My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (19 page)

Chapter Eighteen

Sidcup, September 1917

Captain Purefoy was one of several arrivals that day, all of them underfed, exhausted, stinking and pus-faced. He was unravelled and stripped and cleaned; the general
nettoyage
of the man and the wound. Sluicing and drainage, carbolic soap and clean pyjamas. The starting of the process of putting to rights. Packing, repacking, ligating, temporary splint supports, maxillary and mandibular, to hold him together until impressions could be made for a more accurate appliance. Discussions, plans, surgeons, doctors, nurses, orderlies, VADs. The young man who had been the arrowhead of the system of destruction now became the epicentre of an industry of reconstruction. He who must destroy had become he who must be mended.

*

He wanted to swallow. He tried to move his turgid tongue. They’d taken the bloody weight off it, thank Christ. But there was new stuff in his mouth. New alien stuff.

It took a little effort to control the line of thought. He made the effort, and failed.

He could hear that he gurgled when he breathed. He started coughing. Kind of coughing. There was always liquid, not saliva exactly, but a combination of whatever it was, and a dried-out antiseptic taste.

It seemed best to go back to sleep.

*

He wanted to swallow.

Coughed and gurgled.

Pain, actually – not much. But the wrongness. A lot of the sense of wrongness. He knew his head was wrong. What about the rest of him?

Itch by his eye – he scratched.

Opened his eyes. Light, white, alarming. Closed again. Hospital, of course.

Did I let them down?

Scratched again. Hands were all right. He opened and closed his fingers, valuing them.

Well.
He ran an inventory. Hands, legs, arms, feet. Torso. Dick? He tightened the muscles that could make it bounce. Was it there?
Have I
not thought about this before? Is my brain shaken up?

Yes, it was there. And would it still work?

Ha ha.

Self-mockery. So he was sane.
I’ve had that thought before.

What happened?

I don’t remember.

What did I do?

I don’t remember.

Did I let them down?

*

I didn’t die.

I suppose I should open my eyes.

He didn’t.

*

His mind and his thoughts were a kind of sucking quagmire. The words emerged and sank again, stretching and pulling away. They meant nothing to him. He closed his eyes: the black and the scarlet, the shooting stars, the sunflowers.

Opened them: the blank white calm, the polite living people, the words muffled in glass.

Closed them again.

‘Plenty of rest,’ said the doctor. ‘Keep him well fed. No visitors.’

This is where I am.

He dreamt of star shells, still looking beautiful, high and silent. Starry starry night. The star shells became the painting, and he was with Sir Alfred at the Grafton Gallery, and everyone was saying,
Oh no, oh no, oh no . . .

*

A nurse woke him – intelligent-looking, with a dry expression and bony hands.

‘Lunch,’ she said. ‘Lovely egg-flip. Sit up for me, would you?’

He sat up.

She held his head, found the gap in his bandages, irrigated his mouth –
Do I have a mouth? –
with a big steel syringe. She tipped the detritus into a kidney basin, white enamel, white gauze,
I am fucking helpless here,
wiped his – what there was.
What is there?
He couldn’t spit. She cleaned him up. Tipped his head back –
I have a neck
– so he stared up at the ceiling, and poured the slop slowly, delicately, as best could be done, from the spout of the cup into the throat.

Why am I being fed like a fucking baby?

He coughed. Kind of.

*

Scraps came back to him. Not the battle, or the getting of the wound, but him on a train, smelling his own infection; tasting his own wound. The taste of his own dying flesh in his own mouth. Throwing up, at a CCS, in ambulances, on trains, on a boat? Delirium with interludes of vomiting. How kindly everyone had tended him. His head wrapped in bandages. The bloody weight hanging from his tongue to stop him swallowing it.

Now he tasted of something drying, alcoholic, stagnant.

‘Don’t you worry, old fellow,’ someone had said. Surgeon? Australian voice, or New Zealand. ‘We’ll fix you up. You’re in the right place, and you’ll be all right by the time we’ve done with you.’

He was all right. He had walked. He had, hadn’t he? He had got through the mud, the giant corpse-studded cowpat; he had stayed on the duckboards, past the gaunt dead black burnt wet stalagmite trees . . . a tank upended like a shipwreck, great stern up in the air, like a tufty duck on the Round Pond – tufted duck, Mum said, tufty duck, he insisted, tufty duck, tufty duck. Lovely little tufty ducks, with their bright yellow eyes like the rings you stick on round the holes in a piece of file paper.

