Amy (18 page)

Some of the men carried the equipment to the door and Amy followed to say goodbye. An officer in uniform was standing just inside the door, his cap in his hand. ‘Madame Curie,’ he said. He bent down to her and she stopped and smiled and listened to what he was
saying so earnestly. She took a notebook out of her pocket and wrote in it. She nodded and patted the officer on his arm. He turned around, and Amy saw with surprise that it was Dan.

Madame Curie left the hospital and Dan looked around him. When he saw Amy his face lit up in a surprised smile and he came quickly towards her. ‘Amy!’ he said. ‘I thought you were in England. How very nice to see you.’

She smiled and took his outstretched hand. ‘I’ve just come back.’

‘How is your father?’

She was surprised he knew that her father had been ill. ‘He’s much better,’ she said. ‘But how did you know…?’

He grinned. ‘Helen writes to Peter, so I get all the news. I’ve got my spies, you see. I’m keeping track of you. I know what you’re doing.’

She looked at him. I hope you don’t, she thought. Not everything.

He smiled down at her. ‘I’m only joking.’

‘What are you doing here?’ she said. ‘More army business?’

He shook his head. ‘Not this time. I heard that Madame Curie was going to be here and I wanted to ask her to come to us. She says she will. If only we had more X-ray machines. It would be infinitely useful. Sometimes it’s almost impossible to see what you’re doing.’ He turned his cap around in his hand. ‘I don’t suppose it’s possible for you to come out tonight?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m off at eight, but I’d have to ask Matron.’

He nodded. ‘Could you ask her now? I’ll wait.’

Matron sighed but gave her consent. ‘Be back by ten, Amy.’

Dan gave a huge grin. ‘Well done. I’ll pick you up just after eight. We’ll go to the same hotel we went to before. I’ll get a cab if I have to hold one up like Dick Turpin.’ He put on his cap and left the hotel, waving briefly from the street.

He’s changed again, she thought. Every time she saw him he looked, not older, but harder, leaner, more predatory. She could hardly
remember
the fresh-faced young man she had first met. His ears didn’t turn pink now when he spoke to her. He was different. We’re all changing, she thought. This war is changing us all: Dan becoming stronger, tougher, implacable; Johnny becoming perhaps more reckless. And she? She didn’t know. Life now for everyone was a jumble of emotions, of fear, and strength and superhuman courage. Nothing and no one would ever be the same.

‘What are you going to wear?’ Helen said that evening. ‘You can borrow my green dress if you like.’

Amy was sitting in front of the mirror, putting up her hair. ‘Thank you, but no. I’ll wear my pink thing again.’

Helen leant over her shoulder. ‘What are you going to do?’

Amy took two long hairpins out of her mouth. ‘What about?’

‘You know.’

Amy laughed. ‘You’re just a little old-fashioned romantic, Helen. I don’t have to do anything. They are both just friends.’

‘You can fool some of the people all the time,’ Helen said. ‘You seem to be determined to fool yourself.’

‘We have more important things to think about,’ Amy said. She took her cloak out of the wardrobe, said goodnight, and walked down the marble staircase to where Dan waited.

The waiter settled them at their table and handed them menus.

‘I don’t know how they do it,’ Dan said, ‘producing food like this under these circumstances.’

Amy nodded. ‘The French can make anything taste good. It makes one wonder what it would be like in normal times.’

He was studying his menu. ‘Perhaps we’ll be able to find out one day,’ he said.

She glanced at him sharply. It was the second time he had said something like that, something about the future. But he didn’t raise his head, didn’t look at her.

The waiter came back and they ordered, potage and a Chicken Marengo.

‘How were things at home?’ he said.

‘Lots of shortages, especially anything that has to be imported – sugar, oranges, bananas. There was even a shortage of onions for a while. We used to get the French onion sellers on their bicycles. They’ve gone now, of course.’

‘And how was your father?’

‘He’s well now, physically at least. But I know he’s filled with dread. I can see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice. It’s his boys at school, fine boys, seventeen or eighteen years old, and they almost all
volunteer
as soon as they can, as soon as they leave school. Several of them are already dead. He knows them all so well. He can hardly bear it. It
can’t do his health any good.’

