Band of Angel (58 page)

“This war is hell,” he countered pleasantly. “Far worse than Waterloo I hear, but they say it will be over soon.”

He was watching her as carefully as she watched him. She could see his unmade bed in the corner of the room; the jumble of muddy boots underneath it. She breathed the staleness of his air, his dirty clothes, his socks.

“The reason it’s so untidy,” he was drawling now in a slightly affected way, “is I had to fire my man this morning; I found him drinking my brandy. Actually, I’m getting rather sick of all kinds of people here for letting me down.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “About how very different things are in a war. You think people are one thing, and they are very much the other—or can be.”

“Yes. I’m glad you’re coming round to that way of thinking.”

He nodded his head toward her and put up his hands. “You’re quite bright for a nurse,” he said jauntily, then whispered. “I’m ready to forgive you, Catherine.”

She couldn’t do it.

“I’ve not come to say I’m sorry, but to see you and to ask a very great favor of you.”

“Ah.”

He sat down opposite her, his legs spread-eagled.

“Oh!
She
wants a favor of
me
.” He opened his mouth wide to show how cheeky this sounded.

“My friend in ward six, Deio Jones, did you have time to think about him? He’s very ill.”

“And a diagnostician now as well.” His eyes were sparkling.

“You saw him. You know. Would you consider putting him on your list?”

“Why should I?” He put his legs up against an unlit stove and made an important face.

“I feel he may die without it.”

She heard the popping of his oil lamp.

“The first answer that comes to mind is very much no,” he said at last. “I can’t. They’re stacked up there like sardines. I’m a week behind at least.”

“Please.”

“Why should I?”

“He is someone I knew as a child, a friend of my family. Please.” He was waiting for more. “And,” she lowered her voice and forced herself to look at him, “I want you to.”

“Ooohhhh.” He pretended to be frightened. “She
wants
me to. Do you know you were very rude to me before you left Scutari? Come over here and sit on my knee—I should put you over it—can’t hear you at all over there.”

She felt a complete revolt of her nervous system as she sat on his knee. There was a piece of food still in the corner of his mouth, and though his lips smiled, his eyes only looked at her.

“Would you like a drink, Catherine?” he said. “That little bastard did leave a little brandy.”

“No, thank you. I don’t have much time.”

“Oh,” he grumbled. “I thought all nursies liked a little drop.”

God, how she wanted to strike him.

“If you do the operation”—she made herself look at him again—“I would like to be your assistant. I know you are a very fine surgeon and I could learn a great deal from you.”

“I haven’t said I’m doing it.” He was tapping her waist with his fingers.

“This man needs your help. I think he might die tonight without it.” Her voice trembled, but there was no change in his expression.

“Ah—” He bit at the quick of his nail and rubbed his nose. “I am
on duty in twenty minutes time,” he said. “But I’ve got a good idea. Do you see these?” He held up the first three fingers of his right hand and waggled them. “You were right to come to me, because they are clever hands and do you know what they’d like to do now?”

He shifted her weight on his knee and she tried to stand up, but he held her down.

“This.” She felt one of his hands slither, cold and dry as autumn leaves up her petticoat and under the leg of her bloomers. “And this.”

His voice was calm as he drew aside her apron, and then, grumbling at the amount of material in her uniform, he took her breast and squeezed it hard, all the while staring at her, daring her to cry out. “And this . . .”

She was sweating with the effort of concealing how deeply she loathed and despised him at this moment. The same doglike expression as before crept over his face as he rubbed himself against her, the same harsh breathing and sharp cry and sudden dopey look when he was finished. It was over in a few minutes. He said he wished he had more time.

While it was happening, she closed her eyes and wished she could die and never ever remember this again. But at least, she reasoned, as she straightened her uniform and tried not to cry, he hadn’t tried to penetrate her, or even to kiss her.

The light in his room was already breaking up and cloaking its corners in shadows. It seemed she was free to go now; he was getting dressed, grumbling again, and looking for his instruments: his needles, his knives his sutures. He was not quite finished with her. He did want a kiss—a wet, fishy-tasting kiss, a mouthful of damp whiskers.
Please, God. Please, Deio, forgive me for this.

She took herself to the chair on the far side of the fireplace. She sat, a frozen statue, while he drank a small glass of brandy.

“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll do it tonight.”

He was unconscious when they went to collect him later that night. Two pensioners bundled him on a hurdle; they told her to pick up his blankets and follow behind. They gossiped as they wove around the corridors: about the war and the Russian patient, who they agreed was a surly bleeder considering how nice they were being to him, and about who was operating that day. As they left the ward, they bumped him hard on the doorjamb; then they took him out of the hut and into a biting wind.

A misty moon lit up the squalid collection of hospital buildings and the half mile or so of path that lay between them and the operating theater. It was bitterly cold and, as they slithered and slipped up paths treacherous with mud and half-melted snow, they saw that day’s crop of rotting corpses, some left in stinking piles on the ground, others stuffed unceremoniously into a bullock cart.

The blankets kept sliding off Deio. He looked so pale that if his teeth hadn’t been chattering like castanets she would have feared him already dead. She tucked the blankets around him and felt his pulse, which was faint. “Hold on,” she whispered, “you must hold on.” He gave no indication that he’d heard.

It was ten o’clock by the time they reached the operating hut. A soldier with a gun told them they’d have to wait outside. The surgeons, he said, had been going since early morning and would be working all night. They waited for what felt like an age in the freezing moonlight, then the front door opened and they had to stand for more than an hour in a corridor smelling like an abattoir. Here, men were stacked in stretchers and on the floor and
she had to close her ears to their requests. For water or extra blankets or medicines. It was her first time in the operating theater and it seemed to her like the outer reaches of hell: a hospital with desperate patients and practically no staff, operating in a sea of mud in the middle of a freezing night, and with the barest minimum of supplies.

