did he turn his face away. Afterwards, they lay back to back, their spines touching, like a butterfly, she thought. Their spines were its body, their arms and legs its wings. She could feel his hands all over her now, even when he wasn’t touching her, as if they’d left a permanent imprint on her skin. She was thinking about this, trying to find the words to express it, but it was too much trouble to open her mouth, and an instant later she must have drifted off to sleep, because when she opened her eyes again the fire was out and grey rainy light was leaking under the skimped curtains, finding the little puddles of clothes they’d left on the floor.

She turned over and found him still asleep. He’d turned to face her so the butterfly they’d made together was already broken, before she moved. She lay and listened to his breathing, a little whistle at the end of every breath. His arm was flung across his face — he hid himself, even in sleep — and it came to her that he didn’t love her at all. The conviction was absolute for about one moment, then began to soften with the strengthening light.

He woke abruptly, going from sleep to complete wakefulness in a second, like an animal alert for danger. Almost at once he swung himself out of bed. Perhaps he thought he was late for the hospital, though after he looked at his watch he came back and kissed her. She watched him dress, donning the unfamiliar uniform that clearly, to him, had become a second skin. Her hip joints ached, her lips felt bruised, she was blinking and dazed, her whole body felt different, and there he stood dressed for work. He’d opened the window wide and a stream of cold air came in.

‘I’ll see you tonight,’ he said, bending over for a final, abstracted kiss, and then he was gone.

There had to be a reason why she always remembered him in profile. Certainly, if she ever did try to paint him, he’d be turned away, searching for something — or somebody — but not expecting to find whatever it was. The loss had been long ago, and now only the posture, the expression, remained. What she loved most about him was the quality of detachment that prevented his ever really loving her.

She was nowhere near as unhappy as this thought should have made her feel. In fact she wasn’t unhappy at all. He’d hardly reached the end of the street when she jumped out of bed and started to get dressed, eager for the day that lay ahead.

Twenty-five

She wasn’t lonely, though she hardly spoke to a soul all day. This was what she liked: being alone in a strange city, walking by the canal, smelling dank water, dead leaves and grass, staring at people in the streets and at lunchtime pushing open the door of a little café, and finding nobody there except a woman with auburn hair who smiled at her but didn’t speak. Kit was constantly in her mind, the dread of meeting him, of having to explain, so finding this almost empty café was a relief. After lunch, she sat in the park and sketched, watching, out of the corner of her eye, a group of schoolgirls in blue uniforms, who sat on the next bench and twittered together, as unselfconscious as the birds who gathered round them in expectation of crumbs. By the time they’d gone, long blue shadows were creeping across the grass, and it was time to go home.

Back in the room, though, she felt insubstaintial, the result of eating scarcely anything and speaking to nobody all day. She put her sketches away in a folder, then settled down to draw the rooftops from her window, but it was getting too dark and soon she had to stop. She was thinking about Paul all the time, but she felt peaceful, now, not inclined to pick and tear at the relationship as she’d wanted to do when she first woke up.

Round about the time she expected Paul to arrive, she heard a quick, heavy footstep on the stairs and jumped up to greet him, but it was Madame Drouet. There was a young man downstairs, she said, with a distinctly disapproving air. Oh, Elinor said. She couldn’t think who it could be, but immediately her mind filled with the dread that Kit had some how found out where she was and had turned up like an outraged husband to demand an explanation. Apart from Kit she knew nobody here, but then she remembered Lewis. Yes. But why hadn’t Paul come with him? She ran a brush through her hair and went downstairs, smoothing her skirt nervously as she reached the last few steps. She had no idea what to expect, certainly not this extraordinary-looking youth with hair that seemed about to take off.

‘Good evening,’ he said.

Oh dear. He sounded as shy as she felt, or worse.

‘You must be Lewis.’

‘Yes, that’s right. Paul had to go into theatre so he asked me to take you to the restaurant.’

‘All right. Wait a minute, I’ll get my hat.’

She ran all the way upstairs and all the way down again, wondering what on earth she would find to talk to him about until Paul arrived.

‘Is Lewis your first name or your second?’ she asked as they set off.

‘Second. My first name’s Richard, but nobody ever uses it. Well, except at home.’

‘But Paul is always Paul.’

‘Yes, he is, isn’t he?’

‘I used to use my surname at college sometimes.’

‘I’ve never heard of girls doing that.’ He glanced sideways at her, curious. ‘Why did you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it was a way of saying, Take us seriously. It’s hard, you know, for girls to be taken seriously as artists. We don’t do it so much now.’

They walked a little way in silence. ‘What’s keeping Paul?’

‘He had to go into theatre. We had a rush on. Did he tell you they’ve made him a dresser now?’

She couldn’t remember. ‘That’s special, is it?’

‘You have to be pretty good.’

She caught the note of hero-worship in his voice, the way Andrew sounded, sometimes, when he talked about Toby.

‘So what do you do exactly? If you’re a dresser?’

‘You bandage them up after they come out of theatre. Some of the wounds are … quite difficult.’

‘I’ll bet.’

He looked startled, then laughed. ‘Paul’s not pleased, because he thinks now they won’t let him drive an ambulance.’

‘Which is what he volunteered for.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you? What do you want to do?’

He was striding ahead. She had to trot to keep up with him.

‘The same, I suppose. I know it’s wrong, because you ought to be prepared to do whatever needs doing most, but no, I’ve got to admit, I’d rather drive an ambulance.’

That speech, which should have sounded priggish, but didn’t, because his enthusiasm and energy kept bursting through, confirmed her liking for him. More than liking, perhaps. Attraction. He was attractive, in spite of his freckly skin and staring hair. He didn’t look human, not entirely human. Ariel. That’s who he was. She smiled as she sat down at the café table and looked across at him. Ariel and Miranda.

She suggested a carafe of red wine while they waited. He hardly seemed to know what to do and kept looking at the door hoping salvation in the shape of Paul might suddenly appear. When the wine had been brought to the table and poured, she asked, ‘Do you think you’ll get your ambulance?’

‘I don’t know. We keep nudging them.’

We. Evidently this had become a joint project.

‘Nurses are coming out all the time now. Proper nurses, so you never know, we might be lucky. Anyway’ he raised his glass. ‘To happier times.’

He was happy now, and because of the times, not in spite of them.

‘Didn’t you ever think of enlisting?’

He flushed, perhaps suspecting her of being about to produce a white feather. Little did he know.

‘No, I’m a Friend. It wasn’t an option.’

‘A Friend?’

‘A Quaker. We oppose all wars.’

‘Because Jesus said so?’

‘Yes — and because the inner light leads us in that direction. I know, that probably strikes you as —’

‘Doesn’t strike me as anything, particularly. I don’t think I have the right to judge other people’s decisions. I’m a woman. Nobody’s asking me to fight.’

‘And you don’t want to … nurse?’

‘Good God, no.’

‘So what do you do?’

‘Ignore it — as far as I can.’

‘And how far is that?’

‘Not very far, because there’s Paul, and there’s my brother who’s joined the army. And I’ve got a German friend whose father’s just been interned. But I keep working. Painting,’ she explained, to cut off the question.

‘Landscapes, Paul says.’

‘Quakers pray in silence, don’t they?’

She couldn’t have done that, not that she prayed much at all. But to lose the vaulted aisles, the stained glass, the music, the words of the Book of Common Prayer and put nothing in its place except silence and other people’s faces and tummy rumbles. God, no.

‘Yes, we have a meeting at the hospital every Sunday morning. Paul joins us now and then.’

So, added to the image of Paul expertly winding bandages around amputated stumps, she had to try to imagine him sitting in a hut in silence, surrounded by earnest, well-meaning — but surely rather dull? — men. Women too, presumably — all excellent people, no doubt. But Paul?

At that moment, as if summoned by her incredulity, Paul appeared in the doorway and began threading his way between the tables. As he bent to kiss her, she smelled the cool night air on his cheek, overlaying, without hiding, the hospital smell of disinfectant and blood. He nodded to Lewis, picked up the carafe and caught the waiter’s eye, before sitting down. Silently she passed her own almost full glass across to him. He looked slightly embarrassed, but took it nevertheless.

‘Cheers,’ he said, toasting them both, but nothing could hide his need for that first glass.

She went on talking to Lewis, aware all the time of Paul, of the colour coming back into his face. She could see Lewis was concerned. We’ve a lot in common, she thought. We’re both in love with Paul. Three months ago, she wouldn’t have thought to use those words.

A waitress, with a white cloth tied round her waist, came up to the table. She was invisible to them, standing there with a pad and pencil in her hand, but then, when Paul looked up to give the order, she said, ‘I haven’t seen you here for a long time.’

‘No.’ He’d flushed slightly. ‘I’ve been busy.’

‘And you too, Monsieur Lewis. You have been too much occupied, I think?’

Lewis agreed that he had been too much occupied. After she went, there was an awkward pause, and then Lewis and Paul both rushed in to break it, frustrating each other’s efforts. Elinor stared down into her glass, realized she didn’t care — she ought to care, but she didn’t — and then she started to smile, and then to laugh.

Paul stared at her in amazement. ‘What’s funny?’ He sounded irritable, resentful even.

‘Nothing. I’m just happy to be here.’

They ate some spicy sausages with potatoes. Paul looked even more tired than he had the night before and contributed little. Elinor talked about the things she’d seen and done that day, the places she’d sketched, and they asked about home, about London. Had it changed much? No. The searchlights were beautiful, there was a huge gun on Hampstead Heath, all the lamps were painted blue. The worst thing was the gutter press — always going on about ‘the enemy within’. Lewis asked about the Slade, what was it like now? A convent, she said. A nunnery. A herd of sheep with Tonks the only ram, but she kept faltering into silence.

Paul burst out that when he looked back on those days now he thought they’d all been barking mad.

‘No,’ she said. ‘This is mad.’

‘Well, all right.’ He was tapping his fingers on the table. God, he was bad-tempered. ‘Perhaps not mad, but like children. Spoiled, self-indulgent, selfish children.’

‘And this is better? Young men in wheelchairs. Or dead.’

‘At least it’s not contemptible.’

‘And we were?’

‘Weren’t we?’

She shook her head. Lewis tried to change the subject, and from then on she concentrated entirely on him, asking him about his schooldays — not long past — and his ambitions for the future. He wanted to play the piano, he said, professionally, but he didn’t know if he was good enough. If he couldn’t do that, he’d teach.

‘Music?’

‘Oh, yes — I don’t know about anything else.’

It had been a warm day — perhaps the last day of the long Indian summer. It couldn’t go on much longer, they were into November now — and the café was airless. She seemed to be breathing in the same breath over and over again. And the candles didn’t help.

When the rumbling started, she thought: thunder. Good. She’d always loved storms. She imagined them lying on the bed with the curtains open, blue flashes lighting up their bodies; and they wouldn’t need to talk, and perhaps that was just as well. Then she became uneasy. Paul and Lewis were staring at each other, not alarmed, just puzzled.

‘That was close,’ Lewis said.

Then the candles guttered and the whole room shook and from the look on people’s faces she realized it wasn’t thunder.

Paul had gone white. ‘It’s a stray. Has to be.’

But even as he spoke there was another crash and everything on the table did a little jump into the air. The light bulb was swinging at the end of its flex, sending shadows from side to side. All the people in the room seemed to be clinging to the clapper of a bell. The electric light flickered again, only it was more than a flicker now. A long, fierce, edge-of-darkness buzzing and then the lights went out. The candles, which were really no more than ornaments, wobbled but kept going, giving just enough light to show people’s faces and hands. What Elinor remembered afterwards was the inertia. Nobody moved. They couldn’t believe it had happened; they didn’t want to abandon their nice meals and their bottles of wine, and so they all just sat there, staring at each other, until another thud, closer, brought with it the sound of breaking glass.

Scraping chairs, screams, panic. Paul grabbed her and dragged her towards the door. Lewis was just behind them, treading on their heels. Outside in the dark people were running all in different directions, but Paul stood on the pavement with his hand gripping her upper arm. She wanted to run too, though there was no point running from danger that struck randomly from the air.

‘I’d better get back,’ Lewis said.

‘Yes,’ Paul said. ‘You go.’

Lewis felt for her hand. ‘I’ll see you again.’

She nodded, stammered something and then he was gone, running like a stag down the centre of the road. Paul put his arm around her and they walked back, slowly, to the house. At intervals, the ground shuddered under their feet. The streets were ravines of darkness now, all the lights extinguished, only in the sky was a whirl of sparks flying upwards and an orange glow lighting the underbelly of the clouds.

Another explosion. Paul took her hand. ‘Come on. Not far now.’

As soon as they turned the corner and saw the house they started to run, though running made her more afraid. She stood, gasping for breath, while Paul fitted the key in the lock. The back of his hand was meaty red with the light from the sky. They got inside and switched on the light, but nothing happened.

