Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-five
A turn, we called it, when Alison asked. A wonderfully benign and nondescript term.
‘How unfortunate,’ she said.
I didn’t think about it then – I couldn’t have cared less – but now I imagine she took in the scene: me in the bed, Hugo by my side, Iso hovering.
‘Exhausted,’ I heard her say, authoritatively, as if it were a diagnosis.
And it was, actually. It was a diagnostic euphemism that reduced the shame and inconvenience of a more accurate account, though I don’t know for certain what she knew or guessed.
‘Exhausted,’ she said, and she wrote it down in her ledger, then in a letter to the commanding officer at 24 General.
‘There’s a bed for you at the nurses’ convalescent home in Le Touquet,’ she informed me soon after.
But Iso insisted I stay with her.
Iso lived with her mother and sister, Alis, in a small terrace in the centre of town.
They installed me in an upstairs room with two narrow beds and two easels and layers of threadbare carpets covering boards.
Where the carpets didn’t reach, the boards were stained with paint of every colour.
Two casement windows let in plenty of light and offered a lively view towards Rue de la Gare. I asked Iso to close the curtains.
My memories of that time have lain dormant for two decades and it is only this act of remembrance that arouses them. I search for the details in the journal and find only fragments. I was asleep and Hugo woke me.
It is enough. I can return there now. I was not grateful, and my mind kept trying to return to the oblivion I had almost achieved.
I slept and woke and slept and woke and it was often Alis who attended me.
My malaise did not disturb her as it might have disturbed Iso, nor did the chamber-pot, nor did the odour I refused to let her wash off my skin.
Alis did what I allowed and nothing more.
She was used to nursing and treated me as a patient not a friend.
‘I am in your bed,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘I sleep downstairs with Maman.’
‘Your mother.’
‘She is dying.’
How sad that made me feel, I wrote later.
‘She is old,’ Alis added. ‘It is how it should be.’ But she faltered and I felt her sadness settle on top of mine and I realised how normal it was, to feel sad for an old woman who was dying. I wept with the relief of it.
Alis misunderstood. ‘It’s alright,’ she said, ‘Maman has lived long and well.’
Long and well. I thought of Bill and relief turned to searing sorrow. I could not be consoled.
They treated me like an invalid, and maybe I was.
I slept and woke and sometimes there was food on a tray beside my bed which I did not eat, and sometimes there were flowers which I turned away from, and sometimes there was Iso.
Iso, always with her sketchbook but not always sketching, I wrote.
I don’t recall us speaking those first few days.
I woke and the sisters were in the doorway, talking, too low to hear.
I woke and the room was empty, but light flooded in with sounds from the street. It could have been anywhere. Indistinct voices, a woman shouting, a child crying, a horn from a motor car. Then the rhythm of boots keeping time. Not anywhere.
I woke. Alis was changing my bedding. The dirty sheet was gathered along the length of my body and she wanted me to roll one way, then the other. It was familiar.
‘Has he been?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘The doctor,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘You don’t need a doctor.’
I woke but did not open my eyes. I could hear that Iso was drawing.
I could hear her pencil moving over thick paper – card, perhaps – with a grain.
Good quality, she once said; impossible to get hold of, she once said; there was a stash of it in her room, she once said, from before the war.
The grain of the card resists the movement of the pencil, just a little, she once said. A little resistance is good.
I hoped she wasn’t drawing me. I opened my eyes.
Iso stood in front of one of the easels, at an angle that allowed her to look out the window towards Rue de la Gare.
She had not noticed that I was awake and so I watched her.
How long? I wonder. I could see part of the drawing, the sweep of the road, the rough placement of buildings.
I recognised the outline of Café Terminus and remembered it was on the prohibited list, though I’d been there once or twice.
Already she was drawing the camp beyond the station – rows of triangular tents near the top of the paper.
But she had not drawn in the railway or the people of the town or the horses or the motorcars that I could hear behind the punctuation of her pencil – triangular tent, triangular tent, triangular tent.
