Stella Bain (2 page)
Physical fear begins to climb Stella’s spine, and yet she has done this before, has she not? Her hand shakes on the gearshift. She squeezes her shoulder blades together, expecting a direct hit to the Croix Rouge symbol on the roof. She has no idea where the road begins. She struggles to see the slightest indication of tracks, but smoke clouds the path. How will she find her way back to camp with the wounded inside? Regulations prohibit her from stopping at any point, even if the men behind her start to shout.
She senses the bump of each stretcher as it is loaded into the back of the bus. She waits for the pounding on the wooden panel.
Stella does not know how many are in the back, how badly wounded they are. She cannot even be sure it is the orderly himself who has signaled to her. She wishes he were up front so that she could talk to him.
“Left,” she says aloud to herself as she finds and follows the tracks. And later, “Slow down.”
When she arrives back at camp, she slides like a reptile from the driver’s seat. Despite the cold, she has perspired through to her coat. She counts the wounded as they are unloaded. She is struck by their apparent freedom from pain. Stranger still, she can hear one of them whistling. She feels stronger and lighter than she has in months.
One day, walking through the camp, Stella hears a man curse the institution that assigned his brother to a ship that sank. Her mind snags on the word
Admiralty
in the sentence. She puzzles over it so much in the days that follow that
Admiralty
becomes a kind of mythic goal, a monolith drawing her toward it. She believes that she will one day reach it, and she hopes that once she sees the building or the landscape, she will remember why it seems to be so important. But how strange, because to her knowledge she has never been in England. Can her quest be the result of an event in her former life?
Admiralty
hums in its own layer, the one behind the present moment and before the void that is her memory. A word. A title. A note. It presses and troubles her, even when she actively tries to think of something else.
Stella learns that the Admiralty, headquarters to the British Royal Navy, stands in central London. She begins to cherish the word because she believes it comes from her previous life, perhaps the first chink in the armor of her inner mind, where memory and identity lie. Has she ever worked at the Admiralty? Lived close to it? Did she once have a husband who worked there? The notion threatens her, because she cannot imagine having forgotten something as basic as a man she loved and the intimacy they shared. Often she studies her fingers, searching for a tiny circle that might signal the previous presence of a wedding band. But she has found nothing. In the privacy of her tent, shortly after her arrival, she conducted a physical examination. A husband or a lover is a possibility.
Throughout the summer, Stella’s life consists of tending to the wounded, driving an ambulance, and drawing on paper with a pencil. In this way, she sometimes forgets that she cannot remember.
In October, Stella is granted leave. She thinks this might be her one chance to get to England. She must find the Admiralty and discover its importance. Jeanne tells her she should go to Paris.
Stella asks for and is given a canvas satchel in which she packs her British uniform, her sketches, and the money she has earned from making portraits of nurses and their aides.
Once in Paris, she catches a train for the coast, where, she has heard, English hospital ships carrying wounded men are setting out for home. But the train, due to heavy bombardment, has to stop before it reaches Étaples. Even from a distance of ten miles, the shelling can be heard. The hospital personnel are urged to stay in their seats; the train will be rerouted.
With her satchel, Stella slips from the train and makes her way into the woods. If her exit has been seen, will they bother to look for her? She cannot imagine a doctor or a train conductor trying to find her. Stella remains, for the moment, a stateless woman in a lawless country.
The journey through the forest is arduous and frightening, but gradually the woods thin out to reveal the coastal village. Along the way, she encounters a chaos such as she has never seen before. She begins to cough, whether from the smoke or illness she cannot tell. In Étaples, Stella discovers that the large Red Cross hospital ship to which the wounded were headed has partially sunk.
She ducks inside a tent and changes into her British VAD uniform. “I’ve lost my way,” she tells the first official-looking British man she meets.
“They’re using smaller ships now to get across the Channel. There’s a dock at the eastern end you might try.”
Stella locates a ship that was perhaps a ferry or a pleasure boat. There is no pleasure aboard it now. When she sees the cargo, she gasps. The wounded and the dead have not been separated. The calls of the injured sound as if they come from an underworld she has only dreamed about. Here and there, she observes nurse’s aides like herself comforting men and applying dressings.