‘Madame?’ Paul called. They waited but there was no answer. ‘She’ll have gone to her mother’s.’

The walls and floor seemed to be trembling all the time now, not just when a shell landed. They went down to the kitchen. You had to go down a flight of stairs to get to it; once there they looked for another door leading down to the cellar, but the one Elinor tried opened on to a cupboard full of deckchairs and old coats.

‘There’ll be candles,’ Paul said, opening the cupboard under the sink and beginning to rummage about among floorcloths and scrubbing brushes, but he didn’t find any. Elinor opened the curtains and the full moon shone in. Another shell burst, and the rocking chair in the corner started to rock as if to comfort itself. The grinding of its rollers on the stone floor was worse than the bombs and she went across to it and held it still.

‘Under the table,’ Paul said.

‘No, I want my passport.’

‘That can wait.’

‘No it can’t, I want it now.’

‘All right, but you’ll have to be quick.’

Though when they got to the top of the house he was the first to go across and stand at the window. It was far worse than she’d thought. At street level you couldn’t see the extent of the devastation. Up here, the cloth tower was encircled by fires and seemed to float above the city, borne aloft on billowing clouds of smoke.

Because this window was level with the roofs, they could follow the shells as they came in. Three hundred yards away a house burst open, like a ripe pod, as if the pressure came from within. She felt Paul beside her.

‘I ought to go back to the hospital. If it’s hit …’

She didn’t ask him not to leave her, and in the end he didn’t go, though she could feel him disliking her for standing between him and his duty. That’s why it’s called the forbidden zone. That’s why they didn’t want wives and girlfriends here.

She found her passport and money and they crept downstairs again and sheltered under the kitchen table. From time to time the floor shook. Paul built a barricade of chairs intended to protect them from flying glass. At first every explosion made her heart jump, though she made no sound, not because she was brave, but because she’d found out the hard way that her own cries frightened her. It was easier to be stocial, to force her clenched fingers to uncurl. They talked about their childhoods, the good parts, the woods and fields, the excitement of learning to paint, and then he talked more about his mother. The years of her illness when he hadn’t known from day to day which face she would turn towards him.

‘Eventually she stuck a pair of scissors in my neck. That’s when Dad decided we couldn’t manage with her at home any more.’

Through her fear of the repeated shockwaves shaking the table Elinor reached out and took his hand. ‘Make love to me.’ She didn’t know what else to say.

‘I’m not sure I can. I’m frightened too, you know.’

But there was no problem. Afterwards, leaning on Paul’s shoulder, she managed to get some sleep, and woke with a neck so stiff she could barely move. The room was lit with dirty-dishwater light and the shelling seemed to have stopped. They drank cup after cup of hot, strong coffee until her veins buzzed, and then walked out into a street covered with plaster dust, like grey snow. A thin mist of dust hung on the air; they’d walked only a few yards and their heads and shoulders were white. It got into your throat. Paul was coughing really badly. She looked around. Buildings still burned, the flames licking blackened timbers. Some of the house fronts had been ripped off and all the little private things laid bare: wallpaper, counterpanes, chamber pots, sofas, a crucifix hanging askew above a bed, a little girl’s doll. It was indecent. In one living room everything had been smashed except for the china ornaments on the mantelpiece, which sat there, bizarrely untouched. A huge puddle of water lay in a dip in the road where the fire engines had worked all night to damp down the smouldering timbers. As she watched, rings of rain began to pockmark the surface. She saw it in the puddle before she felt it on the back of her neck. It seemed important somehow to notice and remember that. Important and meaningless.

In a daze they began to walk towards the square. In the centre were several bundles covered with rugs or blankets. At first she thought some families bombed out of their homes had rescued their possessions and covered them to keep them dry. She was almost standing over the bundles before she saw the feet sticking out of one covering, a hand out of another. Further on were other people lined up but not yet covered: a woman with a little dog in her arms, three other women, two men, and then, lying on the cobbles, a child. She thought, how strange it was, to lie on the cold ground looking up at the sky with rain falling into your eyes, and not blink or turn your head away.

Paul’s voice in her ear. ‘Come on, now. Come away.’

She hadn’t known she was shaking till he touched her. Now she looked up into his face. His eyelids were crusted with white dust. In the middle of it all, a red, wet mouth making sounds. ‘We’ve got to get you to the station before it starts again.’

‘It mightn’t.’

‘Why would they stop?’

So they ran back along the cratered road. She looked down one of the side streets and saw water from a burst main jetting fifteen, twenty feet into the air and a gang of boys daring each other to run through it. Their dark figures leaping about against the plume of water were full of joy.

She was packed in minutes. They hardly spoke. Paul tried to help, but two people packing one bag doesn’t work so he went and stood with his back to her, staring out of the window. She thought about her mother and father. Until she saw the child lying dead in the square she hadn’t given them a thought. Now she thought of nothing else.

When she’d checked that she’d got everything, she joined Paul by the window. One of the houses that had been hit last night had a green silk bedspread lolling out of its upper window. It looked … sluttish.

‘Well,’ Paul said, turning to face her. ‘That’s that, then. We’d better go.’

Paul carried the suitcase, striding ahead so fast she had to run to keep up with him. The station was packed. Ruthless suddenly, nothing like the man she thought she knew, he elbowed his way through the crowds. They stood near the edge of the platform, looking up and down the line, not knowing when, or if, a train would arrive. Many of the other people looked like refugees, weighed down with as many possessions as they could carry.

‘Write as soon as you can,’ Paul said.

She could see him itching to get back to the hospital. ‘Look, why don’t you go? I’ll be all right.’

‘No, you won’t. This is going to be a real scrum.’

It was. As soon as the train appeared the crowd surged forward. If it hadn’t been for Paul, she’d have ended up on the line. As it was she lost a shoe. The guards shouted and blew whistles and yelled at people to keep back, but they were clawing at the sides of the train before it stopped. Paul got on and hauled her up behind him, then had to fight to get off again. She was hemmed in on all sides, her suitcase, or somebody else’s, cutting into her calf. She wasn’t sure her feet were on the ground, even, and she couldn’t see anything except backs and heads and necks. Whistles blew, doors slammed. At the last moment she twisted her head and saw him standing there, one hand raised, and then somebody moved and a shoulder hid him from her sight.

Twenty-six

Paul to Elinor

The hospital itself wasn’t bombed, though we have a huge crater a hundred yards away to show how close we came. There’s talk of evacuating us to somewhere further back, but we underlings play no part in such decisions. Lewis and I have both put in for ambulance driving again, and, since we’re supposed to be getting an influx of professional nurses soon, we may succeed. I don’t want to go further back. All the pressure is to go the other way, to be part of it, though I’m sure I shall hate it.

They brought a child in last week, a little boy, ten years old perhaps. It’s not supposed to happen, but the ambulance driver who’d been flagged down at the side of the road by the parents just dumped him here and drove off before anybody could argue. He’d lost both arms. The stumps were curiously like wings. When he tried to move them he looked like a fledgling trying to fly. Even with the morphine he was in terrible pain. His mother visited — she runs a café on the outskirts of the town — I’ve been there once or twice — but they were busy doing repairs so they could open again so she wasn’t here often. One night I was on my way to change his dressings. I pulled aside the screen and found her there, bending over him. She turned round when she heard me, and I apologized and went away. I meant to give them a few minutes alone and then go back, but something else cropped up so it was over an hour before I got back. His mother had gone. He was lying there, alone, with his eyes closed and at first I thought he was asleep, but then I noticed his chest wasn’t moving and when I touched his skin he was growing cold. Everybody said, What a merciful release. Sister Naylor cried. She’d have liked to put flowers in his hands, I think, only of course he had no hands to put them in. Mr Burton, who’d done the operation, was called and like everybody else said, Perhaps it’s just as well. But then, when we were alone — I’d got the job of laying him out — Burton pushed up the child’s lids and said, ‘Look, petechiae.’ (They’re little red spots — haemorrhages — in the whites of the eye.) I didn’t understand. He said, ‘She smothered him.’

It’s strange, isn’t it? You go on and on, or I do rather, seeing God knows what horrors and learning not to care or anyway not to care more than you need to do the job, and then something happens that gets right under your skin. I can’t forget them, the boy and his mother, the look on her face when she turned round and saw me standing there. She had a pillow in her hands. I didn’t realize. What would I have done if I had?

If I don’t get a transfer to ambulance work soon, I think I may have to take some leave.

Elinor to Paul

I wish you would take leave. It would be lovely to see you here and just sit in Lockhart’s having a coffee or go for a meal or back home for toasted crumpets by the fire and … Anything to be together again. I thought seeing you out there would make you feel closer, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. It feels as if you’re in the belly of the whale and I’m out here on dry land. Just. The war impinges a little more each day. The papers are full of atrocity stories, they seem designed to whip up feeling against Germans living here. Catherine feels it very badly.

I missed classes last week. I had to go to stay with my sister. The new baby arrived five days ago, a boy. Mother was in the bedroom trying to take over from the midwife, and then things were going so slowly the doctor had to be called. I walked up and down the corridor outside, standing in for the absent father who’s doing important work in the War Office and couldn’t be spared. Eventually Rache’s cries stopped and I heard the chink of instruments so I thought the doctor must have decided it had gone on long enough. It certainly had — thirty-six hours! — and then there was a cry, a wail rather, and relief all round. I went in to see the baby who had forceps marks on either side of his head, as if he’d been mauled by an animal. Oh Paul, his skin. You know how a poppy looks when you peel the outer green casing back too early? It looked like that: red, moist, creased and then, gradually, it started to fill out. Even a few hours made a difference. Rachel looked shocked. She wasn’t at all the blooming contented mother I’d been expecting. She said labour was the best-kept secret in the world though when I think of some of the noises coming through the bedroom door, I don’t think it can be all that well kept.

At least then we thought, it’s over. But it wasn’t. A few hours later the doctor had to be called back, Rachel was losing so much blood. In fact she collapsed just as he arrived. I think when he walked through the door he thought she was dead. They had to raise the foot of the bed to try to slow the bleeding down. We sat up with her all night and gradually she became a little stronger. Now she can sit up though only for ten minutes at a time. She has to eat raw liver twice a day. I can’t bear to watch her. I go out of the room. You can hear her crying and choking as she tries to force it down.

But the baby’s lovely. I watch the nurse bathe him. When he’s held out over the water there’s a moment when he goes perfectly still. Then the water touches him, and his chin wobbles and he makes little convulsive movements with his arms and sucks his breath in. Of course everybody oohs and ahs, but there’s something terrible about the little naked scrap dangling over the abyss.

It’s been an extremely educational week. I think the role of eccentric maiden aunt will suit me very well. Though I suppose it’s a bit late for the maiden part. I do miss you, Paul.

Did I tell you I’ve almost decided to move? Yes, I know, again. So: more decorating, more buckets of glutinous muck, and no Ruthie to help this time. Doesn’t approve of me any more. She’s volunteered to go out to France and is waiting to hear so can’t be bothered with silly empty-headed people who go on painting while Rome burns. I’ve got to get out of here. Downstairs there are Belgian refugees, grumbling like mad about the food and the weather — which is awful. The rain it raineth every day.

How is it over there? I don’t know what to say about the little boy. How horrible. I hope they let you drive an ambulance soon if that’s what you want, but I’d be even more pleased if you came home on leave.

Toby went off to Scarborough last week on some sort of course, but he had a weekend at home first and saw the new baby. He’s expecting to be sent out early next year. We went for a long walk around all our special places and talked about the future with great determination. After it was over and he was gone I realized my cheeks ached and I couldn’t think why and then I realized it was because I’d been forcing myself to smile for hours and hours.

Barbara — I don’t know if you remember her, she used to go around a lot with Marjorie Bradshaw? — just came in to say she’s been taken on by the Omega workshops, starting after Christmas. Three mornings’ work for thirty shillings a week. She doesn’t mind designing cushions and decorating teapots. I suppose it might be quite fun really, though some people are awfully snooty about it. Prostituting one’s talent, would you believe? They should try teaching flower painting to the young ladies of Kensington. Not that that’s an option any more. I think I might do it too. It leaves you plenty of time to do your own work, and the Slade’s awfully grim at the moment. Tonks sweeping up and down the corridors like the pillar of fire by night.

Mother’s gone back to her bandaging again. Toby’s in the army. Dad’s busy with his head-injuries unit. Tom’s in the War Office. Rachel says the baby’s her war work. Ruthie’s off to France. So you see how things are, Paul. Everybody doing important war work, except me. I alone preserve an iron frivolity.

