“Are you here to talk me out of it?”
He smoothed the bedcover with his thick fingers, and she could feel his breath, warm air, claret, smoke. “I’m here to make sure you’re sure. I’m only concerned that, without school, you wouldn’t have enough structure.”
She put the primer face down beside her on the bed. It was easier to be honest with him than with her mother. “I’m not completely sure. But I think I’m sure. I want to go to Italy. I have some translation projects. That might be enough.” She paused. There was the possibility, of course, that it wouldn’t be. That perhaps she would struggle. “Do you think it’s enough?”
“I’m sorry, pup. I don’t know. And that indecision, I gave that to you too.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“But I could have tried to cure myself, instead of just blindly passing it on,” he said. “Other people just make up their mind and know.”
“I think that I know,” she said, wishing she could sound more certain, wishing for once she were more like Nelly, who always seemed sure of the answers. “If I left school, I think I could use my time far better than I do now.”
“I’ll tell you one thing. The times when you really do know, it’s heavenly.” Gilbert was looking down at the bedspread, at his hands, which cupped one another. “It does happen, even to critical souls like us,” he went on. “I knew when I married your mother that it was exactly what I wanted.”
“You did?” She was surprised.
“Well, I had been smitten with someone else—Margaret was her name, an absolutely ripping girl, actually—but she was not the right sort, and we both knew it. And it was she who introduced me to your mother.” He tilted his head. “I don’t know why your mother gave in and married me. A moment of weakness, I suppose. She desperately wanted to upset her mother, and I was the perfect fix.”
“You still think it was a good decision?”
“Well, some fellows doubt their marriages every day. I never did. I loved her. Still do.”
Georgie was puzzled by this. “Maybe that has less to do with her and more to do with you.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but maybe it has something to do with both of us. Anyway. I say you should go ahead and leave school. We’ll look out for you, make sure you don’t get lost without it.”
“I don’t think I will be,” she said quietly.
And she wouldn’t have been lost without it, she thought now, as she walked along the edge of Berkeley Square Gardens towards the dormitory, avoiding the muddy straw put down to dampen the noise of cars, her pace fast and deliberate through the dark streets. Gilbert would have helped her to adjust to life without school, and she would have had her own independence to study and translate as she wished. Still, it hadn’t happened that way. Instead, in November 1909, after returning from one of her trips to Italy—from three weeks of reckless discussions and exploring ruins and painting, from laughing and dancing with Dorothy Shakespear, and watching clusters of artistic young men eyeing Dorothy adoringly—she had received a telegram to say that her father was dead.
THREE
In Georgie’s first week at the hospital, the matron repeatedly instructed her to mop the floors. But Georgie discovered that if she mopped the floors right to each corner, she was too slow; if she mopped quickly, she was careless. If she spoke to the men, she was accused of being frivolous and flirtatious, but if they called out for her and she didn’t answer, she was declared negligent. When she slopped water on the floor, the matron stood above the puddle and gazed at it in horror, as if Georgie had squatted down and urinated.
Still, she mopped floors, sterilised instruments, emptied bedpans. It was strange to think that it had taken a war for her to finally leave home. It was seven years since Gilbert had died in a flat in Pimlico. It had been a complete shock to Georgie—he was only forty-four, and she never found out why he had gone to that flat in Pimlico or what had happened there. But she came to realise that other people were not so surprised, that it was thought that sooner or later Captain Hyde-Lees might drink himself to death. When Georgie returned from Italy, Nelly sent her to finishing school, and she lived at home until school was over and the war broke out. Still, she wasn’t sure she would ever forgive her mother for sending Gilbert away.
As Georgie placed a clean bedpan under Colonel Fraser’s bed, she accidentally bumped the iron bed-frame, and the gentle knock startled the colonel, who clutched his arms around his chest without opening his eyes. Part of what was so odd about the officers was their hopelessness. Many of them did not look at her, let alone talk to her; many of them didn’t seem to care whether they lived or died. Even Second Lieutenant Pike, who was one of the most animated, had that odd, ghosted expression of a creature who was missing something. Under Mrs. Thwaite’s instructions, Georgie was to pay special attention to Major Hammond, as the matron was concerned about his treatment. Although Georgie was new, she was designated as his nurse presumably because she had cleaner, more aristocratic vowels than Sanderson, the other girl. But Mrs. Thwaite needn’t have worried, because the major seldom opened his eyes and didn’t seem to hear a word Georgie said, and in the rare times he was awake he kept his face firmly hidden behind his newspaper, intermittently shaking the paper, like there was something caught in the pages he needed to banish.
As always, during visiting hours, the ward filled with women; men, too, but it was the women who took over the space, heaving with sighs over their sons and brothers and husbands, reaching into their handbags for gifts or for tissues, and filling the room with the smell of shampoo and perfume and shortbread. A woman crouched at Mayor Hammond’s bedside, her body awkwardly turned away from his wound as she whispered in his ear. A man, perhaps the lady’s husband, stood at the bed’s end, watching the two of them and kicking his heel against the toe of his other boot, gently, over and over, as if trying to knock something through the leather of his shoe.
Georgie was making one of the beds when a young lady approached her, pretty, her hair pale as cooked egg-white, wearing an expensive silk shirt and skirt, standing in a fog of perfume.
“Excuse me,” the lady said. She was standing near Second Lieutenant Pike’s bed, but Pike was looking out the window like he didn’t know she was there.
“Yes?” Georgie straightened up. She followed the lady’s gaze down to her own once-white collar, where she had smudged a fingerprint of blood. Georgie patted her collar uselessly with her fingers.
“I require some privacy,” the lady announced, “to talk to the lieutenant. Would you leave us, please?”
Georgie, who couldn’t see how the lady imagined any privacy possible in the busy ward, continued tucking in the corners of the sheet. “I won’t be a moment.”
“I’m afraid I do not have a moment,” the lady said.
Second Lieutenant Pike looked over at her. “She’s busy, Emma.”
“She is making a bed, Thomas.”
“I’ll come back,” Georgie said, rising from her crouched position and leaving the sheet untucked and the blanket bunched at the bottom of the bed. She was curious to know what this rather haughty lady would have to do with the plain-spoken, approachable lieutenant. Glancing back, she saw the lady lower herself into a chair like a regal personage. Like so many of the men and women on the ward, the lady had a desperation about her, but it was almost admirable how she translated that desperation into pride. She was inflicting it on the world, rather than keeping it close.