Shamrock Green (17 page)

‘Probably not,' John James said.

‘I was here when it started, just arrived,' said Roddeny. ‘I was down under the counter fetchin' out the books when it went up with a bang, just burst into flames, like. Is this the work o' the peelers? Is this some o' their doin'?'

‘I doubt it,' John James said. ‘In fact, no. If you glance behind you you'll find a solution to the mystery hanging on the hook in the corner.'

Roddeny spun round and, reaching out, snatched down the cap and driver's tunic that he had failed to remark before the explosion.

‘What?' he said, frowning and shaking the garment. ‘McCulloch?'

‘Who, if I am not mistaken, will be halfway to Holyhead by now.'

‘We can still catch him, can't we?'

‘No, no,' said Mr Flanagan. ‘Let him go.'

‘Let him go, sir? Let him go?'

‘Perhaps it's for the best,' Mr Flanagan said.

‘But he blew up your limousine.'

‘Did he? I think it was an accident, don't you, Mr Roddeny?'

‘An accident? That's what I've to tell the boys, sir, is it?'

‘Spontaneous combustion,' John James said and, with Gowry's tunic draped over his arm, went off to find a hack to take him home.

*   *   *

The recruiting station was all but deserted at that hour of the morning. Perhaps, Gowry thought, the keen ones had gone up to the barracks at Portobello where you could sign on for the Fusiliers. He didn't care what regiment he joined. He wanted only to be sucked off the streets and given shelter, to become anonymous, a little man without worries or responsibilities who would do his duty for king and country and be drilled into mindless indifference in exchange.

The officer was in full dress uniform. Brilliant shamrock-green facings and a scarlet flask cord made him look like the villain in an operetta. He peered out from behind the wire mesh screen that separated the army clerks from civilians in the funeral parlour that the battalion had requisitioned and, wagging a gloved hand, signalled a sergeant to hasten to the door and nab Gowry before he could change his mind and escape.

The sergeant wore service dress, puttees waxed, boots and buttons shining. The only drops of colour were the badges on his cap and arm, shamrocks and crossed rifles, gleaming like gold. He had a great heavy jaw and shoulders like an ox and bore no resemblance to Maurice Leonard.

‘Come along, lad,' the sergeant said. ‘Come along. Don't be fright. It's what you're here for now, ain't it?'

‘It is,' said Gowry, humbly. ‘Aye, it is. What regiment is this?'

‘The 2nd Battalion of the Sperryhead Rifles,' the sergeant said and for some reason that Gowry couldn't fathom gave him a discreet salute. ‘Best of the little 'uns, I can tell you, just waitin' to write a new page in history.'

‘Whose history?' Gowry asked.

‘
Our
history, lad,
our
history,' the sergeant answered and, laying a massive hand on Gowry's shoulder, steered him gently towards the wire.

PART TWO

Rebecca

Chapter Nine

The winter stand was over and the fighting had begun in earnest once again. The hospital had been moved from sixty miles behind the lines to a position close to the railhead in expectation of a big spring push.

The line, so Rebecca had heard, was ninety miles in length and stretched from Langemarck on the Yser to Dompierre on the Somme, but she had only a vague notion where these places were, for over the months one unit, one tent, one clearing station had become very much like another. Over by Christmas, they'd said, back at the beginning! There's a laugh! It was 1916 now and no end in sight. There were a million men in France and Flanders, half a million more would arrive by mid-summer and many of those would wind up here in the Ecole de Saint-Emile or some other hospital where, according to the will of God and the skill of the surgeons, they would either live or die.

As operating theatres went the Saint-Emile's was rather nice, a dazzlingly white room, not very large, with a door in one wall and two high windows through which, when the night lamps were extinguished, the clear light of day shone down. Until recently it had been the school cloakroom and lavatories faced you and the sinks where the surgeons scrubbed up. The operating tables were covered with oilcloth and in one corner a polished copper tank steamed on an oil-fired stove. It wasn't Becky's job to fish the sterilised instruments from the tank. She left that menial chore to an orderly or one of the half-baked probationers, for she, Rebecca Tarrant, was a staff nurse.

