The Foreshadowing (8 page)

After half a dozen shifts at the hospital I’m no longer nervous each time I close those great front doors behind me. And I feel proud walking up the Dyke Road in my uniform.

As I pass women in the street, they smile, and some even say a word or two. Perhaps they have sons fighting in the war and I’m doing something to help. That means a lot.

This morning a postman standing in the doorway of a café whistled at me. Mother would have been appalled, but it made me smile. He meant no harm, and I marched into the hospital ready to face Maddox, or whatever else came my way. In my few days I have already seen some awful sights.

The worst are wounds to the face. A missing leg or arm is bad, that’s true. It’s terrible to think how that must feel, but at least you can still see that the patient is a person. But some facial wounds stop a man from looking human. There’s a poor man in one bed who has a hole where his nose and mouth should be. He’s covered in bandages, of course, but even that is wrong. There’s no bump where his nose should be. His face is just a flat round ball of bandages, with a tube to feed him through. It’s impossible not to wonder what will be there when the bandages come off. And somewhere he must have family, a wife or a brother. Certainly a mother and father, though no one has ever come to see him.

Despite these horrors, I’m enjoying it at last. I know I have a more privileged background than many of the nurses here, but I’m trying hard to be one of them. The work is hard and constant and we’re all in it together. The main difference is something on the inside. The other nurses see the war differently, they see the soldiers differently.

“What brave men!” they’ll say.

“Poor things.”

“We’ll soon get them right, then they can go and sort them out!”

The Germans, they mean.

And they crow about our brave men. It’s not that I don’t think they’re brave, it’s simply that when I look at a broken body, all I feel is sadness. Not pride, or pity, or horror, or hatred. To me those are false feelings, emotions that we put on top of our sadness, because of the war, because of our country or because we don’t want to feel afraid.

I just wish it didn’t have to be like this.

78

As I went to bed last night I saw the
Greek Myths
Miss Garrett loaned me. I’ve barely picked it up since then; I’ve been too tired in the evening to think about reading.

Maybe there’s another reason too.

At first I read the stories greedily each night. They’re so full of wonderful characters; heroes and heroines. Such awful things happen to them, it’s easy to sympathize. I wondered who I would be, if I was in the myths. And after a few nights I found my answer.

I read a few lines, just a very few lines, about a young girl from Troy called Cassandra. A prophetess who sees the future, and whom no one believes.

Suddenly I found I didn’t want to read anymore, not these stories of people killing and loving and dying. There’s too much of that going on as it is. I don’t want these stories now, even though they were comforting before.

Thomas wrote to me today, which was wonderful.

I put his letter in my pocket because I knew it would irritate Father if I read it at the breakfast table.

“Are you going to be at the hospital this afternoon?” Father said to me. “I would like you to have tea with me. Four o’clock?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised.

So after I got back from Miss Garrett’s I changed into my uniform and made my way up to the hospital.

I could tell Sister Maddox was not happy when I said I was to meet my father as soon as I reported for duty, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. He’s the doctor, after all, and she’s a sister. That’s how things work.

When we got to Father’s office on the second floor, he wasn’t there.

“Well, I suppose you’d better wait,” she said. “Since you’re his daughter I’m sure that will be fine.”

I looked around. I wondered why I had never visited him here before, but then, there’s a lot I don’t know about my father. He doesn’t talk much about his work at home.

I soon got bored with waiting, and went over to the window with its view across town and down to the sea. It was as if I could feel something tugging at me again. From France, across the waves. It was stronger this time, and I was scared. I didn’t want Father to see me like this.

I sat down at his desk and flicked through the papers on his desk, then realized what I was doing and stopped.

There was a book lying facedown on his desk.
The Duality
of the Mind
by Arthur Wigan. It looked very old. It was next to a sheaf of papers, the top one of which was much more recent, dated 1908, and called “Memory of the Present and False Recognition,” by someone called Bergson. I had a struggle to understand what the title meant, but it took my mind away from the window.

“Alexandra.”

Father was at the door.

I jumped up.

“I’m sorry I’m late. Sometimes it’s hard to leave.”

He seemed distracted, but came and sat in the chair I had vacated.

“I’ve sent for some tea. . . .”

