My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (20 page)

That’s not right
, she thought.
Is that – that’s not even real . . .

But it was, so she started screaming, screaming and screaming, trying to silence herself, appalled at herself even as the sound came bellowing out, but incapable of stopping. Riley, who had been asleep, was woken; he saw his mother standing, shocked, her arms spread against the double doors, and the choked-up parts of the machinery of his voice instinctively, inaudibly, called out to her, a hideous croaky noise,
Mum, Mamma!

She saw all the men of the ward, scarred, bandaged, swollen, sliced, shattered, festooned with pedicles: staring at her, this interloper, this pair of healthy, well-set eyes from the outside world, come in to tell them the truth – that they were terrifying, pitiable, horrible. She clapped her hand over her mouth, held it in place with the other over the top, but the screaming kept coming out, through her fingers, into their ears as they lay there, helpless.

She fell back through the double doors, still gasping and moaning as she collapsed against the wall in the corridor outside. The orderly was with her. Rose and another nurse came running. It had only taken a few seconds.

‘I’m sorry I’m so sorry I’m so sorry,’ she was saying. ‘I’m sorry I’m so sorry I’m so sorry.’ Rose was incandescent with rage. Who had let her in? Who was she? Nobody goes into the wards without preparation, without accompaniment.

Bethan gathered herself. ‘I didn’t even see him,’ she said. ‘My son. I can’t . . . can I?’

Rose looked at her as if she were mad.

Sister, between tight teeth, said not. It would be . . . disruptive.

Yes, of course. Bethan saw that.

Instead she sat on a chair outside the entrance to the ward, and thought about him. She sat for almost an hour, white with shock. She said nothing. She didn’t know which of them was him.

*

Riley grew accustomed to the invisible painful absence, the lumpy lack of rightness that had replaced the lower half of his face. He had had the lecture on what a bad idea it was to grow accustomed to it. He knew all about that already. Hadn’t he grown accustomed to the bad before?

He got up. Major Gillies and Rose told him to, so he did. He wandered in the pretty gardens, reading the dark labels on the tree trunks: Judas, Japan, Jacaranda. He looked in on the officers further down the path of healing, reading the newspapers in the Long Gallery of the big house. His capacity for getting on with men had completely deserted him. He stared at their faces: wounds, dressings, scars, stitches. They looked a complete fucking mess. Some of them were chatting, planning a football match. He had a glance at the headlines: heavy fighting continues, Passchendaele, the season, Zonnebeke, push. At night he heard Fokkers overhead.

It’s all still going on. His conscious mind, not for the first time, swooped away from him, shrinking as it went into a tiny dot and hid under a clump of Michaelmas daisies.

He went back to the ward and lay in his trousers and shirt on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

Major Gillies came to see him.

‘Captain Purefoy,’ he said, ‘we need you to understand what’s going to happen. Can you listen to me now and take things in?’ Riley shifted his eyes across. He moved so slowly always. His eyes closed, a tiny sigh, the smallest nod.

‘You’re ready now for your first operation,’ Gillies went on. ‘We will reconstitute your wound as it originally was, so we can see how much skin and muscle is actually missing, and to get rid of any adhesions and scar tissue that have built up.’

Was he taking it in?

‘Then, we let that heal, scar-free and clean. We’ll be able to see what needs to be replaced, and we’ll work out a precise design for your specific wounds. It’ll probably be a double-pedicled bridge flap. I will take a flap from your scalp,’ he said, ‘and bring it under the chin on pedicles, which will lie here,’ he gestured gently, ‘down your cheek, over the healthy skin. I will apply the flap over a reconstructed jawbone to be made of vulcanite, which will be attached with pegs and wire to the sections of jaw that you still have. Then, later, we can replace that with an osteochondral graft – a piece of rib. Or what we might do is grow the bone-graft in place, in two halves under your scalp, and move it all down together. I haven’t decided yet. There’s plenty of time. Both methods are good.’

Riley listened closely, staring at the ceiling. It was all fascinating. How extraordinary. It seemed physically impossible, unfeasible, inadvisable, revolting, miraculous and a million miles away.
It was fucking mad.

‘This type of flap makes for nice clear, clean healing,’ Gillies continued. ‘And as it’s from your scalp it’ll even have hair on. I do my best to make sure it grows in the right direction.’

