Elinor’s thoughts were skittering about like bugs on the surface of a pond while her real feelings lurked in the depths somewhere, out of reach. She looked around: she’d lost all sense of where the main entrance was.
A man with one eye came up to her. ‘Can I help you?’
The other eye was a moist slit with a few sparse eyelashes clinging feebly to the lid.
‘No, thanks, I’m fine.’
She pretended she had somewhere to get to and walked off, head down, away from him. She could feel him watching her with his one eye, and started to walk faster. A turning led into a dark passage; she was afraid she might have blundered into the kitchen area, but no, the passage opened out again on to a wider corridor. She knew she had to give Paul plenty of time to make Kit talk, so she would just go wherever this corridor took her. God, she’d have liked to shake the truth out of Kit, but it wouldn’t have worked. If she’d tried to put pressure on him he’d only have clammed up more. He wasn’t going to tell
her
anything.
She was walking head down when a near-collision with somebody in a blue uniform forced her to look up. The corridor, almost empty when she set off, had become crowded with people all moving in the same direction: some nurses, but mainly patients. Faces
loomed up in front of her, all kinds of faces; the bodies in their garish uniforms hardly registered. Men with no eyes were being led along by men with no mouths; there was even one man with no jaw, his whole face shelving steeply away into his neck. Men, like Kit, with no noses and horribly twisted faces. And others – the ones she couldn’t understand at all – with pink tubes sprouting out of their wounds and terrible cringing eyes looking out over the top of it all. Brueghel; and worse than Brueghel, because they were real.
She had to get away. She scaled along the wall, quickening her pace as the crowd began to thin. By the time the last of them had gone by she was almost running, and not looking where she was going until her nose came into violent contact with a man’s chest. Slowly, she raised her eyes, braced for God knows what horrors, and found herself looking at Henry Tonks.
‘Miss Brooke. Good heavens.’
Her mouth opened but no sound came out.
‘You don’t look at all well. Come along, let’s see if we can find you a cup of tea.’
Still unable to speak, she fell into step beside him.
‘You must be visiting Mr Neville,’ Tonks said, pleasantly, as he unlocked a door.
‘Yes, that’s right. Paul Tarrant’s still with him. I fancied a breath of fresh air.’
Even that little lie made her feel uncomfortable. This was a place for truth.
Tonks ushered her into a large room that contained a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet. There was a screened-off recess to her right. The part of the room she could see resembled a doctor’s surgery, except that at the far end, underneath the tall windows, there was an easel and a table covered with drawing pads, pens and ink and pastels. Directly underneath the window was a stool, presumably for the patient since it had been placed where the full, shadowless glare of northern light would fall directly on the face.
‘I’ll see about the tea. Have a seat.’
He went out; she could hear his voice in the room across the
corridor requesting a pot of tea and two slices of that rather nice fruit cake, do you think we could manage that? A woman’s voice replied; and then a man’s voice – not Tonks – and, finally, a rumble of conversation. Clearly, Tonks had got embroiled in hospital business.
Elinor went across to the table and looked at a pen-and-ink drawing of a patient with a gaping hole in his cheek. Presumably, Tonks’s medical drawings would be done in pen and ink – ironic, really, since he’d never made any secret of how much he hated that medium. In fact, he’d described it to her once as the least forgiving medium an artist could work in, calculated to expose every flaw in draughtsmanship. Yet she’d have recognized this as Tonks’s work from the purity of the line alone.
She wondered what lay behind the screen; probably a washbasin, something like that. But when she looked behind it she saw, instead, a whole wall full of portraits of men with hideously disfigured faces. One of them, the man with no jaw, she recognized from the corridor. Individually, each portrait would have been remarkable; displayed together like this, row upon row, they were overwhelming. She took her time, pausing in front of first one portrait, then another. Were they portraits, or were they medical illustrations? Portraits celebrate the identity of the sitter. Everything – the clothes they’ve chosen to wear, the background, the objects on a table by the chair – leads the eye back to the face. And the face is the person. Here, in these portraits, the wound was central. She found her gaze shifting continuously between torn flesh and splintered bone and the eyes of the man who had to suffer it. There was no point of rest; no pleasure in the exploration of a unique individual. Instead you were left with a question: How can any human being endure this?
