Lewis has just come in to get me. He sends his affectionate greetings and asks to be remembered to you. Do you know he told me the other day he’s never been afraid? He wasn’t boasting either. As you know, he’s not exactly the boasting type. I’m afraid all the time, though it doesn’t seem to make much difference to what I do. Write soon. Even your handwriting on an empty envelope might help to convince me that there’s still a girl called Elinor Brooke.
Ever your own, Paul.
Elinor to Paul
What does ‘ever your own’ mean, Paul, if you don’t believe the person you’re saying it to exists? I haven’t stopped living just because you can’t imagine me. I go on living. I move on. I don’t spend much time sitting in the window outside Tonks’s room, or anywhere else for that matter. I work, Paul. I work as I’ve never worked before. I always feel apologetic when I say that because I know your time for work is limited, and you must find it almost impossible to concentrate even when you do find time, but I can’t help that. If painting matters you have to give your life to it and that’s what I’m doing. Not quite to the exclusion of everything else, I do get out now and then, but every day’s spent working. Most of the time I don’t even remember to eat.
One of the reasons this letter’s late is that I’ve been hesitating over whether to tell you something. I saw Teresa again. She got my new address from somebody at the Slade and just turned up on the door. She looks well, asked after you, her husband was called up in the first days of the war – he was a reservist – and nobody’s heard from him for two months now so she’s beginning to think he’s dead. I couldn’t make out what she felt about it, I don’t think she knew herself. I hope this doesn’t upset you? But if I’m so unreal you can hardly picture me, Teresa must be even more so. Just another of those funny little figures at the wrong end of your telescope.
Apart from that there’s very little news. Catherine’s making me a dress. It’s a way of slipping her a few shillings without making her feel she’s accepting charity. Father has raised my allowance (just when I don’t need it). Of course he’s not supporting Toby at medical school now. Toby came home to see the baby who’s going to be called William. His father pretends to be indifferent to him but is secretly pleased, I think.
I’m sorry you had such a dreadful job to do. I don’t know much about what’s going on out there because I don’t read the newspapers any more. Like you, I find it hard to cross the desert that divides us. It feels like standing on top of a mountain sending semaphore signals across the abyss. But don’t, whatever you do, stop writing. Although I felt quite angry when I read your letter, I do very often think about you – in that long black coat you used to wear.
Write soon. This war destroys so much, don’t let it destroy us as well. Elinor.
Thirty-two
Write soon, she said. But it became harder and harder to write at all.
Dear Miss Brooke (I reserve this formal style of address for
young ladies I haven’t heard from lately/for a long time),
Damn. He’d meant that as a joke, but on the page it sounded bitter. True, though. She didn’t write often now, and when she did her letters were full of people he hadn’t met and places he hadn’t been to. She went on living, he was buried alive. That’s how it felt. He sometimes thought he might as well be one of those poor chaps under the tarpaulin. No doubt their girls had ‘moved on’ too.
Pushing the writing pad away, he sat for a moment with his head in his hands. When he next looked up, he saw a woman watching him. He’d noticed her earlier, sitting at a table in the corner, eating croissants, edging a crumb delicately into her mouth with her ring finger as she looked out on to the street. It had long since been cleared of rubble, though there were boarded-up buildings at intervals along the terrace like black teeth in a smile. She looked up at the sky, wondering, perhaps, if they were to have more snow, and the movement revealed the creased, white fullness of her throat. He liked the slight sagging of her skin that revealed the orbits of her eyes more clearly and the downturn of inbuilt sadness at the corners of her mouth that vanished when she caught him looking at her and smiled.
He got up and asked if he could sit at her table. Did she mind? She looked round at the empty café, smiled back at him, a little doubtfully, and said, No, of course not. Of course she didn’t mind. She was wondering whether he knew what she was. He could see her wondering and deciding not to care, to take the moment for what it was. Her name was Madeleine, she said. Behind the bar, a lugubrious middle-aged waiter flicked a dirty dishcloth at the counter and looked at them with contempt, assuming the young Englishman was too naïve to know he was making a fool of himself. She aroused hostility, Paul could see that. When the waiter brought her more coffee, he set the cup down on the table so carelessly the coffee slopped into the saucer. Paul asked for another, and got it. His French was improving, though his new vocabulary, acquired while nursing badly wounded men, varied between the clinical and the obscene. Her English was good, but she wasn’t confident in using it, so they talked haltingly at first, making a joke of their difficulties, laughing a lot. She was carefree, and became more so as the minutes passed, forgetting who she was and what she did, as he, too, was forgetting who he was and what he did.
When at last she got up to go, he said, ‘Can I see you again?’
Immediately she frowned, and he was dismayed, thinking he’d misjudged the situation.
‘I’m here most mornings.’
‘I was thinking an evening, perhaps?’
‘No, I’m not free then.’
After that he made a habit of meeting her on his days off. Once, to the waiter’s undisguised amusement, he brought her flowers. They flirted, talked about Paris, Brussels, cafés, holidays, food, wine – never anything connected to the present. She mentioned a husband once, but he didn’t pursue it. And then, one evening, walking through the town after a day spent painting, he saw her going into a house beside the café, looking heavier, older, her flesh sagging like dough. As she turned the key in the lock, she glanced up and must have seen him, but she gave no sign of recognition.
