“Mais oui,” says the man, opening the door wider.
They shake off their wet outerwear and hang it on brass hooks next to a mirror over their table. Etna admires the tattered poster of women dancing, the marble bar with its one unbranded pression, the shelf behind the bar covered with exquisitely etched glasses. Their survival intrigues her. She might have come here with other nurses and orderlies any number of times, but she has always begged off, needing rest more than company.
There appears to be only one meal on offer, because the owner has not given them menus. He set before them small glasses of red wine.
“We have the place to ourselves,” Phillip says, looking pleased. With his cap off, his hair, dark blond and curly, seems different.
“Your hair used to be straight and combed back off your face.”
“The damp,” he says. He shrugs and takes a sip of wine.
Etna is anxious about Phillip’s survival. She cannot fathom the vitality of this man ever being snuffed out. But she understands the war in a way she has not until now. All those men who died on cots in her tent had cousins, sisters, and friends who cared for them. It seems to her that she and he, in this unimaginable place, are already better known to each other than they were in Thrupp.
The owner brings steaming bowls of stew to the table along with a loaf of bread. They do not ask about the meal, but Phillip drinks in its scent.
“What’s in this?” she asks when the owner has left them.
“The French are brilliant at making wonderful meals from the meanest cuts of meat.”
Etna savors a spoonful. She tastes meat, yes, but also thyme, carrots, potatoes, and wine. “It’s divine.”
“We can only hope the recipes survive the Huns.” Phillip loosens his tie. Except for his hands and head, he’s encased in wool.
“Your accent is British now,” she remarks.
“Well, if you remember, I was born in England and lived there until I was ten. I’m tired of being called a Yank.”
I’m sure you are, she thinks.
The bread, crusty on the outside, hot on the inside, tastes better than anything Etna has had in months. Perhaps longer. She cannot remember what her family had for meals the previous summer in the States.
“You’re very beautiful, you know that?” Phillip says. “I couldn’t ever say it to you then, back home, but I can now. You look stronger, more confident.”
“Thank you,” she says, surprised by his comment.
“You were trapped before. Your face was pinched,” he says, trying to explain.
“Was it?”
“Well, not in the cottage. But wary. As if you were listening for footsteps. Were you ever entirely guilt-free living there?”
“Yes, I was.” She remembers even now the tremendous sense of freedom and peace she had once she reached the secret cottage and shut the door behind her. “Maybe near the end, when everything went wrong.”
“Was the marriage so terrible?”
“I had Clara and Nicky.”
“Just so,” Phillip says. “I still remember the morning when you came to my family’s house to tell Samuel before he left for Canada that you’d broken your engagement to another man.”
“That seems so long ago.”
The door opens behind Phillip. A British officer and a woman, likely French, enter the café, its windows now beginning to fog. Phillip nods but does not salute. The owner in his white apron appears. The British officer speaks dreadful French. The woman with him must be embarrassed, Etna imagines. Or perhaps she finds it charming.
“I should never have gone to your house,” Etna says. “I thought that if Samuel knew I’d broken my engagement…”
“He might stay in Exeter and not go to Canada, where his own fiancée awaited him.”
“Yes,” she said. “I was out of my mind.”
“I’ve told you this before, but the look on your face that morning is the standard by which I have always measured the ferocity of love.”
“Do you still play tennis?” Etna asks to change the subject. She once witnessed Phillip hit a ball clear over the fence into the next yard to settle himself.
Phillip smiles. “Haven’t seen a tennis ball in years.”
Etna is suddenly curious. “What do you do when you’re not driving?”
He sits back and twirls his glass. “If you mean a pastime, I suppose I’d have to say I look for…well…beauty. It sounds ridiculous, but you’d be surprised how difficult it is.”
“It doesn’t sound ridiculous to me at all.”
“It’s a humble but challenging quest in this place, a bit like a treasure hunt. When I find something, I note it in a small notebook I carry. Keeps me from going mad, I suppose.”
“What have you found?”
He sits back and clears his throat. “I once saw a large flower struggling to poke through the earth. The cracks in the soil caught my attention. I watched the bent stalk pop up as if it were spring-loaded. It was amazing. Let’s see.” He takes a sip of wine. “I saw a beautiful man, an officer.” He pauses, his face somber, perhaps remembering a death. “A field of snow, lit pink. A tooled navy leather journal a soldier kept inside his uniform. He’d barely made two weeks of entries before he was killed. I once watched a priest take ten years off a man’s face simply by calming his nerves. Gunfire is beautiful. If you didn’t know what it signified, you’d think it was beautiful, too.”
“I doubt it. Will you one day write about all this, using your notes?”
He shrugs. “That’s not my goal.”
“What is your goal?”
“To survive. You?”
“To return to my children.”
Phillip nods.
“I asked to be dismissed and was denied.”
“Try bereavement. It always works.”
“To get me to London, perhaps, but what then?”
“Go to Samuel at the Admiralty. He’ll know what to do.”
“You know I can’t,” she says.
Phillip narrows his eyes. “You would put wounded pride before the possibility of returning to your children?”
Chagrined, Etna turns her head away.
