Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-six
Iso’s day was over and I was her final errand. We leaned into a cold October wind and trudged up Isolation Road. She would have left me at the door of the German ward if Matron hadn’t been in a rush to leave.
‘The sister is due and the Hun is already here. There is nothing to report that my notes do not cover.’ Alison looked at me and sighed, then she looked to Iso. ‘There’s a full flask of coffee. Have you time to make her a cup?’
My return to the German ward felt probationary.
Iso and Hugo developed a kind of language around my state of mind.
Small nods and tilts of their heads that they thought I was unaware of – it was a handover, of sorts, and although Hugo and I could not find a way back to where we had once been, these gestures mattered. They were reason to try.
I don’t know for sure how things went on this night, but I am certain that I would have sat at the desk to read Alison’s notes and Iso would have poured coffee, strong from the flask, and put it in my hand.
It is what she did during that time. Then she might have stayed a few minutes or an hour.
She might have sat with a boy who spoke French, or rolled a few bandages or made a drawing.
I have a memory of her hand on Hugo’s forearm, reassuring.
It could have been that day or another. If she said goodbye I don’t remember.
The boy in bed four spoke English. Though he wasn’t a boy.
He was a man of forty. My age, that’s how I remember him, but he looked older.
He was bald and thin and his skin sagged like a deflated balloon.
He’d been a big man once, I thought. Fleshy.
He had no injuries worth recalling, but he suffered terrible cramps and bloody diarrhoea.
I’d seen worse. Much worse. He grabbed my hand and spoke in English.
‘I will be well?’
‘You will,’ I said.
He was typical of so many who arrived at étaples with dysentery. In the first week they got either a little better or a lot worse. He seemed a little better and Alison had confirmed it in her notes.
I’d said what he wanted to hear and the hand that held mine squeezed a little. He smiled. ‘Thank you,’ he said before letting go.
‘I have done very little.’
‘You could have done nothing.’
I shook my head. ‘No, I could not.’
‘Why could you not?’
Why, I wondered. Because you are a man, not a German. A person, not a Hun. ‘Because I imagine my brother in a prisoner’s ward with a German nurse.’ I had tried not to think of Bill since my turn, and the words surprised me. Terrified me. That he might be a prisoner was my last hope.
‘Tell me of him,’ said the man in bed four. ‘I may have seen him in my travels.’
The possibility was suddenly irresistible.
I started telling him about Bill, describing his features, his voice.
‘He is covered in freckles,’ I said. I stopped talking and sat on the edge of the bed.
I picked up his hand then turned it to expose the underside of his forearm.
There’d been a boy in that very bed with freckles like Bill, and for a moment it was his face and his hand that I was recalling.
‘Continue,’ the man said.
‘I can’t remember if he had freckles on the inside of his arm or not,’ I said. ‘How can I not know?’
‘It is often hidden.’
‘But I bathed him. When he was a boy, I bathed him, I dressed him.’ I was forgetting the details of my brother, confusing them with all the other red-haired and freckled boys I’d nursed. ‘If I can’t describe him, how will I find him?’
‘Nurse Taylor.’ It was the sister – sharp and disapproving – I don’t recall her name. I remember being surprised that she was there. I looked around for Iso, but she’d gone.
‘You are not here to provide solace. The essentials of care are more than they deserve.’
But she’d got it wrong. She’d misunderstood. It was him providing the solace, the man in bed four. My age, and bald as a badger’s backside, I wrote.
He squeezed my hand. ‘He may not be lost,’ he whispered.
‘Danke,’ I said.
‘Thank you,’ he replied.
I did a round and provided the essentials of care, nothing more, to thirty men who I now have no memory of and not a single detail recorded in the journal. When the trolley was depleted I pushed it to the storeroom.
Hugo was there, washing his hands. He did not stop when I entered. He let the water run and spoke quietly.
‘I am sorry you have not had news of Bill.’
‘You were eavesdropping?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where I come from that’s quite rude.’
‘Also where I come from.’
Beyond the needs of the ward, we had not spoken since my turn.
I had not accounted for what happened and he had not accounted for his tears.
I missed him, even as I tried to dismiss him.
I longed to close the door between us and the ward, with the sister – sharp and disapproving – but that would draw her attention.
I stood beside him and reached for something on the shelf above the trough, something that should have been on the trolley but wasn’t. Something I could justify if the sister walked in. I don’t remember what it was.
‘Are you alright?’ he asked.
‘I think he is dead,’ I said.
‘Your brother?’
I nodded.
‘But you do not know.’
‘I think I do.’
There was a silence; of course there was a silence. He knew I was probably right.
‘He would not want you to join him.’
No, he wouldn’t, I thought. ‘That was not my intention,’ I said.
But even now I can appreciate the desire for death as a desire for peace.
In the middle of that war I sometimes felt my mind was the greater threat.
My battles had been fought with attitude and alcohol, tried and tested strategies, and when they failed, my body went into the fray.
Like one of those armoured vehicles that rolled towards the German trenches, my body was determined not to feel the assaults of my mind.
But then there was Hugo. He made me feel, and I began to long for sensation.
I’d let my guard down and then he’d withdrawn.
I stood there, amid it all, completely exposed.
‘I’m stronger than that,’ I told him.
‘You are not invincible.’
I had tried to escape, not forever, just for a while. ‘I won’t do it again, if that’s what you want to hear.’
‘It is what I want to believe.’
‘Why?’
It sounded more like an accusation than a question, and I’d said it too loudly. He looked up from his soapy hands and we were us again, for just that moment. We held our breath and our bodies still, in fear of the sister. It was part of a dance we once knew.
I see him now as a painting.
I have no photographs of Hugo, but when it was all over, Iso made me a gift of a small oil, painted on a veneer of wood about twice the size of a postcard.
I remember thinking that it did not quite look like him, though there was a resemblance.
What impressed me, what stirred my guts and brought an ache to my womb, was the truth of his nature.
It was, I think, Iso’s greatest skill, to capture the ineffable.
It is in the Red Cross box, slightly warped, slightly cracked. I have been careless with it, as with all these memories.
Iso painted him waiting. He is sitting at a bedside with the hand of a patient held securely in his.
Iso must have sat where she could see his face, and I imagine her on the other side of the bed.
He looks concerned and I’ve often wondered if he was waiting for that boy to live or to die.
But there is something else, something more intimate painted into his features. Iso has captured Hugo’s vulnerability.
And that is what I’m remembering now. We stood at the trough with the water running, waiting for the sister to interrupt, and I thought he looked so vulnerable.
It was in his face and eyes and I heard it in his breath, deeper than before.
I understood it. I thought I had lost him and the loss had left me exposed to the worst of my fears.
The sister did not call or come in. The water continued to run. I asked the question again because I so desperately needed to know.
‘Why, Hugo, do you hope I do not try again to escape?’
‘Because, Tilda, I am not invincible.’
It was a relief to know that he also thought he’d lost something. That he was making one last attempt to claim it though he knew he might fail.
‘Ich liebe dich,’ he said.
Even now, I’m not sure he knew I would understand.
But I did, and my body ached to respond.
I imagined the exquisite relief of his touch and then the thought of it ending.
And it would end, I knew that. There was no place for us in that war and no place for us out of it.
I should have been braver, I should have walked away. It might have spared us.
‘It is against the rules,’ I said.
‘I know this.’
‘It is against your rules.’
‘Yes.’
The desire I felt then was bruising.