Seasoned by fourteen months in the field, she could lay out a supply table without having to think about it and do everything the surgeons required of her without one slip or stumble, even at the end of a fifteen-hour shift. Her mother considered her stubborn, of course, but her refusal to admit defeat kept her going and would keep her going until the flood of wounded dried up and the tables were wiped down and packed away and the circus of suffering moved on.

Two of the three operating tables were occupied. While Becky opened the parcel that contained a freshly sterilised gown, the orderlies brought in another stretcher. The table had been wiped with a damp cloth but there were traces of blood along the edge of the mat and Mr Sanderson – he insisted on being addressed as ‘Mister' – nodded wearily to a probationer to swab it down again.

Becky shook out the gown by the neckband and let Mr Sanderson step into it. She tied the strings behind and held out a bowl of alcohol for the surgeon to rinse his hands. That done, she gave him a pair of rubber gloves with long turned-back wrists. He pulled them on with a little snap. The orderlies lifted the soldier from the stretcher to the table. On the surgeon's instruction they folded down the blanket and exposed the injured thigh. They tucked the blanket around his feet, buckled on two stout canvas straps, one around his knees and the other across his chest and cut away the pack that had been applied at the dressing station.

Becky studied the damage. Shrapnel; simple enough. She had seen a hundred injuries just like it, a thousand much worse. She transferred scalpels, sponges, and haemostats from the supply table to the surgeon's tray while the orderlies shaved the patient's thigh. Shrapnel wounds might be commonplace to the medical staff, Becky thought, but the soldier had suffered a strange and terrifying insult to his body. The soldier had uttered not one word since he had been brought in but when she pushed the trolley-tray up to the table she could see fear in his eyes. She was tempted to say something, give him a word of reassurance or make a stilted little joke as Mr Sanderson did sometimes but she made it a rule to keep patients at a safe distance, for sentiment had no part in professional relationships as far as Nurse Tarrant was concerned.

The padre was busy at the top of the operating table. The Ecole had been requisitioned only eleven days ago and staffing was not up to strength yet. The padre, Father Coyle, had been sent back from the lines with a painful crop of boils that had become so infected that they needed lancing. Boils on the backside were considered comical and the poor middle-aged priest had had to endure quite a ribbing. Her mother would have liked Father Coyle, for her mother, a Catholic convert, was pious without being stuffy.

The father laid out his cans of ether, gauze, Vaseline and the clips for pulling forward the patient's tongue. Becky could sense his apprehension; he was afraid that he'd bungle the job and kill the poor patient. He leaned forward, tilting the stool, and rested his elbows on each side of the soldier's head.

‘Don't be frightened, son,' he said. ‘This stuff will soon knock you out and you won't be feeling a thing. It'll all be over in a minute.'

‘Will I be dead, sir?'

‘No, no, sure and you won't be dead. You'll be patched up and back with your chums before you can say “knife”.'

The soldier's eyes widened. ‘Knife?'

The padre blushed. ‘You'll be all right, I promise you. Try not to think about the knife.'

The boy shook his head and chuckled, painfully. ‘It's not the holy oil you have in that can then, Father?'

‘It's Vaseline, just Vaseline,' Father Coyle said. ‘What regiment?'

‘The Dublin Fusiliers.'

‘Ah, at Hulluch?'

‘Aye, sir, Hulluch. Fritz came over in force at dusk.'

‘You held them off, I take it?'

‘We did, Father, that we did.'

‘Brave boys,' the padre said, humbly. ‘You are all brave boys.'

Becky tapped the priest on the shoulder. He nodded and smeared a little Vaseline around the soldier's eyes and, holding the mask a few inches above the young man's face, began to drip ether on to it.

‘Breathe deeply,' he said. ‘Don't fight it.'

He had long bony fingers, the priest, his fingernails bitten to the quick. He lowered the mask and wrapped a piece of gauze around the edges to retain the fumes. He poured the ether quickly, while the fusilier moaned and struggled against the straps. Then the moaning became faint and died away.

Alarmed, the padre glanced up. ‘Is he all right?'