She could not believe the quiet patience of the men around her. The man next to Deio had a fearful head injury. His eyes flicked back and forth as though he wanted to flee, but he managed a polite smile and a greeting to her. Others lay absolutely still with their severed legs, or partly missing stomachs, torn ears, and mashed heads. An orderly was holding a candle and reading to a young man with half his hand gone and the rest wrapped in a filthy bandage.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

While he read, the queue shuffled slowly toward the end of the corridor where a sliver of light showed from beneath a closed door. When the door opened, everyone looked at one another:
Is it you now? Is it me?
and watched another body being taken in to murmurs of “God bless,” and “Good luck, mate.” And when the door closed again, the entire line of waiting men listened intently, either to the silence—for apart from the groans and murmurs it was very, very quiet—or to the sounds of sawing and swearing and occasional brusque shouts from behind the door. The orderly told her Cavendish was doing three amputations that night.

The door opened again. “Next!” called the orderly. An emaciated boy clutching a haversack with a hare’s paw sticking out of it, moved up beside them. “We won’t be long now will we, miss?” he asked her.

“No,” she said, trying to smile, “not long now. Where are you from?”

He told her in a speedy gabble about his home in Kent, his mother, his girl named Marjorie.

“Move up!” The orderly pointed and waved him forward. “You’re next.”

The door opened and Dr. Cavendish appeared, gaunt and hollow-eyed and covered in blood up to his elbows.

“You can come in now yourself, Nurse Carreg,” he said. “I think you’ll find this an interesting case.”

The orderlies gave her an odd look, and she hated leaving Deio, who was fast asleep, but she had no choice. She followed the boy into the operating room. It was a cramped space— about twenty feet by twelve—hot after the freezing corridor and bathed in a greenish, coppery light from five hanging lanterns. Her boots sank into about two feet of soft sawdust impregnated with blood; and the heat of the room seemed to cook its rank odors of living and dying flesh to a point where it was so sweet and rich and bad and dreadful, that it was almost impossible not to vomit.

In the middle of the room was a rough table, covered in bloodstained sheets and a careless jumble of bloody instruments: knives, probes, saws, needles. A wooden crate underneath was filled to the brim with amputated limbs, human parts arranged with as much ceremony as dogs’ bones. She felt her mouth fill with liquid and only with the greatest effort did she stop herself from fainting.

When the room swung back into focus, she saw Cavendish standing over the boy.

“Come over here, Nurse Carreg, it’s an interesting case.”

The thin boy, who was having his jacket removed by an orderly, lay on the table, rigid with fright. His hands had to be prised from his haversack and his hare’s paw. They held the chloroform rag over his face, and then Cavendish got a laugh by picking up a knife, neatly lopping the mascot’s paw in two and dropping both parts into the basket under the table.

“I can’t resist,” he said, and two orderlies tittered obediently. His eyes looked huge and exhausted.

Out in the corridor, one of the stretcher-bearers had told her Cavendish was the man he’d choose if, God forbid, he had to have his leg off. The ratio of men to medics, he said, was now one doctor to one hundred men. Kimberly, the other surgeon on duty, was “a nice man but a numbskull” who was learning on the
job, with agonizing consequences. Before the war he’d been the kind of village apothecary for whom the setting of a bone was a medical emergency—the men begged not to have him.

The boy, awake again, trained his petrified eyes on Cavendish as if they would never leave him.

“Damn,” said Cavendish, “another bad batch of chloroform—is this your friend by the by? I can’t remember what he looks like.”

“He’s outside,” she said.

“Oh, I saw you talking to him and thought this was the one. That was why I said he was interesting.” She shook her head at him, how could he play games with her at a time like this?

“We’ll have yours in next.”

“He’s not mine,” she said.

“Well, he’s next.” She felt her body go rigid and cold. Should she try and convince him again that Deio was nothing more than a family friend? And if she did, what difference would it make? He was bending over the boy now, totally absorbed in the messy wound he found on the boy’s upper thigh. Straightening up, he told the boy that he wasn’t going to operate after all because there was about a quart of maggots in his wounds and that they would do the job of cleaning up better than he could. He could go away, have a good night’s sleep, and hope for the best.

The boy’s face went slack with relief. Tears came into his eyes. “God bless your eyes, sir,” he said. “I was prepared for the worst.”

Cavendish’s strange, blank eyes swept over the boy, and she longed to be able to read his mind. When he was working, everything about him—his strutting walk, his brusque voice, his manner—seemed less offensive, less self-conscious. He was a professional. Now he yawned and said, “Well, good luck, sir,” and then, in his barking voice, “send in the next one.”

“Stay here,” he ordered Catherine. “The men will bring him in,” and stood beside her, waiting.

Deio’s hurdle was moving through the door. His eyes were tightly shut, and his face beneath his glossy black hair wore a look of strained anguish. The wound had bled again and stuck to his
nightshirt. When they’d tipped him onto the table, Sister Clara was told to cut the nightshirt off.

“Deio Jones, Thirteenth Hussars, sir.” The orderly ticked him off his list.

Cavendish looked at her briefly and then, holding a candle high, looked down at Deio. He rarely spoke when he worked, and apart from the tinkle of an orderly arranging the surgical tools, the room was silent. She heard him take a breath, and he put his hands on Deio’s stomach, a young man’s belly, hard and brown where it wasn’t torn and bruised. He felt the whole area with his fingertips.