Eva Oxford, 2025 #2
‘Just this one. According to family lore, she preferred actions to words.’
Eva opens the journal and reads the inscription.
Tilda
Remember the details
Helen x
‘Who was Helen?’
‘My great-grandmother.’
‘They were friends?’
‘That’s what they called themselves,’ says Maude. ‘Back then, they couldn’t call themselves anything else.’
Eva’s belly grips and she is quiet for a minute, thinking about the story Iso’s sketches had told her about the VAD and the doctor. Perhaps she did get it all wrong?
‘Tilda could love anyone, according to my grandmother. And everyone, according to my great-aunt.’ Maude takes a sip of wine.
‘It was never published?’
‘I don’t think she even tried.’
‘Why not?’
Maude looked at the painting. ‘Look carefully,’ she said. ‘What do you see?’
Eva stands and goes to the painting. Tilda is not just crouching, not just stretching her spine. She is straddling someone and they are holding her. There is nothing that identifies who it might be, but Eva knows and the tension from a moment before disappears.
It is the doctor. Iso has drawn him in, faintly.
It is ambiguous but he is there. His arms reach up her back, either side of her spine, shadow hands holding her to him.
They are impressions, nothing more. Just movement in her skin if you are not paying attention.
His fingertips pucker her flesh in his desire to have her. To keep her, Eva thinks.
And her arms? They are not covering her chest as they first seemed. They are cradling his head, which must be buried between her breasts. It is protective, but Eva thinks that moments before he would have been kissing her nipples, filling his mouth with them.
Tilda is looking at the viewer. She is neither alarmed nor ashamed, and she is not about to let him go. Eva has the feeling they would have to be wrenched apart.
She takes her phone from her back pocket and searches the gallery of images.
There are hands, arms, torsos in uniform.
They hover, they bend, they lean over patients and towards each other.
There are feet arranged as if they are dancing.
There are two heads bent in a shared whisper.
There are two hands, back to back, drawn over and over, almost touching.
And then she comes to it. The first sketch: no date, no place, no signature.
It is a study, she knows this now, for sure.
It is a gesture done in real time, after all the rest. It was the first sketch she saw, but the last to be drawn of the German ward.
There is the extended spine, the vertebrae, the narrow waist accentuating ample buttocks.
But in the sketch, the woman does not face the artist. In the sketch, her head is thrown back and her neck is exposed.
Eva always assumed it was a pose, but it wasn’t. The VAD, Tilda, didn’t know she was being drawn.
She looks again at the painting, then at the image on her phone.
She’d called it Woman Stretching, but that was inaccurate and in her head she gives it a new title: Study of an Embrace.
Now that she has seen the painting, Eva can see the gaps in the sketch where the doctor might exist. Perhaps Iso ran out of time or perhaps she wasn’t interested in him and only wanted to recall the woman.
Or perhaps the gaps are intentional – a meaningful absence.
Maude stands beside Eva and looks at the image on the phone.
‘That’s her,’ she says.
‘It seems to be,’ says Eva.
‘No doubt. And it’s the same moment.’
‘But there are differences,’ Eva says. ‘In the sketch she has hair and she’s not looking at us.’
‘It’s the same moment seen in two different ways.’
‘But which is accurate?’
‘I’m not sure that accuracy should be the criterion for art,’ says Maude.
She’s right, of course, and Eva feels herself blush.
‘Truth might be a better yardstick.’ Maude sips her wine.
‘Whose truth?’ Eva asks. ‘This moment belongs to more than one person.’
Maude nods, as if Eva is a clever student. ‘Indeed.’
‘So, whose truth should we care about?’ Eva asks. ‘The subject’s or the artist’s?’
‘Perhaps neither,’ Maude says. ‘Perhaps it is the viewer’s truth we should consider. Yours. Or mine.’
They say nothing for a while, and Eva watches Maude as she sips her wine and shifts her attention between the phone image of the sketch and the framed painting.
