More Miracle Than Bird Page 9

  She had never seen her father’s body. His body had been sent to the mortuary, and at the funeral, the coffin was closed. Not seeing him dead meant she could believe, for a time, that the footsteps approaching from down the hall were his, that the door handle turning was from his hand. They never were, of course, but for a time she’d allowed herself to hope.

  The soul’s existence after death mattered; but whether or not Willy Yeats wanted to marry her? That made no difference to the small numbers of the living or the innumerable numbers of the dead. He couldn’t take a thing from her. Nor could this major deception looming between them, which was still promised by the ascent of Neptune in their horoscopes. She could hear voices down the hallway, and she smiled to herself. What was the use in deception if someone wasn’t even here? Probably the deception was that he had once mentioned marriage, and it would come to nothing. She would get over that, she supposed. She tapped out a tune she’d heard on the gramophone onto the flask with her fingers, and drank again. She would try to forget him. He had been proposing to Maud Gonne for thirty years, been rejected for thirty years; perhaps it was too late for him to truly find a way out of that pattern.

  She put down the flask, closed her eyes, and ran her finger along her books, pulling one at random from her little shelf. It was Morison and Lamont, the Oxford academics who, when visiting the Petit Trianon at the Palace of Versailles in 1901, had been transported back to the eighteenth century. Georgie had turned to the page where one of them had seen Marie Antoinette, sketching in the grass. But as she read, the rumble down the hallway became louder, and now the women’s voices were accompanied by the bleary crunching of the wireless. Georgie put the book down and opened the door, and in her nightgown and socks, she followed the noise down the hall. The room at the end of the hall was filled with nurses and VADs, all crowded together and listening in their dressing gowns. They have occupied the buildings, the voice on the wireless was saying. Civilians are being shot on the street.

  Georgie moved up to one of the nurses and asked what was happening, and the woman glanced back at her.

  “Uprising in Dublin. They’re shooting.” Georgie listened for a while to the news, watching the startled faces of the half-dressed nurses, blonde and dark, pale and pink faces, all stricken. The British Army were trying to round up the perpetrators; the dead were lying out on the city streets. The rebels were declaring Ireland a republic in the name of God and the dead generations. Georgie realised she was holding her breath. What if he had gone to Ireland? What if he were hurt? She slipped back down the hallway to her room, her socks making no sound on the wooden floor. She thought of women and men shot, lying face up on the cobbles, and this thought blurred with the idea that perhaps it was not a creamy-skinned woman that had distracted Willy after all. She thought of Willy’s body lying cold on the road, his lovely dark eyes staring up. Of course he hadn’t written. She only hoped he was all right. At that moment she forgave him, impulsively, for everything.

  NINETEEN

  PIKE

  He had become dependent on this swan duckling, this nurse creature. Her low voice, how she carved her steps out across the tiles, that persistent shadow of a bloodstain on her once-white collar. He hadn’t made much progress, however, with courting her. With the exception of a few snatched conversations, a few smiles, she mostly treated him as she did everyone else at the hospital.

