Chapter Thirty-Three
Thirty-three
It was a relief to see the German ward, and as I approached I saw shadows move through the light beyond the windows.
It annoyed me that the light was yellow and that seeing it brought some comfort.
It was enough after all. The shadows were part of a ward routine that I knew like the script of a play.
I could repeat it night after night and never have to think too much about a backstory or an after story.
A new patient was never going to be Bill, or some fellow I’d loved for a day or a year.
There were no conversations about places I might have known or people we had in common.
I didn’t need to read them letters from wives who’d dreamed of one life and would have to lead another, or to think about who the boy in bed four had been when he was whole and who he would become now he was broken.
If their lives before or their lives after began to matter, I would just think of them as Kipling did.
As Alison did. ‘Filthy Hun,’ I would call them under my breath. Though it was never convincing.
Alison was helping Hugo with the boy in bed four. He had a necrotic wound and Hugo was trying his best to manage it. Hoping to avoid infection, sepsis, amputation.
The clatter of scissors then tweezers in a bowl.
The sound of a dressing being removed from its pack, the gentle manoeuvring of the boy’s leg so a bandage could be wrapped around the calf to hold the dressing in place.
When the procedure was over, Alison removed her gloves and waited for Hugo to do the same.
She took a hairpin from beneath her veil and passed it to Hugo. He stared at it.
‘Your fringe, doctor. It may not irritate you but it irritates me. Pin it back.’
He took the pin but was unsure how to use it.
‘For goodness sake.’ Alison took back the pin, reached for the offending forelock, twisted it into a small scroll and used the pin to hold it in place above his forehead. Hugo winced as she drove it in.
She stepped back to survey her work.
‘You look like a fool, doctor. May I suggest a haircut before your next shift?’
‘I do not think she meant for you to be my barber,’ Hugo said.
He was seated on the stool in the storeroom, a sheet draped around his shoulders. I stood before him, surgical scissors in hand.
‘I’m sure she didn’t.’
‘I could do it myself.’
‘You could. Would you prefer that?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then, how much shall I take off?’
‘I do not care. Enough so she does not become irritated.’
‘It doesn’t irritate you?’
‘It has always been this way, and it has irritated everyone but me – my mother, my teachers, my…’ He paused, leaving a space for someone else. I pretended not to care and he pretended not to be thinking of her. ‘And now Matron. I do not notice it.’
‘But you’re always pushing it out of the way.’
‘Am I?’
He was looking up at me from where he sat on the stool.
It was low to the ground so his knees caught the sheet and made a tent of it.
He looked like the boy he must have once been, with a mother and a teacher.
His face was tilted up, his eyes were curious – Am I?
I wanted to lean down and kiss his forehead and tell him not to worry.
I took the pin from the little bun Alison had made of his fringe. The hair fell back towards his eyes and his hand came up automatically to push it back.
‘See?’ I said.
‘Not very well, there is hair in my eyes.’ He smiled.
I smiled. I touched his hair then curled it around my fingers. It had never irritated me and I had the feeling I would miss it.
I stretched out one lock and brought the scissors close. He shut his eyes and I held his hair between the blades. I closed them slowly and watched as they made a hundred precise cuts.
I can hear the sound of it now, like the shuffle of a new pack of cards. And I hear it every time I trim my own hair. I use surgical scissors, as I did then, and sometimes I cut more than I need just to hear the sound and remember the moment.
The lock sprang back into a curl as it fell to his lap. I took up another, pulled it straight, held it between the blades. Another cut, a clean amputation. It fell and curled. Another cut, then another. When I was done the curls lay gathered in his lap, like a nest.
I stood back, as Alison had, to survey my work.
‘I’m afraid you still look like a fool,’ I said, trying very hard not to laugh.
He opened his eyes.
‘I didn’t account for the spring,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It sprang back shorter than I expected. It looks odd with the rest of your hair.’
‘Then you must cut the rest.’
‘And what if I misjudge that? I’ll have to go back and forth until you have no hair left.’
‘So it will be,’ he said.
I stood behind him and cut lock after lock. I’d only ever cut Bill’s hair, which was as straight as string, but I came to understand Hugo’s curls and they turned out to be quite forgiving of errors.
‘Did you know that the ancients used to cut off the hair of women who loved the wrong man?’ I said.
Hugo stayed quiet, but I felt him listening.
‘Alison told me that.’
‘Why?’
‘It was meant to shame them. Their shorn head told everyone they were a whore or an adulteress. It gave people permission to shun them. Punish them.’
His head shook slightly beneath my hands. ‘I meant, why would Alison tell you this?’
‘Why do you think?’
He was silent. I kept cutting.
‘I wouldn’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’d cut it all off.’
‘You are not ashamed?’
‘I think I could carry it off.’
‘Not your hair,’ he said. ‘Us. What we have done, what we are doing?’ A pause. ‘Do you wish it to stop?’
I couldn’t speak. I wanted more, not less.
‘Do you wish it to stop?’ he asked again.
‘No,’ I said. I should have asked him the same question. But I knew his answer would be more complicated. So I didn’t.
I picked up a lock of hair from where it rested on Hugo’s shoulder. ‘Done,’ I said. ‘You can sweep up.’ Then I left the storeroom.
I sat down at the nurses’ desk and took an envelope from the drawer. On the front I wrote, German Ward, Nov 1916. I placed the lock of hair inside.
It is still there, that lock of hair, in that same envelope now yellowed.
It was one of the things that mattered so I packed it into the Red Cross box.
I have resisted opening it until now, and suddenly I am afraid that memories of his hair have become brighter over the years, that I have coloured it in my mind with shades of gold, as Iso used to colour mine.
It would be grey now, regardless, if indeed he has hair at all.
I knew we would have no after, that cutting his hair would be another woman’s task. A joy or an obligation, I did not know then and I do not know now. It might be written in his letter, and perhaps that is why I have not opened it.