Tonks came back into the room. ‘Ah, I see you’ve found my Rogues’ Gallery.’
She thought she detected reserve, even disapproval, in his voice. ‘I’m sorry, I – I realize they’re not on display.’
‘No, don’t worry, you’d be amazed how many people see them. Though I like to think they’re mainly surgeons.’ A pause. ‘I’d be quite interested to hear what you think.’
Tonks wanted her opinion of his work? That was bad enough, but the awful truth was she didn’t have one. She didn’t know how to react to images which seemed to call for several different kinds of response. In the end she just said, simply: ‘I don’t know how to look at them.’
‘Well, they are –’
‘No, I don’t mean I can’t bear to look at them; I mean, I don’t know
how
. I don’t know what I’m looking at – a man or a wound.’
‘Both, I hope. You know, even when I was a very young doctor going round the wards I always saw them like that. On the one hand there’s a patient with a problem you have to solve, or at least try to solve, but there’s also the person.’ He stood back, looking along the row of faces. ‘I can’t not see both.’
Somebody knocked on the door.
‘That’ll be tea, I expect. You do look rather pale. Is there anything else I can get you?’
‘No, I’m all right, thank you.’ She pointed to one of the portraits. ‘How on earth do you repair that?’
‘Actually, that’s not too difficult because basically it’s a flesh wound. This one. Well, I’m not sure even Gillies can do much for him.’ He touched her shoulder. ‘Come on, tea.’
‘How do you find the time to do all this?’ she said, when they were settled in chairs on opposite sides of his desk.
‘Not easily. I do one day a week, two if I can manage it, but it’s not nearly enough. You have to do drawings when they first arrive, then you’re in theatre during the operations, and then there are the post-op drawings. And the portraits.’ He reached for a file. ‘Of course we take photographs as well. Look at this, this is a really good result. There’s a little bit of puckering, but Gillies thinks he can get rid of that. And when you think what the poor devil came in with …’ He handed her another photograph.
‘My God. That’s amazing.’
‘He’d been very badly stitched up at another hospital. I’m afraid that’s what happened to Mr Neville.’ He offered her a slice of cake. ‘Probably stale, I’m afraid. How did you find him?’
‘Same old Kit. You know, he served in France with my brother. Kit was one of his stretcher-bearers. I was hoping he’d be able to give me some more information. You see, Toby was posted “Missing, Believed Killed” and that’s really hard. I mean, I look at one of the men there, that one … He couldn’t tell anybody who he was.’
‘He could write –’
‘It makes me wonder if it’s possible for a man to just disappear into the system, never be able to identify himself.’
‘That’s what identity discs are for.’
‘I know, I’m being silly.’
‘You’ve also got to ask yourself if you’d
want
your brother to be alive in that state. A lot of these men are real heroes – but I look at some of them, the worst cases, and I know if it was me I’d rather be dead.’
‘Yes, you’re right, of course. I’d only want him back if he could be the person he used to be before it all started.’
‘I’m not sure any of us can manage that.’
‘I used to think I could.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes, for a long time. I was determined I was going to ignore the whole thing.’
‘Was?’
She shook her head. ‘It gets you in the end.’
‘Have you ever thought about using your skills to … Well, do what I’m doing, I suppose?’
She almost laughed.
‘I mean, here. With these men.’
‘I’d be completely useless.’
‘You did anatomy before the war. Dissection.’
‘You’re a surgeon.’
‘Most of the artists here have no medical training. Though I suppose you might find the operations distressing …’
‘No, I don’t think I would. Actually, I know I wouldn’t, I’d be absolutely fascinated.’
‘So then, why not?’
Unconsciously, Elinor sighed. This was the usual question everybody asked her but it was coming now from the one person she felt she had to answer. ‘I’m trying not to have anything to do with the war.’
Tonks waited for the silence to thicken. ‘Because …?’
‘Because it’s evil. Total destruction. Of everything. Not just lives, even. It’s like one of those combine harvester things, you know? Only it’s not cutting wheat …’
‘I doubt if you hate it more than I do.’