They’re going to open up my wound all over again. They’re going to peel my head and wrap the skin around where my chin used to be and slide in a bit of my rib to be my jaw.
And, logic says, I should be grateful.

Are they really allowed to do this to people? I suppose they can do what they want. We’re half dead anyway. They haven’t quite managed to kill us so they’ll just chop us to bits instead.

‘It’s a very good method. You’ll get double the blood supply to your graft. It does look a bit like handles, for a while. Well, you’ve seen how it looks. It’ll be like what Lance Corporal Davies had . . .’ Gillies tried not to think about Jamison. Poor Jamison.

Riley thought:
It doesn’t matter anyway.
He had made his mind up.

Later, Riley handed Rose a note he had written.

*

Major Gillies took it out over lunch.

Dear Major Gillies,
I appreciate everything you and your staff are trying to do for me but I cannot honestly play the role you have given me. For reasons which don’t reflect on you, there is no point in undertaking these operations, and I decline them. Thank you, all the same, for your efforts and good intentions.

Capt. R. Purefoy

Gillies swore, very quietly. He hated it when they did this. It made it so much more difficult. He pushed himself up in his chair and went to see Purefoy.

‘Captain,’ he said, standing above the bed.

Purefoy looked up, his laconic, hooded look.
Yes, I am down here, and you are up there, and I cannot speak, and you can save me, and you are a hero, and I am a piece of detritus, a leftover, half a man, a piece of turd. An ort, as Ainsworth would have said.

‘You’re having the operation. It’s an order. Understood?’

Purefoy blinked.

‘You are needed in France. You can’t go without a jaw. This is a military hospital. Understood?’

Purefoy blinked again.

Gillies knew perfectly well that Captain Purefoy was going nowhere, and certainly not to France.

‘And I also order you to put some vim and vigour into your attitude to your recovery, soldier, and none of this lead-swinging.’

Lead-swinging! Here I am with half a face and they still think we’re swinging the lead . . . What does a man have to do to be taken seriously?

‘You have to put your trust in me,’ he said. ‘As an officer. What else can you do? Go home and lock yourself in the attic? Would your mother like that?’

Riley felt a very strong urge to punch him.
If I do, I’ll be court-martialled. Will they shoot me? Can I pull off suicide by firing squad? You’d think there would be plenty of ways to die in a hospital, but perhaps that would be the cleanest, and no one’s fault but my own.

He stared.
I know what you’re trying to do. I’m not falling for it. I can make my own decision about this and you must respect it.

‘Captain Purefoy,’ said Gillies. He perched on the edge of the bed beside this blank-eyed man, making an angle of confidentiality and understanding. ‘You’re taking morphia. It soothes a man’s pain, but it also makes him tired and miserable. Don’t listen to the morphia.’ He leant in, and spoke quietly. ‘Yours is a healable condition, if you believe it to be. Men can think themselves into the grave. Please don’t do that.’

Riley blinked.
Think himself dead! Now there’s a novel method. Perhaps he should try it.

*

Riley had not found the strength to escape his weakness. He could not imagine that there was any place in the world for him. He could not imagine a world in which there could be any place for what he had become. He was not convinced there would be a world at all.

He accepted egg-flip and morphia.

He did not have the power to resist what they wanted to do to him. They sailed like galleons on the brilliancy of their capabilities. They had power, belief, hope and goodness, generosity, talent, application, determination. He had killed people. They would do what they had to do. He would stare out of the window. Gillies kept talking about trust: mutual trust being a bulwark against disaster. Riley had no conception of trust. He had no choice about anything, and no feelings.

When the time came and they wheeled him in and laid him out, and gave him the ether oil up the backside, he stared into nothing.

Rose watched as the anaesthesia seemed to make no difference to his expression. Previously, she had watched the anaesthetist holding up a mask to a face while it was being cut and stitched, on a man sitting up vertical so as not to suffocate on his tongue and his blood. The two doctors had swapped between anaesthetic and surgery, and she’d seen surgeons half passing out from leaked chloroform vapour, knees giving way. She had seen the insufflation method, which ended up blowing blood all over everyone; there had been a tracheal angle-piece made from a .303 cartridge case, ether blown through a funnel, that green rubber tube they came up with going into the trachea, like a worm going into a hole . . . The methods were getting better.

