Chapter Eleven
Eleven
Iso walked with me along Rue de Camiers on my way to visit Jack at St John’s.
The day was waning and the season too. The air was cool under a clear sky and in the distance we could see the yellowing woods.
Behind us birds flocked above the dunes, feeding before their long flight south.
Stragglers, I remember Iso saying and I suggested they’d been waiting for a pause in battle.
We passed troops heading back from the Bull Ring, heads hung, bodies filthy and exhausted. ‘If only they could fly away,’ I said.
Iso had her folding stool and satchel with sketchpad and pastels.
She wanted to draw the horses corralled on the edge of the camp.
She liked to draw them without their saddles and riders, unburdened.
When we arrived at St John’s I didn’t go in straight away.
I stood at the entrance and watched her continue along Rue de Camiers.
I wondered if she’d walk all the way to the cemetery; it had the order she liked – row after row of white crosses.
It was a dormitory of sorts, somewhere to rest for those who’d died too far from home. Strangely peaceful.
But their rules rang like commandments (Thou shalt not…) and the woman behind the desk was buttoned-up temperance with a rod in her back.
She looked me up and down then motioned for the woman behind me to come forward.
A girl really – barely twenty, if I had to guess – but her voice was as tailored as her jacket, and Buttoned-up Temperance smiled warmly before passing her a form.
I could sound like that girl, I remember thinking.
I was good at accents, though the voice I’d inherited would place me closer to Southwark than Mayfair.
I was about to protest when I realised the woman behind the desk was doing me a favour.
There was a war on and neither of us wanted to waste our time.
All those shalt nots – it would never have worked out.
I’d already failed one audition that day; I was in no mood to fail another.
‘Red Cross?’ I enquired, as if I’d only come in for directions.
She’d nodded, approving, and gave me the address.
It felt odd to walk onto the St John’s ward as a visitor, with a visitor’s eye instead of a VAD’s.
I’d dressed up: a cream skirt and a cream blouse with an absurd frill decorating the front.
I recall it because I’d had no occasion to wear it since arriving in étaples and it had an odour – too long at the bottom of a drawer; it had welcomed the damp and humidity of the summer just gone and would not let it go.
But Jack was an occasion, this boy from home.
He would write to his mother and to Helen’s girls and I wanted to look like I had before the war, and not like I was.
I wanted him to report that all was well, as I would for him, regardless of the truth.
So I put on the blouse and sprinkled it with the lavender water Alison had given me.
Buttoned-up Temperance would not have approved.
The frill was designed for the flat chested: it accentuated, and I did not need accentuating.
I topped it with an emerald-green waistcoat – velvet and open at the bust (for all that frill).
It was tied at the waist with two lengths of patterned Chinese silk.
Blues mostly, but also greens and a little white.
Though that’s not quite right. The white was ivory, Iso told me, as we’d walked along Rue de Camiers.
I shrugged and she explained – a hint of yellow gives it warmth, enhances the blues and greens.
It doesn’t compete, it harmonises. I still have that waistcoat, though it doesn’t fit and there’s only one tie – blues and greens, a little ivory. Funny, the things we keep.
And the things we record. Why all this detail about a waistcoat and patterned silk? It is Jack I want to remember. A friend from home. A boy really, like all of them. Rosie’s son. Helen’s neighbour on the canal.
Jack was a little younger than Helen’s girls, but he would walk with them to the press, where they all worked, and take them to dances, and when Helen died he was there beside them like a brother.
He absorbed the blows of Peggy’s grief and anger and he sat with Maude in the silence she preferred.
Helen’s girls are identical but completely different, and Jack never confused them.
These are the details that are important, but I am stuck on an emerald-green waistcoat with patterned silk ties.
What if Jack has died, I wrote in the journal after I had dressed for my visit to St John’s.
There was no reason to believe it, but that place was unreasonable and boys died all the time.
What if he is broken? How will I tell Rosie and Peggy and Maude?
What will I write? How will I say I’m sorry?
Jack was the first boy I’d come across who I’d known from before.
It was bound to happen, I’d been told, but so many of the men I knew were older – too old, in most cases, to fight.
At least at the beginning. So I’d been spared that trauma, if not others.
But there he was, calling my name, covered in mud and half deaf.
When I realised it was Jack I’d thought of Bill.
Until that moment I managed not to think about Bill with crutches, on a stretcher, under a sheet.
But then Jack was there and I wished it was Bill who had called my name, over and over.
A crutches case, that is all, with the mud of Loos obscuring his freckles.
It was Bill I wanted to scold for getting muck all over my silk pyjamas.
Scold him as I did when he was little and I was pretending to be his mother.
I scolded Jack instead and could not get Bill from my mind.
And so I took my time to dress like a visitor.
Like a mother or wife or sister who has crossed the channel to be by their boy’s side.
There were always a few women in frills and lace on the wards of St John’s.
I’d studied them and now I was playing the part.
It was Jack, but I was rehearsing for Bill.
I stood just inside the door and let the silk ties run through my hands. Once. Twice. I recall the cloth flowing, exquisitely soft, but that is a lazy shortcut of memory. It didn’t flow. My hands were so cracked I could hear the scrape of skin as it caught and pulled.
