Shamrock Green (19 page)

‘You don't want one of the youngsters doing it, I assure you. They wouldn't do it like this.' Deftly she unpicked the knot at the side of the dressing. ‘They're good girls but they can be clumsy.'

‘An' – an' are you never rough, Nurse?'

The dressing came away from his face in one piece. Cold morning air pressed against his lids. His eyes were a mess. He knew they were a mess. He kept them shut. He could see threads of colour, though, and the darkness was no longer white but black. He felt the icy solution dribble down his cheeks.

‘Oh dear,' Becky said, ‘you've forgotten my name already.'

‘I'm sorry, I…'

‘Open your eyes.'

He opened his eyes and saw natural light and in the light the nurse's face, solemn and sallow and drawn with concern.

‘Can you see me?' she asked.

Beautiful, he thought, she's quite beautiful.

But all he said was, ‘Yes.'

*   *   *

Becky shared a tiny room on the third floor of the Ecole with Angela Harrison. Angela had been in her second year of training when the war had broken out. She was young, barely twenty. Becky and she had billeted together in bell tents at Mallefort and Angela had been kind to Becky when she had been ill and Becky, in turn, put up with Angela's vanity and perpetual chatter about boyfriends; boyfriends in the plural, that is, for Angela's correspondence with men was prodigious.

Wherever she travelled Angela was accompanied by an astonishing array of clothes, skimpy little garments that had no thermal value whatsoever but that packed neatly into a small suitcase. Even in damp and draughty bell tents her dresses were hung tenderly on hooks and strings and she would repair and clean and cold iron them hour upon hour.

Angela was popular in the wards, though, for she carried her gentle touch with clothes into the handling of splints, fomentations and catheters, and managed to make every man feel that what she was obliged to do was not embarrassing or indelicate but part of a shared intimacy.

Becky wakened, rolled out of her cot and stumbled down the corridor to the lavatory. When she returned, she sat on the end of the cot for a moment to gather herself for the effort of washing and dressing.

Angela was brushing her hair. In spite of the chill, she wore only a silk peignoir with elaborate sleeves that slithered up and down her plump arms. She sang to herself while she contemplated her image in the mirror on the desk that served as a dressing-table.

‘Feeling better, are we?'

‘Not much,' Becky answered.

‘I wonder if we'll be able to have dances here?'

‘A what?'

‘Dances, parties.' Angela sighed. ‘It's been so long since old Congreve allowed us to have any fun at all.'

‘I don't know if I have the energy to dance,' Becky said.

‘If your little pet asked you, you would.'

‘My what?' said Becky.

‘Your Irish pet. What's his name?' Angela swung round, hair spilling across her ample shoulders, and gave Becky a toothy smile. ‘I've seen how you lavish attention on him. Is he going to die?'

‘Of course not,' Becky said, then, too late, added, ‘I don't know who you're talking about.'

‘How do you know he ain't a-going to die then?'

Angela put her elbows on the table and stared at a postcard of Virgin and Child that had been sent to her by a devilishly handsome young lieutenant who had undergone a religious conversion during the storming of a German gun emplacement and thought it only decent to inform her. Angela hadn't written him off quite yet, apparently.

‘Those who are, have,' Becky said. ‘We won't lose any more now.'

‘That's not what Bobby says. According to Bobby Bracknell, delayed onset is not uncommon in phosgene poisoning,' Angela said in the same tone she used when recalling her last visit to Swan & Edgar's. ‘Sudden death can occur up to forty-eight hours after inhalation. Wasn't it odd that Jerry used lachrymal shells to soften up the line? One would have supposed that phosgene would have done the job perfectly well. It does occur to one that perhaps Jerry don't know what he's doing either. What is the chappie's name, your Irishman?'

‘They're all Irish – almost.'

‘I mean the one you've been cuddling up to.'

Becky pressed her fists to her hipbones and stretched her spine. She was hungry, ravenous; a jolly good sign, for her appetite had been poor of late. Unless the ambulances brought in fresh wounded she would be on general ward duties tonight. Bed-rest and careful monitoring would bring most of the soldiers round and in a week or ten days they would be sent back to their units.

