My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (18 page)

Julia stared.

‘The soldiers arrive, partly healed,’ Rose said, ‘and we have to unheal them. Open them up again. Well – we have to wait until they are fully healed, then open the wound up again, then let it heal again, unhindered, and then Major Gillies can start to rebuild.’

‘That’s appalling,’ said Julia. ‘They think they’re healing, and then . . .’

‘Yes,’ said Rose. ‘It must take for ever.’

‘Yes.’

‘What about the pain?’

‘Well, there’re various methods. Today it was rectal ether, on the table,’ said Rose. Julia didn’t know what that was. Rose smiled – exasperated but amused. Even now, what was everyday in hospitals across Europe could not be mentioned in drawing rooms. ‘Up their – you know,’ she said, and Julia raised her eyebrows, and said, ‘Oh!’ Julia, who was married, and had a child, to Rose, who wasn’t, and didn’t.

‘But what about for every day?’ Julia asked. ‘Are they all completely addicted to morphine?’

‘I don’t believe Vicarage is,’ said Rose, mildly.

Julia was frowning. Rose considered letting her off. It was, of course, all terribly extreme when you weren’t used to it.

Am I telling Julia all this to punish her?
she thought suddenly. The thought thrilled her. ‘So,’ she continued, after a pause. ‘Major Gillies has a very neat plan: in a couple of months, he’s going to apply a second flap like a mask all across the eyes, made from the original pedicles – once they’ve finished their job supplying blood to the mask on the lower half. But today – this is the exciting bit – today, looking at Vicarage, and his pedicles, he said they reminded him of flying buttresses, and someone said, “Yes, or guy-ropes holding his face in position,” and Gillies said, “Or pipes bringing water, an irrigation system,” because the edges were rolling inwards, as if the flat strips wanted to be tubes
.
So that gave him the idea. Tubes. If he stitched them into tubes, the underside, the red interior skin, would be kept inside; the dirt of outside could not reach in; the blood vessels could run through safely, protected. It is brilliant. It was marvellous to see the whole process: first he thought of it, then he did it. He just stitched the pedicles where they rolled into tubes. He said . . .’ and Rose gave a little laugh ‘. . . that Vicarage looked like a banyan from the jungle in Burma.’ She was remembering the moment, how she had handed Major Gillies a gauze, and held her breath, and watched him hold his needle aloft, a tiny sword.

Julia was blinking. ‘Well, no wonder you’re so engrossed!’ she said, finally, a little crossly. ‘You sound half in love with the whole thing. Major Gillies and all.’

Rose thought about that later. Gillies, and all the other surgeons, and of Morestin, and Valadier in the first years of the war, operating out of a Rolls-Royce behind the lines in France, holding important generals to ransom in his dental chair till they’d give permission for his plans and requirements for facial-injury treatment. Rose could see that it was . . . not exactly fortunate,
opportune
, rather, that such brave, inventive men should coincide with this never-ending supply of patients, who had no other option, so that they could power ahead, with them, in the progress of this new art.

*

It was not so far from Locke Hill back to the hospital, but it was far enough to raise a glow. The stout chestnut horse plodding down the lane in front of Rose’s bicycle wore great black leather blinkers, bats’ wings steering his big eyes, keeping his attention on the road ahead. His big hairy feet trudged, his driver called to him, and Rose pedalled a little harder, wanting to overtake. She could not go fast enough without indignity so she would have to wait till they reached the Green. The effort was already curling her hair and she could feel her cheeks going pink.

For a moment she thought longingly of pantaloons. When she was in a position of power (and the thought made her laugh) she would transform nurses’ uniforms, give them shorter, practical skirts, like the girls in town, neater, more compact headwear, and more pockets on the apron. But she did not believe she would ever be in a position of power, despite her long service, natural aptitude and the kind of ambition that would be frowned on in a woman anywhere else. She parked her bicycle under the oak tree behind the kitchens, nosing it in among papery brown leaves on the hard summer earth, and walked back into her real life. She returned to the ward, which looked more like a cricket pavilion than anything else. The hospital, spread across the gardens of the big house, was like a series of giant interlinked garden sheds, all windows and wooden beams and panels, painted white and connected by covered walkways and ramps among the ancient trees and smooth, desiccated lawns. She read in the paper about how wet it was in Flanders but the weather here had been wonderful. She half expected the smell of linseed oil and liniment, and to be helping with tea for the first eleven and their mothers. Cucumber sandwiches. Grass-stained cricket whites and willow trees. Institutions for boys, after all. The officers at least felt at home here. It was just like the public schools they were at so recently.