Always the order of the camp and not the chaos, I wrote.
When I woke again she wasn’t there, but the drawing was.
No colour yet, but there would be a motor ambulance, a horse-drawn cart, a troop of men, three abreast and orderly.
There would be four soldiers leaning against the corner of Café Terminus.
They wore slouch hats; that detail was already clear.
Australians, of course: she liked to draw them into the picture, even when they weren’t there.
I woke, desperate to urinate and suddenly appalled by my stench.
I could hear the sisters downstairs: kitchen noises, a chair being moved and then sat in.
I am in a house, I thought, not a hut. I am in the town, not the camp.
I am with a family, not strangers. Then I remembered that the mother was dying. I was wasting their time.
I threw back the covers and swung my legs around to the side of the bed to sit up. The room spun but I refused to lie back down. I held onto the mattress and bent my head until the spinning stopped.
I held tight to the bed frame while I crouched over the chamber-pot. When I was done I slid it under the bed then hauled myself to standing. I took care making my way to the washstand. I did not want to disturb Iso and her family with an inconvenient fall.
I stood at the washstand with my nightdress pulled down to my waist. I soaped a flannel and wiped my face and neck then my armpits and under my breasts.
I needed a bath but it would do. I rinsed the cloth and heard the door open behind me and my body remembered another time.
Someone entering. Me stripped to the waist. I felt unsteady.
It was Iso. She stood a moment and then moved to the bed and removed the sheets and pillowcases.
She left the room and I continued to wash.
I let the nightdress fall to the ground and wiped between my legs.
Iso returned with clean linen. I watched her make the bed and beat the pillows.
I watched her fill my empty glass with the last of the water from the small jug they kept on the bedside table.
She held the empty jug to her chest and looked around the room.
She found nothing else that needed doing. Finally she looked at me.
‘Are you back?’ she asked.
‘I think so.’
‘Will you stay?’
I nodded.
She said nothing for a moment and I wondered if I’d been caught in a lie.
‘I’m not the only one who needs to know,’ she said.
In an ordinary world, he might have visited, held my hand. But this was enough. Knowing he had asked.
‘I’ll stay,’ I said, and I meant it.
She smiled, then took a few steps towards me. I thought we might hug but we didn’t. She bent and picked up the nightdress. I’d forgotten I was naked. She took a robe from the back of the door and passed it to me.
‘I’ll heat water for a bath,’ she said, and turned to leave the room.
‘Iso.’
She turned back.
‘How do you bear it?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘But knowing you seems to help.’
‘I am selfish,’ I said.
‘You can be.’
Their mother died.
The sisters sat on either side of her bed, each holding one of their mother’s hands, bringing it to their lips, kissing it, resting it on her chest. Alis arranged them, one on top of the other. Iso stroked her mother’s forehead, her cheek. They spoke to her all the while. Low and gentle.
They were in the parlour, where the bed had been placed months before so the old woman did not have to go up and down the stairs.
I went to the kitchen and put water on the range to boil, enough for tea and for what would come.
There was no hurry. I gathered cups and readied a teapot.
I found towels and a basin and soap. I went up the stairs to the old woman’s bedroom and found underclothes and a hairbrush and a bottle of rosewater.
I took off the lid and breathed it in. It smelled of Iso. Dear Iso.
I returned to the parlour and the sisters had barely moved.
They sat either side of their mother, talking to her and to each other.
They straightened the covers and rested their hands on top of the small hillock that was the old woman’s belly.
Their fingers touched and soon their hands were clasped together.
I thought of Helen and of Helen’s girls, Peggy and Maude, and the way their fingers had twined with their mother’s so I could not tell whose were whose.
Would they sit beside my bed too, I wondered, when life had truly exhausted me?
Then I remembered Hugo, calling me back, waking me up.
And Iso watching on. How do you bear it, I’d asked her.