All that he remembered. He remembered his name, and three wooden crosses upright in a pool of dirty water.

There was something else. Oh, there was plenty else.

He couldn’t remember what had happened. He didn’t know how he had been wounded. He didn’t seem to be able to talk. Not dumb like shell-shock. (Officers don’t get hysterical. They’re too dignified – who had said that? Oh, Ainsworth.) It wasn’t psychological. He just didn’t seem to have the apparatus. Instead, he had a hideous, panicky, creeping claustrophobia.

*

He dreamt he was making mayonnaise with Jacqueline Waveney. She didn’t believe any Englishwoman could add the olive oil correctly. Drip, drip, drip, so as not to curdle the egg yolks. The yellowness turned into Sir Alfred’s yellow oil paint. The swirl, the oil. And the sunflowers of Van Gogh. Cadmium Naples Zinc Chrome. In the old days they used egg yolks for egg tempera. Country egg yolks for robust complexions; city egg yolks for pale ladies and saints. Botticelli Veronese Piero della Francesca.

She’d let Riley do it. Found it funny that he was interested.

‘What are you going to do when you grow up, Riley?’

‘Painter like Sir Alfred,’ he’d said, and she’d laughed. ‘Or a cook?’ he’d said.

She’d laughed at that too.

*

Riley stared at the nurse to make her look at him.

She looked.
Handsome eyes
, she thought.

He lifted his arm and moved his hand in a writing motion, like an officer asking for the bill in a Parisian brasserie.

‘Pen and paper?’ she asked.

He blinked.

She was pleased. He wanted to talk to her.

He wrote:

I assume I’m in hospital.

I must be. I tasted the egg. It was real. And she’s still here.

‘You are,’ she said. ‘The Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup.’

Blighty!

He wrote:

Will I die?

‘Of course, in the end,’ she said. ‘But not of this.’

He liked her for that. He wrote,

Thanks.

‘You’re welcome,’ said Rose.

He wrote:

How long?

‘Since you arrived? A week,’ she said, and she smiled, and said: ‘I’ll get the doctor. He can explain.’

*

A tall, handsome man arrived, clean, healthy, tired. There was something of the midnight oil about him, and that medical coolness off which women’s attempts at thanks slip and slide, and against which men’s attempts to match up look ridiculous.

‘Major Gillies,’ he said, introducing himself. ‘I’m your surgeon.’

I am here. Hospital. This is the reality. Hold it. Gillies Gillies Gillies – remember that.

‘How are you feeling, Captain?’

Riley thought about it.
Not the slightest idea.
He flicked his eyes up.

‘Do you know what’s happened to you?’

Riley felt a tiny little snort in his nose.

‘
You’ve lost quite a lot of your jaw to a gunshot wound, Captain,’ Gillies said. ‘And we’re going to put you back together.’

You’d think you’d remember that, wouldn’t you?

He wanted to ask more –
what happened? Did I . . .
But he didn’t want to ask as well. And – no one can help being shot. He wanted to know about the others.

Or maybe not.

The tall man was watching for a response. Riley had no response – or no idea how to give it. Gillies continued: ‘This is Tonks, and this is Marcus. The first thing we need to do is get a good look at you, see what we’re dealing with. Marcus here is going to take some photographs, and later Tonks is going to draw you. Don’t worry, he’s quite talented. That way, we don’t have to disturb you more than we need, so you can heal better. So we’re going to take a look at you now . . .’

Riley had seen Tonks before. Sir Alfred knew him. Unmistakable man: like an eagle. He was often at exhibitions. He didn’t like the Impressionists.

With unutterable tenderness, the major unpinned and unwrapped Riley’s face, passing the bandages like streamers to the bony-handed nurse.

I’m so sorry but it’s not convenient,
thought Riley.
I have an appointment at two thirty in Buenos Aires.

He lay there while they uncovered his face. Words washed around him: mandible, masseter, ramus, coronoid process. They probed him gently: lifting, turning. Someone set up the great caravan of the camera with its hood, and its lights.

‘Because you have had an infection, we have to let it heal up completely,’ Gillies was saying, ‘before we can get to work remodelling you.’

I am no longer a man who does things
, Riley thought
. I am a man who things are done to.

