Broken Music (15 page)

A few nights before, Nella had started a spell of night duty. She had long since found that, even in a convalescent ward, it wasn't the easy option people thought it, with men asleep all through a quiet night and nothing much to do. Most of the patients at Oaklands were, or had been, serious cases, and few nights went by without someone reliving the horrors they would never speak of during the day. Then, they kept up a cheerfulness, and the sense of humour which had kept them going throughout the worst of what war could do. But the unguarded night for many was tormented by wild dreams of fighting for breath in the gas-filled trenches; or the terror of being drowned in six feet of mud, or buried by debris, being caught on the wire and left wounded when they were sent on what was virtually a suicide mission, over the top, straight into the face of the enemy guns.

Sometimes it was just sufficient to hold their hands until the terror had abated somewhat, or simply to listen – it was easier to talk in the dark. And there were the quiet periods, of course, when it was possible, with the aid of a lamp turned low on the desk at the end of the ward, to write up notes and patients' records, when most of the men were asleep or if not, lying quietly, waiting to get through the night.

It had been one of the quiet nights in the ward which had once been the ballroom, towards midnight, and Nella was waiting for Burkin to arrive and relieve her so that she could take her break, when the ward suddenly erupted. She rushed to investigate the uproar.

Sergeant Major ‘Bomber' Broadbent was one of the living legends in the hospital. Reputedly a terror for discipline on the front line, though fair-minded and personally fearless, he was a treasure to the nursing staff. He'd lost the fingers of his left hand and half his jaw, and was having to learn how to speak so that he could be understood, but that didn't prevent him from chivvying those men who were well enough, exhorting them to join in activities to pass the time and keep up morale – entertainments between themselves, whist drives, anything he could think of. His current project was to involve any of those who were able to wield a hoe, or pull a weed, in a campaign designed to make a start on smartening up the Oaklands gardens. He was stoical about his injuries and didn't normally cause any trouble, but the noise was coming from the direction of where he slept at the far end of the ward. When Nella got there she found that he had rolled out of his bed onto the floor and was kicking up his legs, not shouting in pain, but singing, roaring like a bull.

‘Sorry I can't help you, love. It's me bunions, see,' said Taffy Davies, who made terrible jokes, from the next bed. He had had an amputation of his right foot, and most of the muscles and bones in the same leg were shattered, too.

‘Ighty-iddle-de-ighty, take me back to Blighty,

Blighty is the place for me!'
roared the sergeant.

‘Stow the hymn-singing, chum! Give us a bit of hush, for Gawd's sake,' came from the other side of the ward, an injunction taken up by several others until, all at once, quiet descended like a blanket. With a soft jingle of keys and a steely glance Matron had arrived on the scene to investigate. Five foot tall, Miss Inman ran her hospital strictly according to Miss Nightingale's principles and many more stringent ones of her own, and all of the men, not to mention some of the doctors, were terrified of her.

‘Nurse Wentworth, this man is drunk! Where did he get
this
?' she demanded, picking up a now empty whisky bottle that lay on the floor beside Bomber and holding it fastidiously at arms' length from her starched bosom.

‘Visiting day today, Matron. You know how it is.'

‘Yes, I do know – and so should the visitors. Haven't they been warned often enough not to bring drink in to the men? They might be convalescent, but they're still patients. Nurse Wentworth, get him back into bed immediately. I'll send someone to help you.'

‘That's all right, Matron. I'll give nurse a hand.'

A male voice sounded behind Nella; a pair of strong hands appeared to help heave the dead weight of the big soldier into bed.

‘In that case, I'll leave you to it.'

‘Yes, Matron,' Nella replied to her outraged, departing back. ‘Come on, Bomber.'

‘Oh, you're a lovely girl, Sister. Give us a cuddle, Sister.
Ighty-iddle-de-ighty, tickle me up me nightie
…
'

‘You've blotted your copybook with Matron this time,' Nella said, trying not to laugh. ‘Just as well she didn't hear that.'

‘I expect she's heard much worse,' commented her helper.

The task of getting him into bed accomplished, quite suddenly the sergeant major stopped singing, his head fell back and immediately he began to snore loudly.