No one asks to see her identity card. No one cares. She does what she has been doing for months in Marne, tending to the wounded and assisting with operations that cannot wait until they reach the shore.
When in England, Stella boards a train with the most seriously hurt, the ones who might not, even with a doctor’s ministrations, make it to Victoria station. En route, the men are sick and their bowels loosen. There is a priest on board to deliver last rites, and it is one of Stella’s duties to make sure she can find the man at any given moment.
In London, Stella silently wishes the wounded well and then leaves them. Trading with the soldiers heading toward the front, she exchanges her French money for English money. Exhausted, Stella follows a crowd along what looks to be a main thoroughfare. She walks in a direction she thinks will lead to the Admiralty, but after a while senses that she has made a mistake. Finding herself on a narrow lane, she tries to retrace her steps. She walks without food or water, fingering the unfamiliar British coins inside her pocket. She moves forward until she can walk no more, but still she keeps trudging. She walks until she comes to a stop against a wrought-iron fence. A woman in a rose-colored suit asks her a question.
A
woman in a rose-colored suit, which strikes Stella as both odd and beautiful because she has seen little color on anyone in London, asks her if she is unwell.
“My name is Lily Bridge. From my window across the garden, I saw you leaning against the fence. Pardon my candor, but you seem to be overwrought.”
Who, Stella would like to know, is not overwrought in this time and place?
Stella can barely lift herself upright. All of life, it seems, resembles static from a radio, full of people and words and smells, if only she could sort out the frequencies. Sometimes the confusion taxes her intellect, as if it were a problem she had to solve. At other times, it is a soft cocoon that comforts her.
“Will you walk over to our house and come inside and sit for a minute?” Lily asks. “It’s quite raw out here.”
Stella does not want to give herself over to another, but at the moment, she is not sure she will even make it to the woman’s front door.
Lily takes Stella’s arm. Stella coughs deeply and is rattled by a searing pain in her chest. After she steps inside, a butler takes her cloak and gloves and satchel. Lily urges her toward a fire in a large, welcoming room. In the warmth, Stella becomes aware of the awful stench that wafts from her. It is, she knows, the smell of French muck, of men’s leaking wounds, and of fear. She has not washed in two days.
Stella cannot remember the last time she stood in someone’s house. The shiny red tiles of the fireplace surround, the mantel with its diamond-paned frieze below the shelf, and the tulip chandelier intrigue her. Many volumes have been pressed together on the shelves of a bookcase.
Stella cannot sit, as she has been asked to do, on the striped red silk settee. She wants no part of her filthy uniform to touch the pristine surroundings. When Lily insists, however, Stella lowers herself to the edge of a paisley wing chair. Lily, who seems attentive to her mood, murmurs soothing words from time to time.
A man comes through the front door, bringing with him the bluster of the weather and an air of affability. “I’ve come to tell you that I’ll be late tonight,” he says, addressing Lily. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you had a guest.” He gives his hat and coat to the butler, whom he calls Streeter.
“August, this woman is a VAD,” Lily explains. “I found her quite exhausted, and I invited her to sit for a moment.”
“Yes, of course,” says the man, who studies Stella.
In turn, she notices a tall tuft of dark hair, a clean-shaven face, navy eyes inside silver spectacles. She senses a strong intelligence.
The butler returns with a tray of biscuits, cheese, and apple slices as well as a large pot of tea. Stella takes her cup and holds it with both hands, not trusting herself not to drop it. An odd quiet descends. It is the silence of embarrassment, apprehension, and ordinary kindness.
“My name is Stella Bain,” she announces after a time. “As you must have guessed, I am an American.”
Lily persuades Stella to go upstairs and lie down. As Stella follows Iris, Lily’s maid, she hears Lily, on the bottom step, speaking in a low voice to her husband in the hallway. “I think she isn’t at all well.”
“I agree. I’ll telephone Michael Fain straightaway.”
