Silence for the Dead (9 page)

“Yes, of course.” Thornton dabbed his napkin over his lip. “Matron, please have the men assembled as we discussed. We'll go upstairs and begin.”

We all pushed back our chairs and stood. Boney moved to lead the doctors from the room; Matron rose to assemble the men; the rest of us prepared to clear the dishes and go about our afternoon work.

“Nurse Weekes,” said Dr. Thornton.

I put down my dishes and turned.

He smiled at me. “I would like you to accompany today's sessions. I believe it will be instructive for an experienced nurse such as yourself. She does have clearance, of course, Matron?”

There was a beat of strained silence.

“Yes,” said Matron from the doorway, her sharp eyes staring at me like chips of stone. “Of course.”

“Very good,” said Dr. Thornton. And he and Dr. Oliver left the kitchen, Matron hurrying behind.

I glanced around at the others. Nina was amazed; Martha shooed me toward the door with one hand. But it was Boney who drew me. She stood aside from the door and stared down at her feet, her gaze furiously fixed, her bright yellow hair garish under its cap. Her lips had lost their prim, important line. Dark red spots flushed high on her cheekbones, as angry as a fever. Hurt crossed her face, but she fought it off. She was so damned easy to read.

Then she blinked hard, and her expression shuttered over again.

I dropped my napkin on the table. It was more important to her than to me; it was everything to her, and it was nothing to me. She had experience and I had none. I didn't even like these men. And yet, when the doctors told me to go, I went. Because when someone offers me a meal, I eat it.

And I tell myself I am no fool.

S
o that the doctors could come and go in an afternoon, the patients were seen in small groups. “We really must be away by supper,” Dr. Oliver explained to me as we climbed the stairs.

“And what do I do?” I said.

“Be ready,” he replied. “Sometimes the patients get upset, and sometimes they need assistance. We don't allow orderlies in the room—what is said is far too confidential. But there should be one posted outside the door. If things go smoothly, you simply sit. And observe.”

His tone told me I was lucky to have the opportunity. I said nothing.

We used the common room, where the chairs had been set in a rough circle. I was directed to an extra chair off to the side by the wall, where I would not intrude on the conversation. I sat, crossed my ankles under my chair, and smoothed my long skirts over my legs.

Jack Yates arrived with the first group.

There was silence as the men filed in: Archie, Creeton, Captain Mabry, and Mr. MacInnes. Jack had shaved, combed his hair, and put on shoes. He looked at me as he entered, his dark-lashed blue eyes registering quiet surprise, and then he turned to the others and sat in the chair with his back to me.

Dr. Thornton cleared his throat. “Ah. We do have someone new with us today. I hope no one will find this too disruptive.”

The men shuffled their feet and glanced at one another. They said nothing.

“This is, ah, Mr. Yates,” Thornton tried again.

They knew. All of them. I looked at their faces and understood that the doctor wasn't telling them anything they hadn't already known, probably from the first. It was Archie, after all, who had warned me about the clearance to see Patient Sixteen. I'd been right; there was no hope of privacy in the close conditions these men lived in, not after being here six months. The happy little fiction that no one knew Jack Yates was here was just that: a fiction.

But the men said nothing, and Dr. Thornton and Dr. Oliver continued to look pained at this supposed breach in the rules.

The tension stretched unbearably. Creeton opened his mouth, a smirk on his face; then his gaze traveled over the other faces and he closed his mouth again. Finally Mr. MacInnes nodded. “How d'ye do,” he said.

“Yes, hello,” said Archie.

Thornton looked relieved. “Let's begin.” He pulled a leather-bound notebook and pen from his briefcase, crossed his legs, and prepared to write. “Dr. Oliver, which patient is first?”

Oliver consulted his own list. “Mabry, sir.”

“Mabry.” Dr. Thornton made an obvious note of the name. “Please proceed, Mr. Mabry.”

Captain Mabry—Matron and the doctors called him “Mister,” but the rest of us couldn't help but call him “Captain,” he was so obviously a captain—swallowed and nervously pushed his spectacles up on his nose. “I've been doing much better,” he said.

“Is that so?” Dr. Thornton regarded him. “I seem to recall, Mr. Mabry, that you were having hallucinations, though we had seen improvement in recent weeks.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I see. And what are you requesting?”

“I would like to see my children.” Mabry sat stiff and brittle, as if a single tap would shatter him.

“I'm sorry?” said Dr. Thornton. “Would you repeat that, please?”

“My children,” said the captain, a little louder. “I would like to see them—please, sir.”

