The Fall (36 page)

A very experienced lady, so Mrs. Warren said. And clean, she emphasized: clean.

“Ten quid,” Maud said. “That’s all. Special price for friends, right?” She waited, wearing a smile that she might have used
for a simpleton. “On the nail, dearie. Okay?”

Diana didn’t understand. There were many things she didn’t understand. “The nail?”

“In
advance,
love.”

“Oh, yes. My purse is up in my room.”

“I think we can wait while you run and get it.”

She would never forget this. As she climbed the creaking stairs, she knew that she would never forget all this — the two women
in the kitchen with their caustic politeness, the stairs creaking as they bore her weight, the wall of the stairwell with
its gray flock wallpaper. This would be there in her memory forever, a part of her more certain than the baby inside her.

She returned with the money and handed it over for inspection. Had it been coin the woman would have no doubt bitten it. As
it was, she folded the large white notes and tucked them away down the front of her dress. “That’s lovely, dearie,” she said.
“Now if you’ll just make yourself ready…”

Diana smiled at her. She wanted to please; she wanted to like Maud, love her even. She wanted the woman’s voice to be mellifluous,
flowing like honey, soothing and loving. But she didn’t know what Maud meant. “Ready?” she asked. “How?”

Maud sighed. “Knickers, dear. Take your knickers off and get on the table. You’re a nurse, aren’t you?”

“An auxiliary.”

“Well, you ought to know about it all then. What is the modern generation coming to, Mrs. Warren? That’s what I want to know.”

Maud had an old leather shopping bag. Her
reticule,
she called it. Out of it she took rubber tubing and a syringe and other pieces of apparatus: a cheese grater and a bar of
Lifebuoy soap and a bottle of disinfectant. Dettol. A kettle whistled in the background. “Hot water, please, dear,” said Maud
to Mrs. Warren. The big woman mixed hot and cold, and rolled up her sleeve to display a forearm as large as a ham and as white
as dough. She dipped her elbow to test the water. Maud began to grate soap into the water, bright-pink curls, like parings
of living flesh. All the time she hummed, expelling air through her teeth in a breathy, toneless whistle — “The Mountains of
Mourne” over and over. The smell of carbolic filled the room. Never again was Diana able to hear the tune or smell carbolic
soap or Dettol without conjuring up that moment in the kitchen of the Warrens’ house, with fear plucking at her diaphragm
and the scrawny woman grating pink soap into a dish.

“Right, dearie?” asked Maud, turning to her with the rubber tubing in her hand. “Are we ready?”

Diana was determined to make no noise. She’d seen so many people, victims of the bombing, suffering in shocked silence. She
would behave like them, almost as though none of this mattered, nothing mattered, neither the destruction of a house nor the
destruction of a child. So she lay on her back on the kitchen table and looked upward at the stained ceiling and the single,
bare lightbulb, and made not a sound as Maud groped around between her legs and inserted her tubing. Diana’s very soul seemed
pierced by it. The fluid flooded her, and the tide of pain flowed and ebbed and flowed again. It was an interior pain, the
agony of her soul being damaged, maybe even destroyed. She closed her eyes and thought; oh, she thought of dozens of things:
her room at home, walking in the Yorkshire Dales, Meg and Eric and the others, her parents, her various family. She tried
not to think of Guy Matthewson. She tried not to think of whatever it was that was inside her. She tried not to think of the
death and destruction that was all about her.

“There we are, dearie. Just wait a few moments before you sit up.” Maud was coiling up the tubing and putting it away. Mrs.
Warren was mopping up.

Diana asked: “That’s it?”

The woman gave a dry chuckle. “No, dearie,” she said. “That’s
not
it. It’s only just beginning.”

There was an ominous pause, a kind of truce, enough time for Diana to go on day watch at the first-aid post. “If nothing happens,
we’ll have to have another go,” Maud had said before she left. Her tone was that of an adult warning a child not to be naughty.

Diana waited. Sensitive to every stirring within her body, she waited. It was like a pause in the raids, an unnatural silence
in which no aircraft sounded in the air above and no bombs fell, but the all-clear hadn’t sounded: it was peaceful, but you
knew it wasn’t peace. At the post they had to tend to a few minor injuries, cuts and bruises gained in the aftermath of bombing:
a couple of children who had hurt themselves playing with bits of shrapnel, a woman who had fallen while searching through
the rubble of her house to salvage her paltry possessions.

When she went to the lavatory, she passed a liquid that was stained pink with soap or blood, she couldn’t tell which.

“You don’t look well, Nurse,” said Dr. Dewar when she emerged. There were two people waiting to be treated, one with a cut
from trying to open a tin and another who had scalded herself. It seemed ridiculous that among all the deliberate damage,
you could suffer an accident in the kitchen.

Diana smiled vaguely at the doctor. “I’m all right. I think I’ll be getting home though. Once we’ve got these done.”

There was some kind of pain there now, like a period pain. And she felt like vomiting. What had nausea got to do with it,
except by proximity? How were these things linked up inside? How could one symptom spill over into another? As she put bottles
of disinfectant back into the cupboards, her head swam with the smell of phenol, the same smell that had pervaded the Warrens’
kitchen, the smell of the carbolic soap that spread through her memory and etched itself like acid into her mind.

She collected the instruments that had been used and put them into the sterilizing kettle. Then she scrubbed down the sink
and collected the bag of discarded dressings. You wore uniform when you were on duty at the post — the white apron and starched
hat. As she went out with the bag to the incinerator, she caught a glimpse of herself reflected in the glass of the medicine
chest: an efficient, sterile figure looking older than her nineteen years.