Major Gillies explained: ‘You’re going to be here for quite a while, but remember, you’re not ill, you’re wounded. When you feel up to it, take a stroll. There’s a library up at the house. The gardens are nice. Plenty of chaps about.’

Riley saw the gardens when the VAD took him to Tonks’s studio to be drawn. Plodding the wooden walkways, he saw the deep green wetness of incipient English autumn, the shrubs dripping in the rain, the moss under the hedge, the collapsed browning stems of the summer flowers, the deserted lawns.

1917, 1917, 1917. 1917.

Tonks didn’t show Riley the picture when it was done.

Chapter Nineteen

London, Autumn 1917

The card, when it came; the news it brought – those words that were not his, his words filling in the gaps, the card that he had touched, the fact of him on the same land as her, that he couldn’t be hurt any more now, that he was
here
, and she could go to him . . . It filled Nadine with a flooding energy, a magnetic, panicky feeling, and a sense of being hurled towards him: a physical propulsion. Reason left her mind. No thought at all, other than ‘be with him’.

Sister recognised it, and granted her leave. One day, in a month’s time. Nadine had physically to restrain herself.

‘Take it easy,’ said Jean.

‘Can’t,’ said Nadine. Her breath was quick and tight all the time, and her knee flickered when she sat. So many still coming in from the Salient. She had only two hours off now on a Sunday. Sidcup and back in two hours? She was filled with mad, fluttering joy. He was safe and everything was possible again.

‘He’s in the best place,’ said Jean. ‘He’ll be getting better all the time.’

*

Riley, propped up, was staring at Jarvis, opposite him. Jarvis had a recent and well-healing flap over what used to be his nose. The lump of flesh was perhaps twice the size a nose would be, waxy, massive, repulsive. It looked slightly as if he were holding on to his normal nose in a big waxy hammy fist. Every person who stopped by the bed told him that the swelling would go down and the flap settle. At the top, where the bridge would be, where the pedicle from the forehead twisted down, a single tight little horsehair stitch was visible, holding the new flesh in, forming the top point of the triangular nose-to-be. Across the forehead was a wet, naked purple scar marking out where the skin had been taken. Jarvis was repulsive.

Riley did his best not to let that show. He did not want Jarvis to read in his eyes how frightening, how repellent, how ridiculous he looked. Riley kept his gaze steady, unjudgemental. But then Riley had not been here long. To those who had, Jarvis looked pretty good, well on the way, a tidy piece of work.

Riley did not know what he, Riley, looked like.
Headful of bandages, an Egyptian mummy . . .

And under the bandages?

*

It would be better
, Riley thought,
if they just came round with a machine gun and shot us all. We all know that life is not sacred any more, and hasn’t been for a few years now. You can’t send us back to the front – we’d scare the horses and Lower Morale. Just fucking shoot us.

He thought:
Fucking fucking bastard bastard war fucking bastard life fucking war fuck fuck fuck.

Once, he thought
Will I talk? Will I eat? Will I sing? Will I kiss?

Then,
Don’t be ridiculous.

After a week or two, he started on
Why me?
One of Locke’s arias had been haunting his mind, the woman, singing – it was in Italian, of course, and Locke had translated it that night he hadn’t wanted to go to the brothel with him . . . I lived for art, I lived for love, I never did harm to a living soul . . .
Oh, but I did . . . we did, didn’t we? . . .
in the hour of sorrow, why, oh, Lord, why, why do you pay me back like this?

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a face for not even knowing how many men you’ve killed. And for forgetting what it was those dying Tommies wanted you to say, and to whom. And who they were. And for not reporting Burgess, and not saving Dowland, or Ferdinand, or Couch, Bloom Atkins Wester Green or, dear God, Ainsworth, and for leading them slowly into gunfire, for walking on by as they drowned in craters of mud, for being impatient when the boy wanted water, and for being promoted, and for forgetting, and for leaving home, and for ingratitude, and for squandering love . . .

It may be harder to die here than there but it can probably be done. Burgess, where are you when I need you?

*

Major Gillies came round again and Riley, more alert, got a better idea of him. He was the boss, the hero, the surgeon. Nice-looking, easy-moving man, cheerful and capable and very busy. He said: ‘Captain, you’re accustomed to giving orders, and you’re accustomed to taking orders. If you put your faith in us, we can help you. If you don’t, we’ll help you anyway, but it won’t succeed as well.’

