The sort she needed to believe her younger brother, Billy, had known in his casualty clearing station at Loos. (No lying unattended, thirsty and in agony on a stretcher; please, not that.)
She drew a sharp breath against the torturous, always ready images, and forced her attention onto Officer Jones instead, watching as he grasped the ambulance’s door frame, jumped down onto the icy gravel, his posture proud. With her mind still half-clinging to Freddie and Billy, she felt her heart swell for the soldier before her, this lonely, suffering man.
‘Officer Jones,’ she said.
He winced. She wasn’t sure why. The long journey getting on top of him, maybe. Nothing a cocoa won’t fix. She took a step forward, ignoring the snow which seeped through her nurse’s hood, the shoulders of her cape, and held out her hand in anticipation of taking Officer Jones’s arm, leading him inside.
The poor man’s just lost, she’d told that VAD.
Not any more, she assured herself now.
He’d found her.
She’d look after him.
He was quiet as they left the driveway, talking only to thank the ambulance driver in a low, well-spoken voice, and then to assure Emma that he didn’t need her hand for help, really, and he could carry his own small bag. ‘I insist.’
Emma, well-used to brevity from her patients, was also well-practised in filling silences. As she led Officer Jones into the hospital’s warm, panelled entranceway that smelt of smoke, bacon from the basement kitchens, and Jeyes Fluid, she chatted, saying what a tonic it must be for him to be out of that cold ambulance. He didn’t reply. Thinking he probably hadn’t had much in the way of companionship from that driver, she decided he’d benefit from some light relief before his initial session with Dr Arnold. She was meant to be taking him straight there, but …
‘Why don’t we go on a little tour?’ she said.
‘A tour?’ he said.
‘Yes, why not? Leave your things here, yes, just by the stairs. I’ll have them sent to your room.’
‘I can take them … ’
‘No, no need. Now, if you come this way.’
She walked on, skirt swishing across the large front hall, past the burning oil lamps and open fire, to the dining room, with its mahogany table to seat twenty. ‘There are three sittings for every meal,’ she said, ‘and we mix them up to keep everything sociable.’ She didn’t add how little anyone talked at dinnertimes, or how many subjects had had to be banned from conversation (France, Belgium, Kitchener, the Boche … really anything to do with the war); plenty of time for him to find that out. Pressing forward, she took him to the drawing room, full of armchairs, landscape paintings, a handful of patients in their blues, and a silent gramophone. She told Jones they had to keep it off whenever certain patients were downstairs, and stopped, distracted briefly by the most damaged of them all: a tragic captain who wore a mask over his poor jaw and skull, wept whenever his mother visited, never wanted to let her go, and shook uncontrollably all the time.
‘What happened to him?’ Jones asked, following her gaze.
She hesitated, then lied, telling him she wasn’t sure, loath to upset him with the grim detail. With a sigh, she moved them quickly on, to the library. ‘See, we have a billiards table. Do you play?’
‘Billiards?’ he said, and the muscles in his cheeks tensed, she wasn’t sure whether in the start of a smile or a frown. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Of course,’ she said, cursing herself for her insensitivity. (It had been a frown, it must have been a frown.) ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m sure we can find a friend to teach you.’
He looked at the table, the bookshelves, appearing to ruminate.
‘Would you—’ she began.
‘I wonder,’ he said, cutting her off before she could offer to take him to the arts and crafts room, ‘might I go to my room? It’s been a long morning.’
‘You must see Dr Arnold first,’ she said, ‘but I was going to show you the—’
‘Dr Arnold?’ For the first time, he looked straight at her. ‘Now?’
‘Well, yes,’ she said, ‘he’s waiting to meet you.’
‘Then please, let’s not keep him.’
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘of course.’
She offered her hand again, but he didn’t notice, so she let it drop and led the way across the library, through the far oak door, towards the doctor’s rooms.
Officer Jones was quieter yet as they progressed down the hospital’s back corridors, his attention fixed on the foggy, lead-lined windows and falling snow outside. Afraid that his thoughts might be running to the maudlin (why wouldn’t they? Poor man), Emma tried to distract him with some history, and told him that the building had been a manor in Elizabethan times, but had been made into a military hospital the year before, specifically for head wounds. (She omitted to mention that it had previously been a lunatic asylum for hysterical women; as with the dearth of dinnertime conversation, it seemed for the best.)
She came to a halt outside Dr Arnold’s door. ‘Here we are,’ she said, unnecessarily. ‘The doctor will ring for me when you’re finished, and I’ll take you upstairs.’
‘Thank you,’ Officer Jones said, ‘you’re very kind.’
‘Not at all,’ said Emma, and, despite his distracted air, felt another swelling in her chest. ‘It’s my absolute pleasure.’
*
He watched her bustle away, taking her chatter, her well-intentioned smiles and talk of manor houses with her. (He knew the hospital had been a lunatic asylum; the ambulance driver had told him. ‘There’s talk it’s haunted,’ she’d said, with merciful disregard for his shattered nerves.) Once he was certain Sister Lytton was gone, he breathed deep, steadying himself with the silence, then raised his fist to knock on the doctor’s door. Exhausted as he was, he was happy to be doing it. He’d been waiting impatiently for his space at the King’s 5th ever since his doctor at the London General had told him of Arnold’s reputation as a miracle worker.
Jones (he loathed the name, but he’d learned to think of himself by it; to accept the unsettling sense of its wrongness, having no idea what was right) needed a miracle. He wasn’t sure how he was going to endure living in this morose, echoing place – the way those men in the drawing room had slouched in their chairs; the one who’d been shaking – but he had to believe that Arnold would help him leave, to mend.
Remember.
He needed, so desperately, to remember.
The door opened. A lean, elderly man peered out. He had neatly combed white hair, an even whiter moustache, and wore slacks, a bow tie and waistcoat, a knitted cardigan over it all. He smiled, tipping his head so that he could peer over the top of his spectacles. ‘Here you are,’ he said, ‘I’ve been watching the clock.’ He stepped back and extended his arm into the book-lined study. ‘In he comes.’
He hadn’t called him Officer Jones. Or Tommy. Or Tom.
Jones liked him for it instantly.
Arnold gestured at the armchair to his left, next to the fire. Jones crossed over to it. It was warm in the room, such a contrast to the draughty corridor, the snowy outside. His skin, still acclimatising, prickled beneath his convalescent blues.