Tilda, the boy kept calling and I thought he was a boomerang. I took my time and kept him waiting. I kept him waiting, and it might have been Bill. But it was Jack. I wiped his face and held him to my belly as if he were my brother and not Rosie’s son.
I kept him waiting. That is what I wrote when the tide of bodies ebbed.
The silk had been a gift from a director I hadn’t much cared for.
I didn’t refuse it, though perhaps I should have; nothing is ever free.
It was a single bolt of fabric I had little use for, so I cut it in half and sewed it to a waistcoat I had acquired playing Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Actually, Bill had acquired the waistcoat, or rather, hung on to it after making some minor repairs.
He was good with a needle and thread. And, now I think of it, it was Bill who cut the bolt of silk in half and made ties of it.
It was Bill who sewed them to the waistcoat.
‘Suits you,’ he’d said when I tried it on.
Funny, the details we forget and then remember.
I’d kept Jack waiting and he was waiting still, as I stood just inside the ward, drawing the silk through my hands. I heard the scrape on cracked skin and felt a tenderness in the cradle between my thumb and forefinger, where the crack had become inflamed.
I hadn’t checked his wounds.
It was Jack and it might have been Bill and I’d held him to my belly but I hadn’t checked his wounds.
It was the only reason I’d been there – to check, to triage, to get them in the queue.
Crutch cases have to wait, but sometimes they wait too long.
We miss the bleeding, the infection, the gangrene.
A limb could be lost, or worse, not cut off in time.
Did I ask if he’d had a tetanus shot? I don’t think I did.
And then I was at St John’s. I stood there in the cream skirt, the blouse with its ridiculous frill, Titania’s emerald-green waistcoat with its Chinese silk, its blues and greens and ivory. Colours from smokeless skies and unblemished fields. And bones picked over by crows.
Suits you, Bill had said. And maybe it had, before.
What if Rosie’s boy was not alright? What if my emotion had caused a delay? Let me see what the war has done to you, I should have said but didn’t.
I wish I’d worn my uniform, I wrote later. There was nothing I could not cope with when I was wearing my uniform, or so I thought then. I let the silk run through my fingers and could not move.
‘Tilda?’
It was a sister I knew.
‘My goodness,’ she said. ‘I didn’t recognise you. Who’s the lucky man?’
I needn’t have worried.
Jack was sitting up. Jack was eating a sandwich.
He did not have lockjaw. He had all his fingers and all his limbs and both his eyes saw me as I approached his bed.
Jack’s mouth was full of teeth and his lips formed an easy smile.
Relief came first, then disappointment. He’d be back at the front in a few weeks.
‘You look like you’re taking up room,’ I said.
‘Reckon I am. It’s just a flesh wound. Decent, but nothing broken.’
I lifted the sheet.
‘Easy.’ His hand rushed down to prevent the sheet from revealing too much. He was blushing. I’d forgotten who I was to Jack, and who I wasn’t. I was his occasional neighbour, his mother’s friend, Peggy and Maude’s aunt, for lack of a better word. I was not his nurse.
‘Habit,’ I said. ‘Though I doubt there’s anything under there I haven’t seen before.’
He smiled and the blush intensified. ‘I doubt that too.’
‘Cheeky bugger,’ I said. ‘What would Rosie say?’
‘Mum would probably agree.’
He’d always been like that. Knew just what was needed to put someone at ease. He was like Bill in that way, which of course made me love him all the more.
‘How did the rest of you fare?’ I asked. Gently. Because I knew.
‘The rest?’
‘Of your platoon.’
He looked at me then, a little confused.
‘Huh,’ he said. ‘I haven’t asked.’
But he had asked, more than once, apparently, and he’d been told.
Two childhood friends and his lieutenant – killed in action, the telegrams would say.
Jack’s lieutenant had been his boss at the press.
He’d taught him how to compose type; how to arrange little bits of metal into words and sentences that would be printed and made into books.
Little bits of metal, I wrote in the journal.
Gareth is dead and Jack’s thigh is full of little bits of metal.
His mind is finding ways to forget the details.
I returned a few days later and Jack’s locker was crowded with cards and a few butter-yellow stars fashioned from coloured papers I had once gifted Maude.
‘Just stars?’ I asked, as I lifted the sheet to check on his dressing. I was wearing my uniform and he let me.
‘Drawer’s full of them,’ he said. ‘Maude reckons they’ll keep me safe.’
I laughed. ‘You should see my hut. More stars than the night sky.’ I opened the drawer of his locker and realised he was not exaggerating, but also not telling it all. Among the stars was a heart, red and cleverly folded to give a sense of fullness. I let it be.
‘Any news, Jack?’ I asked.
‘Couple more weeks, they reckon. Then back to my platoon.’
I nodded and waited for more.
‘Be good to see them all again,’ he said.
It was harder each time I told him.
‘You won’t be seeing all of them, Jack.’
He shook his head a little and the grin that sat easily on his face wavered. I said the names of his two friends and his lieutenant and he heard it as if for the first time. I held him to my belly and let his tears soak into my uniform.
Jack returned to the front in good working order, though I heard later from a boomerang, a boy in the same platoon, that when Jack went to report to his lieutenant, he was confused to find someone new.
‘You’d think someone would’ve told him,’ the boomerang said.