“Your children.” Dr. Thornton wrote in his notebook. “Yes, you've made this request before.” He turned in his chair. “Dr. Oliver?”

As Dr. Oliver riffled through his papers for something, I watched Captain Mabry's face, so plainly stamped with contained emotion, and I understood what Archie had told me the day before.
We have to be well for the doctors.

Dr. Oliver handed Dr. Thornton a piece of paper, and Dr. Thornton looked it over. “I have here,” he said, “an incident report written by Matron. It states that you had one of your delusional attacks only a few days ago.”

That day at supper, Mabry lying in my lap with a nosebleed. The room was painfully quiet.

“Sir,” said Mabry.

“Well? Was it an attack? Or is Matron lying?”

“I had a nosebleed, sir. That was all.”

“A nosebleed.”

Captain Mabry's gaze flicked to me for the merest second; then it flicked in front of me, to Jack Yates. Jack leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, looking down at the floor as if tuning out the scene around him. He raised his head, looked at Mabry long enough to catch his eye for a second, and dropped his gaze again.

“I have a request here,” said Dr. Thornton, “from your wife, Mr. Mabry. She has applied to visit you, along with your children. If you are still having attacks, you must understand that for the safety and well-being of your family, as well as of yourself, I would not be able to allow this visit. Do you understand?”

Mabry did, with agonized clarity. “Yes, sir.”

“Do you still maintain you had a nosebleed and not a delusional attack?”

I was shocked. Thornton had no superior powers, no higher insight. This wasn't medical treatment; it bore no
resemblance
to medical treatment. It was bartering, pure and simple. I wanted to scream.

“Yes, sir,” said Mabry.

“Nurse Weekes.” Thornton turned in his chair and suddenly all eyes were on me. “The incident report lists you as witness. What is your assessment?”

My face grew numb, and for a second my voice wouldn't work. “I'm not familiar with Captain Mabry's attacks, sir.”

Thornton closed his eyes briefly, as if greatly tried. “First of all, he is not a captain here. We have no ranks at Portis House.”

Except for you,
I thought. But I said, “Yes, sir.”

“Please explain, in your capacity as a medical professional, what Mr. Mabry experienced.”

“Cap— Mr. Mabry experienced a nosebleed, sir.”

“It seemed to spontaneously bleed?”

“Yes.”

“And when it spontaneously bled, did Mr. Mabry ask you for assistance?”

“No.”

“And why was that?”

I could feel something closing in on me, like the drawstrings of a bag tightening over my head. “He wasn't speaking.”

“He chose not to speak? Or he could not speak?”

I said nothing.

“Answer the question, Nurse Weekes.”

I looked around the room. Mabry was staring straight ahead, at nothing; the others gazed down at their laps. Even Creeton was subdued. They all had their own requests to make, their own cases to plead. Jack Yates still leaned forward on his elbows, his body somehow coiled and tense in his casual pose. He was, I thought, the only man who could have helped—if he had been in the dining room to witness it, and not shut in his room.

I'd be dismissed if I lied, and everyone knew it. I choked out the words. “He couldn't speak.”

Thornton's gaze drilled into me. “Because he was lying on the floor barely conscious—is that correct? Precision is the most important part of diagnosis, Nurse Weekes. Please be precise.”

I gritted my teeth. I could not look at Mabry again. “He was lying on the floor, unable to speak.”

Thornton turned back around in his chair and wrote in his notebook. “This request is denied, Mr. Mabry. And next time, don't try to lie to me.”

It was hard to understand, the feeling that settled downward on my shoulders and my chest, the feeling that I could be sick if only I had the ambition to move. I'd done as I'd been asked; I'd told the truth. I'd avoided getting sacked, my only goal in this job. I risked a glance at Captain Mabry, who had not moved, had not spoken, and yet his entire demeanor had sunk into despair. Thornton had taught me a lesson, intentional or not:
You are not their friend. You are not ever their friend. Not ever.

It had to be public, of course. We'd had a supervisor in the wool factory who always chastised girls in public, in the middle of the work floor. He'd fired girls in front of us, sending them out the door in tears as we watched. It was the same with these sessions; nothing—no humiliation or lesson—could be private. I'd never cared about being fired from the wool factory—which, of course, I was. But I cared about keeping my job at Portis House. I cared.

“We'll move on to you, Mr. Creeton,” said Dr. Thornton now.

Creeton shrugged. “There's nothing to say about me, gov.”

“Your parents have filed an application to visit you.”

For a second, sheer surprise crossed Creeton's face; then he lit up with a gleeful smile. “Wouldn't you know!” He turned to Captain Mabry. “Sorry about that, old chap. Looks like you can't see your family, but I can see mine.”

