Life Class (26 page)

Twenty-six

Paul to Elinor

The hospital itself wasn’t bombed, though we have a huge crater a hundred yards away to show how close we came. There’s talk of evacuating us to somewhere further back, but we underlings play no part in such decisions. Lewis and I have both put in for ambulance driving again, and, since we’re supposed to be getting an influx of professional nurses soon, we may succeed. I don’t want to go further back. All the pressure is to go the other way, to be part of it, though I’m sure I shall hate it.

They brought a child in last week, a little boy, ten years old perhaps. It’s not supposed to happen, but the ambulance driver who’d been flagged down at the side of the road by the parents just dumped him here and drove off before anybody could argue. He’d lost both arms. The stumps were curiously like wings. When he tried to move them he looked like a fledgling trying to fly. Even with the morphine he was in terrible pain. His mother visited – she runs a café on the outskirts of the town – I’ve been there once or twice – but they were busy doing repairs so they could open again so she wasn’t here often. One night I was on my way to change his dressings. I pulled aside the screen and found her there, bending over him. She turned round when she heard me, and I apologized and went away. I meant to give them a few minutes alone and then go back, but something else cropped up so it was over an hour before I got back. His mother had gone. He was lying there, alone, with his eyes closed and at first I thought he was asleep, but then I noticed his chest wasn’t moving and when I touched his skin he was growing cold. Everybody said, What a merciful release. Sister Naylor cried. She’d have liked to put flowers in his hands, I think, only of course he had no hands to put them in. Mr Burton, who’d done
the operation, was called and like everybody else said, Perhaps it’s just as well. But then, when we were alone – I’d got the job of laying him out – Burton pushed up the child’s lids and said, ‘Look, petechiae.’ (They’re little red spots – haemorrhages – in the whites of the eye.) I didn’t understand. He said, ‘She smothered him.’

It’s strange, isn’t it? You go on and on, or I do rather, seeing God knows what horrors and learning not to care or anyway not to care more than you need to do the job, and then something happens that gets right under your skin. I can’t forget them, the boy and his mother, the look on her face when she turned round and saw me standing there. She had a pillow in her hands. I didn’t realize. What would I have done if I had?

If I don’t get a transfer to ambulance work soon, I think I may have to take some leave.

Elinor to Paul

I wish you would take leave. It would be lovely to see you here and just sit in Lockhart’s having a coffee or go for a meal or back home for toasted crumpets by the fire
and
… Anything to be together again. I thought seeing you out there would make you feel closer, but it seems to have had the opposite effect. It feels as if you’re in the belly of the whale and I’m out here on dry land. Just. The war impinges a little more each day. The papers are full of atrocity stories, they seem designed to whip up feeling against Germans living here. Catherine feels it very badly.

I missed classes last week. I had to go to stay with my sister. The new baby arrived five days ago, a boy. Mother was in the bedroom trying to take over from the midwife, and then things were going so slowly the doctor had to be called. I walked up and down the corridor outside, standing in for the absent father who’s doing important work in the War Office and couldn’t be spared. Eventually Rache’s cries stopped and I heard the chink of instruments so I thought the doctor must have decided it had gone on long enough. It certainly had – thirty-six hours! – and then there was a cry, a wail rather, and relief all round. I went in
to see the baby who had forceps marks on either side of his head, as if he’d been mauled by an animal. Oh Paul, his skin. You know how a poppy looks when you peel the outer green casing back too early? It looked like that: red, moist, creased and then, gradually, it started to fill out. Even a few hours made a difference. Rachel looked shocked. She wasn’t at all the blooming contented mother I’d been expecting. She said labour was the best-kept secret in the world though when I think of some of the noises coming through the bedroom door, I don’t think it can be all that well kept.

At least then we thought, it’s over. But it wasn’t. A few hours later the doctor had to be called back, Rachel was losing so much blood. In fact she collapsed just as he arrived. I think when he walked through the door he thought she was dead. They had to raise the foot of the bed to try to slow the bleeding down. We sat up with her all night and gradually she became a little stronger. Now she can sit up though only for ten minutes at a time. She has to eat raw liver twice a day. I can’t bear to watch her. I go out of the room. You can hear her crying and choking as she tries to force it down.

But the baby’s lovely. I watch the nurse bathe him. When he’s held out over the water there’s a moment when he goes perfectly still. Then the water touches him, and his chin wobbles and he makes little convulsive movements with his arms and sucks his breath in. Of course everybody oohs and ahs, but there’s something terrible about the little naked scrap dangling over the abyss.

It’s been an extremely educational week. I think the role of eccentric maiden aunt will suit me very well. Though I suppose it’s a bit late for the maiden part. I do miss you, Paul.