Angela said, ‘You're thinking about him now, ain't you?'

‘I'm doing nothing of the kind.'

‘Oh, look. She's blushing. Never seen you blush before, Becky.'

‘I wish' – Becky got her feet – ‘you'd put something on, Angela. It isn't right to sit about in that – that scanty thing.'

‘Changing the subject, are we?' Angela said, cheerfully. ‘I do believe you've already got a teeny-weeny crush on this Irish chappie.'

‘Ridiculous!' Becky exclaimed. ‘He's just another patient as far as I'm concerned.'

‘Hoh!' said Angela. ‘You've never cuddled up to patients before. What's wrong? Don't you believe in love at first sight? I certainly do.'

‘I'm well aware of
that,
' said Becky, testily.

She put on her drawers and vest and the stiff waist petticoat that gave the uniform its severe, unfeminine line. She grabbed a towel from the rail of the cot and her toiletry bag from the locker and headed, barefoot, for the washroom at the end of the corridor. She needed time away from Angela, time to think.

It was still daylight outside. The doctors, Mr Sanderson and Captain Bracknell among them, were messing in the administrator's office on the second floor and the gathering would probably become bibulous, for Captain Bracknell's wife had sent him down a case of wine.

Becky had received no mail. Only her mother wrote to her regularly and, now and then, her cousin Donnie but it had been months since she had heard from Aunt Biddy, not since Robbie had been killed, in fact.

She brushed her teeth in the washroom and tried not to stare at her haggard face in the flyblown mirror above the sink. She wondered if there was any truth in what Angela had said about love at first sight and if any man, even an Irishman, could possibly find her attractive in her present sorry state.

For the first time in months, quite softly, Becky began to cry.

*   *   *

‘Sure and you don't have to feed me,' Gowry said. ‘At least you've got rid of that teapot thing. What's on the menu tonight?'

‘Soup. Can you sit up a little more, please?' Becky said.

‘I can't do much else but sit up.'

‘If you don't eat you'll never regain your strength.'

‘I'm sorry.' Gowry coughed. ‘I'm just feelin' a bit down tonight.' Becky held the spoon to his lips. He craned his neck and looked down his nose at the contents. ‘I'm really not very hungry.'

The day nurse had told Becky that Private McCulloch had been panting all afternoon and that he had discharged a small quantity of albuminous sputum but, so far, no blood. His skin was clammy but there was no fever to speak of and in Major Caufield's opinion the inflammatory complications were minor and Gowry would be up and about in three or four days and back with his unit by the end of the week.

She bumped the spoon against his stubborn lips.

‘Eat something,' she said. ‘For me.'

He raised a hand laboriously from the covers and coughed politely into his fist. ‘For – for you?'

‘Just eat the blessed stuff, will you,' Staff Nurse Tarrant told him.

‘Why?'

‘Because I want you to get well again.'

‘So I can go back up the line and get shot?'

‘Oh, what an awful thing to say.'

She whipped the spoon away from his mouth and dropped it with a little
splosh
into the bowl. She made to get up, but he caught her arm. For a sick man, she thought, he was both strong and quick.

‘I shouldn't have said that,' Gowry said. ‘It was a bad thing to say and I apologise.' He craned forward and opened his mouth wide. ‘'Eed me, 'leese,' he said. ‘'Leese, 'ursie.'

She hesitated, the bowl cupped in her hands.

The night wind had got up now and the big, patched tarpaulins that the orderlies had roped in the arches of the cloisters flapped noisily. In the next bed was another Irishman, hardly more than a boy. He watched the little pantomime without expression. Further down the ward a gunner from the Leinsters was moaning and thrashing and flinging his blankets all about, but Angela – bless her – was trotting up from the station to calm him down.

‘Can't you feed yourself?' Becky heard herself ask.

‘Aye,' Gowry answered, ‘but if I do, you won't stay.'

‘Do you want me to stay?'

‘For as long as you can.'

‘Are you afraid?'

‘No, I just want you to…' He lifted his shoulders helplessly.

She seated herself on the bed again and presented him with the soup bowl. He took it in one hand and carefully picked out the spoon. She leaned over him, holding her hand under the spoon to catch the greasy little drips before they fell upon his chest. He dipped the spoon into the soup and put it into his mouth, sucked on it and said, ‘French onion, eh?'