Vicarage, a curly-haired youth, freckled, no doubt, originally, had been set up on a plaster prop, to keep his head forward so the neck was flexed, and the flap of skin not too tense. Even so, it was a little tight at the bridge of the nose, its highest point, and it slipped a little, with a risk of gangrene, but no other untoward result occurred. He was sleeping.

The boys were all sleepy. Whatever she had said to Julia, morphia was an issue. (And, along with all the eggs, it put their bowels in a dreadful state.)

She looked in on Private Jamison to say goodnight.

He waved at her, and handed her a note. It read, ‘how is sailor vicarage?’

‘It went well,’ she said. ‘Major Gillies stitched his pedicles in a new way, into tubes.’ And she wished she hadn’t. Jamison’s grey eyes shivered like a cat’s-paw of wind on a calm sea, a tiny receding, it looked to her, a tiny gesture. When a man can’t speak, other aspects of him become eloquent.

They both knew that if Jamison had lost his jaw at some other battle than the Somme, at some later battle, as much later as possible, then his chances would have been . . . better. Gillies knew it, and minded immensely. Since Jamison, he had done it in more stages: made an initial mandible of vulcanite or celluloid, then replaced that with an organic graft later, when the flaps had healed. Jamison, kind-eyed, unhelpable, was a monument to fallibility.

He scribbled: ‘Good.’

Rose smiled at him. Very early on, Jamison had passed her a note:

So remaineth these three
faith hope and charity
and the greatest of these is a sense of humour

which she had pinned up behind the nurses’ desk, until Miss Black, having read it and laughed, told her she had to take it down, but not before Major Gillies saw it.

‘That’s the ticket, Rose,’ he had said – the first thing he had ever said directly to her. When she thought about how the boys got by, out there, the trenches, she said to herself, Well, this is it, really, isn’t it? Whatever leads Gillies to be like Gillies, and Jamison to be like Jamison, that’s how they manage.

*

‘Tell me more,’ said Julia, the following week

I knew it
, thought Rose.
Morbid sentimental reaction.
She didn’t want Julia to be interested in her patients. They were hers. But she couldn’t resist the rare pleasure of feeling superior to her.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you about Jamison. He came in from the Somme with his jaw shot off. Major Gillies made him a new one from the cartilage and bone of one of his ribs, fixed in place with iron wire, and he brought down a double flap from the top of his head, like the flaps of a Russian hat.’

Julia blinked. ‘What happened to him?’ she asked.

‘The operation took a long time. It was difficult to seal off the junction of the pedicle and the embedded section, and the hair growing made things difficult. The rib started suppurating, and reabsorbing. Actually, there is no new chin any more . . .’ There was just an infected double flap, a flaccid skin hammock for the sequestrum, which no longer held it in place, and a wound drain, and a couple of bits of wire and some horsehair stitches, which would have to be removed.

‘So what will happen to him?’ Julia whispered.

‘We have to get rid of the infection, and see what’s left, and Major Gillies will think of something. Jamison is a very strong-minded man. Very humorous.’

‘But might he die?’ Julia asked.

‘Yes, Julia, he might.’

‘But wouldn’t that break your heart?’

Rose could feel her cheekbones tingling. ‘Yes, Julia,’ she said. ‘It would.’

Rose knew why her heart didn’t break. Because she was working in an area of construction, and the busier she kept, the less scope there was for fretting, dwelling and despairing at the never-ending flow of smashed-up boys whose reconstructed faces, miracles though they were, would always, one way or another, put them on the blue bench.

*

Julia was hopelessly, passively aware of her hopeless passivity, her passive hopelessness. The magnificence of Rose, of the surgeons, of the wounded men, shamed her. Even Harker, bearing heroic baskets of vegetables, and Mrs Joyce, wielding sheets and doing whatever it was she was doing half the time with the Women’s League . . . What? Was she envying the servants?

The day after her conversation with Rose, while drinking tea, a fury descended on Julia, and she summoned Harker to take her to the station. She rode on the train in fury, crossed London in fury, stalked across Paddington station in fury on to the second train. At Newbury she was able – amazed at herself! – to accept a lift in a grubby agricultural wagon going via Froxfield.

She strode, sweating and with bits of straw on her skirt, up the lane to her childhood home.

The fury stalled at the wooden gate. The energy flooded from her limbs. What was she going to do? Declare something? What?
What?

She was ridiculous, and she had come all this way so that her mother could tell her so. And there was her mother, among the delphiniums.

‘Julia? What on earth are you doing here? Why on earth didn’t you let us know you were coming? Really, darling – we could have sent someone to fetch you from the station. You’re quite scarlet in the face – you look absurd.’

I am absurd
, Julia thought.

Tom would not greet her. When brought from the house, and put on the lawn and instructed to go to his mother because ‘Look, Julia, he’s crawling now!’ he sat lumpily on his padded bottom, and cried.

