Chapter Thirteen
There is a length of Chinese silk in the Red Cross box that has been rolled like a bandage. I want to leave it, I want to unfurl it. We can want two opposite things at the same time; I have always known this.
I unfurl the silk – blues, greens and ivory – and let it slide between my fingers. I remember one thing and then another, then I wrap it around my neck and pull it tight. Then tighter and I begin to remember something else. Tighter still and I am swimming towards silence. I let it go. I am shaking.
I roll up the length of silk as I would a bandage and put it back in the Red Cross box.
I open the journal.
New Year’s Eve 1915. I wore the emerald-green waistcoat with Chinese silk ties over my blue skirt (cerulean, Iso tells me) and cream blouse (I’ve cut off the frills – quite ridiculous in this place).
Walton Hut had been transformed and Iso insisted I dress for a dance and drop in before my shift, but when I arrived she was nowhere to be seen.
I moved through the room, only vaguely searching for her.
I was delighted by all the colour: the bunting that scalloped the walls, the muted rainbow of hellebores in old tins on tables covered in chequered cloth.
The debutantes in their one good dress. They were young and every one of them was beautiful, even those who thought they weren’t, who hung back and looked shyly at young officers hoping to be approached.
It was almost enough to imagine myself somewhere else at some other time.
I found Iso in the kitchen, cutting crusts off sandwiches.
‘Hiding,’ I said. She smiled and added one last sandwich to a tray.
She covered it with a tea towel and I offered her my arm.
As I walked her into the hubbub of the crowd she held me tighter and I wondered if her insistence I come was a desire for protection.
We got punch and stood on the edge of things, observing. I felt her relax and wondered if she’d brought her sketchbook. When I turned to look I saw she was holding her punch with both hands, her fingers fidgeting. Poor Iso, I thought. She will be uncomfortable when I leave.
It was not my way to stand on the edge of things and out of habit I searched the room for someone I might flirt with.
My eye could not settle, though it noticed an officer – tall and trim, dark hair with grey at the temples.
There was a time… but the thought trailed off.
I was searching for someone who could not possibly be there.
I drained my glass in order to get another. An excuse to move.
‘You stay here,’ I said to Iso. ‘I won’t be long.’
I shimmied into a thicket of young officers who smiled too politely and let me through without hindrance.
I stood at the trestle and my glass was refilled with punch, then tall and trim with grey at the temples was standing beside me.
His cup was filled and we smiled and sipped.
It was sweet and disappointing, I wrote.
The punch or his smile? I can’t remember what I was referring to.
If he spoke I’ve forgotten. I scanned the crowd, looking for grand gestures and loud talk.
‘Do you mind?’ I said, to a young man with a flask.
I was several inches taller and considerably broader.
I reminded him of his mother or maybe his sergeant – he didn’t have the confidence to object.
He poured, just a little, and I left my cup in place until he poured again.
I cut a meandering path back through the crowd towards Iso.
A toast was made to Edith Cavell and the room went quiet.
There were murmurs and some bowed heads, then the silence began to drag.
We were unsure when we should resume good cheer.
A sister, known to all behind her back as Grizzly Guts, drank down her cup of punch, held the empty glass in the air and called out, ‘Dance.’ When no one took to the floor she called out louder, ‘Dance. You can, so you must.’
And slowly they did. Young men in khakis held out their hands to young women in their one good dress. Iso and I watched on and I noticed that all the young women who thought they were not beautiful had been asked to dance. Did it change their minds? I wonder now.
It felt odd to stand aside and observe, but even as I scanned the crowd I knew I would find no one I wanted to dance with and I could not leave soon enough.
I walked along Isolation Road, towards the German ward and 1916. Dance. You can, so you must, the sister had said, and all I could think of was him.
I opened the door to the ward and the boy in the nearest bed looked up. He let out a low, slow whistle, I wrote. It filled me with joy and still makes me smile.
‘You should be asleep,’ I said, but he didn’t understand.
‘And you should be in uniform, nurse. You are no longer at a party.’
It was the sister; I don’t know which one. She made a point of looking at the watch pinned to her uniform.
‘There was a toast to Edith Cavell,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t leave.’
‘Of course,’ she said. It was unarguable.
‘I’ll be five minutes, I have a spare uniform in the storeroom.’
She nodded; she may have even smiled, who knows, but why not remember it that way?
I looked for the doctor. He was with a patient and was not looking at me, but my edges, blurred just moments before, began to resolve.
‘Gute Nacht,’ I said to my admirer.
‘Gute Nacht,’ he said back.
Dr Henning heard, of course, for that was the point.
I walked the length of the ward and knew he was watching.
I touched my hand to the nape of my neck and let a loose curl run through my fingers.
I stopped at the nurses’ desk and perched, slightly askew, to read the patient notes.
It was my habit and nothing out of the ordinary, except I knew how to twist my torso for greatest effect and I was wearing the velvet waistcoat, emerald green and tied at the waist with Chinese silk, blues and greens and ivory.
Without the ridiculous frill, the blouse sat simply beneath, though perhaps a little low.
I finished reading the notes and stood up from the desk. His back was turned but the sister was watching. I went to the storeroom and closed the door so I could change.
A dull drone overhead, I wrote later, but it was more than that. I could feel it in my skull, a deep vibration, and I had no experience to compare it with. The sound, I thought, was like a laundry copper when it was at its hottest and most agitated.
Like animals sensing threat, we fell silent. The whole ward – the patients, the sister, the doctor and me. Then the lights went out and there was no moon to cast shadows in the dark. The camp had stopped dancing hours ago and now it was hiding.
For a moment I continued to hold the tray that held what Dr Henning needed to pack a wound.
I could sense him hovering, his hands above the wound, the dressing unspooled and connecting him to the patient, a strange sinew.
We needed light to continue, but the drone kept coming and the lights stayed off.
‘Zeppelin,’ said the boy with the wound. Then something else in German.
‘What did he say?’ I whispered, as if sound, like light, might reveal us.
‘He saw one, before the war. He recalls the sound,’ said Dr Henning.
Then the boy laughed and said something to the boy beside him, who said something to the boy beside him. Just like boys in a dormitory telling tales in the dark, I wrote. Those who could wake had woken and laughter spread among them and the fear of moments before was drowned by it.
‘Why are they laughing?’ I asked.
‘The irony,’ said Dr Henning. ‘That the Kaiser will kill them, as the British try to keep them alive.’
The vibration in my head spread down my spine and into my chest and arms and the contents of the tray I was holding – the scissors, the scalpel, the syringe for irrigation – began to rattle.
It sounded cacophonous so I put it down, but then there was an explosion.
My fault, I thought. I remember that so clearly – the guilt and fear, though it was irrational.
I fell across the boy as if my body could protect his.
Dr Henning too, had an instinct to protect and I felt his weight on my back and his breath against my neck.
His arm circled my head and kept it pressed against the chest of the boy.
Another explosion and he held us tighter, like a man protecting his family.
And I wonder, now, if he thought of his wife and son as he held on to me and the boy.
Then nothing. Just his breath against my neck, hot and agitated. ‘It is not so close,’ he whispered as the vibration in my limbs subsided.
Still no sound. No grumbling copper. The zeppelin had dropped its bombs, but not on us.
I felt the weight of Dr Henning shift and he removed his arm from around my head.
He stood, and for the briefest moment he rested his hand on my neck.
I felt his fingers brush the lobe of my ear.
I did not know if it was deliberate. I still don’t.
I checked the boy was alright and he said something in German.
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘It does not matter.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
Dr Henning grunted. ‘Better luck next time.’