Chapter Sixteen
Sixteen
There is no order to the Red Cross box. When the time came I did not place things carefully or chronologically, I just emptied it of its dressings and salves and filled it with what mattered. I wasn’t given a lot of time and I did not know then if I would return.
He is just a man, I wrote. Like any other.
I was in the storeroom restocking the trolley when Hugo was delivered. It had been a week since I’d seen him. Since he’d seen me. I expected him to come straight to the storeroom to put on his doctor’s coat, so I stayed where I was, but Alison stopped him. I listened as she gave her handover.
Her voice had none of the variation I was granted and I could hear the effort she made to keep her tone unfriendly. It was that effort that gave her away. She liked him, I thought, though she didn’t want to.
When the handover was done she came into the storeroom to get her cape.
‘The Hun is here so I’m off. It should be a quiet night.’
For the first few hours, it was quiet. The patients were beyond crises or heavily sedated, and except for the few words required to double-check medications or the whereabouts of a new box of rubber gloves, Hugo, as I now thought of him, was silent, his gestures guarded. He could not look me in the eye.
He sat at the nurses’ desk, patient notes in front of him, his pen poised but motionless.
I watched him for a full minute then went and made a pot of tea.
When I came out he seemed not to have moved.
I stood behind him for a moment, taking him in.
His hair was recently washed, the oatmeal lighter than usual.
He had a double crown. Of all the details to remember.
I put the tea tray on the desk in front of him. There were two cups, two biscuits. ‘What are you thinking about?’ I asked.
He looked at me and focused. ‘Whether the complex fracture in twelve can be cared for in the convalescent camp or should be sent to England.’
‘Will he ever be able to join a labour crew here in étaples?’
Hugo shook his head. ‘Not for months. Maybe not at all. He will need much physical therapy.’
I took a chair from beside an empty bed and sat on the other side of the desk. ‘Then recommend they send him to England.’ Lucky bastard, I thought.
Hugo nodded, but he did not move the pen to the page. He just looked at me. I leaned forward and poured the tea, too soon. It was something to do.
I sat back and held the cup with both hands. Hugo was still looking at me. It should not have unnerved me but it did. I spoke to fill the silence or perhaps to take control.
‘What do you think about when you lie in your cot?’ I asked. I brought the cup to my lips and sipped the tea. I held his gaze until he blinked and looked down. A curl of hair fell forward. His mouth twitched then tightened then relaxed. When he looked up he was smiling.
‘You are asking me to flatter you,’ he said.
‘Am I?’
‘What do you think I think about?’ he said.
I added sugar to my tea. ‘Your homeland.’
He said nothing and I stirred.
‘The end of this wretched war.’
He said nothing and I sipped. I looked at him over the rim of the cup.
‘Your family,’ I said.
I held myself still as his jaw clenched and I thought he might end our conversation – I gave him that chance.
‘I think about all those things,’ he said. ‘But not when I am in my cot.’
‘No?’
‘Not anymore.’
‘What then?’
‘I think of you.’
I didn’t expect him to say it so easily, to admit it to me or even himself. All this he knew from some small change in my face.
‘You see. You are flattered.’
But as he said it, I wanted to object. I’d been used to admiration, before the war.
The kind that scans the face and finds it pleasing, then scans the figure and is aroused.
The start of a game played with words and gestures; it was my daily delight.
Before the war I had an appetite for flattery as one has an appetite for sweets – it was pleasant but not sustaining.
Since being in étaples, something had changed.
He’d seen me naked; of course he thought of me.
I knew this, and yet I still asked the question.
I suddenly realised that it wasn’t flattery I wanted, it was proof that my body existed to do more than care, that it could feel more than the ache of sadness and exhaustion, that it could still excite and be excited.
I needed reassurance that all the horrors and hardships could not extinguish curiosity and desire, and would not extinguish me.
I had felt like I was disintegrating, then suddenly I wasn’t.