“Leave him be,” said Mr. MacInnes. He was whip thin, with graying hair and a close-trimmed mottled beard. “Just leave him be.”

Creeton turned on him. “You changed bedpans in the war, you drunken old sot. They won't let you see your family, either.”

“I did change bedpans,” MacInnes shot back as if grateful the tension had finally broken, “and I wiped the bums of men better than you.”

Archie laughed; Creeton turned on him next. “Shut it, you idiot. I shouldn't even be in here with the likes of you.”

“Gentlemen,” said Dr. Oliver.

“Tell them,” said Archie. “Tell them about—about the nightmares and see if they say you're not crazy. Do it—do it.”

“You think I won't beat you stupid just because you were in the infirmary?” Creeton's beefy hands curled over the arms of his cheap wooden chair. “Do you?” I started wondering whether Paulus Vries was outside the door as promised.

No one moved.

“Creeton,” said Jack Yates into the silence. “Enough.”

Jack's elbows were still on his thighs. He raised his head, his hands still dangling between his knees, and the pose immediately went from casual to that of a man ready to spring. He and Creeton exchanged a long look I could not read.

“I don't have nightmares,” said Creeton at last.

“We all have nightmares,” said Jack. “It doesn't matter.”

The other men exchanged alarmed looks. “Not me,” said MacInnes.

“No,” said Archie. “No.”

Jack looked at all of them and sighed.

Dr. Thornton finally broke in. “Right, then, Mr. Yates. Do we have the session under control now?”

Jack leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest. “Go ahead.”

“Thank you,” said Thornton, his voice cool. He turned back to the room. “Gentlemen. Let's continue, shall we?”

B
y five o'clock the day felt endless, as if it had begun far back in a tunnel I could no longer see the entrance to. My head throbbed and a sinister pulse of pain had started behind my eyes, growing with bloody force with each successive heartbeat. I blinked my sandpaper eyes and tried to keep focus.

We had finished all the groups; every patient at Portis House had been evaluated, or at least checked off a list. Dr. Thornton spoke the name of the man; the man mumbled something about how he was feeling much better; Dr. Thornton told him what request had been made by family, if any, and publicly told him whether it was granted or denied.

Jack Yates simply said he had not been sleeping. No one had requested to see him.

Thornton had made notes in his small book all afternoon, his pen scratching busily, but Dr. Oliver had had to remind him of the names of each of the men. I'd sat quietly in my corner as instructed, rousing myself only when voices were raised.

There had been a single nightmarish moment when Somersham had spoken about his dead sister—he became hysterical and had to be sedated. Thornton had turned to me with a simple barked command: “The syringes in my case, Nurse Weekes.” I'd grabbed the small black bag and unlatched it with damp fingers, but when I hesitated, Dr. Oliver reached in, removed a syringe, and quickly injected the patient as I stared in panicked nausea. It had taken me half an hour afterward, sitting in a corner with my hands pressed into my skirts, to stop shaking.

It was a long afternoon of misery. Patients were a means to an end, part of my job—not my friends, as Dr. Thornton had demonstrated. Lunatics. And yet as I heard a man plead to see his mother or his sweetheart, or burn with shame as he admitted to uncontrolled vomiting or the inability to sleep with a simple blanket touching his arms, I felt the stirrings of a burning, angry dissatisfaction. I started trying to understand.

I'd spent the war in London, going from shared flat to factory shifts or shopgirl work. The war had loomed large and encompassing, yet in the background. It was the topic among the girls at the lunch counter or the pubs, sweethearts shipping out, sweethearts home on leave. It was felt in the rationing, in the black-blazoned headlines that shouted at me from newspapers left in discarded trash bins or on park benches in early dawn on my way to work—stark, angry words like Mons and Passchendaele and Ypres, incalculable numbers of dead, ships sunk, blurry photographs of battles.

My brother, Sydney, had enlisted in the first weeks of war and had never sent home a single postcard. The first few months after he'd gone were the worst of my life; then I'd left home myself, and the war had sunk into a miserable background din, and I was certain he was dead. I had enough problems of my own to worry about what happened in France anymore.

Or so I had told myself.

But these men had been there. They had experienced something so otherworldly, so catastrophically horrible, that I would never know what they saw when they closed their eyes at night. Or what they heard when a plate banged on a table. They'd washed off the mud and the blood and been sent home, unlike Syd, and it had been so bad they couldn't cope with it. They'd ended up here. Something sounded in me, deep down like a bell being struck in the depths of the ocean, something that saddened and frightened me and made me exhausted in the same way one is exhausted after vigorously, repeatedly vomiting up one's supper.

