The Gates of Rutherford (20 page)

“I should have liked to see the shafts all the same, before they blow the buggers up.”

“It's the top act in the whole circus, all right,” John agreed. “A real death-defying seat-of-the-pants. Twenty-two corridors thirty feet down, packed with ammonal.”

Harry nodded. “And you know what they'd do with us, if they heard us talking about it?”

“Shoot us.”

“Correct.” Harry laid back in the rubble of the lawn and stared at the sky. “Stars and a hollow earth,” he murmured. “You see, we'll break through, and there'll be another world. We're rats at the moment, running about in the filth, and digging down through the clay and chalk. But once we break through. . . .”

John realized that it was an allegory for heaven. For passing through something. Or perhaps not heaven, but death.

Harry laughed, and crooked his arm across his face. “You mustn't mind me,” he said. “I feel bloody rotten, if you must know.”

“I'll get you some transport.”

“Will you?” Harry murmured. “And take me away and deliver me home. To a hospital in London. To retirement in Yorkshire. I'll be like my father. I suppose you know of my father.”

“Harry . . .”

“Like a dumb beast now,” Harry said. “But fine sort in his day.”

John said nothing at all.

“I don't blame you necessarily,” Harry continued, still with his face obscured. “Very difficult to deal with. Hardly spoke to me as a child, except to reprimand me. But he was a breed, you see?”

“Yes, I know.”

“I suppose Mother told you.” Harry let down his arm at last, and propped himself up on one elbow. “You ran a blade through the old man by turning up alive after the
Lusitania
. It would have been kinder to kill him straight off.”

“I can't help being alive.”

“You could have stayed away. It was a bloody shock to us. Not just Father. Neither Louisa nor I nor Charlotte knew what . . . what you were to Mother.”

“I'm sorry,” John said quietly. “But I couldn't have stayed away. That was impossible.”

And then it occurred to him, in a sudden rush of realization, what it was that was really destroying the young man in front of him. It was the same thing that would have destroyed him if, after surviving, he had not found Octavia waiting for him. Harry Cavendish was in love, and he needed the woman. “Your sister is looking for Caitlin,” he said. “If anyone can find her, Charlotte can.”

Harry Cavendish stared at him a second. Then, very grudgingly, he smiled. “It's the only bloody thing that stops me putting a gun to my head, Mr. Gould.” There was a prolonged silence while John watched him and tried to decipher the truth in the remark. He couldn't. “What time is it?” Harry asked.

John looked at his watch, angling towards the faint light from the road. “It's eleven o'clock.”

“Four hours to go,” Harry said.

“Yes,” John told him. “Four hours until we prize the lid off the world, and see what's underneath. We'll see if you're right.”

“Hollow,” Harry said. “Just an eggshell world. It'll fall in on itself and there'll be nothing left of us.”

John frowned. He stood up slowly, and held out his hand. “Come on,” he said. “Nobody is going to fall through the world.” He paused. “Not on this side of the fence, anyway.”

C
hristine pushed open the door at St. Dunstan's and stood in the narrow green-tiled porch, the entrance to the convalescent ward. It had been pouring with rain all day and her feet were soaked. She tried to shake the moisture from her coat and hair. “Wouldn't think it was June,” she muttered. All the same, she couldn't repress a smile. She had had wonderful news this morning, and couldn't wait to share it with Charlotte.

“France, France, France,” she whispered to herself, grinning.

She leaned against the wall and tried to compose her face. Not for the men; they wouldn't care, even if they could see her. But for the nurses. Because not everyone was like Charlotte, blithe and welcoming. The VADs were all right; most of them were upper class—notoriously frivolous
—
rushing from the bedsides to dinner at the Twenty-One Club or curtained rooms at the Ritz. She'd seen them peeling off their uniforms, dead on their feet but determinedly bright as they wedged their feet into satin shoes and begged the porters to run out into Regent's Park for them and hail a taxi. Christine adored
such behavior. There was one here—Amanda de Cholmondeley-Row, or Rowbotham or something—the daughter of a knight of the realm anyway, father an industrialist and in the House of Commons—who went home after serving meals all day in the wards, and had her dinner served at home by a butler.

But not everyone was an aristocratic VAD. There was one sister here—one of the old school, nursing long before war broke out—who frightened the hell out of her. She always looked at Christine as if the younger girl had crawled out from under a stone. Of course, Sister disapproved of the hair, shorn so short. “I can see the lobes of your ears,” she had observed coldly last week, as if this were the height of depravity.

