Give Us This Day (28 page)

The death rate was appalling by any standards. At some hospitals, they said, men were dying at the rate of fifty a day from this scourge alone, and the nursing staff and doctors were hopelessly inadequate to deal with such a situation. They did their best, God knows, and Sybil among them, working stints of up to twenty hours, but with the advance to the north the rate of casualty increased, and the strain thrown on the administration became intolerable. She was tough, but she did not know how long she could survive the demands made upon her and then, a challenge that made every other shrink to insignificance, they wheeled in what was left of Hugo, shot through the head in a skirmish up in the hills and certain, so the surgeons said, to die.

* * *

Her immediate reaction was one of terrible guilt, for she reasoned that, but for her, Hugo would be safe at home, jogging round the running track and turning up every now and again with another of those silver trophies. She saw herself, at that moment, as a murderess who had deliberately plotted his death and in her misery she wanted nothing else than to die herself and ahead of him.

But then, when he refused to die, when Udale, the chief surgeon, told her that he had a chance, she rallied, by no means shedding her crushing packload of guilt but finding sufficient resolution to set it aside, a parcel that would have to wait its turn to be opened. Gradually she not only reintegrated herself into the daily rhythm of the hospital, but also delegated herself Hugo Swann’s guide back to the land of the living.

She had him isolated in her own quarters, and although this isolation would be seen as an exercise of privilege on her part, she did not care. Hugo was her personal responsibility, the victim of her vanity, and if, by sheer force of will, she could restore him to even partial health, nothing was going to be allowed to stand in her way.

These were her attitudes during the initial period, when Hugo, head swathed in bandages, lay silent in his cot, a hulk with a fingertip grasp on life. Her first reaction was the deliberate postponement of the acknowledgment of guilt, her second a resolve to atone for the terrible wrong she had done him. When Udale came to her to report the successful conclusion of his third operation, she allowed herself to hope, after the surgeon, in response to her persistent badgering, gave it as his opinion that the patient’s reason did not seem to have been affected by the clean passage of the bullet.

“How can you be sure of that?” she asked, breathlessly.

“He talked, more or less rationally, under the anaesthetic. For what it’s worth, that in itself is unusual with a wound of that nature.”

“What did he say?”

“Mentioned a Lancer subaltern by name. ‘Cookham’ it sounded like. That, and a young Boer who pointed a rifle at him.”

“Does that alone signify anything?”

“A little. For your sake I took some trouble to find out the names of officers involved in that scrap. A Lieutenant Cookham was the fellow who sent him on that run with the message.”

“What about the Boer?”

“That might mean anything or nothing. Some fleeting impression of the battle that stayed with him, possibly.”

She derived some comfort from this and spruced herself up for her next spell of watching at the bedside, where she combined the office of nurse with that of general administrator. The mirror in her tented quarters showed her a gaunt, holloweyed stranger, quite unlike the bustling woman who had presided here before the Stormberg ambush. She even went to the lengths of using papier-poudres on the dark areas under her eyes, and a touch of rouge to her cheeks against the time when they removed his bandages for the first time.

But then Udale insisted on a fourth operation, and the night it was performed, again successfully, he piloted her to a secluded corner of the convalescent sector and admitted the true source of his evasiveness during earlier discussions on the case.

“Someone has to tell you, Lady Sybil, and everyone else shirks it. He’ll recover all right. Not much need to worry on that score. But he won’t see again, not a glimmer.”

It was as though a mailed fist had crashed into her abdomen, and then the same assailant had grabbed her by the throat and squeezed until tears streamed from her eyes and she had the utmost difficulty in breathing.

“Won’t
see
? He’s
blind
? Hugo Swann,
blind
?”

He nodded, reaching out to steady her, but she shook him off.

“But that’s… that’s monstrous! It can’t be so! It can’t!”

“You must have considered it.”

“Never! Never once! I thought of everything but not that…
not that
!”

He said, his eyes on the scorched turf, “The bullet severed the optic nerve. Only vital damage it did. A pure freak. Chance in a million it didn’t kill him outright, or leave him a cabbage.” He took a silver flask from his pocket and unscrewed the stopper. “Take a swallow of that. Please, I insist!” and she took the flask and gulped down the raw spirit, but it did little to steady her. She whispered, presently, “Go back to the wards, Mr. Udale. Tell everybody I’m not to be approached, not for any reason.” Surprisingly, he went, leaving her on the threshold of a little pergola they had built for sitting-out patients.

