Life Class (30 page)

‘Deux,’ he said again, but they all pressed forward, clutching at him, showing their wounds. He opened the door, jumped inside and said, pointing at random, ‘You and you.’ Another scrambled in before he could get the doors shut. Then he struggled through the others, the ones he couldn’t take, back to the driver’s cabin. He’d call the relay station as soon as he got to the hospital. An ambulance would go out to pick up the rest.

But they couldn’t know that and one or two of them mightn’t last. As he drove off, the wheels churning in slush, he hardly dared look into the rearview mirror, where, framed in that small space, a group of mud men dwindled into the distance, staring after the ambulance, which took away with it, as they must believe, their best chance of life.

Thirty-one

Paul to Elinor

After all the excitements of last week we seem to be in another quiet patch. I managed to get back to the town for two nights and spent them painting and lying in the bed in our little room thinking of you. I try to convince myself there’s a ghost of your scent on the pillows though I know it isn’t true. You seem ghost-like to me now. I’ve lost the sense of your voice, the way you move. I always see you sitting still somewhere, more especially in the window at the Slade. Do you remember how you used to sit there waiting for Tonks to come out and sign your exhibition entry forms? I walked past you once but you were too deep in your thoughts to look up and notice me. I see you like that now, framed by the arch of the window, very tiny and far away.

Because it’s so quiet we’ve been given another job: transporting the dead (which The Hague Convention does allow; it doesn’t allow the transport of military personnel who are alive and all in one piece, even if they’ve collapsed with exhaustion). We didn’t mind too much because we thought we’d be dealing with the recent dead, but it seems this particular Casualty Clearing Station had a backlog of corpses. It wasn’t clear why. Men who die at a CCS are generally buried as close to it as possible. They’re surrounded by these little dark crosses that always look like birds’ footprints to me, though I mentioned that to Lewis and he couldn’t see it at all.

Anyway there they were piled up in a corner of a yard under a black tarpaulin cover weighted down with bricks. We put on surgical masks and gloves and just got on with it, though it was depressing, to say the least. You go into a trance, it’s the only way, then suddenly I looked down and realized that one of the
men at the bottom of the heap was wearing British army uniform. The others were all French. He must have got separated from his unit or perhaps this ground was fought over by the British in the first few weeks of the war. He’d been there a long time. In fact he was so badly decomposed that when we tried to lift him he came apart in our hands.

Somebody loved him once. And still does, that’s the devil of it.

What a gloomy letter! I always feel I have no right to burden you like this, but these things happen and if I didn’t write about them I don’t know what else I’d find to say. On a more cheerful note (and high time, too, you may think!) we’ve finished that job now and we can start putting it behind us. This morning we treated ourselves to a bath and a shave in town and came out into the raw air afterwards pink as shrimps with tight, raw, shiny faces. Now it’s afternoon and we’re going to kick a football round the field behind the school for an hour or so and then have supper.

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.