‘He's fine, Father Coyle,' Mr Sanderson said, reassuringly.

Without further ado the surgeon painted the soldier's thigh with iodine and placed around the wound the four sterilised towels that Becky handed him. Mr Sanderson's assistant, Captain-Surgeon Bracknell, took his place at the table. Becky positioned herself by the trolley, the orderlies at the patient's feet, and, with the team complete, the commonplace little operation began.

*   *   *

Nine years of nursing had developed Becky's stamina to the point where she could stand upright all day – all night too if necessary – without a tremor. She came from hardy stock, of course, daughter of a shepherd, granddaughter of a fisherman, and the fatigue that had taken possession of her recently was, she felt sure, not a weakness of the body but a weakness of the will.

She had been all right until January. In January, at the temporary camp at Mallefort, she had come down with a feverish infection and at Sister Congreve's insistence had been pulled off all duties for the best part of a week. The CMO had offered to send her home, give her leave. Outraged at the suggestion, she had lain for five days in a cot in a bell tent, dizzy and sore and dried out, willing herself well again.

Since then she had not been herself, though. Backache and urinary problems were the least of it: it was the dreams that really undermined her.

She dreamed almost every night, grim, sweating dreams in which she saw her cousin Robbie lying naked on an operating table, sweet and smiling as a cherub but with his manhood exposed and erect. She would waken abruptly, shivering, a swooning cry in her throat, the smell of sodden canvas and horse-dung in her nostrils. The smell reminded her of her grandmother's turf-roofed cottage on Mull and brought longing and regret rolling over her like waves from the Atlantic. In other dreams she found herself wandering again through her Aunt Biddy's great gloomy house on the Fetternish peninsula where she had worked as a servant when young Robbie, not much more than a schoolboy, had seemed so innocent, so angelic and asexual that just the sight of him coming down the staircase in the hall had made her want to laugh. In her dreams, however, Robbie was changed, so changed, not innocent at all but manly and provocative in his nakedness, now that he was safely dead.

The ache in her back radiated down into her hips and spread into her belly and thighs. She tried to put it out of mind, to discard it like a wad of cotton wool. She suspected that the pains were simply phantoms that her brain had conjured up to keep her from thinking about Robbie, about Mull.

Three years since she had last visited the island, three years since she had last seen her mother and almost as long since her sister Rachel and she had had a real good chinwag. What she wanted, what she needed was to talk to Rachel, to confide in Rachel, to weep on Rachel's shoulder.

Only Rachel could possibly understand that stoicism and efficiency were no protection in time of war and that all the pain and suffering that she, Becky, had seen had left indelible marks. But Rachel was married now and living in Portsmouth, of all places. She had her sailor husband and two babies to take care of and no time to spare to reply to Becky's letters or pay heed to Becky's complaints about the war in France.

‘Nurse Tarrant, are you quite well?'

‘Sir?'

‘I realise it's been a very long night for all of us but I would be obliged if you would try to stay awake just a little longer.'

‘Sir.'

‘The tubes, please,' Captain Bracknell said. ‘Give me the tubes.'

What had been a small jagged wound in the soldier's thigh was now a gaping hole that smiled up at her like a red mouth. She lifted a handful of thin rubber tubes from the tray, spread them across her palms and offered them to the captain who took them one at a time and held them at waist height for Mr Sanderson to pluck away and push down into the wound.

Becky watched the chief fill the cavity with chlorine-soaked gauze, lay gauze strips plastered with yellow Vaseline around the edges of the wound, then, his work done, step aside to allow the captain to close. She stared at the patient's thigh out of which the drainage tubes crawled like worms.

‘The pad, the pad, Miss Tarrant,' the captain snapped.

She gave him the absorbent pad.

The pain in her back gnawed deep into her vertebrae and sank its teeth into her hip joints. The shaking in her legs was in danger of becoming uncontrollable. Then the door in the wall crashed open and an officer stood in the aperture, light streaming behind him. He was nothing, a creature without authority, a mere subaltern, a dishevelled snotty with a piece of sacking over his mouth and another flung like a scarf about his neck, his tunic smeared with green as if he had been rolling about on wet grass.