She stood there without moving for a long time, only half aware of the medley of background noises of the vast, tented purgatory, the dolorous squeaks of unoiled ambulance axles, the continuous murmur that rose from the huge convalescent marquee, housing men who were short of a limb, and permanently disfigured perhaps but not one, so far as she could recall, deprived forever of his eyesight and reduced to the helplessness of Samson in the camp of the Philistines. There was a bitter analogy here. Samson Swann, noted not for his strength but his fleetness that seemed to her, indeed to all who knew him, the very essence of his being. Samson made a sacrifice to Dagon, the Philistine god. Not by his enemies, not by the Boer who had fired that freakish shot, but by her, Sybil Uskdale, who had coveted him, won him, and led him out to make sport for the multitude. Surely no woman since the world began had gratuitously laid upon herself such a mountain of guilt and shame.

And then, without warning, there burst from her a terrible sob that was like a soft explosion between her breasts, yet so violent that she sagged and almost fell, clutching the upright of the pergola porch and groping her way to the seat beyond. She would have given all she possessed, life itself, to be released into tears, but her eyes were dry and her throat, fearfully constricted, once more in the grip of that merciless fist. The thought of self-destruction came to her, warm and welcome as a fur-lined cape in winter, and she conjured with various possibilities—the row of bottles marked “poison” in the dispensary, a razor at her wrists, a rope about her neck to anticipate the slow strangulation of the mailed fist. She considered them all, clinically and objectively, but neither one nor the other seemed adequate as a means of escape or retribution, and as she rejected them the idea slipped away like a rebuffed beggar; she was left with nothing but a tiny spark of defiance that had never ceased to glow in her from the day she put aside the frivolities and proscriptions of her caste.

She said, acknowledging as much aloud, “It was my doing and I’ll finish it, for no one else can.” She got up and walked jerkily to her quarters, lifting the tent flap and averting her eyes from the still, mummy-like head on the pillow. She sat down and looked in the mirror again, flinching but forcing herself to study the reflection, a small-boned woman in a starched coif with a blue, scarlet-lined cloak about her shoulders. A woman with good features and light blue eyes ringed by sallow areas below the lids. A wide mouth firmly compressed and drawn down at the corners. The famous Uskdale chin, small and resolutely pointed, jutting slightly out but softened somewhat by the central cleft. Behind her the man on the bed shifted and muttered, then relaxed as his breathing became heavy and regular. She said, again aloud, “I’ll tell him and I won’t put it off. No sense in holding out hope, in breaking it gently over a period. That’s his due and my obligation.”

3

She was there when they removed the bandages four days later and watched an orderly scrape away at his bristles, seeing the familiar face emerge from a cloud of lather and marvelling that the scars were so small and insignificant. A pinkish circle on the right temple, puckered and no more than a centimetre across. A zigzag line like a small hedge tear in the left temple, where the bullet had emerged and the stitching remained to be cut. And about this second wound an area of heavy bruising, fading from dark blue to coral where new hair was growing in a ragged sideburn. They left the eyes covered with gauze and cotton wool, and then, as arranged, the doctor shooed everybody out and she waited for Hugo to speak.

He was talking freely then. Two days earlier he had asked them what had happened upon that ridge, whether young Cookham and his survivors were saved, whether the Boers had made good their escape and, at length, how long it would be before they removed all these damned wrappings from his head.

Mr. Udale told him what he knew of the battle. Cookham and his survivors had been rescued. He and Cookham had been recommended for decorations. The main body of the ambush party had slipped away, but they had captured the rearguard, thirty-odd marksmen who came down off the ridge under a white flag.

As to his wound, his wife, Lady Sybil, would tell him about that, for right now, Udale said, he had too much on his hands and so, for that matter, had she. “All I can say is you’re lucky, Swann. Couple of months and you’ll be out of here and sailing for home.”

Sybil fed him then, spooning broth into his mouth, crumbling bread between her long, slim fingers, and jokingly pushing it between his bearded lips. He said, when she told him they were alone, “Odd, me turning up here so quickly. Seems only a day or so since I said goodbye and went off with the new draft. How long have I been in hospital, Sybil?”

