The Bannister Girls (28 page)

‘Thank God they are! Imagine what would happen if you were driving the “dead wagon” and you heard an involuntary fart from one of the coffins. It ‘ould scare the living daylights out of you, wouldn't it?'

‘If it was an arse-tearer, it 'ould blow the plug out anyway!' The two of them had doubled up with laughter, imagining it, and Angel had felt sick to her stomach, not knowing how they could joke over something that so diminished human dignity. She had been green on the wards then. Now she knew that sometimes you only got through
the days and nights by making a joke out of something terrible.

She began to breathe a little easier once they had crossed the English Channel and reached Dover. Army personnel had been there to receive the coffins, and Margot suddenly rallied, found a telephone and ordered a large car to take her and Angel and Edward to Norfolk. The cost never entered her head. Edward was to have the best transport available for his last journey. Margot was acting very strangely in Angel's opinion, but she was in no mood to listen to suggestions.

Margot's next phone call was to her mother, where she broke the news about Edward's death with gentle efficiency. She put her hand over the receiver while she murmured to Angel, ‘Mother's being very stoical. She has just gone to find a handkerchief, then I must talk to her about arrangements.'

It was all like a bad dream. Margot organising and planning, almost as though she were taking charge of a garden party. Margot suddenly remembering something, and speaking rapidly to her mother, as though someone had wound her up.

‘Oh, and you must get in touch with Stinky Hughes, Mother. Edward was most insistent about that. He'll want to see Stinky especially. And you're to wrap his train set in some nice paper, and we'll have a sort of presentation of it to the boy, once the preliminaries are over. We must feed everyone afterwards, of course. What will you get in? Is there still cold ham and tongue to be found in the shops? Something nice, for Edward. He'll want everyone to have a good time. You must see the Vicar at once, and the undertaker, and arrange it all for the day after tomorrow, Mother. We shall be there as soon as we can. Oh – and you'd better get someone to dust Edward's room. It's always such a tip, and it will do him good to see how spick and span it can be. Good-bye, Mother.'

She hung up and turned to Angel with an elated look in her eyes.

‘Isn't that splendid? It's amazing what you can accomplish when you put your mind to it. Now, let's see if Edward's all right, and then find somewhere where we can all have a nice cup of tea.'

‘
Margot
!' Angel gripped her arm.

‘What is it?' She looked at her friend in surprise.

‘Edward's dead. He doesn't want tea, or a tidy room, or care whether everyone has a good time or not –'

‘Well, I know
that
! Good gracious me, do you think I'm going out of my mind or something?'

She smiled pleasantly, as though she hadn't really understood a word that Angel was saying. It was only when they were in the car on the long drive to Norfolk, that she suddenly looked pinched and afraid, and hugged Angel's arm.

‘You will stay, won't you? I hate funerals. All those long faces and everyone trying not to cry, and having to be brave. I'm not brave, Angel –'

Angel leaned sideways and kissed her. ‘Yes you are, darling. You're very brave. Eddie would be proud of you.'

‘Would he?' Margot said in a pleased voice. ‘Oh well, that's all right then.'

Angel found her own nerves jumping. The entire time in Norfolk was like a continuation of the bad dream. Margot still acting so oddly; her mother alternately weeping and being so conventionally polite it was almost ludicrous; the schoolboys, scared at witnessing the trappings of death for the first time; the guilty delight with which Stinky Hughes, in reality John Henry Hughes, received his posthumous gift from his old dorm-mate. It was a weird occasion, more tragic than Stanley's funeral, because of Edward's youth; less traumatic than might have been expected, because of Margot's determination to see that everyone enjoyed
themselves and had a jolly good time, just as if darling Eddie was still here…

Angel had hugged her close when she decided she must leave, and said she looked forward to seeing her again as soon as she felt able to leave her mother and return to Piersville. Margot smiled vaguely and said good-bye, the gracious hostess.

Since she could do nothing about the situation, Angel decided it was best to try and stop worrying over Margot, and hope that time would heal whatever ailed her. The five days away from Piersville had exhausted Angel. She didn't realise what a strain it had all been until it was behind her. It was almost a relief to be boarding the first available leave ship, and hear the cheery baiting of the soldiers.