Julia did not know how to call to him, and make the pretty noises babies like. She remembered the passionate love in his eyes when he had been a few days old; the magical time when they had been the same person.

She pretended not to mind.

Later, she watched as Tom tumbled over, banged his head and tearfully held his arms out to Mrs Orris. She wanted to run to him, but the instinct was warped somehow, and she did not know what to do. Mrs Orris picked him up, cooing and comforting him. Looking over his head, she gave Julia a terrible, piteous, hypocritical smile. Then she said, ‘No, Tom, darling, you should go to your mother.’ Tom clung to her all the more. He lifted his face and stared balefully at Julia, with a finger in his little mouth.

Julia profoundly desired to slap one and seize the other. But she knew that wasn’t right either. It came upon her in that moment that she did hate her mother, she really did, and despite everything she was justified . . . and she shrank inside like the taste of pith. Well. Of course. She’d left it all far too long, and she should never have let it happen. And now it was too late. She smiled boldly at her mother and her son, and blinked.

Chapter Seventeen

London, September 1917

Riley’s field card to Nadine arrived at Bayswater Road on a very warm morning. Barnes brought it in to Jacqueline with breakfast
.

She read it, of course, then put it down pettishly on her tray.
Why has he sent this to Nadine? Why not to his mother?

‘What’s that, darling?’ Robert said, from behind his
Daily Chronicle
. He said he read it for the reports from Russia, but Jacqueline thought he was developing sympathies. So far his interest in the war had been limited to annoyance that people didn’t want to listen to Schubert, because he was German, when it was obvious to anyone with ears that the Octet was perfect music for cheering everyone up, but lately he had been growing excited. ‘Perhaps Communism might be a good thing!’ he had said. ‘Well, it might!’

‘Riley Purefoy’s been wounded,’ she said.

‘Is he all right?’ Robert said.

‘Well, I shouldn’t think so, darling, if he’s been wounded, would you?’

Robert said nothing.

‘Well, it doesn’t say. Only that it’s slight. So I suppose it is.’

‘Hope he
is
all right,’ Robert said. It didn’t occur to him to ask why or how the information was reaching his wife, and for that she was glad. She would prefer him to have no opinions on the matter because she had quite enough of her own. So many young girls – and women old enough to know better – were going quite mad, sex-mad. Not Nadine, of course. Though Nadine might have been sex-mad for all Jacqueline knew. Nadine hadn’t told her anything for months.

But she was not going to marry Riley Purefoy. A woman’s safety is in who she marries: a mother’s responsibility was to ensure . . . A memory swept her: the violin-playing man at the bottom of the stairwell at home in Paris. Chantal not being there any more. Their mother’s eternal silence. Nobody had ever told Jacqueline what had happened, and now everyone was dead or lost.

Nadine was not going to be a war bride repenting at leisure her wedding to a charismatic nobody. Even a wounded charismatic nobody. Even if it was Riley.

She ate some toast, not even bothering to be sad about the ridiculous smallness of the piece of butter Mrs Barnes had given her, and looked at the paper. All bad. Dreadful. She turned the page.

Damn! If his card has come here, does that mean I’m going to have to write to Mrs Purefoy?

Jacqueline decided to ignore the whole thing. It wasn’t a bad wound. It wasn’t her business.

‘Of course, darling, we all do,’ she said.

Subject closed.

*

A week later, a letter arrived from Mrs Purefoy.

Dear Mrs Waveney,
I do not know if you would have heard but Riley has been injured and is at the Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup. I am so grateful he is out of the way of further harm but having not seen him yet we don’t know how bad it is. I wanted to let you know as you have meant so much to him in earlier years.

Yours faithfully,

Bethan Purefoy

Jacqueline felt a bit churlish. But she still wasn’t going to tell Nadine. She hadn’t sent on the card, and she wouldn’t send on the further news. It was her duty to protect her daughter from a very attractive boy in very dangerous times. The most unlikely girls were getting into trouble. Not everyone could be Isadora Duncan.

However, Barnes had noticed the arrival of the card. He noticed, too, that it was still on Mrs Waveney’s bedside table ten days later. He had read it, felt the usual flicker of envy and resentment that Riley provoked in him. He noticed Mrs Purefoy’s letter too. His eyesight had not been good enough for the army but there had been nothing wrong with it that day.

Barnes had felt the changing of the times around his dull and steady life. He and Mrs Barnes had had some little conversations about it, discussed some possibilities, some dreams for later on, should circumstances allow, involving savings, the south coast, and a small guesthouse. And he felt quite strongly that these people shouldn’t be allowed to get away with thinking they could run other people’s lives. On the eleventh day he slipped the card and the letter into his pocket, readdressed them over tea in the kitchen, and slid them into the letterbox on the corner of Queensway.