More Miracle Than Bird Page 2

  “I’d like that.” Georgie watched Dorothy, who at the mention of Freddie and Herbert looked thoroughly bored—but the bored expression of long-gowned, glamorous Dorothy Shakespear was exquisite. At that moment Georgie had the feeling that if the dead would speak to anyone, it would be Dorothy Shakespear.

  “I’ll let you know,” Dorothy said. “Also, some of us are going to Florence next month. A painting trip. Painting and rambling. And drinking. If you want to join.”

  Georgie felt a trickle of excitement, before she realised, of course, she couldn’t do anything of the kind.

  “I have to go back to school.”

  “Surely Italy is a better education than St. James’s?”

  “Of course,” Georgie said, putting her drink down on the table, “but . . .” The sentence that had been forming on her lips fell away, and she found herself staring at the lazy trail of smoke from Dorothy’s cigarette as it rose, weaving in and out of itself. There was no way that Nelly would let her quit school. But the longer Georgie sat drinking brandy with Dorothy, as their conversation ambled between the Futurists and Debussy and those new silk dresses which fell straight to your ankle, the more convinced she became that Dorothy’s approach was the right one. Surely Georgie’s life could also be different.

  That night she’d gone back with her mother for dinner at Drayton Gardens. It was probably the brandy, but in the car she thought her pulse was so loud that her mother would hear it. When they got home there was a pause while Nelly went to talk to Georgie’s father upstairs, but when Georgie arrived at the dinner table, both her parents were already sitting in their places. Lucy brought in the soup, and both Nelly and Gilbert seemed to pay the soup more attention than usual. Were her parents responding to her? she wondered. Could they sense this change inside her, this determination? They each had a glass of wine, which Georgie pretended not to notice; the presence of alcohol in the house had become a source of anxiety, so that no one looked at or spoke about it. How timid this behaviour seemed to her, almost dishonest. Georgie was filled with bravery and brandy. She glanced over to see Lucy retreat to the other room. She raised her spoon above her bowl and paused.

  “I have decided to leave St. James’s,” she said. “Dorothy and the others are going to the Continent, and I plan to go with them.”

  Her mother held a crust of bread halfway between her lips and her plate. “Oh, darling. You can’t leave.” It had been Nelly’s idea to commit Georgie to St. James’s School for Girls in West Malvern.

  “I spend all day learning nothing of use, and I have hardly any time when I come home to study real things.” Her older brother, Harold, was in his last year at Eton, and he too disliked school, but at least he was studying history and theology. St. James’s taught classes on sewing and cookery and deportment, to a horde of girls who seemed somehow satisfied with this as an education.

  “Dorothy loved it there.”

  “Maybe so”—and if she had, she certainly hadn’t mentioned it—“but I don’t.” It occurred to Georgie only now that Nelly would have much preferred a daughter like Dorothy: charming, easy, gifted at telling people what they wanted to hear.

  Her father had taken a large spoonful of soup and now tore a chunk of bread in his fingers.

  “Are you sure you want to leave?”

  “I wish I liked it more,” Georgie said, “but I can’t stop criticising it.”

  He smiled. “You get that from me.”

  “You think she doesn’t get it from me?” Nelly’s smile was tight. “It’s only another year to stay on. And the school is very well regarded.”

  “I don’t see the point in staying,” Georgie said. “What’s the use? It would cost less to have me at home.”

  Nelly shook her head slowly. “There are different kinds of cost.”

  Gilbert reached forward for his glass and took a gulp of wine. “You would have done far better at Eton and Oxford than Harold or I will ever do.” No one contradicted him. The greatest achievement of Gilbert’s education was being part of the winning team in the Oxford Fours boat race. He never took a degree. But no one would consider sending Georgie, a young woman, to Oxford.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” Georgie said, gathering momentum, “I’m going to Italy with Dorothy. I’ve decided.”

  “All right, pup, we hear you,” Gilbert said. “We can talk about it. But the thing is we have our own news, actually. Your mother is kicking me out of the house again.”

  “Gilbert.”

  “It’s true. She’s requested I leave for a few weeks. Leave her to her soirées and her lectures.”