Did I tell you I’ve almost decided to move? Yes, I know, again. So: more decorating, more buckets of glutinous muck, and no Ruthie to help this time. Doesn’t approve of me any more. She’s volunteered to go out to France and is waiting to hear so can’t be bothered with silly empty-headed people who go on painting while Rome burns. I’ve got to get out of here.
Downstairs there are Belgian refugees, grumbling like mad about the food and the weather – which is awful. The rain it raineth every day.

How is it over there? I don’t know what to say about the little boy. How horrible. I hope they let you drive an ambulance soon if that’s what you want, but I’d be even more pleased if you came home on leave.

Toby went off to Scarborough last week on some sort of course, but he had a weekend at home first and saw the new baby. He’s expecting to be sent out early next year. We went for a long walk around all our special places and talked about the future with great determination. After it was over and he was gone I realized my cheeks ached and I couldn’t think why and then I realized it was because I’d been forcing myself to smile for hours and hours.

Barbara – I don’t know if you remember her, she used to go around a lot with Marjorie Bradshaw? – just came in to say she’s been taken on by the Omega workshops, starting after Christmas. Three mornings’ work for thirty shillings a week. She doesn’t mind designing cushions and decorating teapots. I suppose it might be quite fun really, though some people are awfully snooty about it. Prostituting one’s talent, would you believe? They should try teaching flower painting to the young ladies of Kensington. Not that that’s an option any more. I think I might do it too. It leaves you plenty of time to do your own work, and the Slade’s awfully grim at the moment. Tonks sweeping up and down the corridors like the pillar of fire by night.

Mother’s gone back to her bandaging again. Toby’s in the army. Dad’s busy with his head-injuries unit. Tom’s in the War Office. Rachel says the baby’s her war work. Ruthie’s off to France. So you see how things are, Paul. Everybody doing important war work, except me. I alone preserve an iron frivolity.

Paul to Elinor

You’re not serious about leaving the Slade, are you? Do take time to think about it. Painting teapots may keep the wolf from
the door but it won’t do anything to establish you as an artist. On the other hand you know the situation better than me, and I suppose we all have to stop being students some time. Anyway I’ll buy your teapots, honey – if you do leave.
And
your cushions.

The rain that rains on you also rains on us, and it makes things devilish difficult. All the paths between the huts are lined with duckboards now and even so we sink. The mud bubbles up through the slats. I’ve taken to getting right away on my days off, can’t stand the place, can’t work (draw, I mean, the other sort of work I do in a trance). I managed to get an ambulance driver to take me up to the front line, promising if he was full on the way back I’d walk. He’s called Guy and he’s a Canadian, very dark skin, furrowed cheeks, he looks too old to be here, but here he is. And taciturn in the extreme, which suited me. I didn’t want to talk, I wanted to look.

The first part of the road I was familiar with, because I’ve walked along it before, but after that there’s open country. Very strange, mad feeling as you go further out, away from the town, because there are fields and farmhouses and it all looks normal until you see that the farmhouse has a hole in the roof and the corn’s still standing in the fields, beaten flat of course in lots of places, but in others, where it’s more sheltered, still standing. I remembered a cornfield I walked through last summer, how restless it was. How it whispered all the time though there was hardly any breeze and I thought about the farmer who planted this field last spring, with no idea he wouldn’t be there to harvest it. And then after that a stretch of normal countryside: tall, spindly trees, willows – some with yellow leaves still clinging to their branches, bending to meet their reflections in the canals. Everything end-of-year and stagnant, but beautiful too in its own way.

The road was clogged with limbers and motor vehicles and men marching towards the front. They look like a machine: all the boots moving as one, shoulders bristling with rifles, arms swinging, everything pointing forwards. And on the other side of the road, men stumbling back, trying to keep time, half-dead
from exhaustion and with this incredible stench hanging over them. You get whiffs of it when you cut the clothes off wounded men, but out there, in the mass, it’s as solid as a wall. And they all look so grey, faces twitching, young men who’ve been turned into old men. It’s a great contrast, stark and terrible, because they’re the same men, really. It’s an irrigation system, full buckets going one way, empty buckets the other. Only it’s not water the buckets carry.

Further on the road dipped down then levelled out again and that was where the sense of strangeness began. What I didn’t know – though it’s obvious enough when you think about it – is that companies in a column of marching men take synchronized breaks, so, at a given moment,
all
the men fall out and sit by the roadside, blending into the muddy ground. So for a time the road looks empty. I’m not explaining this very well, but I saw it happen and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I don’t quite know why. It’s the feeling of an empty, desolate landscape that isn’t empty at all, but teeming with men.