Riley watched him as he spoke, his mouth moving, the tongue inside, the delicate movements of the lips making the clear, precise words, the characteristic drawl, the idiosyncrasies that made the voice individual and placed the man – educated, intelligent,
au fait,
a touch Anzac, reliable, eloquent, unflappable, warm. The jaw going up and down, up and down. He seemed to be absolutely serious.

Had he had a face to laugh with, Riley would have laughed.
O nice-looking, skilful, kind doctor – what the fuck is the point? Why are you even bothering? Half of my face is missing. You said so yourself. Missing in action . . . still in the filthy mud of Passchendaele . . . Half of my face is dead, doctor, lost without a grave. Known only to God. A jawbone of the Great War. Thank you so much, but – don’t make me laugh. I am detritus now. Leave me be.

The bony-handed nurse, Rose, came to check his dressings. ‘Healing up nicely,’ she said. ‘You’ll soon be ready for your first op. You could go for a walk if you like – it’s nice out. Take a look at the workshops. They make toys, furniture, all sorts. Embroidery! We’ve a chicken farm, too. You don’t want to lie around all day.’

Riley rolled his head, his eyes, towards her.
Shut up. Women’s work and chickens. Don’t you know all I know how to do is kill?

‘If you stay here and brood,’ she said, ‘you’ll make things worse.’ She was upset. Everyone was upset. A nineteen-year-old boy had taken off in the night, drunk a bottle of whisky, and thrown himself under a train. They were angry – with him, with themselves. Rose reminded herself all the time that though the staff had grown used to it, the patients could not. And they must not become used to it.
They won’t be able to operate in civilian life if they become habituated loafers, dependent on the regime here. They have been so destroyed . . . It is not just their faces.

‘Anyway,’ she said.
You can’t force it on them. It takes time
. ‘Letters,’ she said, and she handed over two. He let them drop on the bed.

She looked at him, a
now now
look. ‘I’ll read them to you if you like,’ she said. He glanced up at her. His hooded eyes were a crush of diamonds.
Damn you
, she thought.
Damn you, damn you.

She tore open the first letter, neatly, forcefully. ‘“My Dear Son,”’ she read. ‘It’s from your mother!’

Yes,
he thought.
I gathered.

‘“I hope this finds you as well as you can be. Your father and I don’t understand why you have not written to us but we are sure you have your reasons and we want to say we are thinking of you and hoping for your recovery. We hear that the Queen’s Hospital is a very good one and that the surgeons there are doing very good work, there was an article about it in the paper which Susan kept for us. It all sounds very modern with things changing so fast. We had the letter saying you would not be having visitors yet and we were sorry, because whatever happens, dear Riley, we want to visit you. Your father says you must be worried being wounded in the face in case you look a fright, but I told him you know no face of yours could scare us off. I hope I am right. Take care of yourself, my son, and please write and tell us when we can come for a visit the girls send you kisses we have not told them yet it is your face but you know they will always love you something rotten from your old mum.”’

Rose thought:
That’s a family who will help if they can. They won’t make it harder than it has to be.
And at the same time she thought:
But it’s not a letter from an officer’s mother.
She looked at Riley again. When a man can’t talk, and wears uniform, and bandages, you don’t know who he is. She glanced at the postmark: west London. A west London man. She wondered what his voice had been like.

‘Do you want to write back to her?’ she asked, and he stared at her, his eyes eloquent of something she could not decipher. She handed him the notebook.

He took it, and dropped it on the bed.

She opened the second letter, looked at the first lines, then handed it to him. ‘Not sure I should read this one,’ she said, with a smile.

He glanced at it. Saw the writing. ‘My darling darling . . .’

Tears started from his eyes – no noise, no sobs, just sudden tears.

Rose closed her eyes a second. ‘Captain Purefoy . . .’ she said.

He picked the notebook up in a sudden swoop and wrote:

My name is Riley.

‘All right,’ she said.

Then he wrote:

And I would have thought you’d have learnt by now not to pity.

She read it and flinched, and he was already regretting it when she grinned grimly, and said gaily, ‘Ninety-nine per cent there. Ninety-nine per cent no feeling at all, you’ll be glad to hear, just cheerful efficiency . . .’

He looked up at her. She looked at him. Their eyes met.

He wrote:

Sorry.

‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘So am I.’ She smiled and made a face – to change the mood, for God’s sake, change the mood. ‘So,’ she said. ‘Shall I read it?’ She wanted to, now. She was curious.

He gestured a helpless yes with his hand.

Rose read fluently, carefully, more or less without expression: ‘“My darling darling, Oh my dear, knowing that you are here, so close, and that I cannot come to you – oh god I think this is the cruellest thing of the war so far, such a stupid unnecessary little extra cruelty . . . as if the Chelsea can’t do without me, as if there – oh, it’s just that nursing these boys I don’t know has been enough for me till now, but now I know you are within my reach and need nursing and I am not there to help you – agh! Please dearest Riley let me know when I can come to you. I am going mad here, dropping things, not sleeping, not eating. Mad! Jean says she has never seen a girl so lovesick. It’s not just my mind – my body, my heart, my dreams, my digestive system! All shouting Riley, Riley, he’s in trouble, go to him . . . I can’t shut them up. My poor colleagues here are sick of the sight of me, and of the sound of your name. Apparently I am sleeptalking now! Shouting your name in the night, Jean says. And, she says, rolling over and hugging her!! Which I deny, because I will never ever roll over and hug anyone in the night but you, my darling—”’

A small fine blush rose in Rose

‘“But I can’t even start to think about that area, and you know why . . . But to be stuck here knowing some other girl will be nursing you . . .”’

Rose smiled and glanced at Riley. ‘“Say hello to her from me, tell her I say, ‘Look after him well, he is so beloved, take care of him.’ I hope she isn’t pretty . . .”’

Rose grinned.

‘. . . Not too pretty anyway – Riley I am imagining what might have happened to your darling face, you said on the card that it wasn’t serious, I wrote to your mother but haven’t heard back yet – my love you know I don’t care about it, don’t you? Even if you are going to look like a gargoyle for the rest of your life I don’t—”’

Riley touched her arm. He shook his head.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Rose.

He took the letter from her. Looked at it. Finished reading it. Folded it.

Very carefully, he tore it in half, and in half again.

‘Oh,’ said Rose.

He cast her a warning glance.

‘Oh,’ she said again, very quietly. ‘Oh, no.’

He closed his eyes.

*

Going about her business with her kidney basins and her Lysol, her squares of gauze and her cheerful demeanour, Rose kept thinking about the girl who had written the letter: a nursing VAD like Rose, a girl who was in love, so lively, so funny, so open. Rose hadn’t known a love letter might be like that. She’d always thought of a love affair as a matter between two opponents, like Peter and Julia, where poor Julia prances and dances in ever madder circles, desperate for his attention, unable to see that he has none to give, and he, ashamed, tries to hold her off without hurting her, but does . . . Poor Julia, who is no one when she is not desired; who is only beautiful, who has no other woman to be.
I am better off than Julia
, Rose realised, in a glancing shard of illumination.
I really am.

. . . and so truthful! She had thought that in love truth was a weapon, and subterfuge was the norm, military intelligence in the battle for power, the hunt, resistance and pursuit, and the twisted inverted pursuit that went on before the war in which a girl like her, who nobody pursues, has to trap somebody into wanting her, or fail in her duty of being desired . . . Oh, thank God that was all over. She had never confided in a dance partner or a male friend in her life.

But that letter . . . it was more as if the two of them were on the same side. Two of them in the struggle together, and the rest of the world is the enemy. Not looking into each other’s eyes, but looking at the world through the same eyes. And rolling over in the night. Her skin shivered and prickled.
For goodness’ sake, Rose!
She shook the image away.

Oh, that poor girl. She could have
no idea
what she was letting herself in for. The families and sweethearts never did. Between pressuring him with hope, drowning him in sorrowful sympathy, suffocating him with help, being angry with him, coddling him, fearing him, avoiding him, proving so inadequate that
he
ends up having to help
them –
Jamison had written once, ‘The thing is, Rosy, they seem to think I know what to do about it all. They don’t realise I’m as lost as they are.’

Well. That poor girl. Good luck to her.

*

When Bethan Purefoy turned up, unannounced, Sister and Rose were both elsewhere, distracted by some new arrivals, gangrenous, with the mud of the Salient still on them. Riley’s mother slipped alone into the ward, which was silent but for the low, snuffly noises of men who don’t breathe as they used to. Standing by the door, looking around for Riley, for her boy, she saw first Jarvis, and his great nose.