‘Don't be too hard on the poor bugger – begging your pardon, Sister,' Taffy Evans remarked, ‘but the whisky does him more good than his medicine, you know. Lovely tenor he'd have, though, if he'd learn to sing proper.'

‘Would you like a hot drink, Taffy?' she asked, tucking the sheets around the snoring sergeant major.

‘No, thank you, love. Time all of us got some beauty sleep.'

‘Goodnight, then.'

Her helper was still standing by the bed. She turned and smiled at him. ‘Thank you, Captain Geddes.'

‘A pleasure, Nurse Wentworth. Quite like old times.'

Of course she had known before she saw him who it was that was offering to help her. She didn't need to turn around to know the owner of the voice with the soft Scottish burr, though one didn't expect the new MO to be doing duty rounds with Matron; perhaps he was getting the feel of his new position. And at least it had eased the potential awkwardness of their first meeting. He accompanied her to the door, held it open for her to pass through. In the corridor, he faced her. ‘It's so good to see you again, Nella. And looking better than the last time I saw you.'

‘Well, that wouldn't be difficult, the state I was in,' she answered, tucking a stray strand of hair under her cap, knowing she sounded prickly and defensive, though what she said was true. When she had arrived back in England after the exhausting demands of the previous years and that last, debilitating illness, she had been looking like a scarecrow, without Amy telling her so. She looked up and found him smiling.

‘You haven't changed in the least.' She wondered what that meant. ‘I wrote to you when I heard you were ill.'

‘I never received it.' Nor ever saw you again. ‘What happened to you after that?'

‘What happened? What happened to all of us. Passchendaele happened. I was simply one of the lucky ones.'

The third battle of Ypres would be known for evermore as Passchendaele, from the tiny village, the struggle for which over half a million men were wounded, died, were reported captured or missing. ‘We were both lucky,' she said soberly.

Despite the exhausting years he had spent in France, he appeared much as he had always done, relaxed and casual, a smile in his blue eyes, though he looked older: his face was thinner, and there were lines which hadn't been there before. ‘I'm only here for a short time,' he said. ‘Just long enough to see to the closure of the hospital before I say goodbye to the army. Splendid place to convalesce, isn't it?'

‘You should have seen it before the war.'

They had reached the dispensary, which she was making for in order to prepare the medicines for her first round in the morning, before the patients' breakfast and the end of her shift. ‘I hope we might have a chance to talk, Nella. There's a good deal I have to tell you. Can you make it soon?'

‘Yes, of course,' she replied brightly. ‘There must be a lot of news to catch up with. In fact, I'm due for a break in half an hour. Shall we say the nurses' sitting room?'

For the next half hour she wrote up the patients' notes and reports and didn't have much idea of what she wrote. Duncan Geddes had brought the past with him, peopled by sad ghosts and painful memories.

1916

Flanders. A small town on the French Belgian border whose unpronounceable name she couldn't now remember. Once it had been near the front line but by then, as fronts shifted and moved backwards and forwards, from place to place, each side struggling for a few miles' advantage which neither ever seemed to gain permanently, the shattered town was at present several miles away, attempting to resume something of its normal life, or as much as it could hope for. It was crammed with army personnel on leave, seeking a brief respite and some relief from the intolerable strain of being under constant fire. There was little to do, but everyone was grateful for clean beds and baths, and a decent night's sleep, able to hear the guns only as a not-too-distant, monotonous crump rather than as if in the next room. It was also a relief from army food – almost any sort of food was in short supply, but the Belgians generally knew how to make the most of what there was.

Nella was staying there with Daisy Musgrave.

The day before they came, after giggling over a little blonde VAD who had daringly cut her own hair and looked like a badly shorn duckling, they had cut off their own hair and then wept together when they saw their crowning glories lying on the floor of the tent. But the tears were short-lived. Long hair was impossible when there was neither time nor hot water to wash and dry it, and when it was expected to be kept tidily pinned up under every condition. ‘A much overdue decision, Nurse Wentworth,' Daisy declared in the voice of Griggs, a mutually detested sister, and they subsided into giggles.