“Were you doing rounds?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I don’t do that kind of work here. I see . . . special cases.”

I nodded, and smiled, trying to show I knew what he meant.

He didn’t elaborate.

“Where’s that confounded woman?” he said, looking out through the door. There was no sign of the tea.

“What exactly do you do here?” I asked. He must have seen me looking at the papers on his desk.

“I’m doing tests,” he said. “I’m involved with a group of doctors here. A lot of men are getting hurt in this war, badly hurt. But some of them aren’t hurt in their bodies at all. Do you see?”

“I think so. Is that what they call shell-shock?”

“Shell-shock. Shell-shock,” he said, spitting the words out. “Yes, that’s what people call it. The group I work with here, we’re doing tests to find out more about it. My colleagues are of the opinion that these men are as badly wounded as the fellows in the ward you work in.”

“But you don’t agree?” I asked.

“No, I do not.”

He paused.

“I have no doubt that there are some cases who have severe mental illness, but the vast majority do not. Those who are ill were probably prone to it before they went to war. And the country needs every fit man to do his duty. To fight. We cannot bear the weight of malingerers.

“Where’s that tea?” he said again, then turned to me. “Well, look at you. My daughter is a nurse!”

I smiled.

“How is it? Are you sure it’s what you want to do?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure. But I had better be going. Sister Maddox . . .”

He laughed, but without amusement.

“Yes, I see. Off you go, then. I’m sorry about the tea, but if Maddox gives you one word of trouble you let me know.”

“Yes, Father,” I said, and went back down to the wards.

77

I’ve been working. I’ve been happy. It was almost as if I’d dreamt about what the future held, rather than it having happened. And the memory of a nightmare is much less frightening than the nightmare itself.

Then, yesterday, the nightmare came back.

I was on the ward, making a bed. Without warning, everything seemed unreal. I felt detached, like that time in Miss Garrett’s lesson. My body felt like an empty shell.

Slowly, I turned my head, straightening up as I did so. It seemed to take forever to make that simple movement.

I realized that I had deliberately turned to look at a patient on the other side of the ward. He was talking to a nurse. I knew him. Shrapnel in the back of his head and shoulders.

“You’ll be out of here soon,” the nurse was saying. “You can get back to your friends.”

“Couldn’t you keep me here a little longer?” he said, joking with her. “The food’s so nice and the nurses so pretty!”

She smiled.

“Couldn’t do it if I wanted to!” she said. “Need your bed for someone else, won’t we?”

Then everything slowed right down. He was speaking at a normal speed, but to me his words came out of his mouth so very, very slowly.

“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll be a good boy. Let you have the bed back!”

I heard those words, but I heard others, too.

Somehow I heard him say unspoken words.

“And I’ll be dead in the morning anyway.”

They came to me clearly, from across the ward. The nurse kept on teasing him, he joked back, and everything else was perfectly ordinary.

I panicked.

“I’ll be dead in the morning anyway.”

I ran from the ward.

I don’t think anyone saw me go, but as I got to the doors, I saw Sister turning into the corridor, coming my way.

Without thinking, I ducked into the nearest door. Shutting it behind me, I found myself in the darkness of a linen room. There was one at the end of each ward, full of clean sheets and other bedding.

I crouched in the darkness, wondering if Maddox had seen me, but though footsteps passed outside, the door did not open.

My head was spinning. The feeling of detachment had gone, I was back in my body. I knew that from the way my heart was pounding inside my chest. For a long time, I leaned against a stack of blankets and shivered, trying to blot out the words the man
hadn’t
spoken.

It was no good. They ran round and round in my mind, though l boxed my ears with my fists and shook my head from side to side.

Then I thought I heard something.

Something in the linen room with me.

I stood up, and, fumbling for the light switch, turned on the small lamp in the ceiling.

“Turn it off,” said a voice.

It came from behind the shelves of sheets in the center of the room.

I froze, too scared to do anything.

“Turn it off,” said the voice, plaintively. “It hurts my eyes.”

I turned if off. Then I realized how rash I was to turn the light off in a small storeroom with an unknown man in there with me.

For I could tell it was a man’s voice, though it was small and feeble.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

There was no answer.