Paul to Elinor

You’re not serious about leaving the Slade, are you? Do take time to think about it. Painting teapots may keep the wolf from the door but it won’t do anything to establish you as an artist. On the other hand you know the situation better than me, and I suppose we all have to stop being students some time. Anyway I’ll buy your teapots, honey — if you do leave. And your cushions.

The rain that rains on you also rains on us, and it makes things devilish difficult. All the paths between the huts are lined with duckboards now and even so we sink. The mud bubbles up through the slats. I’ve taken to getting right away on my days off, can’t stand the place, can’t work (draw, I mean, the other sort of work I do in a trance). I managed to get an ambulance driver to take me up to the front line, promising if he was full on the way back I’d walk. He’s called Guy and he’s a Canadian, very dark skin, furrowed cheeks, he looks too old to be here, but here he is. And taciturn in the extreme, which suited me. I didn’t want to talk, I wanted to look.

The first part of the road I was familiar with, because I’ve walked along it before, but after that there’s open country. Very strange, mad feeling as you go further out, away from the town, because there are fields and farmhouses and it all looks normal until you see that the farmhouse has a hole in the roof and the corn’s still standing in the fields, beaten flat of course in lots of places, but in others, where it’s more sheltered, still standing. I remembered a cornfield I walked through last summer, how restless it was. How it whispered all the time though there was hardly any breeze and I thought about the farmer who planted this field last spring, with no idea he wouldn’t be there to harvest it. And then after that a stretch of normal countryside: tall, spindly trees, willows — some with yellow leaves still clinging to their branches, bending to meet their reflections in the canals. Everything end-of-year and stagnant, but beautiful too in its own way.

The road was clogged with limbers and motor vehicles and men marching towards the front. They look like a machine: all the boots moving as one, shoulders bristling with rifles, arms swinging, everything pointing forwards. And on the other side of the road, men stumbling back, trying to keep time, half-dead from exhaustion and with this incredible stench hanging over them. You get whiffs of it when you cut the clothes off wounded men, but out there, in the mass, it’s as solid as a wall. And they all look so grey, faces twitching, young men who’ve been turned into old men. It’s a great contrast, stark and terrible, because they’re the same men, really. It’s an irrigation system, full buckets going one way, empty buckets the other. Only it’s not water the buckets carry.

Further on the road dipped down then levelled out again and that was where the sense of strangeness began. What I didn’t know — though it’s obvious enough when you think about it — is that companies in a column of marching men take synchronized breaks, so, at a given moment, all the men fall out and sit by the roadside, blending into the muddy ground. So for a time the road looks empty. I’m not explaining this very well, but I saw it happen and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I don’t quite know why. It’s the feeling of an empty, desolate landscape that isn’t empty at all, but teeming with men.

We were crawling along most of the time, edging past columns of men in wet, gleaming capes and helmets, like mechanical mushrooms. Now and then somebody looks up, and you get the sense of an individual human mind among the bundles of soaked misery. All this is in semi-darkness of course. Close to the front people move only after dark, with dawn and dusk the most dangerous times. That’s when the heaviest bombardments are. Nothing dramatic happened to us though. It rained all the way there and all the way back — I didn’t have to walk.

This will sound heartless, and perhaps it is, but close to the front line where the land on either side of the road is ruined — pockmarked, blighted, craters filled with foul water, splintered trees, hedges and fields gouged out — I realized I felt the horror of that landscape almost more than I feel for the dying. It’s a dreadful thing to say, I know — a flaw in me — but the human body decays and dies in some more or less disgusting way whether there’s a war or not, but the land we hold in trust.

Sorry! This has got awfully deep and I didn’t mean it to, but it leads up to some good news at least. When I got back I found Lewis in the hut almost bouncing on the beds with excitement. The nurses — the fully qualified ones who, we were beginning to think, were as mythical as the nine muses — are on their way at last, so it can’t be long now before we get our transfer. I want to be up there. I don’t want to be stuck here in comparative safety doing a job that a woman could do equally well, and in the case of a qualified nurse, BETTER!

Elinor to Paul

I’m pleased for you, Paul, I really am — since it’s what you seem to want. I wonder whether you know how hard it is to answer your letters? A week has gone by since I received your last, though I meant to sit down and reply at once. I know you say you want to hear about all my doings but I can’t help feeling that my doings are terribly trivial compared with yours and that this may even may be part of their attraction for you. It’s like looking through the window of a doll’s house, isn’t it?

Anyway doll’s house or not, here goes. I’ve been to tea with Lady Ottoline Morrell! I never thought I’d live to see the day. I met her at the Camden Street Gallery and she looked at me very intently for a long time and then she said in that vague way of hers, wafting a jewelled hand about above her head, You must come to tea some time. Do come to tea.

I thought that was fairly meaningless really — no time, no date — and immediately forgot all about it, but yesterday morning I came downstairs and there was the invitation on the mat and so this afternoon I set off, wearing one red stocking and one blue as a reminder to myself not to be nervous though of course I was. Close to, in broad daylight, she really is quite extraordinary. We sat in a red room overlooking a walled garden and the rainy afternoon light fell full on her face which was heavily rouged with purple shadow on the lids and in a way she looks quite beautiful and in another almost grotesque. She’s obviously decided that being ordinary is not an option for her and she’s right. So although she’s very tall — six foot if she’s an inch — she wears thick cork soles that add on another two inches. Her dress was brightly coloured green silk with an intricate web of gold embroidery — very beautiful, but for afternoon tea? My pathetic little gesture with odd stockings was nowhere, I can tell you. She’s not easy to talk to, though she is interested in everything you say. You feel she’s listening, not just waiting for the chance to make some clever remark herself like most of that Bloomsbury crowd. Only — now I’m going to carp and I shouldn’t — there isn’t much humour, and it’s all very intense. She seems to be drawing your soul out of your body. It’s a kind of cannibalism. I felt I had nothing to offer her. Not enough meat on my bones. We talked about the war. Oh my God, yes, the war, I’m so heartily sick of it but it seems to be unavoidable even with people like her who hate it as much as I do. She said she was totally opposed — a point in her favour — but had decided that it was pointless trying to stop it. I was trying not to laugh. The vanity of these people! — thinking they can influence the fate of nations when it takes them all their time to organize their own lives. But then she said she’d switched her energies to trying to help the wives and families of German internees who’ve been left with no income, dependent on charity handouts. Even when the wife is English she can’t get even the most menial work, not even doorstep scrubbing, which is the lowest-paid work there is — or so Lady O says. I sort of half promised I would go and hand out parcels with her but all the time I was thinking about Catherine and how I ought to have done more for her. She’s a friend for goodness’ sake and that matters more than charity, or ought to, but when I got her letter about her father being interned I was so excited about going to see you I didn’t do anything. I should have gone to see her then. Made time. It was wrong of me not to. Lady O meanwhile was trying to move the conversation on to a more personal plane. She wants something from you — not in any crude material way — something emotional. Or intellectual perhaps, but she must have guessed there was no point expecting anything like that from me! I told her about Catherine and how worried I was about Toby and it was all true, every word of it was true, so why did it sound so false? But these were just bits of gristle, not real juicy flesh. So then I bethought me of my trip to see you, and I told her about that — she’s the first person I’ve told — which is wrong, because what is Lady O to me, or I to her? I haven’t told Rachel. I haven’t told Mother. But I did tell her and she was ecstatic. It became quite embarrassing and I’ve no doubt she’ll repeat the story with embellishments all over London and I shall acquire a reputation for — I don’t know what — recklessness, romantic passion — something.

But I enjoyed meeting her. In the end I wasn’t nervous or intimidated at all. And yet I came away with a bad taste in my mouth in spite of her lovely cream cakes and her real genuine unaffected kindness. It all seemed so false somehow but the falsity was not in her but in me.

When I got back, I started decorating. I’d intended to put it off because it’s so time-consuming. I was going to live with the Victorian wallpaper — huge green roses that look like cabbages — perhaps they are cabbages — but I can’t live with it, Paul, I simply can’t. It all has to come off and then I might be able to work again. So you must think of me wielding that horrible triangular scraper thing that hurts your hands, moving along the paper row by row, murdering cabbages. I’m sure you’re much more usefully employed.

Twenty-seven

He knew he’d cut himself, the minute he did it. He felt a sharp pain as the scalpel sliced through his glove, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He was cutting the dressing from a twitching stump of amputated leg at the time, and needed both hands, one to cut, one to keep the leg still. Gangrene had set in and the discarded dressing was yellow with pus.

As soon as he’d finished, he scrubbed his hands, the peeled-off gloves lying by the side of the sink like sloughed-off skin. Blood flowed from the cut. It was at the top of his right index finger, not big, but deep. A quotation was teasing the fringes of his mind. What was it? Not so wide as a church, door, nor so deep as a well, but t’will serve. Morbid bugger. He scrubbed his chilblained hands till the flesh stung, stuck a wad of cotton wool over the cut and hoped for the best.

The following day was his day off. When he reached the end of his shift he decided to walk into town and stay overnight in the room in order to be able to start work at dawn. He was nearing the end of a painting and so excited he couldn’t bear to be away from it. Even woke up in the middle of the night and lay thinking about it, unable to get back to sleep. It was a tricky time, though. At the end of his last painting session, a week ago now, it crossed his mind that it might be finished. At any event, he was aware of the danger of doing too much. This was when somebody else’s eye would have been invaluable. Elinor’s, or better still, Tonks’s, though what Tonks would have made of it he hardly dared think.

At last he was free to go. His cut finger was throbbing, but it had been painful for the last few days because of the chilblains, so that was nothing new. He felt tired and sweaty, but he felt like that at the end of every shift. Unusually, he changed out of his uniform before going out and the cool touch of clean cotton on his skin soothed him and persuaded him that he didn’t feel too bad after all. Nothing that a good night’s sleep wouldn’t cure. He always slept more deeply in the room than in the hut, though he’d long since become accustomed to Lewis’s presence and even welcomed it. Something about the proximity of the wards and the theatre kept him on permanent alert. He woke if a mouse ran over the floor.

The walk into town in the fresh clear air, stars pricking overhead, revived him. He turned the key in the familiar lock, brimming with excitement and hope. The room was not so powerfully full of Elinor’s presence as it had been even a week ago. Now it was the figure on the canvas he hurried up the stairs to meet, but once in the room he didn’t go immediately to the easel. Instead, he sat down on the edge of the bed, unconsciously cradling his right hand in the left. When he became aware of what he was doing he made a conscious effort to separate the hands. He was treating it like a real injury and that was ridiculous. Children playing in a playground get worse cuts than that everyday.

The easel had a cloth draped over it. Ideally, he shouldn’t look at the painting at all tonight. The gaslight flickered, its bluish tinge changing every colour and tone in the room. No, no, it would be a complete waste of time. But the painting seemed to call to him. At last he could stand it no longer. He jumped up and pulled off the cloth.

My God. It looked as it had been painted by somebody else. That was his first thought. It had an authority that he didn’t associate with his stumbling, uncertain, inadequate self. It seemed to stand alone. Really, to have nothing much to do with him.

He’d painted the worst aspect of his duties as an orderly: infusing hydrogen peroxide or carbolic acid into a gangrenous wound. Though the figure by the bed, carrying out this unpleasant task, was by no means a self-portrait. Indeed, it was so wrapped up in rubber and white cloth: gown, apron, cap, mask, gloves — ah, yes, the all-important gloves — that it had no individual features. Its anonymity, alone, made it appear threatening. No ministering angel, this. A white-swaddled mummy intent on causing pain. The patient was nothing: merely a blob of tortured nerves.

It shook him. He stood back from it, looked, looked away, back again. It must be the gaslight that was so transforming his view of it. And he was no nearer knowing if it was finished, though at the moment he felt he wouldn’t dare do anything else.

Cover it up. Once it was safely back behind the cloth, he relaxed a little, even began to wonder if he were not flattering himself a little. Perhaps it was his own feverish state that accounted for the painting’s impact. He raised a hand to his brow and wiped the sweat away. Probably he should have an early night, but the thought of lying in that bed, alone, with only the painting for company, was not attractive. He’d do better to go out and get some food. Not to any of the usual places, though. He wasn’t fit for company tonight.

The night air restored him. By the time he reached the café he was feeling almost normal again. It was very strange how this thing came in waves. He sat down and ordered a carafe of red wine feeling almost elated, but no sooner had he drunk the first glass than he was starting to sweat again. The café that had seemed so welcoming when he pushed open the door now looked yellow with dark dancing shapes all over the walls. Nothing was the right size. The barmaid’s face loomed and receded, all bulbous nose and fish eyes like a face seen in the back of a spoon. There was a ringing in his ears and the French being spoken at tables all around him had suddenly become incomprehensible. A man with a drooping moustache and eyes to match asked him a question. Was this chair taken? Was that it? Paul stared blankly back at him, unable to attach meaning to the words.

