Life Class (31 page)

‘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 before 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.

Walking down Regent Street to the Café Royal, Paul stumbled and almost fell. It had been a long day, his knee was starting to trouble him. He hated the atmosphere in London now, it was so different from last August. Then there had been crowds, heat, dust, cheering, the burnt smell of London foliage in late summer. Now there were these trampling shadows with their blue-tinged skin. Oh, and everywhere, the posters. One in particular pursued him form street to street. A jack-booted German officer trod on a dead woman’s bare breasts, while behind them a village burn to Beside the picture was a letter from a serving British soldier.

We have got three girls in the trenches with us, who came for protection. One has no clothes on, having been outraged by the Germans … Another poor girl has just come in having had both her breasts cut off. Luckily I caught the Uhlan officer in the act and with a rifle shot at 300 yards killed him. And now she is with us but poor girl I am afraid she will die. She is very pretty and only about 19 and only has her skirt on.

Nothing Paul had heard or seen in Belgium suggested that this scenario was probable or even possible, but then, it’s difficult to persuade young men to lay down their lives to preserve the balance of power in Europe. Some other cause had to be found, more firmly rooted in biological instinct. Pretty young girls with their
blouses ripped off did the trick nicely. God, the cynicism of it.

Not a bad painting, though. In fact all the posters he’d seen were good. Elinor might complain that painting was being dismissed as irrelevant, but it seemed to him that the exact opposite was true. Painting, or at least its near relation – print-making – had been recruited.

He should have asked Tonks what he thought about the posters. Tonks was the only person he’d seen so far, and there, too, he’d thought Elinor was wrong. Her portrait of a Tonks unswervingly dedicated to the teaching of art while the war crashed and rumbled round his ears didn’t hold up for a second. Tonks had gone back to medicine, and now spent more time working in a hospital than he did at the Slade.

‘What else could I do?’ he said. ‘I’m a surgeon, for God’s sake. I have to do something.’

The sight of Tonks bending over his paintings – the familiar question mark of his curved spine – could still inspire fear in Paul. He waited for the whip-crack of contempt, but it never came. Instead, Tonks put his hand over his eyes. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘There’s this too.’

Tonks took the drawing to the window. It was of a young man who had had the whole of his lower jaw blown off by a shell. It was several minutes before Tonks turned to face Paul again. ‘I don’t see how you could ever show that anywhere.’

‘No, I know. But I wanted you to see it.’

Tonks mentioned names and promised letters of introduction. He would do everything he could to help but his time was limited. He was expecting to go to France himself soon. When, at the end of the corridor, Paul looked back, Tonks was still standing at the doorway to his room, watching him go. Perhaps from the window too, though Paul didn’t look up, merely smiled at the men in their wheelchairs and hurried past.

A few minutes later, in Russell Square, great rosy-cheeked, raw-boned lads charged and twisted bayonets. He stopped to watch. Afterwards they lay on the grass, their strong young limbs sprawling, smoking Woodbines and crooning sentimental songs. ‘Row, row,
row your boat, gently up the stream’. Oh, and ‘Itchy Coo’. Over and over again. He could cheerfully have bayoneted the man who wrote that.

Night-time was best. London in the dark still had an excitement, a glamour, that it had entirely lost by day. The cold and gloom made the Café Royal seem fragile, a bubble floating on a black river. At first he thought nothing had changed, but then he looked again more closely and realized everything had. Burnt-butter smears of khaki darkened the red and gold. Young men everywhere: carefully cultivated moustaches over mouths not yet thinned into certainty, breeches and puttees self-consciously worn. Out there, the war stank of blood and gangrene; here, it smelled of new clothes.

Kit Neville was there. It was strange after their last meeting in Ypres to see him here, in his element, beaming, rubicund, gleaming with success. He seized Paul and bore him off to a quiet table by the far wall. As soon as they were sitting down he summoned the waiter and, without consulting Paul, ordered two large whiskies.

‘You’re back, then?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘Sorry I know, obvious.’ Neville seemed to be wanting to say something that couldn’t be said here or, perhaps, anywhere. ‘How are you finding it?’

‘Strange. I don’t seem to be able to slot back in.’

‘No, nor me.’

Nobody could have looked more at home.

‘Congratulations. Everybody’s talking about your paintings.’

‘Hmm.’ Several more gulps of whisky went down. ‘You know what I think? What I really think?’

‘No, what do you think?’

‘I think that once the bloody war’s over nobody’s going to want to look at anything I paint.’

Paul started to produce some reassuring pap.

‘No, listen, it’s a Faustian pact. I get all this attention for a few months, however long the bloody thing lasts, but once it’s over –
finish.
Nobody wants to look at a nightmare once they’ve woken up.’

How typical of Neville to find grounds for self-pity amidst the blaze of success. Paul couldn’t think of anything to say, so ordered two more large whiskies instead.

‘Seen Elinor?’ Neville asked, carefully casual.

‘No, I’ve only just got here.’

‘You know she’s in with that Bloomsbury crowd?’

‘I know she goes to Lady Ottoline’s parties. Do you?’

‘Good Lord, no. You have to be a full-blown conchie to get in there. They don’t like my stuff, that’s for sure. Or me.’

Their drinks arrived. Neville swished his whisky round and round the glass, but judiciously, careful to spill none. ‘You must have seen something of Elinor?’

‘She came to see me in hospital.’

‘Oh, yes, of course, you were wounded, weren’t you?’ Was that a twinge of envy? ‘How is it?’

Paul pulled a face.

‘Still. Keeps you out of it, I suppose.’

‘Depends how much movement I get back. The knee’s quite stiff at the moment, but they seem to think it’ll improve.’

‘Ah, well, early days. Have you managed to do any painting?’

‘I have, yes, quite a bit.’

‘More cornfields?’

‘In winter?’

‘Well, I don’t know, do I? Mangelwurzel-picking, perhaps?’

Paul repressed a smile. ‘No, nothing like that.’

A few minutes later Neville caught somebody else’s eye and moved off. Twisting round in his chair, Paul watched as he was welcomed into the circle around Augustus John. Oh, he was flourishing, was Neville, the great war artist. Paul thought of his own paintings and the determination to get his own exhibition together grew stronger. He’d painted them with such a curious cold intensity – in some cases knowing that a particular painting could never be put on public display – and yet here he was scrabbling around for contacts, envying Neville his success.

He finished his whisky and went outside, walking up and down the street until his mind felt clearer. His relationship with Neville
was strange because he couldn’t call it friendship and yet Neville was one of the most significant figures in his life. That remark about the Faustian pact had echoed his own feelings in a way that nobody else could. He’d lain in bed in Belgium looking at the swollen hand that didn’t seem to belong to him and thought exactly that.