  “That is not what we discussed,” Nelly said. She put her spoon down and sat very still. The last time Nelly had sent him away, it was to a home for inebriates in Twickenham. It had taken months of Georgie’s pleading before she had let him come back. They hadn’t mentioned it afterwards.

  “It is, really,” Gilbert said cheerfully, finishing his glass and looking around casually to see if Lucy might refill it. Georgie delivered soup to her mouth, then spent some seconds coaxing herself to swallow. “But I love your mother, and I give her what she wants, insofar as in my awfully limited capacity I am able. I’ve decided to go down to Suffolk and catch up with an old military chum.”

  Georgie swallowed. She knew that there was a lot more to what was being said, but right now she didn’t want to consider it. She tried to glide past these words, past the looks that her parents were exchanging, and said with confidence, “And I will leave St. James’s.”

  Her mother glanced at the two of them, placed her spoon back down on the tablecloth, and, like a defeated ruler, rose from her chair.

  “Very well,” she said. “You both must do as you like.”

  Georgie heard a knock on her door a few hours later, when she was sitting on her bed reading her Latin primer. She was continuing with her translation of Pico della Mirandola; after she’d mentioned it at the soirée, it seemed more urgent than before. Wouldn’t a project like this be worth leaving school for? Or would she find it too lonely? It could take years. The door pushed open, and her father leaned his long frame against the doorway before coming in and sitting beside her on the bed.

  “Are you here to talk me out of it?”

  He smoothed the bedcover with his thick fingers, and she could feel his breath, warm air, claret, smoke. “I’m here to make sure you’re sure. I’m only concerned that, without school, you wouldn’t have enough structure.”

  She put the primer face down beside her on the bed. It was easier to be honest with him than with her mother. “I’m not completely sure. But I think I’m sure. I want to go to Italy. I have some translation projects. That might be enough.” She paused. There was the possibility, of course, that it wouldn’t be. That perhaps she would struggle. “Do you think it’s enough?”

  “I’m sorry, pup. I don’t know. And that indecision, I gave that to you too.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “But I could have tried to cure myself, instead of just blindly passing it on,” he said. “Other people just make up their mind and know.”

  “I think that I know,” she said, wishing she could sound more certain, wishing for once she were more like Nelly, who always seemed sure of the answers. “If I left school, I think I could use my time far better than I do now.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing. The times when you really do know, it’s heavenly.” Gilbert was looking down at the bedspread, at his hands, which cupped one another. “It does happen, even to critical souls like us,” he went on. “I knew when I married your mother that it was exactly what I wanted.”

  “You did?” She was surprised.

  “Well, I had been smitten with someone else—Margaret was her name, an absolutely ripping girl, actually—but she was not the right sort, and we both knew it. And it was she who introduced me to your mother.” He tilted his head. “I don’t know why your mother gave in and married me. A moment of weakness, I suppose. She desperately w
anted to upset her mother, and I was the perfect fix.”

  “You still think it was a good decision?”

  “Well, some fellows doubt their marriages every day. I never did. I loved her. Still do.”

  Georgie was puzzled by this. “Maybe that has less to do with her and more to do with you.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but maybe it has something to do with both of us. Anyway. I say you should go ahead and leave school. We’ll look out for you, make sure you don’t get lost without it.”

  “I don’t think I will be,” she said quietly.

  And she wouldn’t have been lost without it, she thought now, as she walked along the edge of Berkeley Square Gardens towards the dormitory, avoiding the muddy straw put down to dampen the noise of cars, her pace fast and deliberate through the dark streets. Gilbert would have helped her to adjust to life without school, and she would have had her own independence to study and translate as she wished. Still, it hadn’t happened that way. Instead, in November 1909, after returning from one of her trips to Italy—from three weeks of reckless discussions and exploring ruins and painting, from laughing and dancing with Dorothy Shakespear, and watching clusters of artistic young men eyeing Dorothy adoringly—she had received a telegram to say that her father was dead.