There was a cellar underneath the bar, no doubt opened up since the bombardment to give customers somewhere to shelter should the worst happen again. He’d go down there. It might be quieter there. Draining his glass, he picked up the carafe and stumbled down the stairs.

It was slightly quieter and there were alcoves where you were secluded from the general crush. He made his way towards one of them, thinking it was empty, but then, there at the back, in the shadows, he saw a smudge of white face. He was turning away, not wanting to intrude on the solitude of somebody who’d clearly chosen to drink alone, when something about the breadth of the man’s shoulders, the pudgy, truculent features staring up at him, as if daring him to occupy one of the vacant chairs, struck a chord. Kit Neville.

Simultaneously, Neville’s expression changed and he jumped to his feet. They shook hands and then, finding that inadequate, pulled each other into a bear hug. So much back-slapping and smiling and hand-pumping, and all of it sincere, and yet they’d made no attempt in the last two months to seek each other out, though the hospitals where they worked could not have been more than five kilometres apart. Ten, at most, Paul reminded himself, sitting down.

‘Well,’ said Neville.

After greeting each other like long-lost brothers, there was an immediate awkwardness of not finding anything to say.

‘How are you?’ Paul asked.

‘Oh, pretty well. The old rheumatiz is playing up a bit.’ He probed his left shoulder as if for confirmation. ‘And you?’

‘All right. Have you been doing any painting?’

‘Not much. I’ve got masses of drawings, though. I’ve got to get back home and do some serious work.’

‘Are you still at the same hospital?’

‘No, they’ve put me in charge of the German wounded at another hospital. Like a fool, I admitted to speaking German.’

‘What’s that like?’

‘Not bad. Some of the younger ones come in fighting mad, but I generally manage to get them on my side. I help them to write home. Oh, and I met one who used to be a waiter at the Russell Square Hotel. He was working there when I used to drink there so he must have poured me many a glass of whisky, though I can’t say I remember him. But he speaks good English so I’ve more or less recruited him on to the staff. It’ll be a blow when he has to leave.’

‘I thought you were going into ambulance driving?’

‘Bloody shoulder put paid to that. I only lasted a week. The steering’s so heavy you wouldn’t believe. When you come off shift you don’t feel you’ve been driving. Feels like you’ve gone fifteen rounds with an all-in wrestler. By the way, that’s strictly between the two of us, you understand?’

Paul was puzzled until he realized that nursing enemy soldiers, however necessary, and even admirable, the work might be, didn’t fit in very well with Neville’s desire to present himself as a daring war artist risking his life daily on the front line.

‘You won’t tell anybody?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘You see, the thing is, I was a rotten ambulance driver, but I seem to be pretty good with the wounded, only …’

‘I won’t say anything.’

How strange to find that Neville possessed the qualities needed in a good orderly, and how typical of him to be ashamed of them. He seemed to be under enormous pressure. Even in this short exchange it was possible to tell that he was drunk. Oh, not incapable, far from it, he had an immense capacity, but his speech was just beginning to be slurred. Certainly, his inhibitions were gone. He belched several times loudly and made no attempt to apologize or cover his mouth. Since the carafe in front of him was still almost full, it was evidently not the first. He was staring at Paul, almost aggressively. Pale fish-eyes, caught in a net of red veins.

Neville raised his glass in a toast.

‘What are we drinking to?’ Paul asked.

‘Elinor.’

Immediately, Paul felt a strong sense of her presence sitting in the empty chair between them.

‘Do you hear from her at all?’

‘Yes, now and then. Do you?’

He knew Neville didn’t. Elinor had said they’d lost touch.

‘Now and then. And Catherine keeps me in touch with what’s going on.’

‘How is Catherine?’

‘Bloody awful, I should think. How would you feel if your father was locked up?

‘I thought you and she were…?’

‘No point, old chap. Can’t decide anything like that while this bloody war’s dragging on. So, you hear from Elinor, do you?’

Did he know she’d been here? He couldn’t know, unless she’d told him and she wouldn’t do that. Though she might have confided in Catherine and Catherine might well have mentioned it to Kit. The more he thought about it, the more probable it seemed. But then Elinor had said she’d told nobody except Ruthie. She’d also said she didn’t write to Kit. God, what a muddle, and he was being dragged into it. Even not mentioning her visit was a lie. Well, stop that.

‘Yes, I do. She writes quite frequently.’

They stared at each other, the earlier effusion of friendship forgotten. Paul knew there was something in this situation he was failing to grasp, and that made him uneasy. It didn’t help that his head was full of cotton wool. He couldn’t think.

Suddenly Kit laughed, a great wheezing belly laugh that turned into a cough and came embarrassingly close to tears. God, he was drunk.

‘Shall I tell you something?’ Neville said.

‘About Elinor? I think I’d rather you didn’t. If it’s something she wants me to know I expect she’ll tell me herself.’

He was afraid of being told she’d slept with Neville. Neville was just about drunk enough to say it.

‘For Elinor men come in twos. Always did. Right back when I first knew her at St Martin’s, it was two brothers then, can’t for the life of me remember their names, anyway, doesn’t matter. Point is, she wouldn’t fancy either of us if it wasn’t for the other.’

‘I don’t think that’s true.

‘I know it is. Those brothers she ran around with, playing one off against the other, she didn’t give a damn for either of them. That’s it, you see.’ He was leaning forward, blinking those muculent eyes of his, ‘I don’t think Elinor actually loves anybody. Her brother, of course, but that’s different. And Catherine.’

Paul made a sudden jerky movement, scraping his glass across the table.

‘Yes, Catherine,’ Neville said.

Leaning across the table like that, he looked like something Breughel might have painted. He was enjoying his little feast of drunken malice, but how much pain there was underneath. Clown he might be, but he was a talented clown, and his love for Elinor was real. Now, with an enormous effort, he raised his glass to the empty chair. ‘Elinor. Our Lady of Triangles.’

Paul thoughts were scattered across the table like spilled pins, every one of them sharp enough to hurt. He needed to get away from Neville as fast as possible and since Neville was sinking rapidly into a morose stupor it wasn’t difficult to disengage. Paul left him sitting there, scarcely capable of raising a hand to wave farewell.

Outside a sleety rain was falling. He raised his face to it, enjoying the cold splashes on his skin. The town was in almost total darkness. The streets were chasms where nothing moved but a car slinking along the gutter. He was feeling so ill now he wondered if he should return to the hospital, but the room was so much closer and he wanted to lie down. The thought of walking all that way in the cold wet night was more than he could bear. He turned his coat collar up, thrust his hands deep into his pockets and strode on through the dark. His footsteps ringing out across the cobbles proclaimed his loneliness. If only Elinor was there waiting for him, but she was miles and miles away, never further than tonight. Triangles, what nonsense, Neville was jealous, that was all.

A light still burned in Madame Drouet’s living room, but it was too late to put his head round the door and say goodnight. He trudged upstairs until he reached the room where his draped painting waited on the easel. He mustn’t look at it. Not now, not tonight. He was too afraid of finding out that it was rubbish, that he’d been deluding himself in thinking there was something there. Meeting Neville had done him no good. Quite apart from his slur on Elinor, Neville had thrust him back to those evenings in the Café Royal, where Neville was famous and he was an unknown art student, and an unsuccessful one at that.

Sitting on the bed, he took off his shoes and socks. He meant to undress completely, but he was feeling weaker by the minute and ended by crawling under the eiderdown still half dressed. With an effort he turned off the light. The easel immediately took a step closer. He turned over on to his right side to avoid seeing it, but that made him feel even more uneasy. It was ridiculous of course, but he felt the need to keep an eye on it. In some mysterious way it become menacing. Like the faces he’d seen in the wallpaper when he was a small boy confined to bed with pneumonia. He shivered, thinking of deep, cold, dirty water, but then gradually his eyes closed. For a long time he hovered on the edge of sleep, dimly aware that the shrouded mummy in his painting had stepped out of the frame and was standing by his bed.

Twenty-eight

Richard Lewis to Elinor Brooke

I’m afraid I have rather bad news. You must be wondering why you’ve had no reply to your last letter. Please don’t be alarmed. Paul is ill but is being well looked after. What happened was that he accidentally cut through his glove while dressing a badly infected wound. He washed his hands as soon as he noticed the cut, but the trouble is he’s got chilblains rather badly at the moment — we all have — and although they itch like mad they also make your fingers feel quite numb and so he didn’t notice immediately. (They also make you rather clumsy, which is how the accident came to happen, I suppose.) Infected fingers aren’t unusual. All our hands are in a real mess. But Paul developed a high temperature and has had to spend several days in bed, the last two of them on the ward, so he’s having the unusual experience of seeing the ward from both sides. Everybody’s making a tremendous fuss of him so he’s thoroughly spoiled. Whenever one of the other orderlies has a spare moment they go and sit with him. They are a thoroughly decent set of chaps. I don’t think you could find better anywhere.

I have very happy memories of the evening the three of us spent together, even though it did come to a rather dramatic end. I hope you’re keeping well and once again don’t be too concerned. Paul is in good hands and I’m sure he will soon be on the mend. Which will be a relief to all of us since he makes a far better orderly than he does a patient!

Elinor Brooke to Richard Lewis

Thank you for letting me know about Paul. It was a great shock to get the news, though I was beginning to suspect he was ill because I hadn’t had a letter from him for almost a week. He is such a reliable correspondent despite being so busy (whereas I am a rather bad one, despite leading what some might call an idle life). Give him my love and best wishes for a speedy recovery.

I too have very happy memories of that evening in Ypres, though it seems a long time ago now. Perhaps one day we can all meet again in more peaceful circumstances. I would like that.

Paul to Elinor

I expect by now you’ve had Lewis’s letter. He’s been very kind to me throughout, fussing over me like a mother. (Not that mine ever did, but you know what I mean.) Before I was transferred to the ward he was always racing back to the hut to make sure I was all right. What a stupid accident. And such a small cut too. I went off duty and into town quite cheerfully, feeling no ill effects. The following day was my day off and I wanted to spend the night in the room so I could start painting as soon as it was light.

There was a particular painting I wanted to finish. It shows a gowned, masked, capped, gloved (ah, yes!) figure, standing by the bed of a man with gangrene, getting ready to do one of those awful hydrogen-peroxide dressings. The face is of a particular patient whose wound I used to dress — now dead, poor chap. I should have left it till morning when my mind would have been clearer, but no, I had to get it out and look at it by gaslight, and the longer I looked the more menacing the figure became. Though it’s clearly a nurse or a doctor so I don’t know where the sense of horror came from. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it needed more work or not, so in the end I put it away and went out for a drink.

By now the cut was throbbing, but after a few glasses of wine it felt better. I was drinking in a cellar — several of the cafés that were hit during the bombardment have opened again, but many of them use their cellars.

I was drinking on my own, but then I happened to bump into Neville. I’m suppose it’s surprising it hasn’t happened sooner. After all, we’ve never been more than five kilometres apart. We raised a glass to your good self, had a little chat about this and that — he’s nursing German prisoners, did you know? — and parted. A few minutes later, back in the room, I could hardly believe he’d been there at all. The whole meeting seemed like some hallucination from the past.

By morning I was really quite ill and, after trying and failing to work on the painting, I gave up and went back to the hospital where I was promptly put to bed by Lewis. The hours drifted past in a blur after that, except that the throbbing in the finger increased. By the middle of the night it really hurt and next day, after breakfast, Lewis summoned Sister Byrd who summoned Mr Burton and I was transferred to the ward. All the patients who were well enough to take an interest thought it a huge joke. And there I lay and sweated and mithered. Every so often I caught a glimpse of my finger, which was swollen out of all recognition and didn’t seem to belong to me. By this time it was stiff, hard, pink, shiny and drooling pus from a cut near the tip. I thought I’d caught the infection from the brush while painting the gangrenous patient who died. I also at one point thought I was dying, but it didn’t seem to matter very much.

And then the lancing of the wound, lavish dressings of antiseptic paste — there’s a new one out, Sister Byrd swears by it — and gradually my temperature started to come down. I came round to find myself shivering in cold wet sheets with Lewis sitting by my bed.

It’s been quite an experience. The odd thing is that though I know now that it was cutting myself while dressing an infected wound that caused all the trouble, part of me still believes I caught it from the brush. The true belief and the delusion sit quite happily side by side.

Today Lewis took me to the room to see the painting — which is finished. If I’d worked on it any more I’d have ruined it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done and yet I don’t like it. It reeks of some kind of Faustian pact. No, that’s ridiculous — and pompous. I’m not expressing myself very well. I need to see you face to face to tell you what I mean. Oh, yes, desperately, desperately, I need to see you face to face. But it’s not possible. Write soon, my dearest love. Ever your Paul.