  And then Emma had come again today, to wave at him like a princess and talk at him about their old acquaintances as if nothing had changed between them. He still felt stilted around her, still couldn’t speak to her properly. What the devil was she coming here for, anyway? To taunt him? Was she trying to build him his own circle of hell? He was building it pretty well on his own. She looked like a kept goddess these days. Gloves, furs. Nobody would ever believe he’d seen her naked. It had been only once, the night before he went to join the regiment; they were already engaged, and he’d booked a little hotel with fake names, Mr. and Mrs. Whiteford. She’d told him off because it was too distinctive, and too like her own name; he should have used something more common, like Park, like Smith. But it’s still made up, he’d said. If it hadn’t been his last night, they would have quarrelled, but instead they’d had dinner, all his meagre savings spent on food and lots of pale wine, the alcohol content of which he’d doubted at first, and drunk more to make sure. He had barely eaten, too nervous about how he was holding his cutlery, and anxiously monitoring her reaction to each mouthful. Finally they had gone back to the room. He hadn’t been sure if he had felt distant from her because of his nerves, or because he was preparing himself for being distant. Maybe they had never been all that close. There had been the usual sentimental business; she had cried, fat tears, and he had shown her the place by his heart where he would carry her picture. He realised that in his nervousness he had drunk rather too much, and he had to really steel himself to go through with it. But they had done it, with an amount of fumbling and blushing, and he had promised her it would get much better, when he was back. Now of course they would never get the chance—but he preferred anyway to imagine this nurse in that little hotel room now. She would have pointed out the vase of wilted flowers in the window and laughed, rather than pretending not to have noticed. She would be far more assured than Emma, far more assertive. He imagined her taking off the nurse’s veil, the stiff white dress, and stripping it from her body decisively, the way she stripped a bed of its sheets. Would she ever do such a thing for him? He kept his eyes on his nurse whenever Emma visited. He imagined the nurse’s chest blushing the way her cheeks sometimes did, not as if she were embarrassed but rather like her body was trying to tell her something.

  No, Emma was nothing like the fleshy, real creature who took care of him, who had such strength of purpose, such certainty. He felt in his feet that same musical feeling, that twinging and twanging, a counterpoint of nerves, and he saw the doctor was standing over him—heaven help him—and he was saying that it was astonishing.

  “Pardon?” Pike said. The doctor was looking around the ward as if he wanted to speak to someone else, but not finding anyone, he looked back down at Pike.

  “Truly,” the doctor said, “you, Second Lieutenant, are a miracle.”

  “How is that?”

  “The infection has gone. We won’t have to amputate at all. All going well—barring a recurrence of infection—you’ll soon be fit for convalescence. It’s extraordinary.”

  A miracle? Pike started trying to explain to the doctor that as a medical student he’d been told to distrust miracles, but the doctor interrupted him and told him he should rest for a while, that these things took time to process. It appeared that miracles were meant to keep quiet.

  The doctor had moved on to the next patient, and Pike was left in the bed with his feet, his feet that he was suddenly allowed to keep. His body returned to him. What would Hyde-Lees say to that? It was impossible not to feel a kind of pride, pride for his sturdiness. Surely there was something in him that had caused it. Surely it was related to the fact that his brain had not cracked with what he had already seen. He would walk, dance! He could, seriously, marry this ordinary girl, he would have a real chance; after all, he did not lack charm. He had seen himself in the glass; he would never say it aloud of course, but the truth was he was a fine-looking fellow. It wouldn’t be hard to get rid of the ancient, frail poet, who showed insufficient appreciation for this precious creature. Only he, Second Lieutenant Thomas Pike, knew how rare she was. He could go back to his studies, matriculate (could he?). He could become a doctor, in some practice somewhere (this part was still vague). His feet tingled and it seemed to him they were singing to him, accompanying his thinking, telling him their determination to remain a part of him. He saw her across the room.

  “Hyde-Lees!” he called.

  “Yes?”

  She was wheeling a trolley, full of silver instruments laid on towels, and bottles of acid and water. Everything seemed to glisten suddenly, to be capable o
f so much.

  “They’re giving you more responsibilities.”

  She nodded at him, but she was frowning. He noticed that while she had both hands on the trolley, she also had her notebook in front of her, lying on the trolley as if to keep her company.

  “Was there something I could help you with?” she asked, and although her voice was rather terse, he couldn’t help but rejoice that she was looking right at him.

  “You are right now addressing a miracle,” he said. When she looked confused, he continued, “I’m keeping my feet. They’re not cutting them off.”

  “Really?” she said. And now she smiled, her skin bright, her face lit up. She was delighted, he had delighted her! He was no longer a half man. She must see, too, that it would now be possible for them to get married. Who needed Emma Wetherford (or whatever-her-name-was-now), her perfect posture, her fashionable set, her cold look every time he lifted a fork to his mouth? He watched as Hyde-Lees turned away again, pushing the trolley on towards the window, and he, too, seemed to be gliding, out into the day.

