Shamrock Green (23 page)

It was crowded in the operating room. All three tables were in use. She could hear the cries of the wounded in the examination room and one huge, unintelligible shout, like someone cheering at a football match. Outside, though, the night was quiet. The distant bombardment had ceased. She wondered if the deadlock had been broken at last, wondered where Gowry was right now and prayed that he was safe out of harm's way.

Sister Congreve administered gas and oxygen and the soldier went out like a light. Mr Sanderson gripped his scalpel firmly, made a skin incision three inches above the umbilicus and drew the blade down around the belly button. Becky handed him towels. He ligated the bleeding points, completed the incision through the abdominal wall and peeled back the wound edges.

Captain Bracknell swiftly mopped up the viscous fluids within the peritoneum and the blood that had accumulated in the cavity.

‘I see the Germans have invaded Ireland,' he said.

‘Not now, Robert,' Mr Sanderson murmured.

‘Is that true, sir?' Becky asked.

‘Of course it isn't true,' said Mr Sanderson.

‘The English are shooting our dear wives and children,' said the captain.

‘That's just dirty German propaganda,' Sister Congreve chimed in. ‘Our boys won't be duped by Fritz's nonsense.'

‘In case anyone's interested,' Mr Sanderson said, ‘this young fellow has a perforation in the small intestine. We'll pack it before we continue.'

Becky unwrapped a pad of warm, moist gauze and passed it to Captain Bracknell. Leaning carefully across the chief's forearms, he wrapped it around the intestinal tear before Mr Sanderson teased out a further ten or twelve inches of the soldier's small bowel.

‘How's his breathing, Sister?' Mr Sanderson asked.

‘Steady,' Sister Congreve answered. ‘He's a strong boy.'

‘Oh, look, there's another hole,' Captain Bracknell said. ‘Bit of a mess, ain't it? Any damage to the mesentery, sir?'

‘There doesn't appear to be.'

‘We won't be doing a resection then?'

‘No, we'll suture,' said Sanderson. ‘The perforations are obvious and not too extensive. Robert, what do you say?'

‘I couldn't agree more. Give the poor devil a fighting chance. I'm glad we opened him, though. Nurse Harrison, the artery forceps, if you please.'

The operation proceeded without drama or mishap and in due course Mr Sanderson handed over stitching to Captain Bracknell whose long, blunt fingers passed confidently in and out of the lips of the incision while the chief adjusted the tension of the clamps and snipped away little tabs of ragged tissue with the beak of his forceps.

‘I must confess,' the captain said, ‘that Irish though I am, the nation and what it stands for remain a complete mystery to me. Lord knows, I was brought up breathing an air of suffering and injustice, but to have our Tommies being shot in the streets of Dublin while I'm here in France stitching the beggars up strikes me as a ridiculous irony.'

‘Why don't you talk to them, Robert?'

‘Talk to whom?'

‘The rank and file?' Mr Sanderson said.

Becky could see the captain's hard, dark eyes slotted between his mask and the tight, damp band of his sterile cap. Even with most of his face obscured he looked decidedly Irish. He was a good surgeon, though, and according to Angela a tireless lover, but something about the captain, something hybrid, disturbed her.

‘What can I possibly learn from the rank and file?'

‘Humility,' Sister Congreve told him.

The captain was far too professional to let anger interfere with his craft. Without lifting his head he darted a glance at the woman at the top of the table.

‘Humility, Captain Bracknell,' the sister went on, ‘is not the same as servitude, you know.'

The rivet in the small of Becky's back tightened. Pain bored up her spinal cord. She let out a little
‘uh!'
of shock and surprise.

‘What it is, Rebecca?' Sister Congreve enquired. ‘Are you sick again?'

‘No, I – I…'

‘Nurse Tarrant, do you wish to be relieved?'

‘No, Sister, I – I'm – my back hurts a bit, that's all. It's just a twinge.'

‘Too much exercise,' said Sister Congreve.

‘Or not enough of the right sort,' said Captain Bracknell.

‘What do you mean by that, sir?' said Becky, snappishly.

She felt Angela's hand on her arm, a warning squeeze. She had almost forgotten where she was. It wouldn't do to cheek an officer and risk being sent back to England, not to be here when Gowry came back for her.