Twenty-nine

Paul to Elinor

Ambulances at last. I’ve left the hospital. So has Lewis, we’re here together in a ruined village in what used to be the school. All the houses are in ruins, but the school is untouched except for a hole in the roof. I’ve realized something about ruins. When it first happens they’re shocked, like patients coming out of theatre, then gradually they start to get over it, they don’t mind so much and acquire a raffish, anarchic air, flowers and weeds sprouting from improbable places like trimmings on a hat. We’ve raided the houses to make the school comfortable, chairs, beds, sofas, even rugs. We are very comfortable indeed and you needn’t worry about me. We have good supplies of wood for the stove. In fact the smell of woodsmoke and tobacco is so powerful it reminds me of the life class at the Slade. When I’m sitting dozing in an armchair in the middle of the afternoon, I half expect Tonks to walk in. Is that really the best you can do? He grows in my memory. Isn’t that strange?

‘Dozing in an armchair in the middle of the afternoon?’ I hear you say. Yes! We work at night and even then not every night. I’m amazed how much easier this is than working in the hospital. We do twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, but in quiet times the hours off can extend to days. (Equally, of course, in a bad patch we’re on duty all the time.) There’s much more time for drawing than there used to be. I’m doing a lot — I daren’t think how many drawings I’ve got — but there’s also cards and football. We kick a ball around every morning to keep ourselves fit. Then after breakfast we work on the ambulances, who are a bevy of extremely demanding ladies, I can tell you. I’m not much use at that, I can do the basic emergency repairs but nothing complicated. Fortunately there are two chaps here who can strip an engine down and reassemble it in record time.

Yesterday we had our first snow. As evening was falling, we walked out into it. All the heaps of rubble and the furniture that had been blown or dragged into the street were coated with snow and the cobbles in the road glittered. I slept long and deep, as people do in snow, but now it’s begun to melt. We’re all sorry to see it go. Nobody here minds the cold, even in the trenches, because you can cope with it. It’s this endless, drenching rain we don’t like.

Life here is so uneventful I really can’t think of much to write about. It’s not at all what I expected, and not what I wanted either. But there’s certainly no need to worry about me. I am perfectly, disgracefully safe.

Elinor to Paul

Yes, I know. No letter for a long time. Yours has been lying on the table beside my bed reproaching me for I don’t know how long. It’s so hard to imagine where you are. I can put you in that little room overlooking the roofs and in the restaurant we went to together, but I know you’re not there now. I liked your description of the ruins though. I wonder where the people have gone?

I’ve been working hard day after day, so hard my head feels bashed in. When I can’t stand it any longer I go up to the Heath and watch people swimming, which they still do even in the middle of winter. Pallid creatures, some of them decidedly plump, and they splash and harrumph about like porpoises and their skin turns mottled blue and red and we’re supposed to find it beautiful but it isn’t. And then you see the wounded men in their blue uniforms being pushed along the paths in wheelchairs. They seem to congregate in the Vale of Health as if the clean air might make their stumps sprout. And back at the Slade where I spent so many happy girlish hours being patted on the back — oh platonically of course — by Tonks and winning prizes and scholarships and all that sort of rubbish, some portly madam is even now mounting the dais and a new class of young ladies prepares to contemplate the Human Form Divine and I think –

But that’s the problem, Paul. Always was. I don’t think, I only see.

I expect all this is really about Ottoline and her friends. She kisses me now whenever we meet and introduces me and shows me off and I spend most of my time feeling inferior — rightly, for so I am — and trotting out my little tale about being in Ypres during the bombardment, a tale which has grown so stale in the telling that even I no longer believe it happened.

But I have been working, Paul, and I think at last I’ve done something good. In the ladies’ cabin on the night crossing there was a woman breastfeeding her child and her whole body seemed to be a wax candle feeding the child’s flame. It made an enormous impression on me. Anyway it’s the first thing I’ve ever done that doesn’t reek of Sladery and winning prizes and wanting to be praised.

I do miss you so much, but it gets harder and harder to keep you in my mind. You’re like a ghost almost, fading in the light of dawn. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to summon up your face and I can’t see you any more. Then at other times I hear your voice so clearly I turn round expecting to see you standing there, and every time it happens there’s the same pang of loss. Can’t you send me a sketch of where you are? It would help me a lot if I could picture you somewhere definite, not just have letters dropping in from outer space.

Paul to Elinor

A sketch of where I am might help you, young woman, but it would very likely get me shot! I don’t think our letters get censored very often, but it does happen. We have to hand them in with the envelopes open. Still, I do see what you mean. I was quite shocked when you said you were thinking of moving and leaving the Slade. A large part of my survival strategy is going back (in my mind, obviously!) to known places and finding you there. Anyway, a sketch would be difficult — to say the least! — so I’ll have to do the best I can with words.

The most important place isn’t a place at all. The bus. You saw ambulances like her in the square — red crosses, canvas sides. She takes five stretcher cases or ten walking wounded — and that’s about all the good you can say of her. She regularly stalls and her crank handle could break a man’s wrist. So picture me then in darkness and driving rain, up to my knees in mud and slush, pleading with her to start first time. All the time going round and round in my head there’s a couple of lines of verse.

A red cross knight forever kneel’d

To the lady on his shield …

I can’t remember where it comes from and it’s driving me mad. The only way I can chase it out of my head is to sing very loudly. One night I was bellowing ‘God Save the King’ at the top of my voice when a column of French soldiers marched past. They obviously thought they should keep their end up and broke into ‘La Marseillaise’.

Watching ambulance lumber round the turning circle at the hospital I used to think they were huge, but inside the cabin’s rather cramped. The stretchers are level with the back of the driver’s seat so the groans and cries go right into your ears. Sometimes they seem to be inside your own head. You can hear pleas for water but you can’t answer them, only drive hell for leather down dark, rutted, congested roads. I never get used to the screams that are jolted out of people when I get it wrong and bump into a shell-hole. Sometimes they die on the way to hospital. That’s hard. I’m surprised how difficult it is. I thought because I didn’t have time to get to know them I wouldn’t mind so much. Instead I feel personally responsible in a way I never did on the ward, where you were always part of a team. One morning driving back to base just before dawn I found myself crying, and yet nothing worse had happened on that trip than on any other. Big fat baby tears trickling down my cheeks. I didn’t even feel particularly upset. It seemed to be something my body had decided to do without consulting me.

The other place is a place — our common room, which is where I’m writing this. It’s comfortable and warm, in spite of, or because of, the rain that pelts down outside. There’s an oil lamp on the desk and Lewis is writing one of his endless letters home. Do you know he writes to his mother every day? I can’t imagine what he finds to say. The wood stove is blazing away, and there’s a card game going on at the next table. We’re on duty but no calls have come in yet, though the guns have started up, louder than usual, I think, so perhaps there’s something brewing. Every time the gun near us goes off Lewis’s inkwell gives a little jump. This table was taken out of a schoolroom and has boys’ initials carved all over it. Some of the carving’s so deep it must have taken ages to do. Dates too. I wonder where they are now, those boys? So this is where I am, thinking of you (as always). And now somebody’s come in with a tray of cocoa. The door opens, and the wind lifts the thin carpet and sends dead leaves rattling across the floor, but inside we’re warm. Full of hot cocoa and fingers crossed for a quiet night. Goodnight, my love. I can’t say I wish you were here, and I can’t really, except at the most superficial level, wish I were there, but I do wish with all my heart that we were together in some place where the war couldn’t find us.

Elinor to Paul

I suppose my headline news is that I’ve sold two paintings. The mother and baby from the ferry crossing, and another one I did of some schoolgirls in a park. Based on one of the drawings I did when I came to see you. Dad took one look at the mother and child and roared with laughter. He says if my idea of motherhood ever catches on there’ll be no need for Marie Stopes. I got five pounds each! Of course I can’t think what to spend it on. Not that I don’t need masses of things, but it’s my first painting money so I feel I should buy something special with it, but nothing seems special enough.

Speaking of places, picture me in an Islington workhouse. There, that’s a challenge, isn’t it? The day before yesterday Catherine’s mother said she was too ill to go on the fortnightly visit to Catherine’s father, so Catherine was faced with going on her own. ‘I’m dreading it,’ she said, so of course I offered to go with her. We sat on the top of the bus in a slight drizzle, our knees safely tucked away under the rain apron. Catherine said what a relief it was to be back in London where nobody knew them. I was determined to make her laugh or smile at least and I did, several times, but then we got close and she went quiet.

It was only a short walk from the bus stop to the workhouse. Oh God, Paul, what a place. I thought of all the people over the years who’d dreaded going in through that door, how it must have seemed like the end of everything and been the end of everything, and it’s exactly the same now. We were kept waiting a long time. A long time. Perhaps unavoidably, but I don’t know — there was a whiff of little-minded people with a lot of power. Catherine had brought a cake with greaseproof paper wrapped round it and she sat cradling it like a baby. The room was packed. Children, wives, mothers, no men of course — no boys over the age of fourteen. When the big doors opened Catherine went in alone. I sat there and tried to take it in. Ugh, the smell. Gravy, sweaty socks, drains, oh and on top of it all, Condy’s Fluid. What would we do without it? I heard a woman sobbing and tried to look round the door, I was afraid it was Catherine, but it wasn’t. People were exchanging gifts. Some of the internees had made wooden toys for their children. One elderly couple simply sat and looked at each other across the table, holding hands, not speaking.

The visit lasted an hour. I started sketching and one of the guards came up and told me to stop. Of course I asked why and he didn’t have an answer, but I still had to stop. Then at last Catherine came back holding a letter rack her father had made for her mother. She was crying and laughing at once. ‘I don’t know what use he thinks this is going to be,’ she said. ‘Nobody writes to us any more.’

I can’t get it out of my mind. The papers are full of it, all the time now — the enemy within. The enemy within is Catherine’s father, a dentist, for God’s sake, who never hurt anybody (well, you know what I mean!), and he’s locked up ‘for the duration of hostilities’ without a trial or anything. If this is the kind of thing that can happen, what are we fighting for?

Paul to Elinor

If you ever again hear me complain about things being too quiet will you please hit me over the head with a large blunt instrument — a book, or a doorstop or a sculptor’s mallet would do. Last night I was leaving a CCS — a Casualty Clearing Station — when I heard a screech followed by a crash. The man ahead of me fell and lay spread-eagled on the ground. Another shell landed, sending debris cascading across the roof; then another. This particular station’s in the cellar of a ruined farmhouse. A cloud of dust billowed up into the air. I was rooted to the spot. When I tried to run I found my knees had turned to jelly. A very strange sensation because my mind was quite calm. At the entrance to the station, I ran full tilt into one of the other drivers trying to get out. One of the barns at the back of the building had been demolished, but the clearing station itself was still intact, full of wounded men stumbling about, hair and eyelids crusted with plaster dust. Poor devils, that was the last thing they needed. But the surgeons went on operating, though the lights swung from side to side and the shadows rocked.

Elinor to Paul

I asked Lady O if I could bring Catherine to her Thursday night party and of course she said yes. Catherine came round to my place first and we got dressed up and set off to walk to Bedford Square. Streets rather quiet. It’s the full moon and London’s expecting to be bombed. You can feel it everywhere, the tension, the watchfulness, the excitement. The few people who venture out after dark keep looking up at the full moon — and so the war makes werewolves of us all.

We arrived at the house and were shown into the drawing room where a man was playing a pianola, and Lady Ottoline was standing over a huge box in the middle of the floor holding up a purple feather boa. ‘Who wants this?’ she boomed, and handed it to a tall etiolated man with a straggly beard who wrapped it around his neck and immediately started to dance a minuet — though the music was nothing like that. Gradually others joined in. Ottoline, looking rather splendid and baroque, kissed me and greeted Catherine very kindly. Catherine blushed and stammered and when Ottoline had moved on looked astounded. ‘I did warn you,’ I said. I got a gypsy shawl from the box and Catherine a fan, and we started to dance a tarantella. When I stopped to get my breath I was seized by a man who looked like a highly intelligent teddy bear and spoke with dry, devouring passion about how the war must stop, now, at once, this instant, keeping his gaze fixed on my bosom the while, until Ottoline swept him up and on to the dance floor where any fool could see he didn’t belong, only then, to my astonishment he began to jump up and down, his face shining with that solemn joy you see on the faces of children when the Christmas candles are lit.

Towards the end of the evening when everybody was worn out from the dancing a woman with short black hair sang. I looked up and saw Ottoline standing just inside the door listening with one big white hand held to her throat and her pearls looped round her fingers. I find her very moving. She’s like a giraffe that’s fallen among jackals and stalks about with that improbable head level with the treetops and a pale swaying underbelly within reach of so many teeth and claws. She was caught up in the music as we all were but even her being caught up was different from anybody else’s. Then the dark-haired girl sang a song that I sort of half knew.

