“A blank canvas,” the boy pronounced. “Quite rare, I should think.”
She handed it back to the boy, and he replaced it under the glass.
“I have a weak chest,” the boy said.
“Pardon?”
“I tried to sign up, but was refused.”
“Oh,” Georgie said. “Do you suppose the ring will be here awhile?”
“I’ve no idea,” he said. “I shouldn’t say that, though. I should insist you buy it immediately, but really, I’m no businessman. This is Archie’s business. My brother. He’s fighting in France, and I’m back here looking after his shop. I feel like I’m the only man in London not at war.”
“Is that why you were hiding out the back?”
“Of course. People are cruel. I’ve had a man come in and lecture me about sacrifice. I had a woman actually spit on the carpet.”
“I daresay it’s preferable to going to war.”
“And I daresay it’s not.”
“Well, at least no one will shoot at you here,” Georgie said. “I suspect sacrifice is more enjoyable in the abstract.”
He sniffed at her, disappointed, and she turned her attention back to the ring.
“You needn’t worry,” he said, “hardly anyone ever comes in here. I’m sure it’s safe. If I’m not in the trenches, I can at least save your ring for you. I’ll move it to one of the farthest cabinets, so no one will notice it.”
“Thank you,” she said.
When she returned to the hospital, the tasks were just as monotonous or disgusting as they had been the day before, the matron was still cold and disapproving, and Major Hammond ignored her as usual. Still, she found that she could perform her role calmly, without overthinking. Although she wouldn’t say she liked the job, it was a relief to know exactly what she should be doing, and she had the feeling that her life was following a logic. When the matron asked if she would take another night shift that evening, she found herself responding as if she were being offered a great prize.
When the night shift came, although she knew she wasn’t allowed, she permitted herself her one indulgence: to sit down beside Second Lieutenant Pike and look out at the white-sheeted beds. Pike was silent beside her at first. There was something about sitting there that felt safe; she felt she might sit there for hours, listening to the slight snore of a sleeping captain, the soft rumple of woollen blankets, and the muted hooves on the straw-strewn roads outside.
SIX
PIKE
Here again. She was like a fine-boned bird, perched here. He couldn’t help but smile, couldn’t help but think that this alignment of circumstances was some kind of gift. He had earned some kind of gift, hadn’t he? Then again, she wasn’t smiling. She seemed to be looking past him, thinking about something else entirely.
Lately all of it was unreal to him, as if part of him had died in the car on the way here, with the taste of soil, steady clanking, groans; butter where his feet should be. Part of him had died, smudged on that leather seat, with mud between his fingers, under his nails, mud deep in his cuts, in his ears, and each time he wiped the mud off his face, he wiped more over himself, into himself, dear mud, dear muddy bodies all in a shambles, all in a row. They’d washed him, but only on the outside; inside his skin was lined with mud, it had crept down into his veins, it crouched there now, in puddles mixed with blood.
“You have a sweetheart, don’t you?” he said to the nurse sitting beside him. He wanted to get this clear. And now she did smile. Her whole face held the light differently; it would be fair to say she beamed.
“Perhaps.”
“Who is he?” Pike concentrated on keeping his voice level.
She had tipped her head towards the window. “A poet,” she said.
He remembered having this kind of belief in someone. He’d had it in Emma. How could he tell this nurse this, how could he warn her? He’d written to Emma from the infirmary in Gallipoli, declared she shouldn’t wait for him. He was going to lose his feet, and she should be free. It was spring; he imagined there would be dances for her to go to. That was the extent of his letter. It had felt good to write it—he was a man of virtue. He couldn’t bear for Emma Wetherford to become the wife of a half man, one who couldn’t walk, couldn’t take himself to the lavatory. She was pretty, if a little stiff, but boys like that kind of reserve, they like to think they can crack it. They like to think they can break it open. (They can’t, but they don’t know that yet.) And of course, she wrote back to say she would wait for him, that she loved only him—oh, Emma! It gave him the chance for another noble rebuff: I do not want to be unfair to you, he had written as he lay in the infirmary, smelling of piss, his feet rotting under him, and now it seemed to him that as he wrote this he might have sucked the end of the pencil, tasted lead.
Because not a month later—hardly three weeks!—he received another letter saying she was dreadfully sorry but she was engaged to marry another fellow. One of the chaps with the sense to stay home, and one with a name her daddy approved of. She wanted Pike to be the first to know, and if he didn’t want her to marry—if he wanted to go back to their being engaged—he should let her know immediately, and she would marry him instead. As if he could write back, with no money, no name, feet rotting away to nothing, and say, Marry me!
Her letter had tried to seem solemn but somehow managed to announce the full name and rank of her husband-to-be, like she was brimming over with pride at being his fiancée, an admired thing, like a fine thoroughbred or a twirling windmill. Well, to hell with her. To hell with her, and particularly since she had started showing up to the ward, all gussied up as if on parade, forcing him to remember her, to remember everything. They’d had pink champagne for their engagement on the lawn. Pink champagne! Only Emma’s brother Eddie had stepped forward to shake Pike’s hand; her father simply stared at him like he was a child murderer. Fancy a poor student of medicine snapping up his beautiful, clever daughter—when all the time she had snapped him up, really, just as afterwards she’d opened her lovely jaws again and let him drop, so now she could marry a far more worthy gentleman. A huge relief for the family; apart from Eddie, the whole family had sticks so far up their asses probably none of them had ever glimpsed their toes. She had come into the ward the other day, bossing around his lovely nurse and then sitting upright in her impeccable clothes with her impeccable posture. The worst bit was that he found he couldn’t talk to her, could communicate only in brief snatches, couldn’t tell her what he thought of her. She loomed over him, and he couldn’t tell her to leave him be. She never stayed long, retreating like a sleek spider which creeps out from the floor and the wall, only to crawl back into its crevice. There would be no doubt in anyone’s mind she had made the right decision. When the father-in-law shuffled off from this earth, she would be a countess.
A poet. The nurse was still staring at him with her eyes gleaming with hope so strong you could almost smell it. It was the first thing he didn’t like about her. Not that she had a sweetheart—of course she did, a girl like her—but that the fellow in question was a poet. You couldn’t trust a poet; either he was a fraud, a bad versifier, tapping his scuffed little loafers together while he proudly beat out bad rhymes; or, perhaps worse, he was a real poet, in which case he was self-important, a gentleman surely (no one could make money out of poems), with an enormous oak desk and a pen clasped between his fingers with the worthy expression of someone holding a sword. All that was certain was that a poet was never a serious person.