Chapter Thirty-Eight
A few daubs of light are hardly enough, I’d said to Iso once.
I’d been angry and she’d allowed it, but later she spoke to me about art.
About how light is brighter when the scene is dark and only a little is required for balance and relief.
Sunlight, she said, is best seen when it dapples the shade.
There are moments from that time that I remember in shades of yellow and orange pastel.
A migration, Iso called it. Rare and beautiful. Timed for the warm weather, the low tide and the flow of fresh water towards salty sea.
Alison and I had just finished a long day.
One of those days when the surgery doors kept opening and closing, an endless rotation of men going in and coming out.
Whenever the doors opened I would glimpse him, disguised in his operating gown and cap.
I would try to catch his eye but he’d avoid me.
I need to concentrate, he once said, and you distract me.
So I’d paid more attention to other things and worked twice as hard.
‘Excellent job today, nurse,’ said Alison, as she shed her surgical garb.
‘You have earned a hot meal and a good night’s sleep. ’
But Iso had insisted, and she never insisted, so we agreed to trudge behind her.
We’d crossed the railway lines and trekked through the scrub towards the dunes.
Our shoes sank and slipped over the sandy terrain and our skirts felt heavy.
Our grumbling became audible but Iso was having none of it.
The sun would soon be setting and the view would be our reward.
The way ahead shimmered.
‘Swifts,’ Alison said. ‘Feasting.’
There were a hundred, probably more, darting in and out, around and above the scrub leading to the dunes.
We paused. The movement of the birds was chaotic and yet they never collided.
The strange silence of it demanded ours.
Did they know about the war, I thought. Would they have flown so far if they had?
‘Is this it?’ I said to Iso.
Iso shook her head and we continued to follow. Slower now, the day already too long. Iso led us up a small dune and gave a little flourish of her hand.
There it was – the migration. The shore was dense and the air crackled with calls and chatter. We stood, awed and amused. Grateful that Iso had insisted.
I looked at her, looking at Alison and me. Her smile – I had never seen it so broad and I never did again. Rare and beautiful, indeed.
They’d come from the Bull Ring, filthy and tired.
Bloodied, some of them; it was a brutal place.
Many were already naked, others were in the process of undressing.
Like children at the seaside, they shed their clothes and ran to the river.
Unselfconscious, most of them, though some stood, ankle deep, with their hands cupped over their genitals.
Not for long, though, these attempts to conceal.
They needed their hands to wash and frolic. There were hundreds of them.
Their laughter carried, like seagulls in Brighton on a summer’s day, and we laughed in response. Alison’s stern face was made lovely with the joy of it, and that joy ripples through me, even now as I remember her. I’ve held no grudge.
We settled at a distance, on a little rise with an easy view of the Canche and its silty shore.
Iso had brought a picnic – baguettes and cheese, a bottle of wine.
I write it now and it sounds like a postcard greeting.
We were in France, at a place where a river meets the sea and dunes blush pink in the setting sun.
Iso was at her easel, Alison and I reclined on a blanket.
Ladies of leisure at any other time; only our uniforms told the real story.
Hems grubby with muck. Capes, caps and colours reminding us of rank.
Alison removed her scarlet tippet then her cap with its mother superior wings.
‘Ridiculous thing,’ she said as she folded it away.
And there she was, a woman like the rest of us. ‘In their delirium they think you’re an angel,’ I said.
‘That’s the whole point,’ she replied. ‘God’s work, and all that. A waste of muslin, if you ask me. Your cap is more than sufficient to keep the hair back, though I suppose mine could serve as a sling in an emergency.’ She removed her collar and undid the buttons at the top of her dress.
‘I’m sure they were swallows,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘The birds back there.’ I tilted my head. ‘I think they were swallows.’
‘One or the other,’ she said. ‘I forget how to tell the difference.’
‘Iso would know,’ I said.
‘No doubt.’
Why did I never ask her?
Alison opened the wine. Red, the first few sips harsh, the rest not so.
I drank down a whole glass then filled it again.
I cut small wedges of cheese and tore up the baguette.
Then I stood and walked to where Iso had set herself up to draw.
I watched her attention shift between the men and her easel.
The marks she made were quick and sure, the intention already clear.
The migration had form. I offered her a glass of wine and she nodded but did not speak or reach out.
I put the glass on the ground, burying its base in the sand so it wouldn’t spill. I doubted she would stop to drink.
In the warmer months, the sun sets slowly over the River Canche and Iso had time to add detail, a little colour.
Charcoal for genitals, shades of brown for heads, hands, knees.
I laughed as I watched her capture the piebald soldiers: men who’d been in France for a while, whose faces and hands, and sometimes knees, were stained dark from sun and dirt.
When I’d first arrived at étaples, I’d scrubbed at the knees of an Australian until he could no longer contain his mirth.
‘Digger’s tan,’ he finally informed me, ‘’cos we’re partial to wearing shorts. ’
Alison joined me behind Iso, and we watched her transpose the migration on the river bank to the thick grey paper on her easel. If our presence disturbed her, she showed no sign of it. I suspect she had forgotten we were there.