They were healthy and normal and
alive
. No matter what tomorrow might bring, here on this ship there was still time to indulge in a little harmless flirtation; to enjoy the wink of a man whose eyes told her he found her attractive; to feel like a woman, instead of a nameless driver with a tragic cargo in a silent ambulance; there was still hope.

If she didn't believe that, Angel thought desperately, she might as well lay down at the Front and wait for the next German bullet to claim her.

And there was still Jacques. Through all the harrowing days with Margot, Angel had been conscious of a growing feeling inside her, stronger than hope, as certain as a premonition. If people felt such things when a loved one died, then why wasn't it possible to feel it in reverse? To will someone to live? She had seen enough of death. Had seen it too closely, too many times in her young life.

Jacques wasn't dead
. If he was, she would feel it, know it instinctively. Love didn't die, and hers for him would act like a talisman to keep him safe. She had to believe that too. And however much she might dread the horrors of the battlefield, she had to go back, because somewhere out there, was Jacques.

The coifed nuns moved quietly between the long rows of beds in the old Abbey of St Helene, leaning towards one wounded man and then another, giving comfort and sanctuary to those who would survive, and to the dying the assurance of a better life in the hereafter, promised and reaffirmed in the glint of sunlight on the heavy crosses dangling from their necks.

Sister Therese paused at the foot of the mystery patient they had named Papillon, because of the way he had flapped his arms in his delirium, and because of the crude, grotesque sketches he made, some like gigantic butterflies, some resembling great winged birds with blackened faces and blank eye sockets, or drawings of hideously grotesque bats.

Always flying creatures … they wondered if perhaps he had been attacked by something. That the man was tortured, the nuns had no doubt. That his memory had been lost to him, through whatever suffering he had endured, was also a certainty. That he would one day recover, they could only hope and pray, and had bestowed the gentle name of Papillon on him, meaning butterfly, to aid that eventual return to health, because for all his ravings, they sensed that here there had once been a gentle man.

‘How are you today, Papillon?' Sister Therese spoke softly. The nuns spoke only French in the converted Abbey, and since the man understood them perfectly and responded when he felt so inclined in a natural accent, they had no
reason to believe he was anything but a Frenchman.

Where he had come from, they did not know, and so far he could not tell them. He had been almost naked when he had been brought in, what clothes he had worn were burnt off him save for a few tatters, and it was a miracle he had survived. Had it not been that he had been found half-drowned in a pool at the edge of a wood, he would undoubtedly be dead long before now.

Jacques looked vacantly into the sweet face of the nun. Along one of his cheeks were livid scars, but in time they would fade. He had been assured of it. He hardly cared. He cared about nothing. He was consumed with an anger as bitter as gall, and he did not fully know why. If only he could remember.

He wasn't stupid. He was fully aware that he had lost his memory. During the months he had been in the Abbey of St Helene, tended so caringly by the nursing nuns, he had recovered enough to know that he was in some kind of a hospital, that there were many other men here suffering far more than he, that he was one of the lucky ones who would eventually get well. And in time, the nuns hoped confidently that his memory would return…

In time
! The phrase was uttered constantly, confidently, meant to give him sustenance, courage, endurance. Instead, it left him raging and boiling inside himself. Didn't anyone understand that time was no more than an empty vacuum, stretching into infinity, when there was no past, no more than a hazy uncertain future, a searingly painful, red-rimmed present?

He refused to speak to the nun who had taken his pulse, and was now swishing away from him. He could almost taste the smell of her, gagging him with its cleanliness, its godliness. She was all starch and cheap soap and clinical perfection. Too perfect to be womanly. Sterile. Unsullied. The words swam through his mind, but remained without voice, as Jacques did. Only occasionally did the words he
produced make sense, but mostly they did not. They were the bleatings of animals in pain. Bleatings or roarings, depending on the pain. Everything depended on the pain.

‘Poor sod.'