“I can see the lobes of every nurse's ears in here.”

“That is because their hair is properly pinned up.”

“I can't pin my hair up,” Christine pointed out. She had trembled despite herself: the woman reminded her of a hated governess who had used to make her stand on a chair to repeat her times tables. Sickly old Stevens, who had smelled of mothballs. The sister looked just like her, rotten old trout.

“I'm here to draw the men. I shan't get near them.”

“You had better not,” Sister had replied. “I should think you are most unsanitary.”

Christine pushed herself away from the wall now, having caught her breath, and—after peering through the glass panel to make sure that Sister was not in this ward—pushed against the door, and went in.

Out in the grounds here, they had erected temporary shelter for the vast numbers of men who were relentlessly appearing. Most stayed just a short time; others went into the main houses where they recuperated. It could take a long time for a man to adjust to being blind, she knew. Others—like Michael Preston—seemed to accept it with calm, even resignation. “Just glad to be out of it,” one officer
had told her as she was preoccupied with drawing his scarred face. “Blind or not. Whatever it takes. Glad it's over for me.”

She had laid her pencil down. The men very rarely spoke of what had happened to them. “What did you feel like, before?” she prompted him. She'd forgotten his name long ago, though she recalled the conversation clearly. This was last winter, and they had been sitting out on the lawn in the depths of the snow; they had had to clear it from the bench seat, but he had told her that he liked the cleanness of the frosty day. “Was it fearful? Were
you
?” she'd asked.

He had kept very still as he spoke. “You're afraid when you're going up to the lines,” he murmured. “There's these far-off noises. You feel the ground shake. You think, maybe we're going into that. What'll happen to us? Of course, you don't say that. You whistle instead. You joke. Rag each other, make fun. And there's excitement of course. But after a while, after the months go by, you just have no feelings for yourself.”

“No feelings? No fear at all?”

“I don't mean in the way of courage, of having no fear. You don't have a choice about that anyway. Fear just sits with you. It's like daylight or the dark. Always there. Disgust and despair the same. They're like another skin. They sit with you and they're in everything you taste. In the food. In the air and in the tea you drink.” He smiled. “If you get any tea.”

“But that must be sickening.”

“You don't think of it. You're past being sick or having a thought. Artillery can go on for days, weeks. If you've got that endlessly happening, you've got to let it. I mean you can't resist it, else you'd go crazy. People do.” He turned his head in the direction of her voice. “There was one officer, he'd tap a little drumbeat on the fire step, or his belt, or on his other hand. If the barrage is heavy, you've maybe got thirty seconds between shells. There's an instant when it's silent
after a shell has dropped. But only an instant. Then you hear another, and you start counting. While he counted under his breath, he tapped whatever came to hand.” The man laughed. “Funny thing. It wasn't the shells that nearly drove me mad. It was his tapping.”

“What happened to him?”

There was an infinitesimal shrug. “The one that got me got him. Shrapnel. We were stuck in a shell hole. Couldn't go forward, nor back. Thirty-six hours. The funny thing was, they told me that when it came down twenty yards away, this officer—he was a fine man, don't misunderstand me—but he just broke. He dived for cover.” He sighed slowly. “You don't do that, you see? Bad example. But he dived, and he went forward into the blast. It was the last thing I ever saw. Just a second. That's all it took.”

Christine was sitting forward very close to him watching the fragments of memory chase across his face. She wondered if he was aware how much his face twitched and creased; perhaps he didn't. He couldn't see himself in the mirror anymore, and so he had possibly lost a sense of his looks or the way that his face behaved. She found that interesting, poignant. Faces told so much that voices could not.

“May I carry on drawing you?” she asked.

“Aye, why not?”

She smiled a little at the “aye.” He had told her that he came from Cumberland, and she heard it in him. Promotion to an officer class had not removed the lilt of the North Country. He would be going on soon, up to Liverpool and then on to home.

“Where is it that you live?” she asked, taking up the pencil again.

“Ah, a place called Longsleddale. Narrow valley. Lovely big mountains.”

“And what will you do?”

“We've got a farm. Father and I. I shall go back.” He nodded to himself. “I've a younger sister. She'll walk with me.”

“Along the paths in the village?”

“There's no village,” he told her. “I mean mountains. We'll walk the fells.”

“As you used to?”

“Just the same.”

