to an order …
She had believed, when she failed to get anyone to marry her, that she had let everyone down, and been, in fact, a failure. She had, quietly, felt the fact that some of the nurses were definitely quicker off the mark than some of the doctors, and could have made better medics than those in authority over them. And now – Lady A. might as well have written to me personally, saying Rose, yes, we have seen you, we have noticed you, we want YOU to step up.
Dr Rose Locke.
She found herself grinning. This isn’t vanity, it’s not arrogance. It’s possible. They want me to do this! Think how sad they would be if nobody applied!
And of course the money made the vital difference. She would not have to ask Peter, or be beholden, and nothing anybody thought about it would matter. My work is beyond all praise, and this is my reward.
She was so happy she almost skipped.
So she had filled in the form, got the new medical certificate, dug out her old school reports and certificates and birth certificate and service record, and given it all to Matron, who had, most gratifyingly, said she’d be sorry to lose her, and it was up to Major Gillies.
And Major Gillies had wondered why on earth a nice girl like her would …
And she had looked at him straight and said, ‘Major Gillies, sir, ignore the fact that I’m a nice girl, and think about my brain.’
‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Have you got one?’
‘Have you never noticed it?’
‘Tried not to,’ he said. ‘A bit of brain in a nurse is just the ticket, but not too much. It only makes them sad.’
‘No longer,’ she said. ‘It’s about, I hope, with your blessing, to make me very happy.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘If we have to have lady doctors, I’m glad it’ll be you.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Sir.’
Since then, Further Correspondence had been large in her mind.
But when Peter had shouted at her, her response was not scientific or nursely at all. It was purely and deeply emotional.
It wasn’t so much the shouting. So he had become a man who shouted: it was very unpleasant, but men could be like that, she knew, she’d seen enough of it on the wards, and though it made it harder to love him as she had when he was a boy, he had been to war and therefore she accepted it. What upset her was the phrase ‘in his own house’. Rose had lived and stayed at Locke Hill since before the war, and throughout the uncertainties of the war years she had taken comfort in calling it home. But now the underlying message lay there like a crushed snail underfoot: she was the poor relation – which was sort of true – and she’d better mind her step. He had never said, or implied, any such thing before, ever – he had always been the kindest man, the funniest companion, most loving cousin …
When he said that – ‘in his own house’ and ‘some bloody woman’ – Rose felt slapped. She left the room, and went upstairs with her feet odd on the steps, and an aerated feeling in her arms. Peter, her generous sweet cousin, friend of her youth, companion of her heart – he would not – but he just had. He had. Hadn’t he?
And then she sat on her bed for a while, wondering if she was overreacting, and why she didn’t understand Peter at all any more, and what she could do to make things easier for him, and whether perhaps it was, well, not her fault, of course she was not responsible for what had happened at Loos, which seemed, really to be the beginning of where he started going wrong, not that he’d talked about it, but she’d seen the lists of the dead, and how many had been his men.
We cannot ever know, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help, she told herself. Don’t mind one thoughtless comment.
What was he thinking, to say that?
Oh, he wasn’t thinking. It was the drink talking.
But a man chooses to get drunk. Doesn’t he?
At least, he could choose not to. Couldn’t he?
But alongside her hurt impatience, she felt a deep, naked sympathy. There had been such suffering. And there was Tom, little white-haired, milk-skinned Tom with his furious eyes and his great silences, wandering the house, lurking in the hall by the elephant-foot umbrella stand, watching, growing, needing . . . He misses Nadine. She was so sweet with him.
Rose recalled, suddenly, a day when Tom had called Nadine ‘Mummy’. Julia had tried to laugh it off, and Nadine had been mortified, and Tom had not known what he had done wrong … Later Julia had said, ‘Well, it’s all in the genes, isn’t it? Clearly I’m going to be as foul a mother as my mother was. Girls like me shouldn’t have children,’ and Rose had wanted to slap her, and Julia had noticed and wept and gone and got Tom and carried him off into her dim bedroom and hugged him nearly to death when he had already forgotten all about it and just wanted to play with his ball.
Time is flying by and they are all suffering. There has been so much silence, and it is so hard to tell if it is the silence of healing rest, of peace and contemplation, or the silence of fear and loneliness, emptiness and pretending … Are they dying there behind their closed doors? Or dealing with it all in their own way, taking the time it takes?
Should I be doing something? Something else?
In a way, Peter being foul gives me permission to leave, if I get the scholarship. But in another way, it’s another reason why I have to stay with him. He’s so helpless he can’t even be nice.
But I want to go. I want to live my own life.
But—
Is it pride and nothing else, to want to stand around with the men, with my notes and my professional judgement, and have other people act on my instructions, when my family needs me here?
Then she told herself that this was their own storm, and would work itself out its own way, no matter how much she threw herself at the stone walls surrounding it. Then she told herself that it was selfish of her to want to leave – if she got the chance – when they were all so helpless. Then she told herself it was arrogant to think she could help by staying. Then she thought of Tom again, and asked herself, if I leave, I will create a vacuum, and who’s to say if either of them will be able to expand to fill it? And finally she said: Go to sleep, Rose. It’s not your fault. He’s not your husband. She’s not your wife. He’s not your son.
It was not, in the end, Peter’s outburst that made up her mind. It was the sight of a plucked, untrussed chicken on the kitchen table a few days later. Headless, footless, wing-tipless, pink and naked, it looked alarmingly like a dead baby, arms out, knees pulled up, splayed. Flesh and skin and bone. I know about flesh and skin and bone. I know how they work. I would rather work with them.
Bugger Peter, and bugger Julia, she thought, enjoying the language she’d picked up – only for mental use – from the men she’d been caring for. When the Further Correspondence comes, if I get the chance, I will be off. I will be off.
Locke Hill, April 1919
What Peter had been thinking was what he was always thinking, one way or another: the phrases and repetitions that garlanded his dance with whisky, excusing and justifying on the one hand, denying and defying on the other.
He might have