“More than a month,” she said, “but we’ll talk about that later. Right now you must sleep. You were in very bad shape when you came in, dearest, but Mr. Udale thinks you’ve done splendidly.”

“Where was I hit?”

“In the head. Just once but it was as the surgeon said, you were lucky not to be killed.”

He lifted his hand to the bandages and canvassed them from ear to ear, from the crown of his head down to the chin. “My God, it must have come close,” he said. “That chap lower down the hill. One of two of ‘em, firing from either side, crafty devils. Simply never occurred to me they’d move off the crest.” And then glumly, “Sorry about that kid, though.”

“What kid, Hugo?”

“The one I had to shoot. Couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Stood there bold as brass after I’d got the older one. Who the devil would want to kill a kid that age?”

“Don’t think about it. The fault lies with the men who sent him there. Try and sleep.”

She could have told him then, she supposed, but it seemed wiser to wait and build up his strength a little, and once they had the bandages off he made tremendous strides, so that she wasn’t surprised when he sat up as soon as Udale cleared the tent and said, “When can I see you, Sybil?”

She choked at that and had to summon every scrap of courage to prevent herself breaking down there and then, but at least he had given her an opening. She took his hand, lifted it, and pressed it to her lips.

“Hugo, dear.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got something bad to say. Can you take a grip on yourself? Can you hear me out without… without shouting me down, trying to get up, making a… a fuss?”

His brow contracted. Clearly the statement puzzled him very much. She took a tighter grip on his hand, still covered with the tape they had put over the long bullet crease on the palm. He said, finally, “There’s something else? I was hit somewhere else? But you said…”

“No. You’ve just the one wound but that… it was as bad as could be. The bullet went in one side and came out the other…”

“My face is smashed up?”

“No, dearest. You’re as handsome as ever. The most handsome man in the world,” and she kissed the freshly shaven face twice, still without releasing the hand.

“What then?”

She braced herself, as for a leap across an impossibly wide chasm.

“Your eyes, Hugo.”

She felt him stiffen and at once extended her hold to his shoulders, drawing her chair so close to the bed that she was dragged sideways by his weight. “It was the optic nerve. It’s damaged… enough to affect your sight.”

He tore his hand free and lifted it, passing his fingers over the gauze.

“How badly affected?”

“It’s very difficult to say. It might be a long time before we know.”

It seemed best to tell a white lie, to leave him a ray of hope. He would need time, years perhaps, to adjust to the truth. Yet even now he did not cry out or give any kind of vocal reaction.

“That doctor. He said I’d be going home.”

“You will. We both will.”

“But if there’s more treatment…”

“You’ll get treatment in London. The very best there is. Far better than anything they can do for you out here.”

“Then I might… might see again?”

“It’s possible.”

”
Possible?
Dear Christ…!”

The reaction came at last, a convulsive heave that lifted her clear of the chair.

”
Please
, Hugo!… You never know about these things… Surgeons nowadays can do amazing things… impossible things!”

“Like making a blind man see again?”

“Don’t
say
that word…”

“Why not? Why not, if it’s true? Oh, Christ! Christ help me!… Sybil, tell me there’s hope… real hope. You must know… you’re in charge here.”

Little by little she was getting a grip on herself, and it derived from a defiance of the kind she had cultivated and practised all her life. She said, “I’m matron because of whom I am, not because of what I know. I’m not a surgeon, and I’m not a doctor. I was only playing at the job until I came out here, and saw what awful things can happen to people. But I know this. We’ll go everywhere, and we’ll see everyone. In London and on the Continent. Maybe there’s someone who could give you partial sight… I don’t know about that yet, and can’t even make proper enquiries from here, in this awful country. All I can say is your sight is badly affected, and all I can be glad about is that you’re alive and I’m here to help and will always be here, right beside you. Will you try and remember that, and never forget it, and think about it all the time, Hugo? Will you do that for your sake and mine? It’s terribly important for both of us that you should. For me especially because… because I brought you here, I put you in the path of that bullet.” Mercifully, at that point she began to cry, the tears flowing silently as she rocked to and fro, a woman racked with unbearable pain. A little of her stress communicated itself to him. Not much, perhaps, but enough to cause him to lift his free hand to her face and touch her eyes with the tips of his fingers. He said, “Don’t cry, Sybil. Not now. Not yet. Just… just
be
there and talk… Say something… anything…”