The two of them, for their few days' leave, were sharing a room in a small hotel in the bomb-shattered town, and had arranged to go out to dinner that night. However, during the day Daisy had come across a young captain, one of the scores with whom she had often dined and danced the night away in London and in grand country houses, in the palmy days before the war. She seemed to know half the officers in the British Army, so many of whose names later featured in the frighteningly lengthening casualty lists. They all adored her, loved her not only for her feminine company but the feeling she gave them that life could still offer some sense of fun and gaiety. She flirted outrageously with them all, but it meant nothing; it was only this young man who brought colour to her cheeks, and sometimes tears to her eyes when she read his letters, and whose name had become exceedingly familiar to Nella.

‘Would you mind, darling?' she asked. It was obvious she meant not only the cancellation of their dinner arrangements, but also that she wanted Nella to make herself scarce from their shared room.

‘Daisy, you mustn't!'

‘Yes, I must,' she replied fiercely, and looking at the pretty face from which all smiles had vanished, Nella said nothing. Unlike her young man, if Daisy were found out, her contract would be terminated and she would be sent home in disgrace, but Nella was not as shocked as she would have been once, nor did she feel she had any right, or wish, to judge. Morality had a different slant here for men in the trenches, and for some of the women, too, taking the reckless ‘eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die' attitude, a possibility that became more like absolute certainty as the war dragged on. She had arrived in France an innocent, as she now saw it, but by now there was no room for shock at anything, after what she had seen and experienced.

She left their room in the cold winter's evening before George Chiversleigh should arrive and wandered disconsolately out to look for somewhere to have dinner alone and unnoticed, and in the half-destroyed
place,
with ruined buildings on every side of it, and the fountain in the centre nothing but a heap of stones, she almost bumped into Captain Geddes. Their surprise was mutual. Neither had known the other would be here; in fact they knew little of each other's activities outside the tented lines of the hospital where they worked as part of a professional team.

‘I was looking for somewhere to have supper, Nurse Wentworth. They tell me there's a good place along the end of this street. If you haven't already eaten, why don't you join me?'

She was out of uniform, wearing the only civilian clothes she had brought with her (of which she was heartily sick by now, though anything made a change from her uniform) but she hesitated, until he added, with a sudden laugh, looking at her hair, ‘No one will recognise you. Oh, I say, I'm sorry, shouldn't have said that…'

‘That's all right, I know,' she said. Her hair looked terrible, but she was hoping she'd be able to find somewhere to get it cut a little better while she was here.

‘But if anyone does, by any chance, and sees fit to report you, refer them to me and I'll tell them I needed to talk ‘shop' with you – which happens to be true.'

That explanation would not save her if the senior superintending nurse happened to find out, but suddenly, the risk seemed worth it. She let him take her elbow and guide her to a small
estaminet
tucked into a corner, which had evidently had a miraculous escape when the
h
ô
tel de ville
next door, its roof now half missing, had been shelled. She followed him, amused that with a few words and a smile, he was able to command a small corner, screened from the packed and noisy main room by a high bench. If anyone noticed them passing they didn't make it obvious.

She still found herself a little constrained. There was almost no opportunity for personal conversation in the day-to-day nursing routine, or in the desperate conditions where they worked; there they were simply a skilful doctor and another competent nurse, doing what they could under impossible conditions, but within that environment there had grown a certain easy familiarity between all of them who worked together. A brief smile, or a nod, when they had accomplished something difficult, perhaps saved a life, a stoical endurance when they failed. Here, away from the familiar routine, it was different.

The place was very small, and very warm, and crowded with service personnel. He ordered their food – there was no choice, they had to take what was on offer – and a bottle of red wine was brought to their table by a young girl while they were waiting. After he had poured them each a glass, he came directly to the point. ‘I really do have something to say to you. Let's get it over and then we can enjoy the evening. It's about young Foley I wanted to speak. I gather you knew him in Civvy Street?' She nodded. ‘What's wrong with him? Is he
asking
to be killed?' He must have seen that kind of sheer recklessness that Grev was showing often enough, and understood it perhaps as being a refusal to admit to danger in case their terror, and even cowardice, became apparent, but obviously he felt in his case it was something more. He was looking steadily at her. ‘Or is he looking for a Blighty one?'