Cold blows the wind to my true love

And gently falls the rain.

I never had but one true love

In cold grave he was lain.

I knew as soon as she started I was going to cry and I started edging towards the door. I don’t think anybody saw me go. It was raining outside so I went upstairs and hid in a bedroom and only came down again when the singing stopped. I stood on the bottom step looking into the drawing room and saw the red walls and the chandelier lit and all the heads bobbing up and down and a great stamping of feet — on bare boards because all the carpets had been rolled back — and Ottoline with her red hair flying loose from its pins and streaming across her face. I thought either they’re sane and the rest of the world’s gone mad or …? It was silly and splendid and I didn’t know if I was part of it or not, or even if I wanted to be. I thought about the dead people lying on the cobbles. The dead child. I think about them all the time, but crying won’t bring them back.

I’m losing you, Paul. Or myself, I don’t know. I’m tired and this is a stupid letter. I suppose I ought to focus on the good things. Catherine enjoyed herself. She’s sure of a welcome there and that isn’t true anywhere else now. I think perhaps I should just go to bed and hope it all looks better in the morning. Write soon. Ever your own Elinor.

Thirty

Lewis had fallen asleep with his head on the table. A stump of candle guttered only an inch away from his slackened mouth. The French batteries behind the school had started up the dawn bombardment and the table juddered beneath his distorted cheek. Once, a louder crash than usual made him grunt. He raised his head, stared around him, sank back into sleep.

Five minutes later the first call came. They ran towards the camouflaged shed where the ambulances were parked. Paul cranked the handle, survived its first vicious kick and climbed into the cabin. Soon he was bumping gently across the uneven ground. Peering through the muddy windscreen at the road ahead, he thought, for a second, of Elinor, before the reality of his surroundings grabbed him. Snow-stippled fields. Here and there, a blurred moon stared up from frozen puddles at the side of the road. He kept the ambulance in low gear, labouring up the hill. As he got closer to the front, it needed all his attention to steer round pits and craters in the road. The road was crowded now with motor lorries, columns of marching men, horse-drawn limbers taking the rations up. At the crossroads, which had been subjected to repeated heavy bombardment, a shattered crucifix stood in the middle of desolation, the figure of Christ reduced to one hand hanging from a nail. He hated that hand: it offended him that such a banal image should have so much power.

But he hardly existed now as a person who could hate anything. He was a column of blood, bone and nerves encased in a sheath of cold, sweaty skin. His hands kept slipping on the wheel. When at last he dropped down from the cab and began to walk towards the clearing station his legs again threatened to give way under him.

The CCS was in the cellar of a ruined farmhouse. You went down a flight of narrow steps — so narrow you had to plant your feet sideways — into a whitewashed room lit by oil lamps. At the far end a surgeon worked in a makeshift theatre, patching men up for the journey back. On benches ranged along the wall the walking wounded waited. They’d had iodine sloshed into their wounds and been bandaged, but all were in shock, blue some of them, jaws wobbling, hands shaking. Paul shared out his cigarettes.

‘What about me?’ the surgeon called plaintively from behind his mask. ‘Don’t I get one?’

He was bent low over the table, now and then pausing to drop handfuls of flesh into a bucket by his feet. Paul went across, pulled the surgeon’s mask down and stuck a lighted cigarette between his lips. The tip glowed red as he inhaled. ‘Thanks. I’ve been dying for that.’

As he spoke, he straightened up and groaned — he must have been hunched over that table for hours.

Paul risked a glance at the patient, an abdominal. He thought of all the shell-holes between here and the base hospital and felt like groaning himself.

He took one stretcher case, the rest walking wounded. Now they were on the move, going away from the front, the lightly wounded became positively cheerful, laughing, joking, clenching their teeth against the pain only to burst into laughter again a minute later. A canteen was passed from mouth to mouth and it certainly didn’t contain water. But then the stretcher case recovered consciousness and from then on every jolt of the wheels on the shelled road produced a scream. He was begging for water. Paul shouted at the others not to give him any and they grumbled assent, obviously offended at being taken for idiots. Paul crouched forward in his seat, hunched over the wheel, peering through the windscreen at what little the fitful moon revealed of the road ahead. He felt useless. Nothing he could do in the way of nursing care was more likely to save the man’s life than just getting him back to base as fast as possible. But in places the road was almost impassable. The bombardment had been heavy and accurate. At one place he came upon a tangle of broken wagon wheels and dead horses where a limber had been hit. He pulled to the side and slowed to a crawl. He’d just drawn level when one of the apparently dead horses reared its head and screamed. Frightened though he was, he’d have got down and put the poor beast out of its misery, but ambulance drivers didn’t carry revolvers. Screwing up his face, he drove on.

Once past the horse he began to relax — he was almost at the end of the worst stretch of road — but then, no more than ten, twenty yards further on, he saw a dark shape ahead. As he slowed down, it was joined by a second, and then a third. Men, some of them badly wounded, crawling out of the ditches that lined the road. He stopped and wound down his window. He couldn’t understand the words but it was obvious what they wanted. They had no faces, only flaking mud masks with white circles round the eyes and red wet mouths struggling to speak. When words failed, they pointed to their wounds.

He raised two fingers. ‘Deux.’

That was more than he ought to take, but he couldn’t just drive past. Jumping down from the cab, he walked round to the back of the ambulance, feeling them behind him jostling and treading on his heels. These were the drivers of the horses he’d just passed.

‘Deux,’ he said again, but they all pressed forward, clutching at him, showing their wounds. He opened the door, jumped inside and said, pointing at random, ‘You and you.’ Another scrambled in before he could get the doors shut. Then he struggled through the others, the ones he couldn’t take, back to the driver’s cabin. He’d call the relay station as soon as he got to the hospital. An ambulance would go out to pick up the rest.

But they couldn’t know that and one or two of them mightn’t last. As he drove off, the wheels churning in slush, he hardly dared look into the rearview mirror, where, framed in that small space, a group of mud men dwindled into the distance, staring after the ambulance, which took away with it, as they must believe, their best chance of life.

Thirty-one

Paul to Elinor

After all the excitements of last week we seem to be in another quiet patch. I managed to get back to the town for two nights and spent them painting and lying in the bed in our little room thinking of you. I try to convince myself there’s a ghost of your scent on the pillows though I know it isn’t true. You seem ghost-like to me now. I’ve lost the sense of your voice, the way you move. I always see you sitting still somewhere, more especially in the window at the Slade. Do you remember how you used to sit there waiting for Tonks to come out and sign your exhibition entry forms? I walked past you once but you were too deep in your thoughts to look up and notice me. I see you like that now, framed by the arch of the window, very tiny and far away.

Because it’s so quiet we’ve been given another job: transporting the dead (which The Hague Convention does allow; it doesn’t allow the transport of military personnel who are alive and all in one piece, even if they’ve collapsed with exhaustion). We didn’t mind too much because we thought we’d be dealing with the recent dead, but it seems this particular Casualty Clearing Station had a backlog of corpses. It wasn’t clear why. Men who die at a CCS are generally buried as close to it as possible. They’re surrounded by these little dark crosses that always look like birds’ footprints to me, though I mentioned that to Lewis and he couldn’t see it at all.

Anyway there they were piled up in a corner of a yard under a black tarpaulin cover weighted down with bricks. We put on surgical masks and gloves and just got on with it, though it was depressing, to say the least. You go into a trance, it’s the only way, then suddenly I looked down and realized that one of the men at the bottom of the heap was wearing British army uniform. The others were all French. He must have got separated from his unit or perhaps this ground was fought over by the British in the first few weeks of the war. He’d been there a long time. In fact he was so badly decomposed that when we tried to lift him he came apart in our hands.

Somebody loved him once. And still does, that’s the devil of it.

What a gloomy letter! I always feel I have no right to burden you like this, but these things happen and if I didn’t write about them I don’t know what else I’d find to say. On a more cheerful note (and high time, too, you may think!) we’ve finished that job now and we can start putting it behind us. This morning we treated ourselves to a bath and a shave in town and came out into the raw air afterwards pink as shrimps with tight, raw, shiny faces. Now it’s afternoon and we’re going to kick a football round the field behind the school for an hour or so and then have supper.

Lewis has just come in to get me. He sends his affectionate greetings and asks to be remembered to you. Do you know he told me the other day he’s never been afraid? He wasn’t boasting either. As you know, he’s not exactly the boasting type. I’m afraid all the time, though it doesn’t seem to make much difference to what I do. Write soon. Even your handwriting on an empty envelope might help to convince me that there’s still a girl called Elinor Brooke.

Ever your own, Paul.

Elinor to Paul

What does ‘ever your own’ mean, Paul, if you don’t believe the person you’re saying it to exists? I haven’t stopped living just because you can’t imagine me. I go on living. I move on. I don’t spend much time sitting in the window outside Tonks’s room, or anywhere else for that matter. I work, Paul. I work as I’ve never worked before. I always feel apologetic when I say that because I know your time for work is limited, and you must find it almost impossible to concentrate even when you do find time, but I can’t help that. If painting matters you have to give your life to it and that’s what I’m doing. Not quite to the exclusion of everything else, I do get out now and then, but every day’s spent working. Most of the time I don’t even remember to eat.

One of the reasons this letter’s late is that I’ve been hesitating over whether to tell you something. I saw Teresa again. She got my new address from somebody at the Slade and just turned up on the door. She looks well, asked after you, her husband was called up in the first days of the war — he was a reservist — and nobody’s heard from him for two months now so she’s beginning to think he’s dead. I couldn’t make out what she felt about it, I don’t think she knew herself. I hope this doesn’t upset you? But if I’m so unreal you can hardly picture me, Teresa must be even more so. Just another of those funny little figures at the wrong end of your telescope.

Apart from that there’s very little news. Catherine’s making me a dress. It’s a way of slipping her a few shillings without making her feel she’s accepting charity. Father has raised my allowance (just when I don’t need it). Of course he’s not supporting Toby at medical school now. Toby came home to see the baby who’s going to be called William. His father pretends to be indifferent to him but is secretly pleased, I think.

I’m sorry you had such a dreadful job to do. I don’t know much about what’s going on out there because I don’t read the newspapers any more. Like you, I find it hard to cross the desert that divides us. It feels like standing on top of a mountain sending semaphore signals across the abyss. But don’t, whatever you do, stop writing. Although I felt quite angry when I read your letter, I do very often think about you — in that long black coat you used to wear.

Write soon. This war destroys so much, don’t let it destroy us as well. Elinor.

Thirty-two

Write soon, she said. But it became harder and harder to write at all.

Dear Miss Brooke (I reserve this formal style of address for

young ladies I haven’t heard from lately/for a long time),

Damn. He’d meant that as a joke, but on the page it sounded bitter. True, though. She didn’t write often now, and when she did her letters were full of people he hadn’t met and places he hadn’t been to. She went on living, he was buried alive. That’s how it felt. He sometimes thought he might as well be one of those poor chaps under the tarpaulin. No doubt their girls had ‘moved on’ too.

Pushing the writing pad away, he sat for a moment with his head in his hands. When he next looked up, he saw a woman watching him. He’d noticed her earlier, sitting at a table in the corner, eating croissants, edging a crumb delicately into her mouth with her ring finger as she looked out on to the street. It had long since been cleared of rubble, though there were boarded-up buildings at intervals along the terrace like black teeth in a smile. She looked up at the sky, wondering, perhaps, if they were to have more snow, and the movement revealed the creased, white fullness of her throat. He liked the slight sagging of her skin that revealed the orbits of her eyes more clearly and the downturn of inbuilt sadness at the corners of her mouth that vanished when she caught him looking at her and smiled.

He got up and asked if he could sit at her table. Did she mind? She looked round at the empty café, smiled back at him, a little doubtfully, and said, No, of course not. Of course she didn’t mind. She was wondering whether he knew what she was. He could see her wondering and deciding not to care, to take the moment for what it was. Her name was Madeleine, she said. Behind the bar, a lugubrious middle-aged waiter flicked a dirty dishcloth at the counter and looked at them with contempt, assuming the young Englishman was too naïve to know he was making a fool of himself. She aroused hostility, Paul could see that. When the waiter brought her more coffee, he set the cup down on the table so carelessly the coffee slopped into the saucer. Paul asked for another, and got it. His French was improving, though his new vocabulary, acquired while nursing badly wounded men, varied between the clinical and the obscene. Her English was good, but she wasn’t confident in using it, so they talked haltingly at first, making a joke of their difficulties, laughing a lot. She was carefree, and became more so as the minutes passed, forgetting who she was and what she did, as he, too, was forgetting who he was and what he did.

When at last she got up to go, he said, ‘Can I see you again?’

Immediately she frowned, and he was dismayed, thinking he’d misjudged the situation.

‘I’m here most mornings.’