Mabry hadn't seen his children because of me.
You are not their friend.

“I hope that was instructive,” Dr. Thornton said to me as the last few men filed from the room. “Have you any questions, Nurse?”

“No, Doctor.”

“Come now,” Dr. Oliver chimed in. “There must be something?”

I turned to them. “It just seems . . . it just seems that it isn't actually treatment the men get. Medical treatment, I mean. They're just . . . motivated to behave.”
Like in a prison.

Dr. Thornton nodded. “You've come from casualty cases, so the confusion is understandable. Mental cases are very different, Nurse Weekes, especially cases of shell shock. Did you think we could give them a bandage, perhaps, or a pill, and cure them?”

“These men,” said Dr. Oliver, “need to
learn
.”

I looked from one man to the other. “What about Jack Yates? Does he need to learn?”

“Ah,” Thornton said. “That went better than expected, did it not? Perhaps I should explain. Patient Sixteen came to us with instructions from the highest level of government—the highest, I repeat—that his stay here was to remain confidential. I don't think anyone will trust a madman's account, but it's good to be certain. You've been given great trust today. I hope you can keep it.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why the secrecy?”

Thornton leaned in so he could not possibly be overheard by anyone except Dr. Oliver. “Mr. Yates was a great hero to this country. To know that he has fallen to this . . .” He gestured around the room. “To know that he has fallen to such a low level would, I think, be detrimental to morale.”

My head throbbed with pain. “But the war is over.”

“Our great country is involved in many operations the world over,” he replied, “and will continue to be. The will of the people behind government is important. If it were to be known that Jack Yates had become a coward . . .”

I choked, any anger I'd ever felt at Jack evaporating. “Jack Yates is not a coward.”

Dr. Oliver patted my hand. “You're a loyal lady, and we admire you for it. But you must understand that there is nothing lower for a man than this, than to come here. To be one of . . . these.”

“Nothing lower,” Dr. Thornton agreed.

I followed them to the corridor, the two of them conferring quietly together. I waited for them to finish their conversation, for them to dismiss me at last. There was a single crack in the wall, hairline thin, making its way down from the ceiling. Outside, the sun struggled to break through a thick cotton layer of cloud. I had the sudden desire to walk out the door and keep walking, walking, breathing the warm, damp air.

Why had none of the men admitted to having nightmares?

“Doctors.” Matron approached us, only slightly reddened from her climb up the stairs from the lower reaches of the house. “You are finished, I see.”

“Yes,” Dr. Oliver replied. “We are ready for the weekly debriefing.”

“Certainly.” She looked at me in a signal of clear dismissal, for which I could have kissed her feet. “Thank you, Nurse Weekes.”

“Actually,” Dr. Thornton said, “I'd like Nurse Weekes to accompany us to the debriefing. I believe it could be beneficial to her training.”

Matron was already flushed, so I couldn't tell whether her color deepened. “That won't be possible.”

“I do believe I have Mr. Deighton's authority, Matron, in matters of protocol.”

“You do, of course. What I meant is that Nurse Weekes can't be spared just now. She goes on night shift as of tonight and is scheduled to take some rest before her shift begins.”

That stunned me out of my exhausted reverie, but before I could open my mouth, Matron had turned her gimlet stare on me. “Come with me, Nurse Weekes.”

We stood at the foot of the servants' stairs before she spoke again. “I'll send Nurse Beachcombe to you when I can. She'll tell you what's required on night shift. You're to report at eleven, after the others have gone off duty.”

“This is it, isn't it?” I said, childish in my outrage. “This is my punishment. The incident report wasn't good enough for you. Why don't you just sack me and have done with it? Or is it because you're so understaffed?”

Matron sighed. “Please go now and prepare for night shift.”

“What was it?” I said to her. “What made you hate me so? Was it the fact that I was requested by the doctors without your
clearance
? Or was it that I actually cleaned that disgusting lav?”

She looked at me for a long moment. I knew nothing of Matron; I didn't know where she came from, or whether she had a family or friends, or even what her first name was. I realized as I looked into her hard, square face with its blunt fringe of hair that this opaqueness was utterly deliberate on her part. If she had her way, I would learn no more about her than I could learn from the statue of Mary on the front lawn. For a second she seemed about to say something; then she changed her mind, her eyes glittering as she looked at me.

“You have a great deal to learn, Nurse Weekes,” she said.