‘It’s like the pacifists. You know, some of them, the majority, take on work of “national importance” – bit of a joke sometimes, but never mind – and they go and work on a farm or in a hospital. But the others – the absolutists – won’t do that. They’d rather go to prison than contribute anything, anything at all, to the war. And I just think that’s a stronger position, it’s more logical, because the others are just pouring their little bits of oil on to the combine harvester and telling themselves there’s no blood on their hands because they’re not actually driving the wretched thing. And I know none of this applies to women but actually I think some of it does. So anyway that’s why I don’t contribute and … and I don’t paint anything to do with it. Because the war sucks that in too. And I don’t think it should be about that, I think painting should be about … celebration. Praise.’
She came to an abrupt halt, realizing that she was lecturing Tonks –
Tonks
– on the subject of art.
He was smiling at her, rather kindly she thought. ‘I wouldn’t disagree with you, I think a very large part of art is about celebration, but then you also have to paint what’s in front of you, don’t you? And your generation hasn’t been very lucky in that respect.’
‘Well, no, nor yours either. What could be worse than losing adult children?’
‘Mercifully I’m not at any personal risk there. One thing it might help you to think about … The men here, the process of rebuilding their faces takes so long, I don’t think many of them are going back to the front. If any. What we’re doing here is simply trying to get
them back into civilian life with some hope of … being happy. That’s all. So you wouldn’t be pouring oil on to the combine harvester.’
Reluctantly, she started to smile. ‘Yes, I know, sorry, it’s ridiculous. I’m just not good at explaining things.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Do you mind if I think about it?’
‘No, take as long as you like. Well, not quite. Why don’t you come in on Thursday and I’ll show you round? See what you think.’
‘All right.’
‘Early start, I’m afraid. Eight o’clock?’
‘Yes, of course, I’m up anyway. And now I think I’d better be getting back to Paul, he’ll wonder what’s happened to me.’
At the door, Tonks held out his hand. ‘Sure you can find the way back? Just turn left at the end of the corridor and then it’s straight down till you get to the main entrance.’
So where had that sense of a labyrinth come from? The waking nightmare, where now there was only sunshine slanting into a perfectly ordinary corridor. People in white coats came and went, and yes, once or twice she passed patients with terrible disfigurements, but not the Brueghel-like horde she’d seen advancing on her an hour or so ago. On her left, an imposing door led to what might once, she supposed, have been the library, or perhaps even a ballroom. A roar of laughter reached her, followed by a ripple of titters. Somebody was thumping away on a piano, while a trio of wobbly falsetto voices sang ‘Three Little Maids from School’. The song came to an end with another burst of laughter and applause.
Paul was waiting for her in the garden, pacing angrily up and down. ‘Where on earth have you been?’
‘Sorry, I got talking. Where’s Kit?’
‘Back on the ward. Long since.’
‘Did you get anything out of him?’
‘No, and I’m not sure there’s anything
to
get.’
‘Yes there is. And you know it.’
‘This isn’t helping you, you know. It just stops you –’
‘Go on. Stops me what?’
He shook his head.
‘No, go on. I’m interested.’
‘Moving on with your life.’
‘I am. Moving on.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Well, if you really want to know I just spent the last half-hour talking to Tonks and he’s offered me a job.’
‘What sort of job?’
‘Medical illustration.’
‘Here?’
‘Ye-es?’
‘I wasn’t … I mean, I think you’d be very good at it.’ He waited. ‘Will you take it?’
‘I’m coming in on Thursday, I’ll know more then.’
They set off down the drive. Up till now Elinor hadn’t seriously considered taking the job. In fact, she’d been trying to work out ways of refusing it without appearing to Tonks – whose opinion she valued more than anybody else’s – as egotistical, silly, uncaring and trivial. She thought she was quite possibly all these things, but she didn’t want Tonks thinking so. But then, Paul’s advice to ‘move on with her life’ had been incredibly irritating – not to mention trite – and, almost simultaneously, she’d realized that working at the hospital would give her unfettered access to Kit.