‘I was thinking an evening, perhaps?’

‘No, I’m not free then.’

After that he made a habit of meeting her on his days off. Once, to the waiter’s undisguised amusement, he brought her flowers. They flirted, talked about Paris, Brussels, cafés, holidays, food, wine — never anything connected to the present. She mentioned a husband once, but he didn’t pursue it. And then, one evening, walking through the town after a day spent painting, he saw her going into a house beside the café, looking heavier, older, her flesh sagging like dough. As she turned the key in the lock, she glanced up and must have seen him, but she gave no sign of recognition.

It changed everything, that sight of her, though he didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if he’d been under any illusion about what she did. On his next day off, he slipped down the back street but, instead of going into the café, knocked on the side door. It was opened by Madame’s husband, a drooping, tadpole-shaped man.

Paul was ushered into the parlour, a room of such stifling respectability he immediately wanted to laugh. A glass case full of artificial flowers, a picture of the Virgin — oh, for God’s sake! — a fan of red crepe paper in the empty grate. The paper was peppered with soot, the only dirt allowed in the room, which was otherwise spotless. Dust motes sifted in a shaft of sunlight. The room smelled of beeswax and Condy’s Fluid, or whatever the Belgian equivalent of Condy’s Fluid might be.

Paul sat on the pink sofa and contemplated Madame’s knick-knacks. He was already regretting his visit. Inertia, rather than sexual need, kept him pinned to the cushions. Like a big, fat, juicy insect, he thought. As they all were, the men who sat here, listening to the floorboards creak in the room above. In the café he’d always been repelled by the sight of men sneaking off to the house next door. He’d wanted no part of it. Now he didn’t know why he was here, except that it had less to do with Elinor, the coldness of her letters, than with the man in British army uniform he’d found lying under a heap of French dead. Something was needed to sluice that memory away. Drink didn’t do it. Painting didn’t do it.

When, eventually, he was led upstairs and found her lying on the bed in a room that seemed to be all pink and shiny, like intestines, he couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘Come in,’ she said, weariness trapped behind her smile. ‘I wondered when you’d come.’

After counting notes at the dressing table, he undressed, washed and climbed on top of her, smelling her powder and the sweetness of stale urine in the pot under the bed. The sex was much as he’d expected. Afterwards, he pressed his face against the creases in her neck and closed his eyes. She tolerated his weight for a second, then heaved him off. There was a queue, he understood. However tactfully things were managed, there was a queue. He fumbled into his clothes as fast as he could and clattered downstairs, out on to the slushy street, feeling as if he’d committed a small, unimportant murder.

Thirty-three

The clock opposite the door showed twenty minutes to midnight. They’d been on duty six hours, though so far only one ambulance team had been called out.

‘Shall we go and play cards?’ Lewis said, nodding towards a group in the corner.

‘No, I don’t think I will, thanks. I’ve got a bit of a sore throat. You go.’

Paul spent the next two hours huddled under a blanket in a chair by the wood stove. From time to time he dozed, only to jerk awake as rain spattered against the one intact window. The beds had been pulled together in the centre of the room. The sacking that draped the broken windows kept the worst of the rain out, but you still woke cramped with cold to find the upper blanket damp. Every time he surfaced, his sore throat felt worse. Despite his proximity to the stove, he was shivering. He’d had a dream of falling into cold, rat-infested water and he knew it was connected with his discovery of the British officer. His visit to the prostitute — as he now thought of her — seemed merely to have driven the chill of that moment deeper into his bones.

It was still dark when the call came. He was going to be driving with Lewis. One of the advantages of relatively quiet nights was that you had the luxury of a second driver. Walking out to the ambulance, they were cold, yawning, stiff from sleep in cramped positions. Their breath whitened the air. Lewis was stamping his feet and clapping his hands against his shoulders, like a ham actor portraying the idea of extreme cold. Paul was fingering the swollen glands in his neck, though he made himself stop when he saw Lewis watching him.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine. No, actually, I’m cold, tired and pissed off beyond belief.’

‘Normal, then?’

As they turned into the village’s main street, they saw scribbles of black and yellow smoke low in the sky. The darkness had begun to thin. Dawn was the most dangerous time to be on the road. When they reached the main road they had to wait to let a column of motor lorries go past. Once on the road they made slow progress. Motor lorries and ambulances were slowed to walking pace because the road was clogged with horse-drawn limbers taking the morning rations up to the line. A column of men who’d been relieved were trudging towards them. Lewis wound down the window, and a powerful yellow stench came into the cabin. Helmets bobbed beneath the window the faces beneath them drained and almost expressionless. Once they were past Lewis should be able to overtake the limbers. At last the way was clear and they pulled out. Ahead of them the column of motor lorries was moving slowly in a cloud of spray.

‘I’ll never get past,’ Lewis said. ‘I’m going to slot in behind them.’

Paul nodded. You weren’t supposed to join convoys of military vehicles, but sometimes it was the only way to make progress. Another column of men marched past and then the lorries accelerated, the rear vehicle sending up a sheet of water that sloshed on to the ambulance windscreen.

The road wound uphill from this point on. As they neared the crossroads, the pits in the road became deeper and the pace of the convoy slowed. At the top of the slight crest the motor lorries stopped. Lewis muttered under his breath as the ambulance’s sluggish brakes let them slide almost into the rear lorry’s tail. Lewis jumped down to see what was happening. He walked a little way along the column, peered into the darkness, came back shaking his head.

Paul was leaning out of the open door. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Don’t know. Can’t see.’

A column of black smoke hung over the road ahead. Ahead of him men jumped down from the lorries, but none of them seemed particularly concerned, more glad of a chance to stretch their legs.

‘I’ll see if anybody knows what’s happening,’ Lewis said, and disappeared round the corner of the lorry in front. Paul could hear him asking the driver what was going on. He got down himself, his legs numb and threatening to collapse under him. He’d had nothing to eat and was buzzing from too much coffee on an empty stomach, that exhausted, stale, irritable alertness. He took a deep breath to freshen himself and simultaneously there came a long whistling roar so close it seemed to be caused by the movement of his chest.

When he was next aware of himself he was staggering around in smoke with the screams of wounded men all around him. The motor lorries ahead of him were on fire. From somewhere men came running and started trying to pull men out of the burning vehicles but there were too many of them in a crowded space. He could hear an officer shouting at them to get back. Lewis. He started pushing forward against straining, jostling backs. Men were milling around the stricken vehicles, beaten back by the flames. His leg felt different. He put his hand down and brought it back up covered in blood but there was no pain and he walked on. At one point he collapsed against the side of a lorry only to find himself being dragged away by the same young officer he’d heard shouting at people to get back. He found himself being hauled down the side of the road into a declivity, wrenched so hard he stumbled and fell and rolled the rest of the way. Immediately he was up on his knees and crawling forward. The officer tried to hold him back. ‘Fuck off!’ His voice sounded strange and he realized he’d gone deaf, which must be why everything was muffled, the shouting and cries, the explosion of petrol tanks, the crump of shells bursting further up the road, the slosh of boots through mud, all smothered, adding to the unreality of shock and fear.

He went round assessing the damage to some of the men lying screaming on the ground, quickly selecting those who stood the best chance of life. It was easier to keep calm now he was doing what he knew how to do. One man was lying on the ground cradling his intestines in his arms as tenderly as a woman nursing a sick child. Another was trapped inside a burning lorry. Sheathed in flame his face appeared at the shattered windscreen screaming for help. Paul grabbed an officer’s arm and pointed. ‘For Christ’s sake, shoot the poor sod.’ He had no way of knowing if it happened or not, he was already moving forward again. The smell made him gag, but his mind was clear. At last he saw Lewis, sitting by the side of the road. His cap had fallen off and Paul recognized him by the wet-wheat colour of his hair. ‘I’m blind,’ he kept saying to anyone who would hear. He was unaware of Paul’s presence until he felt the touch of his hand. ‘No, you’re not.’ There was a wound at the front of his head, not serious though blood was streaming out of it, and another in the lower abdomen. No apparent damage to the eyes, but he daren’t risk exploring and disturbing any shell fragments that might be lodged in there. He hauled him to his feet and half carried him back to the ambulance. He was turning to go back and collect more wounded, when he stumbled and fell. His left leg wouldn’t work. A moment later hard hands lifted him by the armpits and seemed to want to put him into the ambulance. ‘No.’ He fought them, deaf, mad, blind, covered in blood he didn’t know was his own, until they pushed him on to a stretcher and strapped him down.

The doors banged shut. The ambulance started to grind and bump along, sweeping round in a sharp turn, then accelerating away. He could feel the movements as if he were driving. A row of wounded men sat beside the stretchers, their jaws juddering with shock. He stared up at the stretcher above him and saw a patch of blood, spreading.

‘Lewis?’

Muttered words, then a groan as the ambulance bounced along. Despite the pain in his leg, Paul didn’t believe he was injured. Bloody fools, tying him down like this.

‘Lewis?’

The red stain was spreading. Still the groans and gabbled words went on. ‘Mum,’ he heard. And again, ‘Mum?’ Then silence. Groping above his head, he found Lewis’s hand and touched it. It was still warm. He thought he felt an answering pressure before the fingers went slack.

He was in the Salle d’Attente. He had a vague memory of being lifted out of the ambulance, talking too much, waving his arms, spit flying. He couldn’t understand why they were putting him into bed when there were so many patients to be attended to. They seemed to want him to get undressed and when he wouldn’t they cut his uniform off. His left thigh was covered in blood.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said, but still they kept pushing him down and all the orderlies were there, their familiar faces strange as he looked up at them from the bed. They were cutting his breeches off, easing bloody cloth away from the wound as so often he’d done to other people, uncovering just such a mess as this one on his left thigh. He stared at it, bewildered, and his bewilderment increased his deafness so when Burton (was it Burton?) leaned over and spoke to him his lips moved but he made no sound, opening and shutting his mouth like a goldfish. Cool fingertips on his thigh searched for soil in the wound and then the fish lips swelled and filled his whole vision and he slipped over the edge into unconsciousness and the whistling roar of the exploding shell which seemed to be lodged inside his skull followed him down into the dark.

Thirty-four

London was drab, full of mud-coloured people. As the night closed in and the street lamps were lit, their blue painted globes seemed not so much to shed light as to make darkness visible. Nelson on his column looked out over a city that had moved closer to its origins, a settlement on an estuary whose fragile lights kept at bay a vast darkness.

Walking down Regent Street to the Café Royal, Paul stumbled and almost fell. It had been a long day, his knee was starting to trouble him. He hated the atmosphere in London now, it was so different from last August. Then there had been crowds, heat, dust, cheering, the burnt smell of London foliage in late summer. Now there were these trampling shadows with their blue-tinged skin. Oh, and everywhere, the posters. One in particular pursued him form street to street. A jack-booted German officer trod on a dead woman’s bare breasts, while behind them a village burn to Beside the picture was a letter from a serving British soldier.

We have got three girls in the trenches with us, who came for protection. One has no clothes on, having been outraged by the Germans … Another poor girl has just come in having had both her breasts cut off. Luckily I caught the Uhlan officer in the act and with a rifle shot at 300 yards killed him. And now she is with us but poor girl I am afraid she will die. She is very pretty and only about 19 and only has her skirt on.

Nothing Paul had heard or seen in Belgium suggested that this scenario was probable or even possible, but then, it’s difficult to persuade young men to lay down their lives to preserve the balance of power in Europe. Some other cause had to be found, more firmly rooted in biological instinct. Pretty young girls with their blouses ripped off did the trick nicely. God, the cynicism of it.

Not a bad painting, though. In fact all the posters he’d seen were good. Elinor might complain that painting was being dismissed as irrelevant, but it seemed to him that the exact opposite was true. Painting, or at least its near relation — print-making — had been recruited.

He should have asked Tonks what he thought about the posters. Tonks was the only person he’d seen so far, and there, too, he’d thought Elinor was wrong. Her portrait of a Tonks unswervingly dedicated to the teaching of art while the war crashed and rumbled round his ears didn’t hold up for a second. Tonks had gone back to medicine, and now spent more time working in a hospital than he did at the Slade.

‘What else could I do?’ he said. ‘I’m a surgeon, for God’s sake. I have to do something.’

The sight of Tonks bending over his paintings — the familiar question mark of his curved spine — could still inspire fear in Paul. He waited for the whip-crack of contempt, but it never came. Instead, Tonks put his hand over his eyes. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘There’s this too.’

Tonks took the drawing to the window. It was of a young man who had had the whole of his lower jaw blown off by a shell. It was several minutes before Tonks turned to face Paul again. ‘I don’t see how you could ever show that anywhere.’

‘No, I know. But I wanted you to see it.’