‘Dreaming of thee, dreaming of thee,' the captain crooned. ‘Oh, how I long to be dreaming of thee.'

‘Robert, have you been at the bottle?'

‘Not I, sir. Not I.'

‘Please concentrate on your sutures and never mind the serenade.'

‘Of course,' said Bobby Bracknell.

He was satisfied now that he had exacted revenge, not on Sister Congreve but on the pathetic little Scots woman who, so Angela told him, had never had a man inside her. He knew precisely what Becky Tarrant needed to get rid of her back pain. If it weren't for clingy Angela he wouldn't be entirely averse to administering the treatment himself.

‘Are you all right, Rebecca?' Mr Sanderson asked.

‘Absolutely fine, sir.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘I'm sure, sir,' Becky said.

‘Good, then let's close this fellow up and move on?'

*   *   *

From the moment he stepped into no-man's-land Gowry was lost. He scuttled along behind the Rangers and prayed that he wouldn't be left behind. He was afraid less of being shot than of failing to keep up. He longed to make Becky proud of him, to be her Irish hero. He stumbled and fell to his knees while the Rangers vanished into the darkness. Ninety yards to the German line. Ninety yards? How far was that in kilometres? Maurice would know. Maurice was good at measuring things. Where the heck
was
Maurice? Why wasn't Maurice here to look out for him?

The rifle tangled in his legs when he tried to rise. He hadn't trained hard enough, hadn't trained at all. The flash of an exploding grenade was astonishingly violent and in the same split second he saw the livid little tongue of a Maxim gun spitting out bullets at six hundred rounds per minute. He flattened himself on the ground and heard the lieutenant – he assumed it was Soames – screaming,
‘Down, down, down. Get down, damn you.'

All fear went out of him. He was a fighting man after all, a fighting Irishman. He got up and ran through the rain of bullets towards the silhouettes on the edge of the German trench. He groped. Found his bayonet. Cinched it to the flanges. Came up hard behind the backs of the Rangers lying against the sap. He flopped down beside them, slapped one of the Rangers on the buttocks and shouted into his ear, ‘Where's the gun? Where is that soddin' Maxim?'

The Ranger gave no answer. His helmet was tilted at a funny angle, cocked like a straw boater on a hot race day. Faceless. Sightless. All blood. Gowry rolled away. Another man, flung back like a crucified ram. A sergeant – not Maurice – on his belly, retching blood, the vivid little tongue of the Maxim spitting lead around him. Gowry rolled again, holding the rifle close to his body. Rolled under the springy ends of the wire and tumbled into a clamshell crater close to the rim of the enemy trench. Four soldiers were already cowering there, pinned down by machine-gun fire.

‘Christ, ah Christ, ah Christ!'

‘What's wrong with you?' Gowry shouted.

‘Who'll take us back. Who'll take us back?'

‘Back?' The possibility hadn't occurred to Gowry. ‘Back where?'

The Maxim was off to the left, thirty or forty yards away. He couldn't see it but he could hear its insatiable chatter.

‘It's all gone wrong,' one of the soldiers told him, shouting. ‘There's wire in the trench. The bastards've laid wire in the trench.'

‘How many went over?' Gowry shouted.

‘Both officers an' fifteen or twenty men.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Sure an' I'm bloody sure.'

‘We'd better go back then?'

‘We can't go back, not till we're told.'

Gowry leaned against the side of the crater, turned on his hip, pulled himself up to the lip and peered back at the British lines just as the shelling commenced and trench mortars pummelled German positions. The high screaming note of the shells and the pulsations of the mortar bombs landing on the trenches engulfed him. He could see the wire twisting away like a thorn hedge to the site of the machine-gun emplacement. He could see nothing in the trench in front of him, though, no sign of forward movement or retaliatory fire. The attack had been smothered. The raiders were lying dead or wounded or doggo or, if the soldier was right, had been swallowed up in a German trap. There was nothing to aim at, nothing to be seen, only the Jerry machine-gunners' incessant strafing and a sky bright with the glare of star shells.

