Thus, when Bea is driven back after her dinner with the Prince, she wedges herself at the far side of the seat from her escort. This time, she makes it to her hut intact. As she reaches the yard, the girls are starting up the ambulances. Bea is straight into hers and out towards the station.
Once she’s going, the fresh air coming at her in the cab is an improvement on the fug and smoke of the mess. She does three rounds before she realises it is half past one. Her truck feels heavy, as though she’s pushing against an ox and she’d really just like to fall asleep on its shoulder. Well, dinner was jolly. There were a couple of FANYs there as well and as she walked in, bottles of wine were beckoning from the table. My God, she was gasping for some and clearly so, for the Prince noticed, smiled and, with a flourish of his arm, said, ‘Give Miss Masters a glass. She looks as if she might expire.’ Bea felt as though she hadn’t been shown gentlemanly good manners like that – the steady I-will-look-after-you sort – in an age. He was as charming as Edward at his best.
‘Do you enjoy your work?’ the Prince asked all three women. ‘It’s damn good of you all to come out here. Though it seems as though you manage a fine time, too.’
Six months ago these comments would have infuriated Bea, but tonight, indeed any night or time of day, she was simply grateful for being thanked. Perhaps it’s because it has become clear that what she is doing is something genuinely worth being thanked for, rather than some fatuous task meriting fatuous praise.
Her glass was filled, and refilled each time she emptied it. She had forgotten how delicious a good red wine could be. But it was the food, it was the food that did it for her. Only beef stew, but meat distinguishable from its sauce, and what a sauce. Monsieur Fouret
would be sacked on the spot if he sent this up, but it tasted better than anything Bea had eaten in months. How can you use the same word, eating, for that and what they’re served up back in their hamlet of board huts?
By the time the meal was over, it was already nine thirty and Bea felt her eyes were going to close. It was stiflingly warm in there, and any breath she managed was filling with cigar smoke; quite a different proposition to Bea’s cigarettes. Please let him go, she sat wishing, so that we can, too, and I have a chance of even just the shortest shut-eye before the night runs. Blast the tradition of not being able to leave before a member of the Royal Family, even out here. The more dire the circumstances, the more it appears people cling to etiquette. Just as she was thinking this, a trio of troopers entered, song sheets in hand. Oh no, how could she have forgotten: of course there was going to be an after-dinner show.
As Bea struggled to keep awake through half a dozen tunes, her mind turned to Edward. He claimed to spend his evenings like this, but it wouldn’t make him safe, would it? Some of the men she has transported spent their evenings like this, too. It didn’t mean they hadn’t ended up on a stretcher. Dear God, she sat silently praying, dear God, please don’t let that happen to him.
And then her thoughts are interrupted as a new train comes in to the station. Bea feels herself revving up, her sleepiness metamorphosing into a buzz as she reverses her ambulance in beside Blister’s, turning to wave at her. The girl’s face is drawn back over her cheek and jaw bones, as though she has taken a sharp intake of breath and it has stuck. She isn’t looking to the side; she’s rigidly facing forwards, as though she wants to see as little as possible of what is going on. Bea, thank God, is not there yet. She’s loaded up faster than she’s been before and the side of her truck is rapped to tell her to be off. ‘Busy tonight,’ yells a stretcher-bearer. And, relieved to be away from the terror on Blister’s face, she is gone.
No sitters on this one, just Bea, out alone with half a dozen strange men. And no chaperone; she laughs to herself in the way that you only can when you’re losing your reason, and things seem lighter, funnier, tonight.
A thud shakes the truck’s rear axle, and a screaming starts up in the back. Hell, it’s that ditch. No, it’s not that ditch; the truck isn’t stuck, it’s still going. Bea’s certainly got that awakening fear now; she can feel the sweat soaking into her hair under her cap. Had the ambulance fallen into that hole, there’d’ve been no pumping it out. The screaming is still going too, though it’s not a scream, it’s a yell, with words, the same words coming again and again. ‘He’s down, he’s down. Stop, for God’s sake.’ Someone half off his head. You can’t stop, you’re not allowed to stop, you have to get them to a hospital as quick as you can for the sake of those who might still make it. More words are coming. ‘He’s off the rail, rolling around the floor.’ Bea goes on driving but the yells worsen. ‘He’s down, I tell you he’s down.’ It’s the same voice. ‘Stop the bloody ambulance.’ Bloody ambulance, thinks Bea, yes, in every imaginable way. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop.’ It occurs to Bea that maybe she should stop and, as gruesome as the prospect of manhandling a near corpse back on to its stretcher might be, she could save a life. It would not be so terrible to be sent home, either. Isn’t that what she wants, a decent excuse? But she knows they can’t spare her, rumours of what this job is really like are seeping back and the girls are sticking to Blighty now, working in hospitals. Lead-swingers. What would Bea say to her burstingly proud mother, Celeste, even Edward, if she went home?