We were crawling along most of the time, edging past columns of men in wet, gleaming capes and helmets, like mechanical mushrooms. Now and then somebody looks up, and you get the sense of an individual human mind among the bundles of soaked misery. All this is in semi-darkness of course. Close to the front people move only after dark, with dawn and dusk the most dangerous times. That’s when the heaviest bombardments are. Nothing dramatic happened to us though. It rained all the way there and all the way back – I didn’t have to walk.

This will sound heartless, and perhaps it is, but close to the front line where the land on either side of the road is ruined – pockmarked, blighted, craters filled with foul water, splintered trees, hedges and fields gouged out – I realized I felt the horror of that landscape almost more than I feel for the dying. It’s a dreadful thing to say, I know – a flaw in me – but the human body decays and dies in some more or less disgusting way whether there’s a war or not, but the land we hold in trust.

Sorry! This has got awfully deep and I didn’t mean it to, but it leads up to some good news at least. When I got back I found Lewis in the hut almost bouncing on the beds with excitement. The nurses – the fully qualified ones who, we were beginning to think, were as mythical as the nine muses – are on their way at last, so it can’t be long now before we get our transfer. I want to be up there. I don’t want to be stuck here in comparative safety doing a job that a woman could do equally well, and in the case of a qualified nurse, BETTER!

Elinor to Paul

I’m pleased for you, Paul, I really am – since it’s what you seem to want. I wonder whether you know how hard it is to answer your letters? A week has gone by since I received your last, though I meant to sit down and reply at once. I know you say you want to hear about all my doings but I can’t help feeling that my doings are terribly trivial compared with yours and that this may even may be part of their attraction for you. It’s like looking through the window of a doll’s house, isn’t it?

Anyway doll’s house or not, here goes. I’ve been to tea with Lady Ottoline Morrell! I never thought I’d live to see the day. I met her at the Camden Street Gallery and she looked at me very intently for a long time and then she said in that vague way of hers, wafting a jewelled hand about above her head, You must come to tea some time. Do come to tea.

I thought that was fairly meaningless really – no time, no date – and immediately forgot all about it, but yesterday morning I came downstairs and there was the invitation on the mat and so this afternoon I set off, wearing one red stocking and one blue as a reminder to myself not to be nervous though of course I was. Close to, in broad daylight, she really is quite extraordinary. We sat in a red room overlooking a walled garden and the rainy afternoon light fell full on her face which was heavily rouged with purple shadow on the lids and in a way she looks quite beautiful and in another almost grotesque. She’s obviously decided that being ordinary is not an option for her and she’s
right. So although she’s very tall – six foot if she’s an inch – she wears thick cork soles that add on another two inches. Her dress was brightly coloured green silk with an intricate web of gold embroidery – very beautiful, but for afternoon tea? My pathetic little gesture with odd stockings was nowhere, I can tell you. She’s not easy to talk to, though she is interested in everything you say. You feel she’s listening, not just waiting for the chance to make some clever remark herself like most of that Bloomsbury crowd. Only – now I’m going to carp and I shouldn’t – there isn’t much humour, and it’s all very intense. She seems to be drawing your soul out of your body. It’s a kind of cannibalism. I felt I had nothing to offer her. Not enough meat on my bones. We talked about the war. Oh my God, yes, the war, I’m so heartily sick of it but it seems to be unavoidable even with people like her who hate it as much as I do. She said she was totally opposed – a point in her favour – but had decided that it was pointless trying to stop it. I was trying not to laugh. The vanity of these people! – thinking they can influence the fate of nations when it takes them all their time to organize their own lives. But then she said she’d switched her energies to trying to help the wives and families of German internees who’ve been left with no income, dependent on charity handouts. Even when the wife is English she can’t get even the most menial work, not even doorstep scrubbing, which is the lowest-paid work there is – or so Lady O says. I sort of half promised I would go and hand out parcels with her but all the time I was thinking about Catherine and how I ought to have done more for her. She’s a friend for goodness’ sake and that matters more than charity, or ought to, but when I got her letter about her father being interned I was so excited about going to see you I didn’t do anything. I should have gone to see her then.
Made
time. It was wrong of me not to. Lady O meanwhile was trying to move the conversation on to a more personal plane. She wants something from you – not in any crude material way – something emotional. Or intellectual perhaps, but she must have guessed there was no point expecting anything like that from me! I told her about Catherine and how
worried I was about Toby and it was all true, every word of it was true, so why did it sound so false? But these were just bits of gristle, not real juicy flesh. So then I bethought me of my trip to see you, and I told her about that – she’s the first person I’ve told – which is wrong, because what is Lady O to me, or I to her? I haven’t told Rachel. I haven’t told Mother. But I did tell her and she was ecstatic. It became quite embarrassing and I’ve no doubt she’ll repeat the story with embellishments all over London and I shall acquire a reputation for – I don’t know what – recklessness, romantic passion – something.