Tonks mentioned names and promised letters of introduction. He would do everything he could to help but his time was limited. He was expecting to go to France himself soon. When, at the end of the corridor, Paul looked back, Tonks was still standing at the doorway to his room, watching him go. Perhaps from the window too, though Paul didn’t look up, merely smiled at the men in their wheelchairs and hurried past.

A few minutes later, in Russell Square, great rosy-cheeked, raw-boned lads charged and twisted bayonets. He stopped to watch. Afterwards they lay on the grass, their strong young limbs sprawling, smoking Woodbines and crooning sentimental songs. ‘Row, row, row your boat, gently up the stream’. Oh, and ‘Itchy Coo’. Over and over again. He could cheerfully have bayoneted the man who wrote that.

Night-time was best. London in the dark still had an excitement, a glamour, that it had entirely lost by day. The cold and gloom made the Café Royal seem fragile, a bubble floating on a black river. At first he thought nothing had changed, but then he looked again more closely and realized everything had. Burnt-butter smears of khaki darkened the red and gold. Young men everywhere: carefully cultivated moustaches over mouths not yet thinned into certainty, breeches and puttees self-consciously worn. Out there, the war stank of blood and gangrene; here, it smelled of new clothes.

Kit Neville was there. It was strange after their last meeting in Ypres to see him here, in his element, beaming, rubicund, gleaming with success. He seized Paul and bore him off to a quiet table by the far wall. As soon as they were sitting down he summoned the waiter and, without consulting Paul, ordered two large whiskies.

‘You’re back, then?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘Sorry I know, obvious.’ Neville seemed to be wanting to say something that couldn’t be said here or, perhaps, anywhere. ‘How are you finding it?’

‘Strange. I don’t seem to be able to slot back in.’

‘No, nor me.’

Nobody could have looked more at home.

‘Congratulations. Everybody’s talking about your paintings.’

‘Hmm.’ Several more gulps of whisky went down. ‘You know what I think? What I really think?’

‘No, what do you think?’

‘I think that once the bloody war’s over nobody’s going to want to look at anything I paint.’

Paul started to produce some reassuring pap.

‘No, listen, it’s a Faustian pact. I get all this attention for a few months, however long the bloody thing lasts, but once it’s over — finish. Nobody wants to look at a nightmare once they’ve woken up.’

How typical of Neville to find grounds for self-pity amidst the blaze of success. Paul couldn’t think of anything to say, so ordered two more large whiskies instead.

‘Seen Elinor?’ Neville asked, carefully casual.

‘No, I’ve only just got here.’

‘You know she’s in with that Bloomsbury crowd?’

‘I know she goes to Lady Ottoline’s parties. Do you?’

‘Good Lord, no. You have to be a full-blown conchie to get in there. They don’t like my stuff, that’s for sure. Or me.’

Their drinks arrived. Neville swished his whisky round and round the glass, but judiciously, careful to spill none. ‘You must have seen something of Elinor?’

‘She came to see me in hospital.’

‘Oh, yes, of course, you were wounded, weren’t you?’ Was that a twinge of envy? ‘How is it?’

Paul pulled a face.

‘Still. Keeps you out of it, I suppose.’

‘Depends how much movement I get back. The knee’s quite stiff at the moment, but they seem to think it’ll improve.’

‘Ah, well, early days. Have you managed to do any painting?’

‘I have, yes, quite a bit.’

‘More cornfields?’

‘In winter?’

‘Well, I don’t know, do I? Mangelwurzel-picking, perhaps?’

Paul repressed a smile. ‘No, nothing like that.’

A few minutes later Neville caught somebody else’s eye and moved off. Twisting round in his chair, Paul watched as he was welcomed into the circle around Augustus John. Oh, he was flourishing, was Neville, the great war artist. Paul thought of his own paintings and the determination to get his own exhibition together grew stronger. He’d painted them with such a curious cold intensity — in some cases knowing that a particular painting could never be put on public display — and yet here he was scrabbling around for contacts, envying Neville his success.

He finished his whisky and went outside, walking up and down the street until his mind felt clearer. His relationship with Neville was strange because he couldn’t call it friendship and yet Neville was one of the most significant figures in his life. That remark about the Faustian pact had echoed his own feelings in a way that nobody else could. He’d lain in bed in Belgium looking at the swollen hand that didn’t seem to belong to him and thought exactly that.

It was twenty minutes before he returned to the Café. And there she was, her shining cap of hair reflected in the mirror behind her. She looked older, but not as tired as most people did at the end of this long winter. Quite the contrary, in fact. She glowed. The lights caught the gloss in her hair, the sheen of her eyelids, the full, red pouting mouth. She hadn’t seen him. He watched her for a while talking to the men on either side of her, teasing, flirting, playing one off against the other, then suddenly sitting back against the red plush seat, self-exiled, bored, thin arms folded across her chest. He walked across and kissed her. She was expecting him — they’d arranged to meet here — and yet her lips were slack with surprise.

Recovering, she said, ‘Oh, come on, Angus, move along. I want to talk to Paul.’

The seating was rearranged and he sat down beside her. Her whole body was turned towards him, screening the other men out with her shoulder, but the eyes that looked up at him were wary. The feeling of hope that had flared in him when he first saw her began to fade.

‘I haven’t seen you for quite a while,’ she said. Getting in first, he couldn’t help thinking.

‘I don’t move in the same exalted circles as you do.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘Gower Street.’

‘Ah, the old stamping ground.’

‘Just across the road.’

‘Are you sure that’s a good idea? On a quiet morning you’ll be able to hear Tonks shouting, “I suppose you think you can draw?”’

He smiled. ‘I saw him this morning. I went to show him some stuff I’ve done.’

‘And …?’

He raised his shoulders.

‘Did he like it?’

‘I don’t know about “like”. He’s going to put me in touch with some people. With a view to getting an exhibition together.’

‘Paul, that’s fantastic.’

She leaned across and kissed him. There was no doubting her sincerity.

‘Have you seen Nev’s show?’ she asked.

‘No, I’ve heard about it. Have you?’

‘It was amazing. Totally new, somehow, though obviously he’s building on what he did before. It’s as if he was born for this.’ She smiled. ‘Do you know, as I was leaving there were these two old codgers wandering about shaking their heads and I heard one of them say, “It’s not much like cricket, is it?”’

‘It’s terrifying people still think like that.’ He felt her withdraw and said quickly, ‘I’m pleased for Neville.’

‘So am I.’

A pause. She was looking round the room. ‘Are you working?’

‘Yes, I am. I thought at first I wouldn’t be able to, but once I started I couldn’t stop.

‘Landscapes?’

‘No. Well, some, but not the sort you mean. The hospital and the road.’

She put her hand on his arm. ‘Don’t let’s talk about the war, Paul. Please? It gets into everything.’

‘Well, yes, of course it does.’

Her expression hardened. ‘If you let it.’

‘Oh, I see. Not mentioned in Bedford Square?’

‘Sometimes. Not often. Mainly we talk about art.’

‘Ah.’

‘Don’t let’s quarrel, Paul.’

‘I’ve no intention of quarrelling.’ He shifted restlessly in his seat. ‘Do we have to stay here?’

‘No, I’m quite happy to move on. It was just a place to meet.’

She stood up and said goodbye to the two young men.

‘Who are they?’ he asked, as they left.

‘No idea.’ She pulled a face. ‘Hangers-on.’

They hardly spoke on the journey in the cab. Under cover of the silence, a bead of tension formed and grew. He was aware of the shape of her shoulders under her coat. Remembered seeing them too, the bones standing out from the skin. Her collar bones in particular looked poised for flight. He could picture it all exactly, down to the bluish shadow between her breasts. He leaned towards her — her hair smelled of scent and smoke — and tried to kiss her, but she moved away.

Her rooms were on the top floor. Slanted, beamed ceilings, stonewashed walls, red, rust and brown rugs on the floor.

‘This is lovely’ he said.

She pulled the curtains closed before switching on the lamps. ‘Will you light the fire? I’ll put the kettle on.’

The fire was already laid. He put a match to the paper, then sat back on his heels, watching the flames lick and flicker round the sticks. The paper turned orange first, then brown. Black holes formed, glowing red at the edges, and little fluttering helpless wings that whirled away up the chimney on a shower of sparks. There. That ought to go.

While she was busy in the kitchen he wandered through into the other room and found a painting on the easel. It was a view of the hill behind her parents’ farmhouse, covered in deep snow.

‘Finished?’ he asked, hearing her come into the room behind him.

‘Nearly.’

‘Don’t do too much more to it, will you? It’s perfect as it is.’

‘You know we had snow the week before Christmas? I was at home looking after mother so in the afternoons when she was asleep I painted.’

‘How is she?’

‘Up and down. Worse since Toby left.’

The kettle whistled. She disappeared to make the cocoa. When she came back with the tray, he cleared a space on the table by the fire and said, ‘I did do one painting you’d approve of. A canal with poplars.’

‘At least you’re working.’

‘Are you really content to let it all pass you by?’

‘The war? Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t think it matters very much. I don’t think it’s important.’

Silence. She looked slightly uncomfortable.

‘Of course it matters, in one way, it matters that people are dying. I just don’t think that’s what art should be about. It’s like painting a train crash. Of course it’s dreadful, but it’s not …’ She was groping for words, which had never come easily to her. ‘It’s not you, is it? An accident’s something that happens to you. It’s not you, not in the same way people you love are. Or places you love. It’s not chosen.’

‘You think we choose the people we love?’

She shook her head.

‘Toby’s out there now, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. He left about a month ago.’

‘Is he at the front?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, suppose something happened to him? I’m sorry, but, you know, suppose he was killed, would you still say the war doesn’t fundamentally matter?’

‘Yes, then more than ever.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘The last thing I’d want to do is paint any part of what killed him. I’d go home, I’d paint the places we knew and loved when we were growing up together. I’d paint what made him, not what destroyed him.’

‘Well,’ he said, taken aback by her ferocity. ‘Let’s hope it never comes to that.’

‘I’m so frightened for him.’

‘But you still don’t want to know what’s happening?’

‘I do know, as much as he can tell me. He writes every week. What about you? Will you go back?’

‘If I can. I’ll do something.’

‘I won’t. Daddy keeps dropping hints about nursing, but I won’t do it. That’s how it is, you see, even for a woman.’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘We all have to give in to the great bully.’

They sat in silence. The firelight crept over her face and throat. She was blossoming. It hurt him to see her, though it would have hurt him far more to see her thin and pale with grief.

‘How are you really?’ she asked. ‘The truth.’

‘I don’t know. All right.’

‘Only all right?’

‘Lewis is dead.’

She bowed her head. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘I only realized how fond —’ The truth. ‘I only realized how much I loved him when it was too late.’

She looked startled. ‘I suppose men do become very attached to each other in those circumstances.’

‘No, it wasn’t like that. I’d have loved him anywhere.’ He laughed. ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t been converted. I shan’t be jumping on any of your new friends.’

‘I can think of one or two who’d be delighted if you did.’

He lay back in the chair, his injured leg stretched out in front of him. ‘You know in Ypres you said I didn’t love you?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘I’m sure you did.’

‘No. I thought it.’

‘Anyway it isn’t true. There’s not an hour goes by I don’t think about you.’ He looked directly at her. ‘I think we should get married.’

He didn’t know what he’d expected. Certainly not this cool, considering stare. ‘Why?’

‘Oh, lots of reasons.’ He was smiling now, getting ready to pretend he hadn’t been serious. ‘We could share a studio. Save rent.’

She shook her head.

‘No, listen, that’s not a bad idea.’

‘It wouldn’t work.’

‘Why wouldn’t it?’

‘You’d need somebody to take care of you while you were working.’

‘Not true.’

‘You don’t mean it. You’re at a low ebb at the moment, so you’re clutching at straws, but as soon as you felt better you’d wonder what on earth had possessed you. You don’t love me.’

‘I do, you know.’

‘As a friend.’

‘No, as a woman.’

‘No.’

Exasperated, he said, ‘You seem remarkably determined not to be loved.’

‘I don’t think you can love a woman.’ That shocked him. ‘That’s very sad, if it’s true.’

‘You don’t trust us.’

‘No, I’m not sure I do. Mind you, I don’t trust men either so I don’t know where that gets us.’ He sat thinking. ‘And I probably wouldn’t be faithful to you.’

He saw the recoil on her face. For all her contempt for the conventions she didn’t like that.

‘No, I know you wouldn’t.’

‘I suppose we could always have an open marriage.’

‘You mean you sleeping with anybody you fancy and me sitting at home pretending not to mind? No thanks.’

‘Anyway’ he went on, after a pause, ‘I can’t ask you to marry me, my knee won’t bend.’

Instantly she threw herself at his feet, gazing up at him with clasped hands and adoring eyes. ‘Darling Paul, please say you’ll be mine.’

‘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.