He put his hand over hers. ‘Oh Amy.’

Tears started in her eyes but she blinked them away. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Other people have worse things to deal with. I’m just being weak.’

He pressed her hand gently. ‘You’re just being human, Amy. There’s nothing wrong with caring, even though it hurts sometimes. We can’t become automata, without feeling. If we lose the ability to care we lose everything and this dreadful evil has won.’ His hand on hers felt strong, comforting.

‘I know,’ she said. He was almost repeating her father’s words.

The waiter came with their soup and Dan took his hand away slowly. ‘You look very nice,’ he said. ‘Is that a new dress?’

She looked at him and laughed. ‘It’s the same one I wore last time.’

He looked sheepish. ‘Is it really? I’m afraid I’m not very good at … fashion.’

She laughed again and he smiled back. ‘You still look very nice.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘We do our best.’

They finished their soup and the waiter brought the chicken, and then a fruit pudding. Dan ate everything before him as if he’d been starved. The waiter cleared the table and brought their coffee.

‘Wonderful,’ Dan said. ‘Real food.’ He stirred sugar into his coffee, looking at her. ‘Amy?’ he said. ‘What do you intend to do after the war?’

She was taken by surprise and for a moment didn’t know what to say. ‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually. ‘How can anyone know? I’m just getting through every day.’

‘Don’t you have any dreams? Anything you really want to do?’

He seemed so calm, so reliable and sensible that she was almost tempted to tell him, but that wouldn’t do any good. He couldn’t help her. ‘I’m not going to think about it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what the world will be like then.’ She didn’t want to talk about herself. ‘What about you?’

‘Back to peacetime medicine,’ he said. His voice was filled with enthusiasm. ‘It’s going to get better and better, Amy. We’ve learnt so much already in this dreadful war – so much about surgery and
infection
and hygiene and nutrition. Science is moving on.’

She smiled. ‘You sound like my father,’ she said. ‘He’s mad about science.’

‘I’d like to meet him,’ he said. ‘He sounds like a man after my own heart.’

She smiled briefly and looked down, away from him, saying
nothing
.

‘And, of course,’ he said, ‘I’d like to marry and have a family one day.’

She glanced at him, but he was looking at his cup, stirring his coffee again. When he looked up his expression was bland and casual. ‘How is Helen? Peter will certainly ask me.’

‘She’s very well.’ She was relieved that he had changed the subject. ‘She’s a great girl, a good friend. Still very much a suffragist, though that’s been shelved for the time being.’

‘I think,’ he said, ‘Peter is in love with her.’

‘Is he?’ she said, warily. Apparently he hadn’t changed the subject after all.

‘Has Helen said anything?’ he said. ‘Is she in love with him?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why? Has he asked you to find out?’

He looked embarrassed. ‘No, of course not. I just wondered.’ He was silent for a moment, and then he said, ‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea, in a war like this one, to say too much, to get too involved.’ He paused again. ‘I’d hate to think that I might leave a wife, perhaps a child on the way, and not be there to look after them. I couldn’t do that.’ He looked at her, into her eyes. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I do. I quite agree with you.’

He nodded slowly. His expression seemed to her to be a strange mixture of relief and disappointment. What had he expected her to say? ‘Helen will do what she thinks best,’ she said. ‘She is sensible and independent. I would trust her decisions.’

‘Of course.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s time I got you back to the hospital or Matron will be after my blood.’

The cab was waiting outside. He helped her in and followed her. They clopped back to the hospital. ‘I hope you won’t tell Helen about that conversation,’ he said. ‘Peter must make his own decisions, too.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I understand. I won’t say anything.’

He handed her out at the door. ‘I won’t come in,’ he said. ‘I must be on my way back. Thank you so much for the evening, Amy. I’ll keep in touch.’ She held out her hand. He took it and held it in both of his. He smiled down at her, then turned abruptly and got back into the cab.
‘Gare du Nord,’ he said to the driver, and the cab clopped away down the street.

She went into the hotel and stood for a moment inside the door. She imagined him reaching the station, taking the train packed with men, getting off the train into an army lorry, bumping along those ravaged roads, reaching the field hospital. She saw him, masked and gowned, operating while shells and bullets screamed around them.