Lily shows Stella her bedroom. In it, she waits for the maid to draw her a bath.
“You can sleep here,” Lily says.
“You are very kind.”
Stella is used to being told what to do. In any case, there is no thought of doing otherwise. After her bath, she changes into her nightgown and slips between the sheets. She drifts off, but is woken often during the night by her worsening cough.
Dr. Fain makes several visits, alarmed by Stella’s rising fever. She is aware of a genial man whose hair might once have been blond and who wears golden spectacles. She is unused to doctors who have the time to perform proper examinations, to talk to their patients, and even, occasionally, to smile.
The doctor prescribes medicine, but Stella does not seem to get any better. Feverish, she soaks her sheets at night and sits outside her room while the maid changes them. Lily, in her dressing gown, stands near Stella, sometimes resting a hand on her shoulder.
Stella drinks hot bouillon and cool water. On the fifth night, there is an unexpected crisis, and Dr. Fain is summoned to the home. Stella’s fever is dangerously high, and she is having trouble breathing. Lily, the doctor, and Iris take turns sitting with Stella during the night. She hallucinates a fire and tries to climb out of bed. Her head aches nearly all the time. She sweats and shivers and coughs so much her throat hurts.
When she is alone with Dr. Fain, she asks him his diagnosis. He hesitates, knowing that she is a nurse’s aide and will understand the gravity of the pronouncement. “Pneumonia, I think,” he says quietly.
“I thought as much,” Stella replies, turning her face away.
Her recovery is both agonizingly slow and remarkable. As her cough eases up, her temperature gradually returns to normal. Lily brings fattening lunches to Stella’s room and often stays to eat with her. They make pleasant conversation. Stella learns that Lily is originally from Greenwich, that she and August have been married eight years, and that she volunteers at a settlement house three days a week. Stella is surprised to discover that Lily’s husband is also a doctor, a cranial surgeon with a clinic in Harley Street.
“He works all the hours of the day,” Lily says, perhaps offering a subtle apology for why he has not visited Stella. She is surprised that he did not once come to see how she was faring.
Lily is petite, with coloring opposite from Stella’s. Whereas Stella has acorn-colored hair and golden brown eyes, Lily is blond, with light blue eyes. She dresses well, but not extravagantly—a nod to the war, Stella suspects.
On the eleventh day, Stella opens the velvet drapery to sunshine. She feels better than she has in weeks. In the mahogany wardrobe, she finds, in addition to her uniform, two dresses tailored in the style of the uniform. One is navy wool with silver embroidery on the collar; the other is the color of tea with milk. She is to make a decision then. If she chooses the uniform, the garment will announce, once she descends the stairs, her intention to leave the house. If she picks either the navy or fawn dress, she will be signaling that she will stay, even though she has not been formally invited to do so. With some reluctance—she wants nothing more than to return to the bed—she puts on the uniform, appreciating its cleanliness.
Stella does not want to leave the room. Apart from its comforts, which are many—the bed with its ironed sheets, the enormous bath and warm towels, the pretty arrangement of boudoir chairs nestled in front of the tall window—she knows that to open the door is to reenter the world as she knew it just eleven days ago, the world of battlefields and guns and shrapnel and dead and dying bodies. She has nearly as much fear of leaving the bedchamber this late October morning as she might have of entering a ward of grotesquely injured men while deafening German shells pound the earth.
Lily, who is waiting for Stella at the bottom of the stairs, holds her smile even though Stella is in uniform. “You are intending to leave us,” she pronounces.
“I find I must.”
Lily, flustered, backs up as Stella descends the stairs.
“My gratitude toward you and your husband is immense,” Stella says. “I can never thank you enough, though I hope you will allow me to pay for my care.”
Stella opens her satchel, but Lily waves her hand away. “Nonsense,” she says. “I’d have done the same for anyone in your condition.”
Stella reluctantly closes her satchel and sets it by her feet.
“August will be home in ten minutes for the luncheon. He’ll be upset with me if I have let you go. Besides, you cannot leave without some nourishment.”