Gowry was thinking what to do next, how to get out of it, when nine or ten Tommies swarmed over the rim of the depression. They came from all sides at once and Gowry would have stuck the bayonet in if he'd had room to swing.

‘Wey, wey, wey, wey, z'us, z'us, z'us.'

‘Reilly, that you?'

‘Aye, aye, z' me.'

The support unit, his mob. Seemed he'd got here first after all. He was surprised that any of them had made it. Several had to be bundled over the edge, wounded, mortally or otherwise. None of them, he realised, could tell him what to do. He wondered again where Maurice was. God, but wouldn't Maggie be mad if Maurice left him out here to die?

Here we go again, Gowry thought, a choice that's no choice at all.

Take it or leave it: Flanagan's law.

‘McCulloch? McCulloch, what the bloody 'ell do you think you're doin'?'

‘Gettin' out of here,' Gowry said, and, clambering over legs, buttocks and thighs, hauled himself out of the clamshell crater and crawled up the pock-marked slope towards the German trench.

*   *   *

She was dewed with perspiration and her undergarments clung uncomfortably to her hips and thighs. The night air was cool, though, and above the oaks the moon hung in a haze of starlight. She was not alone on the terrace. An ambulance crew was drinking tea by the kitchen doors and one of the regular chaplains was strolling up and down the terrace with his arm about the shoulder of a weeping soldier.

The sandy-haired Tommy had been stitched up and wheeled away to a recovery ward. In a few minutes she would be obliged to return to the theatre where another soldier would be hoisted on to the table and the whole process would begin again. Meanwhile, she sipped tea, let her body cool and wondered when the ache in her loins would ease.

He came up on her, stealthy as a ghost. He had peeled off his gown and unbuttoned his shirt. She could see his under-vest and the curly dark brown hair on the upper part of his chest. Angela had told her that he was hairy all over, a revelation that Becky found disgusting.

The captain flipped open a worn silver case. ‘Cigarette?'

Becky shook her head. ‘No, thank you.'

He stood close to her, looking out across the lawn, cigarette held between finger and thumb. He inhaled deeply and released smoke from his mouth.

‘I'm sorry if I upset you,' the captain said.

‘You didn't upset me, sir.'

‘You don't have to call me “sir”. Angela doesn't call me “sir” when we're alone.' He tugged on the cigarette. ‘How bad is that back of yours?'

‘It's just a sprain,' Becky said.

‘Someone should take a look at it.'

‘You?'

‘I was thinking, rather, of Major Caufield. On the other hand if you'd like me to examine you, I'm sure that can be arranged.'

‘Don't you ever think of your wife?' Becky said.

‘Pardon?'

‘When you're with Angela, don't you ever think of your wife?'

He dropped the cigarette to the paving and trod on it. ‘My wife is in England. Angela is here. And never the twain shall meet, thank God. In any case, I doubt if Eleanor would grudge me some of the comforts of home.'

‘Angela isn't the first, is she?'

‘How curious you are, Rebecca. No, Angela isn't the first.' He paused. ‘Nor can I guarantee that she will be the last. Men do have needs, you know.'

‘I'm well aware of that,' said Becky.

‘Don't women have needs too?' Bobby Bracknell said. ‘I'm certain they do. Much the same sort of needs as men, in fact. Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about.'

‘I know perfectly well what you're talking about,' Becky said.

‘Don't you agree with me?'

‘It's not a subject to which I've given much thought.'

‘Really! Even with your new Irish sweetheart panting in the wings.'

‘What do you know about my—'

‘I know he has a wife,' Bobby Bracknell said.

‘What has Angela been telling you?'

‘No need to fly off the handle,' the captain said. ‘We only have your welfare at heart, Rebecca.'

She wanted back to the tiled white room, out of range of the rich Anglicised voice of the Irish surgeon. She had given much thought to what she would do if Gowry returned to Saint-Emile or if by some marvellous chance they were able to meet away from the fighting. She had made no decision, however. She preferred to dwell on a kiss and a fond embrace and close the door on how far affection – love – might take her.

‘He isn't a Catholic, you know,' the captain said, ‘your Irishman.'

‘So he told me.'

‘He isn't even a nationalist.'

‘He told me that too.'