•   •   •

I
t was men like that who kept bringing her back to St. Dunstan's. Men who'd managed to somehow put the past to one side. Not behind them, but to the side. It was a soft, silent piece of courage—one entirely without words—to put such demons away, to deny them attention. They said that fighting took courage, but it wasn't anything to the courage that was needed to come back.

She glanced round the ward quickly now: there were many new patients. She hurried between the beds, and out to the little galley kitchen. A nurse was in here making tea.

“Is Charlotte on duty?” Christine asked. “Charlotte Cavendish? Oh—I mean, Preston.”

“No,” the girl replied. “I haven't seen her in a week.”

“Is she on another ward?”

The girl shrugged. She looked very weary, almost sullen, splashing the contents of the big white enamel teapot, which she held with both hands, along the rows of waiting cups. “She might be.”

Christine gave her a sympathetic grin. “Bloody awful day?”

“Bloody awful,” the girl replied, not glancing up. “Two gone. Changing dressings on the rest. Blind eyes cry.” At last she put the pot down and looked at Christine, hand on hip. “Did you know that?”

“It's miraculous.”

“Is it?” She shrugged. “It's sad. That's what it is.”

“But miraculous,” Christine insisted, as she turned to leave. “Think of that.”

“I don't need lessons from you in what to think,” the girl told her. “What are you? The drawing girl. Hardly an expert.”

“Chin up. It can only get worse.”

The nurse relented at the black humor, and smiled back. “Oh, do be a dear child and kindly bugger off.”

Christine obeyed. Instead of going back through the ward, she let herself out of the back, and ran over the grassy yard to the main building. Here, up two flights of stairs, she found Michael Preston's office. The door was open, and two assistants were typing. In one corner, Michael Preston sat half propped on the windowsill. He was talking in a brisk fashion to the nearest girl.

“There's another place,” he was saying. “On Farringdon Road. Turning out bicycles. Tell them I'd like to come. We want a stationary cycle, on a ramp, for exercise. They've already told me they're busy, but I want to talk to the organ grinder, not the monkey. Find out the top man there, would you? Address it to him. And the usual, Maisie, if you'd be so kind. ‘I should be so deeply obliged, etc.'”

Christine gave a short knock on the doorframe. “Captain Preston.”

“Yes? Who is it?”

She walked forward. “It's Christine Nesbitt. Charlotte's friend. How are you?”

“Well enough. We haven't had the pleasure of your company in a while, have we?”

“No,” she said. “I've been gadding about rather. Garsington Manor for one.”

“Should I know the place?”

“No,” she admitted. “Lady Ottoline Morrell? She's awfully nice to people. Artists, anyway.”

“Is she?” Michael said coolly. “How kind of her.”

“I expect you wouldn't approve. She likes guests. She has a swimming pool. People paint there, and she feeds everybody and puts them up and there are charades in the evening. I'm not quite sure if she's grotesque or superb, but it's great fun. I went with a friend. He gets invited, and I tag along.” She was embarrassedly aware of how much she was gabbling, and that the typists had stopped work and were staring at her. She cleared her throat. “I was working,” she mumbled. “Preparing an exhibition.” She was intensely aware of how flat this sounded. She felt like a complete alien, a timewaster. She hastily changed the subject. “I was wondering if you knew if Charlotte was on duty today, and which ward it was.”

“She isn't in,” Michael said.

“Oh?” Christine couldn't keep the disappointment out of her voice. “I had such news to tell her.”

Michael Preston got to his feet. He made his way across the room. “Shall we step out into the hall?” he asked.

They walked some distance from the office, into a cream-painted corridor lit at intervals by plain, high windows. Here, he stopped. “Charlotte's at home,” he said. “What was your news? I can relay it.”

“That's awfully kind. But I wanted to tell her myself. I'm going to France.”

He frowned. “France? Why in heaven's name are you going there?”

“War artist,” she said. “Female war artist. Isn't it thrilling? My exhibition that was in The Strand did it. You didn't come. I sent an invitation. Last month. I was shown with Fry and Gertler. Imagine!”

“I'm afraid I don't know them.”

“Oh . . . no, of course.” She paused. “But, anyway. That's not important. What I wanted to tell Charlotte is that I shall be going soon. Perhaps next month. And I'd like to finish the portrait of her before I go. I've only got preliminary drawings so far.”

“She's not terribly well at the moment,” he said. And he suddenly shuffled his feet and moved his head back and forth like a bird pecking at the air. “She has a broken wrist.”