Rectal ether oil had its problems too: it was too light at the beginning and too heavy at the end; it would probably give him pneumonia, and she would have to clean the oil out of his backside so it didn’t continue to absorb, re-anaesthetising him. But at least the surgeon would stay conscious.

They set him up, laid him out, and with their knives released the tangled, lumpen, distorted misplaced healing of his face. Liberated from the scars, his flesh fell away in wings and shards and scraps: they cleaned it and tended it and loosely bound it up again, so it could heal free, and become the fabric for the next stage of the campaign.

Chapter Twenty

Sidcup, November 1917

Nadine walked from the station, trying to control her breath. Turn left, up the hill – there was a bus stop but that would involve waiting and she couldn’t do it: her feet wouldn’t stop.

The bus came to a halt just by her, and her feet walked themselves on to it.

Why hadn’t he written? Why hadn’t he told her anything more?

Not serious.

She’d seen so many wounds. Wounded men in their hospital blues walking about; limps, crutches, bandages, slings. She’d seen them arrive at the hospital straight off the train, stinking of infection, emaciated, dirty, bloodstained, temporary splints falling off, bones sticking out.

Her stomach was cramping as she walked up to the entrance to ask after him. She didn’t even see the face of the woman she spoke to.

‘Purefoy,’ she said, ‘Purefoy, ah, yes . . . Follow round to the left and down the hill. Ask for Sister.’

It floated over her head.

Down the hill, enquire.

‘Captain Purefoy? Yes, one moment, please . . .’

She sat in the corridor, knee jittering. Passing staff observed her uniform and one smiled. She didn’t notice. She lit a cigarette. She was so utterly happy.

A youngish woman approached her – tall, dark, same uniform as her, nursing member VAD. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, her head craning round a little. She was strong-looking, not pretty, fine eyes, overworked, firm. Good hands, Nadine thought. Good hands for him to be in.

She jumped up. ‘I’ve come to see Captain Purefoy.’ Words of joy.

‘Miss . . .?’ asked the VAD.

‘Waveney,’ said Nadine.

‘I’m Rose Locke. I help look after Captain Purefoy. Um – Miss Waveney . . . ’

It was her, Rose thought.
No question
. ‘I’m afraid Sister is busy, but I can . . .’ She wished Nadine had said she was coming, or that Riley had – oh, she just wished she’d known, so she could have prepared. Well. It wasn’t the first time, wouldn’t be the last. It might be good for him to have a visitor.
Shake him up a bit.

‘Come this way. Do sit down. Now . . . Captain Purefoy has recently had an operation, the first of several that will be necessary . . . Are you acquainted with the nature of his injuries?’
At least in France you don’t have to deal with the relatives
, Rose thought.
Handing out misery like sweeties.

At the same time, Rose couldn’t take her eyes off her. This girl and Riley . . . rolling over in the night . . .
Stop it, Rose.

Miss Waveney shook her head very quickly.

Ah.

‘Miss Waveney,’ said Rose.

‘Please call me Nadine,’ she said. ‘I don’t know who Miss Waveney is. She’s a sort of stranger.’

Rose smiled. Then stopped smiling. Arranged the professional face. ‘Captain Purefoy has requested no visitors,’ she said.

Nadine was like a jumpy loving dog, wriggling, trying to sit when told, couldn’t do it, wriggling while sitting . . . ‘Tell him it’s me.’ She smiled.

You of all people
, Rose thought.
You beautiful, odd-looking, yellow-eyed girl, whose letters so leaping with life and love he puts away unread.
‘I’ll see,’ she said, stood and walked out of the room. She stopped a second, to breathe, and went back to the ward, where Riley was propped, his face newly dismantled, a new mandibular support under his remaining scrap of jaw. ‘Captain Purefoy,’ she said, ‘I know you said no visitors, but there is a young lady here for you who wants to visit you very much.’ She always said ‘visit’. She never said ‘see’.

He looked up at her.

‘It’s Miss Waveney,’ she said.

His eyes froze. His whole body was still. Time paused.

Other people
, Rose thought.
Other people and their bloody love.

Almost imperceptibly within his metal frame, Riley shook his head. Raised his hand. Rose passed him the pen and notebook.

Tell her gillies says no

Rose read it, and nodded. ‘Probably for the best, for now,’ she said.