He had seen me and it had felt like a breeze on wet skin. I had shivered with the pleasure of it.
I can articulate it now, but then, I just ached for something I knew he could give me.
I think of you, he said, and I felt a tingling in nerve endings dulled from neglect.
I remembered his stillness in the storeroom and I saw myself through his eyes.
He’d held his breath, like a child not wanting to be noticed, or a man hoping to slow time.
In the days that followed, that moment had hovered on the edge of everything I did, every conversation I had.
It had become an antidote to despair. Before sleep could claim me I would bring it into focus and then imagine us coupling.
The nightmares that shared my bed had begun to retreat.
I think of you, he said, and I began to feed on it.
‘I’m not flattered,’ I said. ‘I’m relieved.’
It affected him, this answer: his smile faltered and he could no longer look at me.
For a while he seemed to be examining his hands, the ring he wore.
He turned it absent-mindedly, perhaps deliberately.
Then he spoke, to himself, perhaps, or to me.
I don’t know. He was trying to articulate something and failing.
It was something that came from his body and not his mind and his words were untested.
‘Seeing you…’ He stopped. ‘I…’ He shook his head and stopped turning the ring. He looked at the palms of his hands as if the words were written there. ‘You were perfect,’ he finally said.
‘I’m not perfect,’ I said.
He looked up and frowned. ‘But you are.’
He glanced around the ward and I began to understand.
‘I have spent these years looking on the bodies of broken men and more broken women than you want to know,’ he said.
‘We have done dreadful things to human bodies during this war. We have torn them and crushed them and mangled their insides so they cannot eat or shit or urinate or ever make love again. This is what I see when I am awake, and when I sleep it is worse.’ He took a breath and I was afraid he would cry.
‘Scarred and rotting flesh is more familiar to me now than unblemished skin,’ he said.
‘I saw you and felt…’ He stopped and shook his head.
He spoke to his hands. ‘A longing that was hard for me. I could not move for the strangeness of it, and the fear. I wanted to touch you, to feel your skin, the smoothness of it. I wanted to turn you around and examine every inch of you to know there was no wound. I wanted to hold your breast in my hand and know its weight, and feel the steady beat of your heart beneath.’ Then he whispered, ‘I imagined the strength of your legs and your arms. How it would feel to be held by them.’
He took a deep breath and let it go. He had come to the end of the confession. He looked at me. ‘I had none of these words then,’ he said, ‘but I have thought of only this.’
‘You didn’t move away.’
‘You did not dress.’
‘I wanted to be seen.’
‘I could not look elsewhere.’
‘I didn’t want you to.’
He said nothing.
‘I wanted you to step towards me,’ I said.
‘I could not.’
‘Why?’
Again, he said nothing.
‘Why?’
This sudden silence, after all he had said.
‘Why?’ I repeated.
He shook his head and I knew what he didn’t want to say.
‘You wanted more than to touch and examine,’ I said.
He looked down. He filled his lungs with air and turned the ring once more. I reached across the desk and put my hands on his. I noticed the teapot, the teacups, his and mine, full of tea, too weak.
‘Look at me,’ I said.
He obeyed.
‘What else did you want?’
‘You know.’
‘Say it.’
He shook his head.
‘Why not?’
‘It would make things harder.’
Of course it would, for him especially. How could I have been so selfish? That’s what I ask myself now, twenty years later. Hindsight, they say, but then is not now. We were out of time and out of place and all the rules had changed. We were both disintegrating in our own ways.
The tea went cold and we stood from the desk and went about our work filling the hours before dawn.
Then there was the chorus of birds and I stopped what I was doing and searched for him along the ward.
He stood by a bed and had his back to me, but he was still and listening.
He did not turn and I have always wondered if he knew I was watching him, or if he was afraid I might not be.
The reveille brought the noise of the camp, then a sister, then a Redcap. When Hugo was escorted from the ward I had an impulse to go after him.