  THREE

  In Georgie’s first week at the hospital, the matron repeatedly instructed her to mop the floors. But Georgie discovered that if she mopped the floors right to each corner, she was too slow; if she mopped quickly, she was careless. If she spoke to the men, she was accused of being frivolous and flirtatious, but if they called out for her and she didn’t answer, she was declared negligent. When she slopped water on the floor, the matron stood above the puddle and gazed at it in horror, as if Georgie had squatted down and urinated.

  Still, she mopped floors, sterilised instruments, emptied bedpans. It was strange to think that it had taken a war for her to finally leave home. It was seven years since Gilbert had died in a flat in Pimlico. It had been a complete shock to Georgie—he was only forty-four, and she never found out why he had gone to that flat in Pimlico or what had happened there. But she came to realise that other people were not so surprised, that it was thought that sooner or later Captain Hyde-Lees might drink himself to death. When Georgie returned from Italy, Nelly sent her to finishing school, and she lived at home until school was over and the war broke out. Still, she wasn’t sure she would ever forgive her mother for sending Gilbert away.

  As Georgie placed a clean bedpan under Colonel Fraser’s bed, she accidentally bumped the iron bed-frame, and the gentle knock startled the colonel, who clutched his arms around his chest without opening his eyes. Part of what was so odd about the officers was their hopelessness. Many of them did not look at her, let alone talk to her; many of them didn’t seem to care whether they lived or died. Even Second Lieutenant Pike, who was one of the most animated, had that odd, ghosted expression of a creature who was missing something. Under Mrs. Thwaite’s instructions, Georgie was to pay special attention to Major Hammond, as the matron was concerned about his treatment. Although Georgie was new, she was designated as his nurse presumably because she had cleaner, more aristocratic vowels than Sanderson, the other girl. But Mrs. Thwaite needn’t have worried, because the major seldom opened his eyes and didn’t seem to hear a word Georgie said, and in the rare times he was awake he kept his face firmly hidden behind his newspaper, intermittently shaking the paper, like there was something caught in the pages he needed to banish.

  As always, during visiting hours, the ward filled with women; men, too, but it was the women who took over the space, heaving with sighs over their sons and brothers and husbands, reaching into their handbags for gifts or for tissues, and filling the room with the smell of shampoo and perfume and shortbread. A woman crouched at Mayor Hammond’s bedside, her body awkwardly turned away from his wound as she whispered in his ear. A man, perhaps the lady’s husband, stood at the bed’s end, watching the two of them and kicking his heel against the toe of his other boot, gently, over and over, as if trying to knock something through the leather of his shoe.

  Georgie was making one of the beds when a young lady approached her, pretty, her hair pale as cooked egg-white, wearing an expensive silk shirt and skirt, standing in a fog of perfume.

  “Excuse me,” the lady said. She was standing near Second Lieutenant Pike’s bed, but Pike was looking out the window like he didn’t know she was there.

  “Yes?” Georgie straightened up. She followed the lady’s gaze down to her own once-white collar, where she had smudged a fingerprint of blood. Georgie patted her collar uselessly with her fingers.

  “I require some privacy,” the lady announced, “to talk to the lieutenant. Would you leave us, please?”

  Georgie, who couldn’t see how the lady imagined any privacy possible in the busy ward, continued tucking in the corners of the sheet. “I won’t be a moment.”

  “I’m afraid I do not have a moment,” the lady said.

  Second Lieutenant Pike looked over at her. “She’s busy, Emma.”

  “She is making a bed, Thomas.”

  “I’ll come back,” Georgie said, rising from her crouched position and leaving the sheet untucked and the blanket bunched at the bottom of the bed. She was curious to know what this rather haughty lady would have to do with the plain-spoken, approachable lieutenant. Glancing back, she saw the lady lower herself into a chair like a regal personage. Like so many of the men and women on the ward, the lady had a desperation about her, but it was almost admirable how she translated that desperation into pride. She was inflicting it on the world, rather than keeping it close.

  As Georgie left them to it, she could see the matron signalling to her from the doorway. She looked back at the unmade bed as she walked over to the matron, preparing for a reprimand as she rubbed her bloody collar once more. But when she reached Mrs. Thwaite, she saw that the matron was, astonishingly, smiling. Her gaze travelled up Georgie’s uniform and skimmed over the bloodstain on her collar to meet her eyes.