‘Don't you like it?'

‘Hmm,' he said. ‘Lovely!'

She wiped his lips with her handkerchief.

‘Then have some more,' said Becky.

*   *   *

During the long watches of the night Gowry could not help but think of Maeve. He wondered if she was lying in bed thinking of him, wondered if she was taller than her mother yet and had undergone that curious transformation from child into woman. With the wind buffeting the piebald tarpaulins above his bed, he even imagined he could hear her calling out to him in her shrill Dublin twang,
‘Dad, Daddy? Daddy, Dad?'

He watched the nurses come and go. Pretty girls, plain girls, young and not so young. Heard their voices in the shadows, the squeak of trolley wheels, the apologetic clatter of oxygen cylinders rolling on the paving. Imagined Maeve, his little daughter, back in Dublin just as he had left her, innocent and unchanged. Thought too of Sylvie – a little. He wished that she would come to him, swaying down the cloistered corridor, her stiff skirts hissing, the odd sad little smile on her mouth that indicated that she cared more for him than for any of the other soldiers in the here and now of Saint-Emile.

He knew he wasn't going to die and wasn't going to stumble through the rest of his life unsighted. His first excuse for going home had turned out to be a dud. Propped up on a bolster, he listened to the sounds in the cloister ward. There was something almost offensive about soldiers in clean nightshirts, pinioned by clean sheets. In the lines, blood and mud and corruption seemed so much of a piece that he had learned, almost, to ignore it. Here in Saint-Emile, however, indifference proved impossible; sturdy young athletes with stumps instead of legs, poets reduced to voiceless wrecks, observers with their eyes gouged out, a hand gone here, an arm there, organs pulped and blood, blood everywhere, bloodstained dressings, blood dripping through red rubber tubes into white enamel basins, filling them up like soup.

‘Are you Gowry McCulloch?'

The voice was very light, very Irish. The speaker was a small man with a small, round head set on a neck like a celery stalk and a stiff, unyielding collar two sizes too large for him. Gowry wondered if the priest had shrunk and if when the war was finally over he would swell out to fill his vestments once again. The padre held a steaming tea mug in each hand and nodded a greeting.

‘Nurse Tarrant sent me along. She said she you wouldn't be asleep. Is it the pain keeping you awake?'

‘No, sir, not pain exactly.'

‘Are you – ah, disturbed?'

‘I'm thirsty, Padre, thirsty rather than disturbed.'

The priest grinned and handed over the mug. Gowry took it in both hands and, clearing his throat first, sipped the hot sweet tea. There had been nights on the line when he would have sold his soul for a mug of hot tea. Now here it was, conjured up when he needed it. He felt grateful to Becky, and spoiled, and glad of the man's company to lift his mind from impossible longings.

‘May I sit with you?' the priest said.

He was courteous and self-effacing, unlike several priests who had lodged at the Shamrock. Gowry shifted his legs beneath the blanket.

‘Please do, Padre.'

‘Are you well? I mean, are you feeling stronger?'

‘I am, thank you.'

‘Your eyes?'

‘Not so bad, sir.'

‘And the breathing?'

‘Easier than it was yesterday.'

The priest seated himself on the bed. He seemed almost weightless and made no indentation on the edge of the mattress. He took a great gulp of tea and sighed. ‘By George, I needed that.'

‘What time is it, Padre?' Gowry asked.

‘Three, or close after. I say, do you mind if I smoke?'

‘Not in the least,' Gowry said.

‘I'd offer you one but in your condition…'

‘Bad for me, I know.' Enviously, he watched the padre light a cigarette. ‘Do you do rounds every night, sir?'

‘Only when someone needs me – which, come to think of it, is pretty well every night,' the padre said. ‘I gather you're not a Catholic.'

‘I'm afraid not, Padre. It must be easier when you are.'

‘Easier?'

‘Dying, I mean.'

‘Oh, I doubt that,' said the priest.

‘Don't you comfort them at the last?'

‘God comforts them. I'm only a representative of God's forgiveness and redemption. Are you from Belfast?'