I turned to stomp up the stairs, but she gripped my arm. “Dr. Thornton left his notebook in the common room. Please fetch it; then, for God's sake, go.”

I fetched the notebook, the fine leather smooth and heavy in my hand. I was in such a storm of emotion that I had nearly left the empty common room again before I realized what I was holding.

I remembered Dr. Thornton scribbling diligently all afternoon, his pen scratching. I felt queasy, not with unease at what I was about to do, but with a horrible, creeping suspicion. I opened the notebook.

There was a page of names, the names of our patients. Beside each was a thick black check mark.

And the rest of the pages—four in all—were covered in inky doodles, of clumsy giraffes and splotchy elephants, a dog sitting on his hind legs begging, a cat with long whiskers. A hillside dotted with trees and houses.

I snapped the book shut, and I did not notice that my hands were shaking.

•   •   •

T
here was no point in undressing, as I'd only have a few hours to sleep, so I dropped onto my narrow bed in the nursery, untying my boots and letting them fall to the floor. I lay on top of the thin quilt fully clothed and rubbed my eyes.

Exhaustion took my body, but my mind was alive with all I'd seen. Something in me was shifting, changing. I felt as if I'd been touched with an electric wire. I'd never sleep. I rolled over and reached down, finding the book and the locket under the bed.

I pulled both of them onto the bed next to me and propped myself up on an elbow, opening the book.
Practical Nursing: An Everyday Textbook for Nurses.
I ran my finger down the table of contents.

Nina had told me there would be no time to read at Portis House, and she'd been right. I owned no books myself, but I had perused the shelf of books in the common room—
Ethan Frome, The Thirty-Nine Steps
—and silently selected the ones I wanted. Books were a means to an end, even novels; for the more a person knew, the less she could be taken in.

Treatment of infectious disease. Bandaging practices. The lancing of boils. On disinfection. Correct suturing.
I'd been caught unawares earlier when Dr. Thornton had expected me to inject a patient and I'd hesitated. I'd been lucky neither man had noticed. I turned to the chapter titled “Intravenous injections” and began to read.

Footsteps approached from the hall and I flipped the book shut, shoving it under my pillow just as Martha came to the door. “Matron sent me,” she said. “Do you want the curtains shut?”

“No,” I said. “I won't sleep.”

“It doesn't help much anyway,” she agreed. “Matron says I'm to bring you supper if you like.”

I'd been sent away before supper. Matron wanted to get rid of me that badly. I had no wish to put yet more work on Martha, who had handled night shift already. “I'm not hungry.”

Martha sat on the edge of the bed and groaned as the weight came off her feet. “I'm sorry about night shift, but I can't say I'm sorry for my own sake. I'm so tired. I'll appreciate a good sleep tonight— that's for certain.”

I was still lying on my side, propped on an elbow, and from my position I could see the thin bones of her shoulder blades through the back of her blouse. How someone as small and thin as Martha accomplished the monumental workload at Portis House was rather surprising. “What do I do on night shift, then?” I asked.

“Oh, yes.” Martha rubbed her ankles, not willing to go quite so far as to remove her shoes. “Well, there's a desk next to the stairwell door in the men's hallway—you've likely seen it.”

“Yes. In the nook built into the wall.”

“That's the one. That's the night nurse's desk. You sit there, though you make rounds once per hour, checking on the men. Their doors should be open, or at least ajar, except for Patient Sixteen. Those are the rules. You go as quietly as you can and you check to see they're sleeping.”

“It sounds dull.”

Martha rubbed her eyes. “Perhaps. It's easy, unless any of the men has a bad night. Then it gets more exciting than you'd like.”

I thought of the sessions I'd listened to earlier that day. “They have nightmares?”

“If it happens, you get the orderly—I think Roger is on duty tonight. Though you likely won't have to fetch him, because he'll hear and come on his own. You shouldn't approach the patient without an orderly, because when they're in that state, they tend to thrash. You probably know all of this from London.”

“Just tell me.”

“Well, all right. Most of them calm down nicely once they're awake. If a man wakes and he doesn't calm down, there are hypodermics in the nurse's desk, locked in the drawer, for emergencies.”

I lay back, feeling the hard edge of the book under my pillow. I'd have to study before I went on duty tonight, and pray that things were calm. “And what do I do the rest of the time? When the men aren't having nightmares?”

“You count linens,” said Martha. “The inventory lists are in the top drawer of the nurse's desk, as well as a pen and ink. Both the upstairs and the downstairs closets. Make sure to count the linens on each man's bed, or the count will be off.”

I stared at her. “We count the linens every night?”