Chapter Seventeen
Seventeen
My shoes and stockings were off and my toes were worming into the sand, burying themselves.
Iso had the day off and I had the afternoon before my night shift.
She’d packed a picnic and I’d found us a lift to St Cécile Plage.
Spring was attempting to be summer and so everyone with a few hours off was doing the same.
Some swam, though the water was still cold, and others walked the length of the shore.
Blankets dotted the sand and everyone from enlisted men and officers to support corps and hospital staff sat with their picnics and bare feet as if they were in Brighton on a holiday weekend.
We might have been fooled if the blankets hadn’t been army-issue and half the men hadn’t been in uniform.
Though their trousers were rolled up and their shirts loose, they had brought the colours of the war with them.
Iso sketched a young officer in this exact state of dress, looking out over the water. He was alone and I wondered who he’d come with and why he’d wandered away from them.
‘How long do you think it would take to swim back to England?’ I asked Iso, but she was too absorbed in her sketch to hear me.
It’s what the young officer was thinking, or something like it.
He was lost in thought and had no idea we were observing him, so there was time to make some assumptions.
His trousers were worn and his hands were suntanned and rough.
There was a long scar on his calf, still raised and purpling-red.
He might have spent a few months at home to recover and now he was back.
How cruel that was, returning them to their homes and the comforts of care from mothers and sisters and sweethearts, then wrenching them out and putting them back in a trench.
‘He’d do it if he thought it was possible,’ I said, and Iso looked at me, unsure of what I was talking about.
When the young officer finally turned from the horizon, we watched him walk along the shoreline. His feet left hollows in the wet sand that were quickly filled by the sea.
‘It’s a metaphor,’ I said.
Iso turned and I pointed at the footprints.
‘They are all so easily erased,’ I told her.
But they weren’t; Iso was making sure of that.
I picked up her sketchbook and admired the young officer.
Then I turned a few pages and admired all the others.
There were plenty of portraits, some posed but most not – two patients in hospital blues, an Australian military policeman, a New Zealander in his lemon squeezer hat, a cook, a French soldier.
The next page was from the German ward and I lingered.
It was Hugo. Iso had drawn him framed by the doorway of the storeroom, his hands holding either end of the stethoscope that rested around his neck.
He seemed to be looking at the nurses’ desk, where there was a figure, barely sketched.
Just shapes for a torso, shoulders, a head, one arm but not the other.
What interrupted her? I wondered. I imagined it was me, at the desk.
Me he was observing. Then I thought it might not be and jealousy sprang, quick and bitter.
I wanted to trace the shape of him but knew it would smudge. Still, my hand might have hovered and Iso noticed my desire to touch the drawing. She smiled, a sad kind of smile that anticipates disappointment but knows there is nothing to be done. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed.
I can’t recall Iso ever warning me, or trying to dissuade, and I wonder sometimes if she understood there would be no point.
She knew what was happening, perhaps even before we knew ourselves.
When I looked through her sketchbook the evidence was there, moments when we are turned in the other’s direction or our bodies are nearer than they need to be.
I turned the page and our heads are bent close; another, and our shoulders seem to brush; another and our arms are reaching for the same object but the object is missing from the sketch. Parts of me drawn with parts of him, though who could tell? I knew it was us but I couldn’t always say why.
Only sometimes did she draw us whole. We are by a bed, side by side, working. It is ordinary but he is leaning towards me. If you are not looking for it you would not see it, I thought. I couldn’t recall the moment but I could imagine the smell of him and the whisper of his breath on my neck.
I put the sketchbook down and unwrapped the sandwiches.
The day dragged. That’s what I wrote in the journal. I wanted to be back on the German ward.
I arrived early that evening for my shift.
There was a new sister at the nurses’ desk and she looked up as I entered and watched me walk the length of the ward towards her.
I was careful not to search for the doctor.
She introduced herself but I’ve forgotten her name.
What I do recall is that she was new to étaples and when Hugo was delivered and her shift had come to its end, she was reluctant to leave.
She stayed an hour then two. When fatigue began to show I took advantage.