‘I think the sketch is an observation and the painting a reflection,’ Eva says.
Maude looks at her and Eva continues. ‘The sketch was done quickly, instinctively. It shows us what the artist was observing at that moment in time – the woman, obviously. Tilda. But the painting is different.’ Eva pauses, a little self-conscious now.
‘Go on,’ Maude says.
‘The artist has had time to think, to reflect, to put the moment of observation in context. And so the painting contains more than what the artist saw. It hints at circumstance, emotion and consequence while at the same time obscuring explanation.’
‘Perhaps that is why we can’t stop looking at it?’ Maude says.
‘Yes. There is some truth in this painting we can’t quite see and so we keep searching the canvas.’ Eva is excited and could keep talking, but sips her wine instead. Drains her glass.
‘So which is more truthful, do you think, the sketch or the painting?’ Maude asks.
Eva shrugs. ‘It all depends on what you ask of it.’
‘How interesting.’ Maude smiles. ‘You will explore that, I suppose, in the paper you write. I’d look forward to reading that.’
Their glasses are full again and the clock in the kitchen has struck nine.
‘I offered it to your war museum but they didn’t want it,’ says Maude. ‘Too personal, they said, too ambiguous. It didn’t fit their narrative of that war.’
‘When was that?’
‘Oh, early seventies. That’s when I inherited it, along with the Red Cross box. I was a student and I had nowhere to hang it. I knew the artist was Australian.’
‘They might take it now.’
‘I wouldn’t give it to them now.’
‘Who is the man holding her?’ Eva asks.
‘The enemy,’ says Maude, then smiles when she sees Eva’s reaction. ‘It never occurred to you?’
‘No, not at all. I just assumed…’
‘Never assume,’ Maude says.
‘Does he have a name?’
Maude nods. ‘Hugo.’ She taps the journal, still on the table. ‘Dr Henning. It’s all in there.’
‘What happened to them? Is that in there too?’
Maude shakes her head. ‘No. Tilda stopped writing in the journal in 1917.’
‘Is that when she left étaples?’
‘It’s when she left the German ward. She and Hugo broke the rules but, in her own words, she was too bloody useful to dismiss. She was sent to the respiratory ward. It could have been a death sentence given the timing, but it wasn’t. She stayed at the camp well into 1919. One of the last to leave.’
‘And him?’
Maude shrugs. ‘She never knew. He was gone the next day. Another camp, her matron refused to tell her which one.’
‘And after the war?’
‘She did what a lot of VADs did who were good at their job. She returned to England and trained as a nurse.’
‘Did she marry?’
Maude laughs. ‘Tilda was not the marrying kind. She eventually became matron, here in Oxford. She worked at the Radcliffe Infirmary until the mid-thirties.’
‘Then what?’
‘She moved to Germany.’
‘Germany! Why?’
‘He found her.’
‘The doctor?’
‘Hugo. He sent her a message.’
Maude searches through the Red Cross box and removes an envelope. She passes it to Eva. ‘Open it,’ she says.
There is no letter, just a sketch. A bird outlined in pencil, a long tail, a splash of red pastel on its head and throat.
It looks like one of the birds Eva saw as she walked along the Oxford Canal.
She reads the description the artist has given.
Swallow, étaples, August 1917. There is no signature.
Eva turns the sketch over and there is a note written on the back.
They were Swallows.
I asked Iso and of course she knew.
They come in spring and I remember you. When they leave I do not forget.
Eva is surprised by her emotion, by the tears that have begun to fall.
‘So she just left?’
‘She just left. She was sixty-one and she did not want to wait any longer.’ Maude smiles.
‘Surely she knew what was coming?’
‘Perhaps. Though it’s easy to convince yourself it can’t possibly happen again.’ Maude raises her brows. ‘Regardless, she had a habit of running into the fray.’
‘And when that war started?’
Maude looks at the painting. ‘She was detained. She spent the war nursing POWs at a military hospital in Leipzig.’