  That night she sat not far away, by the wooden chair over by the window. More relaxed about the rules, now. He had watched her take an electric lamp from the nearby table and sit on the chair with the lamp held in her lap. She covered the bulb with her dark blue veil so as not to disturb the officers, so that when she switched it on it made only a dull glow.

  “What are you reading?” he called softly, but she didn’t look over; it was possible she hadn’t heard him at all. She was leaning back on the chair and held her book above her, tipping her head towards the ceiling.

  Attraction was a kind of mystery, wasn’t it? He had seen Emma talk to Major Hammond—evidently another of her worthy acquaintances—and glance back at him in embarrassment. “I am visiting a friend.” Why had Emma been drawn to him in the first place, when she had barely ever mixed with anyone of his sort, and wasn’t the type to be curious about those further down the ladder? Like most people, she was scared to look further down, in case it meant she accidentally fell herself.

  They had met at Cambridge. Her brother was studying there at the same time as Pike, and Emma had been visiting Eddie. She was awfully pretty, tall and pale and upright, alongside Eddie with his severe bone structure, his cheeks hollowed out. Eddie was a genuinely kind chap, perhaps a bit too gentle for the world. They had been at a party; her brother was her chaperone. Apparently she had been taunting Eddie, who had fallen in love with a little sprig of a thing called Natasha. Emma, fuelled by port with lemon, had lunged at her brother in a way she’d often done when they were children, but Eddie had inadvertently stepped to the side at the moment she lunged, and she ended up unable to stop her momentum, flinging herself forward, losing her balance, and hitting her head on a wooden table in the middle of the party.

  She hadn’t screamed but landed sprawled on the floor, where she took a moment to move again. Her eyes were closed, then open. Pike approached her as she pulled her head up and glanced around.

  “Easy,” he said. “I’m training to be a doctor. How do you feel?”

  Her eyes were very wide as she pulled herself up to a sitting position. “I’m mortified,” she whispered. “Sit with me?” He paid no attention to the people who were watching them, and sat down, while Eddie stayed standing to reassure the small crowd that everything was under control and they could return to the party.

  “What’s your name?” Pike asked her.

  She reached her hand up to her forehead to check if there was any blood. She frowned to find none. “Are you trying to seduce me?”

  “I’m trying to gauge whether or not you are concussed. Today’s date would also be fine.”

  “I’m not concussed.”

  “That’s good,” Pike said. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”

  “Answer him, Frolly,” Eddie said. “For goodness’ sake.”

  “My name is Emma Elisabeth Anne Wetherford, and it is the seventeenth of October, nineteen hundred and thirteen,” she said primly, and put her hand up to her eyebrow and winced. “No blood, then.”

  “You’ll have a real shiner, I’m afraid,” Pike said.

  “It’s Eddie’s fault for falling in love,” she said, looking crossly up at her brother.

  “I can assure you,” Eddie told Pike, “there is nothing here that is not my fault.” He shook Pike’s hand. “Thank you for helping us.”

  Pike turned to go, but Emma called out to Eddie.

  “He can’t leave,” she said, “he saved my life.”

  Pike laughed. “Hardly.”

  “But you must make sure I don’t develop a concussion. He must, mustn’t he, Eddie? That table was a vicious adversary. Imagine what could be next.”

  And just like that, she and Eddie had swept him up and included him in all their plans for the week she was visiting. At first Pike had been cautious about getting too caught up in the whirlpool of this pretty, sophisticated girl—which he was, of course, immediately—but, oddly, she seemed to show signs of caring for him too. And the next summer Pike had received an invitation from Eddie to join them at the Wetherfords’ country house in Oxfordshire, and he had proposed to her on the terrace, and she had wept, and said yes.