That wasn't something one said lightly and she was glad of their secluded corner and the noise that surrounded them, which made it impossible for anyone else to overhear. ‘A Blighty one' meant a wound sufficiently serious to be sent home and because of this, despite its severity, was often welcomed. More than that, a self-inflicted injury, or one deliberately courted by men who had reached the bitter end of their tether, was not unknown. An arm above the parapet of the trench which the ever-vigilant German snipers would be unlikely to miss. ‘Accidentally' shooting oneself in the foot. It took courage, but better the grim prospect of losing a hand or a foot than stay in that hell on Earth, where one was more than likely to be dead or maimed for life the next day, anyway. Such an action was, however, regarded as a serious offence, marked down as an act of cowardice, punishable by court martial and most likely a firing squad. Was it sublime courage that drove young Foley on, or was it cowardice? he was asking.

She replied, as steadily as she could, ‘You don't understand. If you were a musician, as Grev is, you would
never
deliberately put yourself in the way of anything that might injure you to the extent of ruining or jeopardising your career. But he's not in any way a coward. He always swore he would never fight if war came, but don't you see, what he's doing, going out night after night to bring the wounded in, is far braver?'

‘Yes, he's brave and fearless and all that, God knows how many lives he's saved, but he can't carry on like this. I don't like the look of him at all. Yet he's refused all leave so far. I've recommended he be sent home, whether he wants it or not. What are the odds on him surviving if he carries on like this?'

‘I don't know,' Nella said. She couldn't deny what he was saying, that what Grev was doing was an idiocy, because she'd seen it with her own eyes. He was unsteady, he had a wild light in his eyes, indeed, a kind of madness. ‘I can tell you, though,' she went on hesitantly, ‘that something happened, before the war, something personal and very terrible, and it's made him extremely unhappy.' She found she could not go on. She took a sip of her wine. It was so rough it made her cough, but it gave an excuse for the tears which sprang to her eyes.

‘It concerned you, too,' he hazarded, and looked contrite. ‘Look here, please don't feel you have to speak of it. I am so sorry.'

‘That's all right. It was my sister, you see, she died, accidentally drowned. Grev was very fond of her. I think it's thrown him a little off balance.'

She had never spoken of Marianne, and the way she'd died, to anyone before, afraid of the embarrassed pity such a revelation would call up. But he said nothing more, simply stretched out his hand and covered hers. It was a nice hand, big but well shaped, strong. She had seen those same hands expertly performing terrible, by now routine operations, little miracles, a thousand times. The contact steadied her.

‘I wouldn't have mentioned anything,' he said eventually, ‘except that I feel a certain degree of responsibility for him.'

‘I'm worried, too, but I don't know what I can do.'

The bar was overheated, khaki uniforms mixing with the locals, the smell of food mingling with Woodbines and French tobacco and too many people squashed into one small, hot room. The decibel level of the noise was making it hard to have a serious conversation. A group of young subalterns at the bar, none of them much more than schoolboys, were making asses of themselves after too much to drink, and an old Belgian in a beret, from his place at the bar, spat accurately into the fire. In the corner a gramophone played what seemed to be the same tune over and over again, though it was impossible to make out exactly what it was, with all the noise.

The arrival of the young woman with their food bridged the awkwardness that followed the exchange. The Belgians could generally find something palatable, and this time they were given fried potatoes and steak, with a sauce, bread and some cheese. He seemed to have accepted that the subject of Grev was closed. ‘Bon appétit,' he said, smiling and raising his glass.

At the bar, an altercation had arisen. Madame in charge had decided the young officers were getting out of hand and was demanding they should leave, which they were not inclined to do, but after a certain amount of good-humoured protest, at last they tumbled unsteadily out of the door. In the relative quiet they left behind, the gramophone could at last be heard, scratching out the newest popular tune, a sweet nostalgic melody that was on everyone's lips, being sung, whistled and hummed, everywhere. Would she ever hear ‘Roses of Picardy' again without a wrench of the heart?

It was just two nights after that conversation over dinner that Grev went out under heavy fire with three other stretcher-bearers. It was a nightmare attack, star shells exploding into the night sky, the deafening sound of guns, the screams of the wounded, men falling like swatted flies. Two of the stretcher party were killed but the bodies of the other two, one of them Grev, were blown to bits and never a trace was found. Only one of the countless numbers with no known grave. Quite literally blown to pieces, so that there was literally nothing left, not even a cap badge or an identity disc, to identify them.