Riley glanced up at her. He blinked.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Rose said to Nadine. ‘You should really have enquired before coming all this way. I spoke to his surgeon, and Major Gillies says he really isn’t fit to be visited at the moment. If you want to write to him, I can find—’

Nadine had slumped down on to the seat. Silent tears were pouring down her face, pouring.

Rose’s heart clenched for her.
You never get used to it, you mustn’t get used to it.
She was too used to it already. ‘Major Gillies is a brilliant surgeon,’ she said. ‘He’s in the very best place. They do really wonderful work here. It takes time but the results are often excellent . . .’

Nadine was weeping, weeping, weeping.

‘The first operation was a success,’ Rose continued, almost pleadingly. ‘We can do a really good job for him. He’ll look all right.’
Damn this girl.

‘It’s not that!’ Nadine said, lifting her head, like a child outraged by an injustice. ‘Can’t you see? I just want to see him!’

She stared at Rose, and then she gave a split-second sort of apologetic look. Then she leapt up and she ran – she hurled herself – down the way Rose had come.

Rose took off after her, boots slapping the wooden boards of the walkway. ‘Miss Waveney! Miss Waveney!’

Oh God, oh God.

An orderly grabbed Nadine’s arm, and was swung round by her impetus. Rose shook her head at him as she careered up.

‘Come on, Nadine,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and have a cup of tea.’ She was making calming noises,
ssht ssht ssht
, like you might use to a dog, or a horse, or a baby. To something unsocialised and immediate. Nadine, rigid in the orderly’s embrace, rolled rigid into Rose’s, a sudden shocking intimacy. Rose took her, folded herself round her and enclosed her, holding the flying pieces of her together.

She propelled her to the parlour – a child with a giant doll – and when it came to putting her on a chair, Rose found herself holding on to Nadine’s body, hugging her, feeling in its bones and flesh a profound shuddering comfort of her own, so strong that she felt obliged to break away.

‘Miss Waveney,’ she said, over-compensating with professionalism. She turned to the urn to get tea. Lots of sugar. She would have a cup too. ‘You’re a necessary part of your hospital, a member of your team. Pull yourself together.’

Nadine had collapsed into the wooden chair, breathing very shallowly. She seemed now half the height and size she had been when she was stiff.

‘I really, really, really want to see him,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if you can understand this but the idea that he is –
there—
’ she gestured vaguely ‘—and I can’t be with him, is – it’s – it’s not right. It’s very, very wrong. And unlike most of the very, very wrong things,’ she said, as if the sense of it were unfolding before her, ‘which we are surrounded by, I can make it right – by going to him. I can make it right. So why are you stopping me?’

‘It’s my duty,’ said Rose. ‘What would you do, nurse?’

Nadine smiled. ‘Yes yes yes,’ she said. ‘But you see I’m not here as a nurse. I’m here as a girl. Are you a girl sometimes, Miss . . .’

‘Rose Locke,’ said Rose.

‘Rose Locke. What a beautiful name. And are you locked? Are you a locked Rose? Oh, God, I’m sorry. Sorry. None of this is your fault. I’ll try to be good. I know, I know. Do you have any idea, Miss Locke, Miss Rose, when I will be able to visit my darling?’

‘I can’t confirm, I’m so sorry,’ Rose said, and before she could finish, suggesting phone calls to the front desk, letters perhaps to the patient, and so on, Nadine had said, ‘I’ll come tomorrow then. Or this afternoon?’

*

Later on that day Rose saw her, walking away from town, wandering, clearly wasting time, in the countryside. She went across a lush field with a few cows in it, carefully climbing the gate on the other side in her long, heavy skirt. Rose had forbidden herself sympathy, as an emotion detrimental to efficiency, but for this girl, the careful way she climbed the gate, weighed down, she felt it, she just did.

*

Riley lay as usual, propped up, eyes shut.

Later, before going to the bathroom, he paused to fossick in his kitbag. He took a small shaving mirror from one of the pockets.