  “I’m afraid Sanderson is ill, and we’re very short-staffed. I wondered if you might stay on for the night shift.”

  “Of course,” said Georgie.

  After the visitors had left and the night shift commenced, Georgie started to dig her nails into her palms to keep herself awake. The ward was silent and she was the only person on duty—armed with a bell, which could summon the matron, who was sleeping upstairs.

  Georgie eyed the clock at the back of the room. One of the gold hands twitched. Standing for such a long time—they were forbidden to sit—meant already Georgie’s back and feet ached with a cool, pulsing pain. She was exhausted. She started to pace the room. On her break she’d received a message from her mother, checking in with her and asking if they could meet soon. This was good news; that Nelly was writing to her indicated there was a chance she might consider restoring Georgie’s allowance. It also meant Georgie might be able to go and stay with her at the house at Montpelier Square for a weekend. She had to admit that she already missed being able to have a proper cup of tea whenever she wanted, and having a maid to fix her breakfast and manage her laundry (and she needed someone to get rid of this bloodstain on her collar). And she missed living in a house where you didn’t have to tolerate the banging and thumping and giggling and chattering of the girls in the rooms on either side. Nelly had not wanted her to take the job at the hospital, and they had quarrelled. If she really wanted to help with the war, Nelly argued, she should wait for a position at the Foreign Office instead. But although the Foreign Office would doubtless have been better suited to her, Georgie wasn’t prepared to wait.

  She avoided looking towards the bed of Major Hammond, who seemed to her to be near death. A part of her thought that if she didn’t look too closely at death, perhaps she might escape it.

  “Will you sit awhile?” It was Second Lieutenant Pike again, with his ruined feet sticking out the end of his bed. He gestured to a chair th
at, some hours ago, the imperious blonde lady had occupied.

  “I’m not allowed.”

  “A pity.” Unlike the other men, many of whom slept all day and all night, Pike did not seem to need to rest. She hadn’t yet seen him close his eyes. She was debating about whether or not she should sit down anyway, given how tired she was, when there was a scream across the room. Then another. Strained, sharp screams. It was as though a small, howling creature were trying to burrow its way out of a body. Georgie hurried over. It was the same young officer from the first day, the blond one with the scaly face whose name Georgie had already forgotten. He began to arch his back and fall back down on the bed, arch and fall. She stood by him a moment before reaching for his wrists, but he shook her off, arms flailing in the air, scratching at nothing.

  “You’re all right,” Georgie said, reaching for him again. He grabbed at a handful of her hair and pulled, yanking several strands out of the follicle.

  “Mary!” he yelled, his breath hot. He had streams of snot and tears running down his face, and his cheeks were bright orange, from the gas. The bald patches of his scalp were wet.

  “I’m not Mary,” she said. “I’m the nurse.”

  He reached his arms up to her neck, as if he wanted to strangle her, and she stepped out of the way.

  “I didn’t bring your Gospel, Mary,” the man said, his eyes wide. “I left it in your stupid head.”

  He lunged up and caught her wrist. Georgie leaned down and, with her other hand, slapped the boy’s face across the cheek. The boy dropped her hand and whimpered. He thumped his own windpipe with his fist, making a deep thud, like wood dropping on bone.

  She rushed across the room to ring the bell, and after a few minutes, footsteps could be heard coming down the stairs. Mrs. Thwaite, with a coat over her dressing gown, arrived in the room as the boy’s eyes flew open again, and the matron rushed over to him immediately, speaking softly and stroking his hair, moving closer until she was holding his head in her arms like a lover: “You’re safe here, you’re in London, everything is all right, I’ve got you, you’re safe, I promise.” After some time, the boy fell limp, his eyes half closed, his arms resting loosely on either side of his body. Mrs. Thwaite said nothing to Georgie. She disentangled herself from the boy, looked around the ward once, left the room again, and could be heard going slowly back upstairs. Other officers were stirring; one was signalling for water. Georgie’s uniform was wet with sweat. She felt sick now, as if she were waiting for someone else to wake, some other blurry horror to float into the room.