“Have you ever been in love, Phillip?” she asks after a time.
He fingers a circle of red wine on the white tablecloth. “I’ve known love,” he says carefully and without explanation.
After Phillip pays the bill, he slips Etna’s cloak over her shoulders. “I can get next Saturday night free. Is there a chance you could join me?”
“I’ll put in a request. I think they’ll grant it because I so seldom go anywhere. The other nurses call me Mother Superior.”
Phillip laughs. “I’ll come by for you at six, same meeting place. Do you enjoy dancing? I know of a club in Étaples. The drinks are decent. If I don’t show up, it doesn’t mean I’m dead. It just means I’ve received unexpected orders.”
She gazes through the window at the slanting rain, beginning again to ice up. If only they did not have to leave the little café. “I love dancing,” she says.
On Saturday evening, Phillip describes Étaples as he and Etna drive away from the stone barn. “The village was an artists’ colony. They came for the incredible light from the sea.”
Etna imagines artists in garrets above shops, painting in bright colors, meeting in the evenings with bottles of wine on blue-checked cloths.
“What beautiful thing did you find this week?” she asks.
“I saw a pair of cows behind a whitewashed fence. There were green shoots on the ground. The beauty was in their obliviousness to the insanity around them. They were positively serene.”
“You can’t have seen green shoots.”
“I promise you.”
“Will we even know when it’s spring?”
“It will rain more.”
“I think I may have you beat,” Etna says, not without a smile. “I helped a woman give birth. The entire event was beautiful, and the baby girl, when she emerged, h
ad the most wonderful black curls.”
“Who was the mother?”
“A French woman who’d walked all the way from her village. She explained that she had nowhere else to go. Soldiers had taken over her house, and it wasn’t safe to stay there. Truth be told, we were delighted that she’d come to us. To witness a birth in that place of death and misery…even the surgeons couldn’t stay away.”
“Not all would think a birth beautiful.”
“Oh, but it is!” Etna protests.
“Two cows. A baby girl. Both signs of life as it should be. But yes, you win this round.”
Pieces of pavement appear to float here and there on the muddy road beneath them. Etna regards her duties in the war as a test of endurance. “We occasionally work twenty-four hours straight,” she tells Phillip. “It’s not at all unusual to get only four hours of sleep three nights in a row. Sometimes, when I walk into the operating theater, the physicians look more dreadful than the patients.”
Phillip concentrates on the road ahead. “My job is a little different. Hours of boredom punctuated by episodes of pure fear. I heard you got caught in the bombardment on Wednesday.”
“How did you know?”
“I ask about you.”
“Are you trying to look out for me?”
“Something like that,” he says and smiles.
During a midmorning return from the aid post, Etna, as part of a three-ambulance convoy, came under bombardment. She chose to leave the road and, for ten or fifteen wild minutes, bounced and careened along the rock-strewn fields before rejoining the convoy, which by then had only one ambulance left—the other having been destroyed.
Officially an adjunct to ambulance unit 3, Etna wears her boots with puttees now, as the men do. Just when she thinks the unit no longer needs her, another driver is wounded or dies. She is always last to be called up, even though a few of the orderlies have told her they would rather be in her truck than with some of the other drivers.
In Étaples, Phillip parks on a back street, the houses dark silhouettes against the moon-sparkle of the Channel.
“I’ve never been to Étaples,” Etna says.
Underground, in the club, the lights dazzle. No wonder men and women take great pains to get here on their nights off. There is a long bar, tables with plum leather chairs, cigarette smoke collecting at the ceiling. Even a small orchestra plays on a stage. Though barely half past six, dancers cover the floor. Most, she guesses, will get only a few hours of sleep before their shifts begin in the morning.
Phillip has on a dress uniform: a British officer-style jacket, white shirt, dark tie, and wide leather belt. In this room of decorated officers, Phillip has little rank. What a waste, she thinks when she remembers his exalted academic reputation. She has to remind herself that he has chosen to be an ambulance driver. That he is a pacifist. The war has been hard on pacifists.
“I can’t tell you what’s in the drink, except to go easy. A pair of them can make a woman drunk.”
“And not a man?” she says teasingly.
“That takes at least three.” He presents her with a silver case filled with cigarettes.
“No thank you.”
“Do you mind?”
“No, not at all.”
Etna has borrowed a dress for the evening, a red gabardine shirtwaist with a ruffled skirt, cut looser than she is used to. How strange that she can have worn, in the past twenty-four hours, the wool skirt of an ambulance driver, the demure headdress of the VAD, and now this red dress that seems to have been made for dancing. “Do you have friends here?”
“Well, none here. Acquaintances, yes. Fortunately, this place isn’t exclusive. I’d be thrown out of most clubs officers frequent.” He paused. “Would you like to dance?”
Phillip takes her hand and leads her onto the dance floor. He twirls her into a dance embrace.
The orchestra plays “By the Beautiful Sea.” Her hand fits smoothly into his. The skirt of the red dress swirls dangerously high when Phillip whips her around.