It changed everything, that sight of her, though he didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if he’d been under any illusion about what she did. On his next day off, he slipped down the back street but, instead of going into the café, knocked on the side door. It was opened by Madame’s husband, a drooping, tadpole-shaped man.
Paul was ushered into the parlour, a room of such stifling respectability he immediately wanted to laugh. A glass case full of artificial flowers, a picture of the Virgin – oh, for God’s sake! – a fan of red crepe paper in the empty grate. The paper was peppered with soot, the only dirt allowed in the room, which was otherwise spotless. Dust motes sifted in a shaft of sunlight. The room smelled of beeswax and Condy’s Fluid, or whatever the Belgian equivalent of Condy’s Fluid might be.
Paul sat on the pink sofa and contemplated Madame’s knick-knacks. He was already regretting his visit. Inertia, rather than sexual need, kept him pinned to the cushions. Like a big, fat, juicy insect, he thought. As they all were, the men who sat here, listening to the floorboards creak in the room above. In the café he’d always been repelled by the sight of men sneaking off to the house next door. He’d wanted no part of it. Now he didn’t know why he was here, except that it had less to do with Elinor, the coldness of her letters, than with the man in British army uniform he’d found lying under a heap of French dead. Something was needed to sluice that memory away. Drink didn’t do it. Painting didn’t do it.
When, eventually, he was led upstairs and found her lying on the bed in a room that seemed to be all pink and shiny, like intestines, he couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Come in,’ she said, weariness trapped behind her smile. ‘I wondered when you’d come.’
After counting notes at the dressing table, he undressed, washed and climbed on top of her, smelling her powder and the sweetness of stale urine in the pot under the bed. The
sex was much as he’d expected. Afterwards, he pressed his face against the creases in her neck and closed his eyes. She tolerated his weight for a second, then heaved him off. There was a queue, he understood. However tactfully things were managed, there was a queue. He fumbled into his clothes as fast as he could and clattered downstairs, out on to the slushy street, feeling as if he’d committed a small, unimportant murder.
Thirty-three
The clock opposite the door showed twenty minutes to midnight. They’d been on duty six hours, though so far only one ambulance team had been called out.
‘Shall we go and play cards?’ Lewis said, nodding towards a group in the corner.
‘No, I don’t think I will, thanks. I’ve got a bit of a sore throat. You go.’
Paul spent the next two hours huddled under a blanket in a chair by the wood stove. From time to time he dozed, only to jerk awake as rain spattered against the one intact window. The beds had been pulled together in the centre of the room. The sacking that draped the broken windows kept the worst of the rain out, but you still woke cramped with cold to find the upper blanket damp. Every time he surfaced, his sore throat felt worse. Despite his proximity to the stove, he was shivering. He’d had a dream of falling into cold, rat-infested water and he knew it was connected with his discovery of the British officer. His visit to the prostitute — as he now thought of her — seemed merely to have driven the chill of that moment deeper into his bones.
It was still dark when the call came. He was going to be driving with Lewis. One of the advantages of relatively quiet nights was that you had the luxury of a second driver. Walking out to the ambulance, they were cold, yawning, stiff from sleep in cramped positions. Their breath whitened the air. Lewis was stamping his feet and clapping his hands against his shoulders, like a ham actor portraying the idea of extreme cold. Paul was fingering the swollen glands in his neck, though he made himself stop when he saw Lewis watching him.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine. No, actually, I’m cold, tired and pissed off beyond belief.’
‘Normal, then?’
As they turned into the village’s main street, they saw scribbles of black and yellow smoke low in the sky. The darkness had begun to thin. Dawn was the most dangerous time to be on the road. When they reached the main road they had to wait to let a column of motor lorries go past. Once on the road they made slow progress. Motor lorries and ambulances were slowed to walking pace because the road was clogged with horse-drawn limbers taking the morning rations up to the line. A column of men who’d been relieved were trudging towards them. Lewis wound down the window, and a powerful yellow stench came into the cabin. Helmets bobbed beneath the window the faces beneath them drained and almost expressionless. Once they were past Lewis should be able to overtake the limbers. At last the way was clear and they pulled out. Ahead of them the column of motor lorries was moving slowly in a cloud of spray.
‘I’ll never get past,’ Lewis said. ‘I’m going to slot in behind them.’
Paul nodded. You weren’t supposed to join convoys of military vehicles, but sometimes it was the only way to make progress. Another column of men marched past and then the lorries accelerated, the rear vehicle sending up a sheet of water that sloshed on to the ambulance windscreen.
The road wound uphill from this point on. As they neared the crossroads, the pits in the road became deeper and the pace of the convoy slowed. At the top of the slight crest the motor lorries stopped. Lewis muttered under his breath as the ambulance’s sluggish brakes let them slide almost into the rear lorry’s tail. Lewis jumped down to see what was happening. He walked a little way along the column, peered into the darkness, came back shaking his head.