Alison picked up the sketchpad that rested on the ground.
I recognised it as the one Iso carried everywhere so that she might catch the ordinary in the short intervals of her day.
I imagined it in an art supply shop, orderly and clean, its thick cardboard cover flat and unmarked.
It looked nothing like it once had (neither did we, neither did anything).
The covers, back and front, were stained with colour and smudged with charcoal.
The edges were soft and the corners frayed.
Pages were collected loosely between them, covered in moments that pass most of us by.
Alison leafed through them. She was careful, respectful.
There were sketches of the camp, rows of tents; long wooden hospital huts; a soldier with his horse in the dunes; a group of Chinese unloading goods from a train; a matron bent to her notes.
Alison recognised herself and paused. She tried to check her smile but failed.
The image satisfied her. There was a soccer game; a pair of street cleaners; a soldier reading a letter outside Walton Hut; a nurse stretching, a plait of hair falling down her back.
I remembered the moment. There was a page of hands.
Different hands: mine, Hugo’s, Alison’s, a patient’s.
There were two hands back to back, almost touching. Mine and his.
I looked back at Iso’s migration to slow my pulse.
She had shaded the river’s banks, long and wide, exposed by the low tide.
There was movement in the water and the texture of a hundred pairs of feet in the grey silt.
The men were a multitude of small unmistakable gestures, those in the foreground more detailed than the rest. She was absorbed and didn’t see the look that Alison gave me.
If she had, she might have given me away.
My pulse slowed and I concentrated on my lines. On getting the tone just right.
‘Wonderful, aren’t they?’ I said.
Alison looked back at the hands, mine beside his, and did not respond. I wondered if I’d be able to hold the pose. You need to look guileless, a director had once shouted at me. I was anything but, and it took some discipline, but I’d managed in the end to be convincing.
Alison looked up and searched my face.
‘Yes,’ she said, slowly. ‘She certainly has a way of capturing things.’
‘There are quite a few of you,’ Alison said when we were back on our blanket.
‘She sketches me all the time. She thinks I don’t know.’
I divided what was left of the wine between the two of us, then took a bite of cheese, mature and sharp.
‘It explains the way she watches you.’
‘How might that be?’
Alison thought. Looked over to Iso, then back to me. ‘Like a suitor.’
I let my eyes go wide, as if the thought had never occurred to me.
‘Has she ever asked you to sit for her?’ Alison asked.
‘Once.’
‘Was it a good portrait?’
‘She didn’t complete it.’
‘Why not?’
‘I think it made her uncomfortable.’
‘Really?’
‘I think I made her uncomfortable.’
‘How?’
‘I was watching her.’
‘What else could you do?’
‘I wasn’t just looking ahead, like she’d instructed.
I was watching her. Her hands, the way she held the brush and moved it between her palette and the canvas.
I was watching her face. You know she holds one corner of her bottom lip between her teeth when she stops to consider how a picture is coming along.
’ I motioned to where Iso was sketching. ‘Look, she’s doing it now.’
‘You made her the subject.’
‘I did.’
‘What else did you notice?’
I turned my gaze from the men on the beach to Alison.
‘I noticed the way she scanned my body. It might as well have been a row of hospital huts, or tents.’
Alison smirked. ‘And that bothered you.’ She took a sip of wine.
‘She would have labelled it VAD, étaples, 1915.’
‘So?’
‘I refuse to be generic,’ I said. ‘When she turned away to mix some paint I took off my cap, removed the pins and let my hair fall loose over one shoulder.’
‘And?’
‘She blushed. I thought she’d be cross because I’d messed with the composition, but she blushed.’
Alison said nothing, so I continued.
‘Then she looked away, back at the canvas, but she didn’t make a mark on it for the longest time. When she did, her rhythm had gone.’
‘You made her self-conscious.’
‘She made me self-conscious.’
‘You are always self-conscious. But not in the same way. You expect to be seen and adjust yourself accordingly. You let down your hair, so to speak.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yes. I notice you do it whenever someone comes onto the ward.’
Whenever Hugo comes onto the ward, she might have been saying. I leaned back on my elbows and stretched my neck, as if it was aching.
‘So you watch me too?’ I said. Deflecting.
She laughed so loud that Iso turned, but just for a moment. Then she looked down at me, her face bright with amusement.
‘Were you flirting with Iso the way you’re flirting with me?’
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
She frowned. ‘You shouldn’t.’
I sat up. ‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘She might take it seriously.’
‘I might be serious.’
‘But you’re not.’
‘How do you know?’
She shook her head slightly and I suddenly felt transparent.
‘You don’t watch her the way she watches you,’ Alison said. ‘And, to my knowledge, you’ve never walked her to one of her shifts at the YMCA.’
It wasn’t entirely true, but her point was accurate.
‘Be careful with her, Tilda. She’s not like you.’
‘But you are?’
She considered me. She did not look away or blush. When she smiled it was almost disarming.
‘I’m not exactly like you, Tilda. I doubt anyone is. But you are familiar.’
‘Are you saying my charms are wasted on you?’
Again, she looked straight at me.
‘Not entirely,’ she said. ‘But I’m well armed.’