Chapter Thirty-Five
The past feels present. My body is not as firm but I feel it as I once did, whole and wanting, my skin alert. It is a craving I welcomed then, but when it was over it became a torment. After the war I packed the details away in the Red Cross box and tried to forget.
Now his letter, after twenty years, but I am still afraid to open it.
I’m afraid of what he might have written, what he might accuse me of, what he might ask.
I’m afraid of who he might be and of who I may have become.
I have opened the Red Cross box so I might understand the past. I will open the letter when I am sure I’ve remembered it truly.
Our lovemaking, if that’s what it can be called, was always clothed and rushed and incomplete.
It was tinged with fear and anxiety and I barely recall it.
What I do remember is the desire. I lived for so long with the frustration and distraction of wanting him to touch me that now I can’t rid myself of the feeling.
But actual touching? I think sometimes I have made it up.
That I’ve put it together from fragments that surely happened at one time or another, though how can I be sure?
I did not write it all down. I thought they were moments I would never forget, but now I find myself darning the gaps left by time’s insatiable appetite.
I remember his hands – one on the forehead of the boy in bed four, another holding a pen, a thermometer, the diaphragm of a stethoscope as he listened to a boy’s breath.
I remember them pushing stray curls away from his eyes.
These were commonplace gestures, drawn over and over, and they will not fade.
But those same hands on my cheek, my waist, beneath my skirt and against my thigh?
I wanted these gestures more often than they could ever have happened.
I imagined them then as I imagine them now – the pressure of his fingers on my hips, through all the fabric of my uniform, holding me to him.
It is desire dressed as memory. An impression and better than nothing, but never enough.
Other things I wrote down and recall as if they have just happened.
We would be alone on the ward, which is to say, there was no matron, no sister, no orderlies.
No one who might form an impression. Even so, thirty German patients could keep us apart for hours, both of us tending to the needs we were best equipped to tend, occasionally coming together: the brush of fingers in passing; an unnecessary closeness at the side of a bed; a hand on a shoulder when one of us sat at the desk to write notes.
I felt the pressure of it and longed for it to spread, I wrote once.
But there were times when the ward would go quiet and we could meet in the storeroom for a few minutes.
We would search for each other’s flesh beneath layers of clothing.
The sensation of his fingers along the top edge of my chemise, finding the curve of my breast. It is how lovemaking begins and it was impossible not to anticipate the journey his hand might make across my body. But then the ward would interrupt.
Sometimes, we would move beyond a beginning.
I recorded some details but not others and I am left with only fragments, brief outlines of moments, like one of Iso’s sketches.
Sometimes I put them together, sometimes I keep them apart.
A blanket stained with my blood and his semen.
Who would know? I thought. Such stains were commonplace.
In the quiet of night I had often seen men move beneath their covers.
The rhythm of pleasuring unmistakable, the moment of relief.
I remember gathering up our blanket and putting it in the laundry bag.
I remember taking a damp flannel to wipe myself clean. I remember feeling it was not enough.
Our desire had become a necessary distraction, but I longed for what might linger if the storm building in our bodies ever found land.
I apologised for the blood. His fingers were slick with it.
‘Why apologise?’ he asked.
Why? I thought. I’d known I was bleeding but I hadn’t stopped him. Couldn’t, perhaps. The body can be demanding and we were not free to love whenever it was convenient. We were like cats, opportunistic and selfish. Intent on surviving and taking what we needed.
He held his fingers to his nose and smelled them. Smelled me. Then he touched them to his lips. Stained them red.
He might have just eaten a strawberry, I wrote. He licked his lips and I was shocked.
But shocked is not the right word. I was disturbed, by the familiarity and by his seriousness and his ease. He was lingering. It was an intimacy that felt unique and exquisite and should have been impossible.
‘Why are you doing that?’ I asked.
‘Because it is healthy, your blood. It is clean. I have begun to forget how blood should smell.’
‘And how does it smell?’
‘There is almost no odour, it has not had time to spoil, and the taste is like’ – he searched for a description and I watched as his lips rolled over the tip of his tongue as if he might find it resting there – ‘a new coin, before it is spent.’
‘It doesn’t disgust you?’ I asked.
For a moment he was abashed and I felt like I’d dropped something fragile. I hadn’t meant to and I held my breath. Nothing broke. He looked at his fingers where my blood was drying, the colour fading. He rubbed them together, as if the blood had texture, and maybe it did.
‘It does not disgust me,’ he said, looking me in the eye, refusing shame. ‘Your blood is as it should be, and there is so little in this place that is as it should be.’
It might have been that time, or another. He might have found my flesh or not. What I remember is Hugo attending the boy in bed four and me writing up notes for handover. Suddenly he was behind me with his hands in my hair, I wrote later.
I feel it now, that shimmer across my skin – my arms, my back, my neck. How extraordinary that this feeling can travel so effortlessly across decades.
My cap needed tying and my plait had come loose, unfurled from its bun and frayed at the ends.
He was reconstructing it, starting again.
I stilled. We were in the open ward and I was afraid of being caught, but I didn’t want him to stop.
He combed through my hair with his fingers then divided it into three strands.
Bill would sometimes plait my hair. And Helen.
I thought of them both as Hugo lay one strand across the other.
My three loves, I thought, then wished I hadn’t.
Hugo was not mine to keep, but none of them were, in the end.
I felt the gentle pull as each strand was woven between the others, over then under, rhythmic and deft.
I knew there would be no tension at the base and that the plait would roll neatly into a bun.
Did I think then that he’d done this before? That the care he took was to honour the memory of someone else, just as I thought of others as he did it? He was a man who knew how to plait a woman’s hair, how to do it gently and well. He had loved his wife before the war, and he would love her after.
The door to the German ward opened and Hugo was back beside the boy in bed four.
The plait, half finished, hung down my back.
I pulled it over my shoulder and picked up where he had left off.
I did not try to rush or hide it (already I had drafted a scene and was acting it out).
My bun had slipped its cap and pins. Who has time to fix their hair properly when we have barely six hours between shifts?
I would say. Whoever came through the door would raise their brows and tell me to do better, respect the uniform, take pride in my appearance. God help me if it was Sister Morgan.
It was Iso. I dropped the act and let go of my hair. The strands that Hugo had laid, one across the other, released themselves.
She stood for a moment and we looked at each other. She is already sketching me, I thought.
‘Be a darling,’ I said, grabbing my hair like it was a skein of wool I needed to untangle.
She obliged and I felt her small fingers undo all his work. They lingered, as his had, then she wove the strands, a little too tight.