He had heard the chirpy Englishman's voice many times, and struggled to get him into focus. No clinical smell now. Sweat and stale blood, the whiff of excreta still lingering on the air. Going back soon, the Englishman kept saying cheerfully. Back to the war, the war, the bloody war…

He heard the man discussing him with someone called Jock in the next bed. They thought that because he couldn't concentrate, had difficulty in speaking, probably had only half a face for all he knew – that he couldn't hear, couldn't feel…

‘Christ knows what they'll do wiv 'im,' the Englishman went on. ‘Set ‘im up as the Abbey artist, p'raps, and sell off his drawings. They ain't bad, if you like being scared to death. Not the kind of thing my old woman 'ould want, or I might take one 'ome to her.'

The other man grunted as usual before he spoke in his gravelly voice. What was he? Scots, presumably. Jacques was too tired to think, and too uncaring to bother.

‘Nice wee lassie he's drawn. Have ye seen it? Keeps staring at it, poor devil. His wife, mebbe.'

Jacques turned his head a fraction, away from the two men. The face of a pretty girl was crudely drawn on a piece of paper. The nuns had propped it up beside his bed, so that when he turned he had no choice but to see it. It wasn't that he kept staring at it. If he needed to holler for help, he had to turn his head that way. The girl's face was a meaningless series of black lines and curves on the paper.

If he screwed up his eyes, he could make better sense of the bad drawing. He had enough sense to know that he was capable of better, which must be something in his favour. The face had large, expressive eyes, pale hair framing her cheeks, soft wide mouth. Part of another life, when such
things had the power to stir his loins, to make him a man with a man's needs for such a woman. He didn't recall drawing her. She was a stranger to him, like everyone else in this bloodied world right now…

He closed his eyes tightly, before the black fear dragged him down once more. Better to shut it all out than to go on seeing a frightening place in which he was an alien thing, a man with no memory, therefore no soul.

The Englishman studied the drawing on the other side of Jacques' bed, and gave a sudden lewd chuckle.

‘She's a nice bit o' crackling, whoever she is, Jock. I could give her a bit o' the old heave-ho, given 'alf a chance –'

‘And given a guid right arm to hold her down,' the Scot sniggered. ‘A lassie like that wouldn't give ye a second look, Harry! She'd go for the aristos, like yon laddie.'

Harry looked thoughtfully at Jacques' apparently sleeping face, too used to the Scot's sharpness to take offence. It was true enough anyway. He was rough-hewn stone, compared with the classic elegance of the Frenchman. Despite the injuries, breeding showed through. But an aristo?

‘Is that what you reckon him to be, Jock?'

‘I dunno, and I couldna care less.' Jock was tired of all this speculation. His own wound burned and throbbed, and he wanted attention for himself, not for this mystery man whose physical injuries were mending, but whose mental wounds never seemed to improve, and was taking up a bed.

Harry was the lucky one. Getting out of here in less than a week with any luck, and back to the Front. Back to being blown up all over again, and sent back to some hospital for repairs. Doctors and nurses were no more than bloody mechanics these days, Jock thought humourlessly, repairing those that still had enough parts to mend, sending the rest to the scrap heap in the sky. Boxed if they were lucky, heaped into a communal spit of earth if they were not. And hopefully, God would know where to find them and sort out
the tangle of bodies and legs and make them whole again for eternity.

He shivered, as if he could feel the damp cloying earth already suffocating him, mouldering his bones. He bellowed for a nun to bring him a piss bottle before it was too late. Shocking the nuns was the tiniest diversion in the boredom of waiting to get well. They all did it.

Angel felt as though she had lived a lifetime at Piersville. Since returning from taking Margot and Edward home to England, there had been little time to think. If an army of men had been sent into battle, then an army of men was being sent back into the hospitals, daily, hourly, incessantly. All those wasted, wasted lives.

All the wasted days that could have been spent so differently. Lovely, summer hours that had once drifted by in a haze of heat, the hum of insects on the air, the scent of blossom heavy and sweet, the raw tangy grasses soft underfoot, the caress of the ocean on bare feet, the nights warm and balmy. Summer, summer, all gone in a bloody stench of choking dust and burning sorrow, of pain and grime and tears, and stinking wounds that violated God's earth and sky.