There was a sudden stirring within her abdomen. She paused and closed her eyes against the pain, and it suddenly seemed to
her that her baby was in there, fighting for its life, drowning in carbolic. A shudder passed through her body, and someone
grabbed her arm.

“I say, are you all right, Nurse?”

The room moved. As though it had been hit by a bomb. They said that happened if you were near a blast — the walls would shift
and sway like a ship in a storm. Often you never heard the sound of the explosion, so they said. “I’ve got to get home,” she
said.

“Not for the moment, you haven’t.” A Scots voice. “You’d best lie down.”

The post had once been a butcher’s shop, and the inner room was the cold store. Now there were half-a-dozen hospital beds
with iron frames and bare mattresses, but there were still the pipes along the walls and the rails from which carcasses of
beef had once hung. The doctor helped her onto one of the beds and bent to take her shoes off, a strange and touching gesture
that almost made her weep. She’d a hole in her stocking, her big toe showing through. A
potato,
that’s what her mother called holes like that. And thinking of her mother brought on the weeping, so that she lay there with
her skirt pulled primly down and Dr. Dewar taking her pulse and her big toe poking through her stocking and the tears flowing.
One of the other nurses was hovering uncertainly in the background. You didn’t leave a woman patient alone with a male doctor.
“Is it your time of the month?” Dewar asked.

“Maybe that’s it.”

He placed a hand on her forehead. His touch was cool and dry. “Maybe. But we’ll take your temperature and see if you’re sickening
from something. It’s probably all brought on by exhaustion. I’ve seen you working, Diana, and it’s enough to stop a man in
his tracks.”

He’d never used her Christian name before. Among the waves of nausea flooding up from her abdomen, she noticed that fact.
How did he even know it? she wondered. She closed her eyes and swallowed something. “I think…”

“What is it?”

“I think I want the bathroom.”

He called the other nurse to help her. In the bathroom she vomited and she bled. Later she must have fainted, because when
she came to she was sitting on the floor and someone was hammering on the door and she vaguely heard Dewar’s voice coming
through the wood paneling. He was saying something about taking the bloody locks off; it was bloody lethal to have locks on
doors in a bloody clinic. She noticed the way he said
bloody,
the Scottish intonation. Shortly after that they broke the door open, but she was beyond caring by then. She heard a call
for towels and felt hands picking her up and his voice telling them to go carefully, for God’s sake. There was blood on her
legs — to go with the
bloody
in his language, she thought. There was pressure on her stomach, someone leaning and pushing. Then they hurried her outside,
and there was the motion of the ambulance, and then a stretcher and doors banging and bright lights in a long corridor and
a room with a sink and a sluice and a glass-fronted cabinet. There was more pain and the pushing on her abdomen and the sound
of water flowing. And then they transferred her to a gurney and wheeled her into a ward full of women. “Where am I?” she asked
one of the nurses.

“The Royal Free.”

They put screens around her bed, and a male face looked down at her. He reminded her of Mandeville. He had a stiff collar
and a thin black tie. His hair sprouted gray wings above his ears, like a gull’s. That was even his name, she discovered later:
Dr. Gull. “Do you understand that you could face criminal charges for this, young woman? This ought to be reported to the
police.”

“Have I lost it?” she asked. How was it possible to want the answer to be twofold, positive and negative at the same time?
How was it possible to hold contradictory ideas like this, to want death and life, to feel both relief and pain, happiness
and misery at the same time? The doctor looked down on her with the pinched and sententious expression of a priest. “Yes,
you’ve lost it. It was a girl,” he added, “but I don’t expect you care, do you?”

“Of course I care.”

“Then why did you do it?”

She turned away from him to stare at the plain gray cloth of the screen. There was no answer to give really. Dimly she was
aware of the man rising from his chair. “We’ll have to do a small operation to clean things up,” he said as he turned to go.

She felt a sudden panic and turned to look at him, to grab his arm. “Will it damage me?” she asked. “I mean, will it stop
me from having babies?”

He paused, measuring his answer, wanting, no doubt, to be able to deliver worse news: “Let’s hope not.”

Later the ward sister looked in on her and asked if there was a number they could phone. “You’ll be out the day after tomorrow,
and you’ll need looking after.” Diana gave Meg’s number. There was no one else. There was a whole city out there, but her
knowledge of it was limited to the ambulance unit, the first-aid post, the Warrens, and Meg — fewer people than you’d know in
a village.

The sirens went that evening. They had to evacuate the ward. Women in dressing gowns and slippers trooped down to the basement.
Those who couldn’t walk were pushed in wheelchairs. One or two had to be taken down on their beds. They sat in the half darkness
beneath the central-heating pipes and the water pipes and the ventilation ducts and listened to the distant concussion of
high explosive. Diana thought of the ambulance unit, imagined Bert driving through the littered streets and Dr. Dewar at work
with the wounded in the first-aid station. The all-clear sounded at three o’clock in the morning, and everyone went back upstairs,
grumbling and complaining.

Later that morning, they did the operation.
D and C,
they called it. They gave the impression that she ought to know what the letters meant, but she didn’t and she was too afraid
to ask. When she came around from the anesthetic, she was back in her bed. This time there were no screens: she was immersed
in the noise of the public ward, people coming and going, stretchers trundling along, patients complaining, exchanging diagnoses,
prognoses, disasters. Her next-door neighbor looked across at her with a wry expression. “Up the spout were yer, love?” she
said. “Always the way. There’s dozens of ’em in ’ere for that.”