The calls from the rear of her truck are going on, ‘He’s on top of one of us. Get him off!’ They’re all at it now, and what, what if they’re right? There are hellish turns ahead. No matter what’s been drilled into her, she can’t carry on knowing that her driving is killing a man behind her.
She’s passed the turning to Six and Seven and there’s a flat patch on the side of the road. The commandant can’t see Bea here. She
won’t be going this far for she always gets the nearest hospitals, and expects you to be just as quick even if you’ve been three times the distance. Bea pulls over, she takes a deep breath, climbs down, goes to the back and opens up. She hates this, looking in. Remember to keep your eyes away from the faces, Beatrice, for there’s always that fear – that you’ve danced with one.
A stretcher in the middle row is empty. The man has rolled off it and is lying against one of the bottom stretchers, which is only just far enough off the floor to avoid the blood and urine. It is not far enough to stop the fallen man’s torso covering the face of the man lying on this bottom rung. The latter’s legs are flailing as though he’s gasping for air. Bea’s mind, slowly it seems, is taking it in. Then she leaps up inside and grabs an arm of the fallen man to pull him away. The arm comes off in her hands. She retches as she drops it, adding her own vomit to the cesspool around her feet.
The legs have stopped flailing. The man on the bottom stretcher is quite still. Bea can’t look up at where she thinks the voice came from. Whichever he is, he’s fallen silent, too. There’s just one still groaning ‘Help me, Mother’ up there.
Bea turns and jumps out, jarring her knees, and rushes back to the cab. She left the engine running, thank God, she’s not going to be a damn fool who finds it can’t start again. For hell’s sake, Beatrice, get moving.
It’s fallen quiet as she leaves Nine. But empty she can drive faster, as fast as she dares, keep that fear going, keep her awake. After all she’s Beatrice Masters, proving that she’s not just some little rich girl by being the fastest on the road. She knows every bump, she could do it blindfold, and she might as well be blindfold when there’s no moon and she’s driving in the dark without her lamps on. She shuts her eyes for an instant, just to see what it is like. There is, she concludes, little difference, even if there is a flicker of a moon tonight. Cigarette, yes, she’ll have a cigarette. She slows down to light it and as she draws breath she feels a rush and exhales
as though she is a dragon breathing fire. The cigarette sits in her right hand, which is only barely resting on the wheel. Now put your foot down, Beatrice, to make up the time. There’s that pit she detests coming up. Dammit, she thinks, I’ll have the better of you and she ups the throttle. But she’s fumbling almost, what is wrong with her? Blast, that’s too much. The ambulance bucks and skids forward on its rear wheels. One catches in the pit. At least she thinks that is what is happening as the truck turns on to its side and off the track.
Blackness.
1917
22
BEA IS PACING THE BALLROOM OF DARTMOUTH HOUSE
brandishing a mop which so reeks of disinfectant that it makes the back of her nose feel like a well-scrubbed bath. Little wonder, she thinks, that the men are coughing in their rows of iron beds. It’s not just the gas over there that’s got to them.
Mopping is at least physically active, even if she’s not the best at it. She thought it would take only a couple of months for her arm to heal, and she’d be back over the Channel. But not a chance that she could take the weight of the steering if she’s still one-handed with a mop after a year. At least the arm’s there, though, and thank God it’s her left. Jolly close shave, old girl, they said when she woke in Number Nine. That’s funny, she thought when they told her where she was, I left here. I’m sure I was driving away. Maybe they’ve called me back for an evacuation. Once they’ve loaded my truck they’ll put me back in the cab. Then she lost consciousness again.