As the music changes to a ragtime beat and changes again to a melody she’s never heard before, Phillip dips her and deftly makes her feel light on her feet. He, so unlike Van Tassel, her former husband, the only man she has intimately touched in years (apart from the wounded), seems completely natural in motion, as if he had been practicing forever. In time, Phillip would have suffocated in Thrupp as the dean of the college, a post her husband now holds.
“Your face is flushed,” he says when the music stops.
“I might need to sit this one out.”
A woman in a green taffeta dress bends toward the table and asks, “Phil?”
“Marjorie,” Phillip answers, standing.
“Introduce me, darling.”
“Etna, this is a friend of mine, Marjorie Sherriff.”
“Edna, did you say?”
“No, Etna,” Phillip repeats.
“Like the mountain,” Marjorie muses, assessing whether or not a volcanic mountain is an apt description for the tall woman beside Phillip.
“How do you do?” Etna asks.
“Well, thank you,” Marjorie answers, turning away from Etna. “Phil, Jerome is with us. We’re at a bigger table. You should join us. Everett and Ruth are here, too. Well, I think Ruth is still with us.”
“Do you mind?” Phillip asks Etna.
How can she possibly mind?
All British except for Etna and half of Phillip. Both Marjorie and Ruth, who just manages to sit upright, are nurses with the British Expeditionary Force. The two men drive ambulances, which explains how they know Phillip.
“Another Yank,” says Jerome. “You’re at Camiers.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Heroes,” he tells the table. “Not even in the war, and still they volunteer.”
“Nothing heroic about it,” Etna says.
The hairstyles of the two women fascinate Etna. Ruth, a brunette, has bobbed her hair, the curls falling above her shoulders. It’s a smart look, somewhat ruined by her sodden eyes. Marjorie, who is blond, has her hair crimped and pulled back.
Darling.
Jerome, his face full of freckles, stretches his body beneath the table. Everett has long brown hair slicked back from a high forehead. Everyone except Etna smokes.
“You got caught in the bombardment,” Jerome says, addressing Etna.
“I did, yes.”
“The way I heard it,” he says to the table, “she executed a perfect shortcut through the fields.”
“Just for a minute or two.”
“You saved your wounded. That’s the kind of thing they give medals for.”
“They give medals to ambulance drivers?” she asks unthinkingly, and then covers her blunder by saying, “I should hope they’d give a medal to the ambulance driver who stayed on the road and made it safely to camp.”
“I don’t know,” says Jerome, determined to give her a compliment. “Quick wits on your part.”
Merely the will to live, she wants to say.
Phillip puts his arm around her shoulders, and she understands it as a protective gesture.
A meal arrives of unidentifiable fish in a white sauce. Bottles of wine appear on the table. Ruth seems to have fallen asleep.
“Is she all right?” Etna asks.
“She shouldn’t drink,” Everett says. “In fact, I ought to drive her back.”
“You can’t take her back in that condition,” protests Marjorie. “Besides, I would have to leave, too, and I’m not ready. Find some of that brew they’re calling coffee now, get it into her, and walk her around outside. She’s got to be able to walk into her tent. I can’t very well carry her.”
Everett does as he is told, which leaves only the four of them. Marjorie shows no sign of tiring. She asks Phillip to dance. He hesitates, perhaps not wanting to leave Etna alone. Can Marjorie be the person to whom Phillip was referring when he said he had known love?
Well mannered, Jerome asks Etna if she woul
d like to dance.
“If you don’t mind, I’d rather sit a moment.”
“Me, too,” Jerome says with relief. “She’s wearing me out.”
Etna smiles.
“We’re all a bit in awe of you,” Jerome confesses.
“Why so?”
“You’ve taken on the double role of VAD and ambulance driver. Not sure I’ve ever met anyone who answers to that description.”
“The war has caused all of us to be people we didn’t used to be.”
“Isn’t that the truth.” Jerome picks up a bottle of wine and offers to pour some into her glass. She shakes her head no.
“What were you before the war?” she asks.
“Librarian.”
“You must miss your books,” she says.
“I’ve got a copy of Paradise Lost on onionskin in tiny print. My mother gave it to me before I left. I’ve read it nine times.”
“You should have a new book.”
“Most of the men in the corps don’t care much for reading.”
“Surely Phillip—”
“No, that’s odd, he being an academic and all. He seems to have no interest in books.”
“I’m very surprised,” Etna says.
Phillip appears with Marjorie, who clings to him. Etna has forgotten to watch the pair dancing.
“I’d best be getting you back,” Phillip says to Etna.
“Must you?” A whine from Marjorie.
“I have to get up early,” Etna says.
“Lovely to meet you,” Marjorie offers in a bored voice, not even bothering to look at Etna. A languid dismissal.
“Was that so terrible?” Phillip asks when they have found his vehicle.
“Oh, not at all. I quite enjoyed the dancing and even talking to Jerome.”
“He’s lost two brothers already. He’s the only son left. They ought to send him home.”
“But they won’t?”
“Don’t think so.”
Etna can see the mother: benumbed, quiet, getting on with life for the sake of Jerome. Not for her husband, whom she barely notices. He with his own grief. Two sons, two extreme sacrifices, too much for anyone to bear.