She walked wearily up the great staircase, tired out by the evening, by the strain of Dan’s conversation, by unspoken emotions, so many things not said. Were all those remarks about marriage and
relationships
directed at Helen and Peter? She didn’t think so. Dan seemed to be giving her some kind of message. She had to admit now that Helen was probably right and Dan did have feelings for her. But he was also a man in control, who would say nothing until he thought the time was right. He wasn’t facing her with decisions or declarations. He was content, for the moment, to be a friend. He had not attempted to kiss her. He was not Johnny.

Helen was asleep. Amy was glad about that. She wasn’t ready to give the expected account of the evening. She could be flippant
tomorrow
.

Amy knew that she would never forget that April as long as she lived. The English newspapers were late, but got to them eventually. Her father’s letters reported the same things – Zeppelin raids on Newcastle, German aircraft bombing the East Anglian towns,
civilians
dead, women and children. Nowhere was safe any more. Then, on 22 April, the Germans unleashed chlorine gas on the totally
unprepared
Allied troops in the trenches. The reports came in. The foul cloud had rolled over the trenches, the men had screamed and clutched their throats, coughed up blood and tissue and died in agony.

‘Those Germans signed the Hague Commission in 1907,’ Helen shouted in rage. ‘They agreed never to use poisonous weapons.’

Amy blanched, unable to reply.

Soon the men began to come in, blinded, coughing up their lungs, dying. Amy had thought that she had seen everything, but she had never seen anything like this.

Then the men came in from the battle for Hill 60 and for some reason
there were more abdominal wounds than they had seen before. Amy ached to get into the theatre, to anastomose the shattered intestines, remove tattered organs, make the necessary colostomies to save their lives. The surgeons worked hour after hour, day and night. Often Amy was asked to help in theatre, to count swabs, carry away dishes of amputated tissue, apply dressings to dreadful wounds. She watched the surgeons, missing nothing.

Then, at the end of April, came the disastrous news from Gallipoli, where the ANZACS were dying in their thousands, in a hell of heat, flies, dysentery, skin sores and, of course, the relentless Turkish bullets.

May, then, and Helen running into their room with a French
newspaper
. ‘Look Amy. Oh look!’ The
Lusitania
, a civilian liner on its way to America, had been sunk by German submarines. Over a thousand innocent people were drowned, including more than a hundred Americans who weren’t in the war at all.

The months ground by, one wearied day after another. The wounded poured in, shot, shelled, gassed; with typhoid, typhus,
shell-shocked
, exhausted. Time seemed to stand still, unchanging, and yet it flew by; summer, autumn again and the trees turning gold in the boulevards. Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, Loos. One useless battle after another, and thousands dead for nothing, Nurse Edith Cavell, put up against a wall and shot as a spy by the Germans, a woman, a nurse. Christmas again, and New Year’s Day, 1916; the effort to be cheerful for the men, knowing that there was no end in sight.

Amy dressed, ready for the day, for the endless chores and forced cheerfulness. For a moment she sat back on her bed, her eyes closed. She felt suddenly chilled, as if her blood had turned to ice. She did not want to feel anything, ever again, no pity, no compassion. Feeling was too painful. She could not. They had to go on, day after day, wading through one horror after another, hoping in a kind of foolish fantasy that one day it would end.

‘Are you all right, Amy?’ Helen sat on the bed beside her.

‘No,’ Amy said. ‘I’m not. I feel as if my heart has been taken out of my body. I don’t think I will ever feel anything again.’

Helen took her hand. ‘You need someone to put it back,’ she said. ‘You need someone to love you and care for you and put back all the feeling that you’ve lost. I don’t think I could go on if it wasn’t for Peter.
Even though I don’t see him very often I know he’s there, thinking about me.’

‘I don’t know how you do it, Helen,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how you can risk it – loving someone like that.’

‘It’s worth the risk,’ Helen said. ‘It keeps me alive. Let it go, Amy. Take the risk.’

There was a knock at the door and Helen went to answer it.

‘There’s someone downstairs for Miss Osborne,’ the maid said. ‘It’s an officer.’