Sometimes she tries to persuade herself that it was damned bad luck. After all, it was just one of those dents in the road. Oh, the excuses were there. The engine wasn’t up to it … But serves her right for not owning up to the fact it wasn’t in perfect nick. That was just it, Beatrice Masters, you thought nothing could touch you, and now you are paying the price. Cripple, that’s what
you’ve made yourself, and you might as well be a funk and a coward.
The only way to make sure that she hasn’t been a funk is going back. In a couple of months some of these chaps will be bandages off and on the boat over, having been cleaned for, washed-up for, even fed by Bea, former woman of action and now ever-patient member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment. She misses each one. Not least because they’re too grateful for the forkfuls she slips into their mouths to care if she’s now holding the fork like a spoon.
Bea starts to sweep the mop across the floor in grandiose gestures. She’s almost humming. Today is a good day: Edward is coming home on leave. Only on leave, but still home. And he always makes her feel a dazzler, whatever form she’s on. Just the afternoon to get through first.
It’s the limbs that simply aren’t there any more that are the worst here. Don’t look or you’ll see the saw marks, Ada Milton rattled out on Bea’s first day. Ada, who’d learnt the social niceties with Bea and Edie at Miss Wolffe’s, and who had once fainted there when Edie cut herself on the flower scissors, now doesn’t flinch at a thing.
Bea flinches, not just with the gruesomeness, but the terrible, terrible sadness, especially each time she’s asked to see what she can do about an itch on a leg that is no longer there. At first Bea lifted the sheets and scratched away at where a foot should have been. They couldn’t feel her hands; well, of course they couldn’t, what was she thinking of? They’d ask her to move her fingers this way and that, and scratch harder until either they realised, or Bea’s eyes gave it away. Then they’d fall still, looking so deep inwards that Bea thought their eyes would suck her in too. Now, when she’s asked to scratch, she just squeezes a hand and promises that it will go away.
The holes come in every part of the body. She’s seen a man who has lost his behind; the other VADs joked about being asked to scratch it, though nobody laughed aloud. No point in their conversation giving the nurses something else to complain about.
They seem to delight as it is in sending the VADs after the bedpans. Bea tries not to think about what she’s cleared up, but there’s no time for prudery, it’s all matter-of-fact. Bea sees parts of men she hasn’t seen before, inside and out, and many in a state that she hopes she’ll not see again.
As she manoeuvres the mop she taps a bedframe and the occupant reaches forward with his hand. Nurse, nurse. Bea walks around, taking mop and bucket – Sister would murder her if she left it at the end of the bed. She gives the man her hand, her good hand, and he grips it.
‘I’m not a nurse, Captain Peters, just a VAD.’ Need to put that in quick. She doesn’t want to be done for masquerading.
‘Oh, yes, I know your voice. It’s Masters, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ says Bea, ‘yes, it is.’
Nothing wrong with his eyes, the doctor says, yet he can’t open them. Sister Adams suggested packing him off to one of those hospitals where none of them are quite right in the head any more, but Lady L. came straight down on her. If he goes home, he can be looked after perfectly well, blind or not. But the letter sent to that home was returned,
No longer at this address
scrawled across it. He can’t stay for ever, can he, said Sister Adams. It’s my house, replied Lady L. So he has stayed. He’s a handsome man, Captain Peters, if only he would open his eyes.
‘Miss Masters and the pianist’s hands. Will you play for me one day?’
‘Yes, I will,’ lies Bea, thinking that he would have to be deaf, rather than blind, for her to pass muster on any instrument.
‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘The smell …’
‘Yes.’
‘Cut grass. Dampened by the morning dew. Is there anyone on the lawn? They’ll have to wait until it dries before they rake it up.’
Bea hesitates, but gentle lying seems to be a part of nursing.
‘Yes, they will.’ She gives his hand a squeeze.
‘But the sun’s out, isn’t it? It’s on my face. It’ll dry quickly this morning. Mind you don’t let your pretty skin burn. You’re fair, aren’t you? Your skin feels like that. Tell me what birds you can see. I hear them, but I’m no expert.’
‘Nor am I, and they are hidden.’
‘Hidden?’
‘In the bushes.’
‘Rhododendron?’
‘Yes,’ she answers.
‘They must be in flower, now that it’s late May. What colours? White is my favourite. Rather unoriginal, I know. And a little funereal.’