  Silently, he pushed the covers aside and shifted his legs to the side of the bed. Hyde-Lees didn’t seem to hear him. He would surprise her. He looked above, squinting to obscure the grid of white-sheeted beds, to pretend the building was once more a lovely house in Mayfair, with its violet drapes tied back from tall windows, and a large canvas with blurry Helen always on the brink of war.

  He placed his miraculous feet gently on the floor to test them. The music inside them screamed. He laid them on the cold parquet for a while, waiting for them to grow accustomed, watching her rebalance the lamp carefully between her knees, holding her book with one hand, oblivious to his movements. He would just get a little closer to her.

  She read under the small circle of light, one side of her face lit golden. He tiptoed, on his screaming feet, until he reached her, and still she hadn’t noticed he was there. Silently he peered over her shoulder, and he could read one line:

  The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed.

  He waited one moment and started to say, close to her ear, “What’s a thing wide open?”

  But she jumped. The lamp, which was balanced on her lap, fell, and the bulb smashed across the tiles.

  He frowned. This was not how it was meant to go.

  “What are you doing?” She stared up at him. Tiny splinters of shattered glass covered the floor in a loose mosaic.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Stay there. You’ll cut yourself. How are you even standing?”

  He felt himself swaying. “I am a miracle,” he said awkwardly. He found he could not move. He felt himself slither down, and he sat on the parquet, his feet out in front of him, heels cold on the floor. He could feel nothing but the pain in his feet. All the nerves in his body were collecting together to scream. There was a sliver of glass in front of him, the size of a child’s finger. He focused on it. He picked it up in his fingers, and for some reason, it did not cut him. He slipped it into his pocket.

  “Mary!” That bloody lieutenant. How he went on. Pike must have blacked out for a bit, woke again. Georgie was carrying something tall—a broom—and she was sweeping up the glass in a hurry. Across the room, the lieutenant had started gurgling as if he were trying to swallow something too large.

  Pike winced. Why couldn’t he get up? Why wouldn’t his feet do what he told them? His buttocks had gone quite numb.

  “Get up,” Hyde-Lees snapped at him. She was sweeping the glass into a shovel. “You must get up, please.”

  “Will you help me?”

  “You seemed fine to get over here.”

  Pike managed to smile. He couldn’t get up, but he couldn’t bear to tell her. He felt warm tears clustering around his eyes and reached his hands to cover his fa
ce. He was a fool, always. He had ruined everything. She would never marry him. She was a stranger, for God’s sake. She was only doing her job. The bell clanged across the room, and he shut his eyes. He heard the matron enter, the fluster of women’s voices, and steps nearby.

  “Come on, you idiot,” a voice above him said. An arm reached down. And it was her again, it was Hyde-Lees; she had come back for him after all; her voice, even cursing him, was soft. In a moment she was holding him, she was guiding him, and because he was weak, she had her hands all over his body. He tried not to touch her any more than he had to. He clutched her arm and tried not to lean too heavily on her, all the way to the bed. He was worried what his body might do, being held like this. Her touch was everywhere. Could he stay like this? He wanted to smell her, but he could smell only his own sweat, like honey and soured milk.

  TWENTY

  SUMMER 1916

  It was some weeks before Georgie finally found time to meet with Edmund Dulac, who was designing the ring engravings for her. They met in Berkeley Square Gardens so he could pick up the ring. She had met the Frenchman once before; he had a comfortable presence, as if nothing bad could happen to him. His drawings showed deep caves and creamy palaces, floating princes, trees like soft blankets, and peacock-blue skies interrupted by bright moons. From those drawings, she knew that he understood symbols; his drawings created not only pictures but doors that were openings to entire worlds. They had written back and forth and eventually settled on a design for the ring: an entwined hawk and butterfly, signifying the union of complexity and innocence, strength and wisdom. Inside the ring would be signs for Saturn and Venus, which not only counteracted the threat of Neptune’s deception (which had refused to vanish from her horaries), but also referenced the planetary alignments at the date and time she and Willy had that first discussion of their journey in Olivia’s library.