Paul was leaning out of the open door. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Don’t know. Can’t see.’
A column of black smoke hung over the road ahead. Ahead of him men jumped down from the lorries, but none of them seemed particularly concerned, more glad of a chance to stretch their legs.
‘I’ll see if anybody knows what’s happening,’ Lewis said, and disappeared round the corner of the lorry in front. Paul could hear him asking the driver what was going on. He got down himself, his legs numb and threatening to collapse under him. He’d had nothing to eat and was buzzing from too much coffee on an empty stomach, that exhausted, stale, irritable alertness. He took a deep breath to freshen himself and simultaneously there came a long whistling roar so close it seemed to be caused by the movement of his chest.
When he was next aware of himself he was staggering around in smoke with the screams of wounded men all around him. The motor lorries ahead of him were on fire. From somewhere men came running and started trying to pull men out of the burning vehicles but there were too many of them in a crowded space. He could hear an officer shouting at them to get back. Lewis. He started pushing forward against straining, jostling backs. Men were milling around the stricken vehicles, beaten back by the flames. His leg felt different. He put his hand down and brought it back up covered in blood but there was no pain and he walked on. At one point he collapsed against the side of a lorry only to find himself being dragged away by the same young officer he’d heard shouting at people to get back. He found himself being hauled down the side of the road into a declivity, wrenched so hard he stumbled and fell and rolled the rest of the way. Immediately he was up on his knees and crawling forward. The officer tried to hold him back. ‘Fuck off!’ His voice sounded strange and he realized he’d gone deaf, which must be why everything was muffled, the shouting and cries, the explosion of petrol tanks, the crump of shells bursting further up the road, the slosh of boots through mud, all smothered, adding to the unreality of shock and fear.
He went round assessing the damage to some of the men lying screaming on the ground, quickly selecting those who stood the best chance of life. It was easier to keep calm now he was doing what he knew how to do. One man was lying on the ground cradling his intestines in his arms as tenderly as a woman nursing a sick child. Another was trapped inside a burning lorry. Sheathed in flame his face appeared at the shattered windscreen screaming for help. Paul grabbed an officer’s arm and pointed. ‘For Christ’s sake, shoot the poor sod.’ He had no way of knowing if it happened or not, he was already moving forward again. The smell made him gag, but his mind was clear. At last he saw Lewis, sitting by the side of the road. His cap had fallen off and Paul recognized him by the wet-wheat colour of his hair. ‘I’m blind,’ he kept saying to anyone who would hear. He was unaware of Paul’s presence until he felt the touch of his hand. ‘No, you’re not.’ There was a wound at the front of his head, not serious though blood was streaming out of it, and another in the lower abdomen. No apparent damage to the eyes, but he daren’t risk exploring and disturbing any shell fragments that might be lodged in there. He hauled him to his feet and half carried him back to the ambulance. He was turning to go back and collect more wounded, when he stumbled and fell. His left leg wouldn’t work. A moment later hard hands lifted him by the armpits and seemed to want to put him into the ambulance. ‘No.’ He fought them, deaf, mad, blind, covered in blood he didn’t know was his own, until they pushed him on to a stretcher and strapped him down.
The doors banged shut. The ambulance started to grind and bump along, sweeping round in a sharp turn, then accelerating away. He could feel the movements as if he were driving. A row of wounded men sat beside the stretchers, their jaws juddering with shock. He stared up at the stretcher above him and saw a patch of blood, spreading.
‘Lewis?’
Muttered words, then a groan as the ambulance bounced along. Despite the pain in his leg, Paul didn’t believe he was injured. Bloody fools, tying him down like this.
‘Lewis?’
The red stain was spreading. Still the groans and gabbled words went on. ‘Mum,’ he heard. And again, ‘Mum?’ Then silence. Groping above his head, he found Lewis’s hand and touched it. It was still warm. He thought he felt an answering pressure b
efore the fingers went slack.
He was in the Salle d’Attente. He had a vague memory of being lifted out of the ambulance, talking too much, waving his arms, spit flying. He couldn’t understand why they were putting him into bed when there were so many patients to be attended to. They seemed to want him to get undressed and when he wouldn’t they cut his uniform off. His left thigh was covered in blood.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said, but still they kept pushing him down and all the orderlies were there, their familiar faces strange as he looked up at them from the bed. They were cutting his breeches off, easing bloody cloth away from the wound as so often he’d done to other people, uncovering just such a mess as this one on his left thigh. He stared at it, bewildered, and his bewilderment increased his deafness so when Burton (was it Burton?) leaned over and spoke to him his lips moved but he made no sound, opening and shutting his mouth like a goldfish. Cool fingertips on his thigh searched for soil in the wound and then the fish lips swelled and filled his whole vision and he slipped over the edge into unconsciousness and the whistling roar of the exploding shell which seemed to be lodged inside his skull followed him down into the dark.
Thirty-four
London was drab, full of mud-coloured people. As the night closed in and the street lamps were lit, their blue painted globes seemed not so much to shed light as to make darkness visible. Nelson on his column looked out over a city that had moved closer to its origins, a settlement on an estuary whose fragile lights kept at bay a vast darkness.