第8章 Ward C

Corporal Ewan Boyle died at twenty minutes past two in the morning, and by breakfast he had been written down as a case of septicemia, and by noon the bed by the window had been made up fresh, because the beds were always needed. Milly heard about it from Hilda, who had heard about it from an orderly, and she went to the ward before her first run and stood in the doorway with her cap in her hands. The bed was smooth. The window was open a crack. On the sill there was a folded paper bird that Boyle had made out of a ration ticket, and nobody had thought to throw it away. Sister Farlow was doing the dressings. She was a heavy, deliberate woman of fifty with grey hair pinned tight and a voice that carried the length of the ward, and she did not look up when Milly came in, and did not look up when Milly said, quietly, "He was well yesterday." "He was," Farlow said, to the dressing. "He was talking to me last night. He was cheerful. He said he would have his hand back by November." "He said a great many things," Farlow said. "Men do. And then the poison in the wound reaches the heart, and a man is carried out at three in the morning with a sheet over his face, and the war goes on. That is all. Do not make a story out of it." Milly looked at the paper bird on the sill. "I am not making a story," she said. "I am keeping an account." Farlow's hands stopped. For a long moment she stood quite still over the dressing tray, and then she said, without turning round, in a voice pitched for the two of them alone: "An account of what?" "Of what comes up the road, and what does not come back down it." Farlow turned. Her face was the same heavy, patient face, but her eyes had gone somewhere else, and Milly recognised the place; it was the place a person goes when they have decided to be afraid at last. Farlow said nothing for a while. Then she said, "There was a man in this ward at two o'clock. I do not know what he did. I know that he went to the drug cupboard, and that he had a key to it, which he should not have had, and that I pretended to be asleep in the sister's room because I have a son in the artillery and I want to live to see him. That is my account. Put it in your book if you like, but do not put my name in it, and do not ask me to write it down, because I will deny every word." "You will not have to deny it," Milly said slowly. "You will only have to say it once more, to someone who matters, when the time comes." "That time is never coming," Farlow said, and went back to the dressing, and said no more. Milly walked out into the yard. It was a bright cold morning, the kind that made the mud look almost clean, and the column was forming up for the first run, and Marchbanks was arguing with a wheel. She stood by her Ford and took out the notebook and wrote, in the second list, beneath the other names: *Boyle, Ewan, Cpl, died Ward C, 23rd, 2.20 a.m. Not the wound.* Then she put the notebook away and started the engine, and drove the four miles to the Warren with her jaw set and the sum in her head running faster than the wheels. Sister Farlow was not a woman who could be hurried, and Milly, who had been raised among farm women who could not be hurried either, knew better than to try. So she did not press on the first morning, or on the second. She came to Ward C at the changing of the dressings and made herself useful with the water and the lint, and let Farlow talk about anything at all: the rats in the kitchen, the price of eggs in Rouen before the war, the son in the artillery who wrote dutiful letters and never said where he was. And slowly, across those two days, Farlow began to talk about the ward, and the night shift, and the way a man's breathing changes in the hour before he dies, and the fact that in twenty years of nursing she had learned to tell the difference between a man who was sleeping and a man who was pretending. "They pretend because they think it protects them," Farlow said. "They think that if they keep their eyes shut, the thing in the ward cannot see them. It never works. It has a key and a lamp, and it knows which bed to go to." "How does it know which bed?" "Because the bed is written down," Farlow said, and then stopped, and looked at the door, and said nothing more until morning. That night Milly could not sleep. She went out into the yard and stood by her Ford with the cold coming up through the soles of Ted's boots, and she did the sum she had been avoiding for a week. If the market needed six names a fortnight, and the clearing station passed two thousand men in a fortnight, then the market was a small thing in a great river, and it could run for the whole of the war without anyone noticing, because nobody in the whole vast machine had ever been given the job of counting the dead twice. The only person in France who was doing it was a girl in an ambulance with a notebook against her heart. She went back to Ward C on the third morning and found that the bed by the window had been given to a man with a shoulder wound who was already complaining about the food, and that the ward had forgotten Boyle the way a ward always forgets, because a ward has no room for its dead and must keep its grief for the living. On the sill where the paper bird had been there now stood a small china dog that another man had found somewhere and set there for luck. She did not move it. It seemed to her, standing in the doorway, that the china dog and the paper bird and the photograph of a stranger with a dog at his knee were all the same object: the small ordinary tokens by which men reminded themselves that they had once lived somewhere with animals and children and a door that opened onto a street and not onto a trench. What made it worse was the certainty that she could do nothing yet. A notebook is not a case. A suspicion is not a charge. A nursing sister who would deny every word, a frightened clerk, and a photograph with a name on the back were not, together, enough to bring down a sergeant and a staff captain and whatever stood above them. They were enough only to send a girl home in disgrace, or to a base, or under the wheels of a lorry on a dark road. Milly had begun to understand the arithmetic of the market from the other side. It did not have to kill everyone who found out. It had to kill one, and let the rest take the lesson. A man who dies of a wound that was healing is a man who knew something. Boyle had known about the market and the man with the key, and he had told her, and less than twelve hours later he was dead and the bed was smooth and there was a paper bird on the sill. She was not clever enough, yet, to prove the order of those facts. But she was stubborn enough to keep them in a column of her own, and to wait, and to watch, and to be a nuisance, which in wartime is often the most dangerous thing a woman can decide to be. ---