‘There’s no need to stay,’ I said.
‘A VAD should not be left without supervision,’ she said.
‘The doctor provides supervision.’
‘But he is German.’
‘He is a doctor.’
‘And this is usual?’
‘Matron tries to fill the roster, but the need for a sister overnight isn’t so great when the doctor has no opportunity to leave the ward.’
‘What stops him from walking out?’
I’d never thought about it. The Redcaps didn’t guard the doors, so I suppose it was possible.
‘He wouldn’t,’ I said.
‘How can anyone be sure?’
‘He is a doctor, sister. A good doctor. I think they’re the same no matter their nationality – he wouldn’t abandon his patients,’ I said. Would he abandon me? I wondered.
She wasn’t convinced but she wanted to be. ‘You are sure you are comfortable being left with the German?’
‘Perfectly comfortable, sister. He does his job and I do mine. It’s rare that we ever need to speak.’
‘Very good,’ she said. ‘Very good.’
The next minute she was gone. The minute after that I was in the storeroom, where Hugo had been sheltering from the sister’s talk of Germans and doctors and the ridiculous notion of escape.
‘Where would I go?’ he said as I walked in.
‘Paris is nice this time of year. You could get a room in the Latin Quarter, overlooking the Seine.’
I went to the trough to wash my hands. ‘I might come with you.’
He didn’t respond and the walls of the war surrounded us. I felt as imprisoned as him.
He came and stood beside me. I passed him the soap.
‘When I am in my cot I sometimes just think of you beside me, sleeping,’ he said as if no time had passed since we last spoke. ‘And I am watching your chest rise and fall on deep, even breaths.’
‘Surely I’m naked,’ I said.
‘Almost.’ He smiled, and it came so easily, a surprise to him and me.
Even now, as a memory, I feel it like the heat of sunshine on a cold day, when it is unexpected and you hold yourself still in the hope it may last. I want his smile to hold me now, as it did then.
I want the warmth of it to last beyond a moment.
And so I linger, as always, on this memory and all it contains.
‘You wear only those ugly black stockings.’
‘And what else do you think of?’
‘Many things.’
A patient called out and he was gone.
The boy was skin and bone and he had bedsores on his pelvis, his spine, his heels. We turned him often, but as the old sores began to heal, new skin would begin to break down. Hugo dressed the broken sores and I rubbed castor oil into reddening skin.
‘What do you think of, in particular?’ I asked. For all the boy knew, we were talking about his care.
‘When I am in my cot?’
‘Other than me sleeping beside you.’
He said nothing for a while but his mind was not blank. His face was full of tells: a deeper breath flared his nostrils, his lips rubbed together, his jaw clenched. Whatever it was he thought of, he was thinking of it in that moment, I wrote.
‘What do you think of?’ I asked again.
He ignored me and continued dressing a sore on the boy’s back. Then he gathered up the gauze, the scissors and the tape, and straightened.
‘Deine Vulva,’ he said, barely audible so the boy below my hands could not hear.
It was just a word but I felt like I’d been touched.
‘Say it in English,’ I said.
‘It is the same.’
‘Say it.’
‘Your vulva.’
His lips were full and the word played between them, each syllable pushing them forward, keeping them slightly parted.
His voice had the timbre of a moan, or is that something I’ve added over the years of remembering?
I didn’t blush; I never blush. But I felt it.
It was as if the word itself had fingers and they had slid inside me and I could only breathe through it.
I held his gaze like I wanted to hold his body, unambiguously. Unashamed.
Did we stay like that for a moment or for minutes?
Memory can stretch the exquisite just as it stretches the excruciating and my memory is full of both.
It is the exquisite that keeps me sane and so I exercise those moments.
Strengthen them. Shadow and light. Your vulva, he said, and it was like a match to kindling.
Your vulva, he said, and I feel it now, the same ache, a longing to be touched. Now, as then, unsatisfied.
The ward spoke. There was a noise, a cough, the sound of the door – I can’t remember – but we stopped our talk and he went to the storeroom while I continued rubbing castor oil into reddened skin.