He walked through his ward, seeing the others out of the corners of his eyes. He glanced, in passing, at the other wards off the walkway, and continued up to the big house. A few fellows were sitting about on the flagged terrace in the autumn sun, chatting, reading. As best he could, without causing the particular pain of observation, he looked at the variety of heads he passed, sticking out of the hospital blues of the men, the uniforms of the officers. He imagined what was beneath the bandages, and he made himself look at the various stages of dismantling and reconstruction, of healing and scarring, of swelling and adhesion, of skin pulled this way and that, cut and replaced, puffed up like bacon fat, promising, healing, ugly, terrifying, eyes pulled sideways, noses twisted, the clear, shining skin of burn scars, pedicles dangling, keloids puffing, thick black horsehair stitches, pads and lumps of semi-healed flesh. He looked at the eyes in those heads: moist slits, some of them, crooked, or empty, slack without muscle, a couple of eyelashes stuck in any which way. He considered the souls behind those eyes. As best he could, without being seen to look, because being seen to look would cause pain . . . He didn’t know how to look, any more than anyone else did.

People will not know how to look at me . . . Children will scream at the sight of me.

I am angry. I am bewildered. I am scared. I am disgusting. I am embarrassed. I am embarrassing. I can’t talk. I can’t chew to eat. I will be looked at, judged, rejected, pitied. Pitied.

Pitiable. Self-pitying.

Men, pitying me. My mother, pitying me. Nadine, pitying me. Me, pitying me.

Disgusting.

He ambled delicately back down the wide steps, moving silently into the grounds. In the wooded area beyond the pond, he tried to move his tongue in his mouth. He made the tiny soft snorting noise in the back of his throat: the only noise he could make.

His hands were heavy when he lifted them to unwrap the dressing.

He propped the mirror in the fork of a branch, and carefully, consciously, determinedly, he looked at his face.

He was both ridiculous and grotesque. He didn’t look like a face at all. His own wide brow with his hair cropped like a prisoner’s, his own grey eyes, with their lashes and folds of skin, their iridic rings and the tiny black holes into the inside of his skull. His own flat cheekbones, his little mole, sitting quietly undisturbed by his left temple where it had been all along. His own strong broken nose, with its pores and its nostrils. His upper lip, shaven, and clean, the dent where, his mother had told him, God had pressed his fingertip to mark him finished, perfect, ready to be born.

The top lip of his mouth, still there, the upper lip Nadine had kissed and sworn was so beautiful to her.

And, underneath, the biggest mess . . . He looked like a scarlet crater rimmed with a half-formed pile of earthworks, a fallen-over pile of dirty sandbags. Grey bruising and purple swelling and black scab, hanging loose over nothing. The metal chin support, like revetting. Seams between pads of flesh running across his face like trenches, swellings like sandbags. A few loose stitches like barbed wire.

I
look like fucking no man’s land.

*

An orderly found Riley asleep in the woods, his unravelled bandages around him, his face cradled in his arms in the dead birch leaves of the previous year, and the mirror in the fork of the tree staring down at him. He woke him gently, and took him back inside, and when Riley wrote in his notebook that he would like a screen around his bed, Rose spoke to Sister, and Sister spoke to Major Gillies, and Rose, they decided, should keep a special eye on him.

She came to him that night after supper, when everyone had been cleaned up, and the ward was quietening. She handed him the notebook and pencil.

He shook his head, as best he could, rebandaged.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘You can’t keep it all locked away inside. We’ve plenty of experience of this.’

He glanced down, shook his head again, a tiny movement.

‘Please, Riley,’ she said. ‘How can you live in the world if you won’t communicate?’

He grabbed the pen and wrote:

How can I live in the world?

‘You can,’ she said. ‘You’re loved. Why would you want to die when you’re loved?’

Who said I want to die?

‘You did. You’ve made it perfectly clear.’

He was still for a moment. He had had so much time to think about all this.

I was a boy, I knew nothing, I was interested in art, I had a place, I loved a girl.

I became a soldier, trained to live and fight like an animal in circles of Hell.

I was made an officer, leading the animals.

I am a cripple so hideous my own mother screams and can’t stay in the room long enough to look at me.

My own mind lies to me and hides things from me.

After who knows how many years of pain, flesh-cutting, other people’s generosity, drugs, stuck here, incapable, I am to go back to . . . normality, with a plastered-on face made from my own sliced-up skin, a lying mind, a corrupted soul . . .

Rose was still there.

He wrote:

You met Nadine

‘I did. We had a cup of tea. She’s lovely and she loves you.’

Still. Then:

tell me if this is cruel enough

and he passed her a letter. She read it quickly.

My Dear