She did not eat her dinner. She sat by herself in the corner of the estaminet, and stared at the wall. The other nurses were looking at her, she was sure, and whispering. They must all know something, she didn’t mind. No doubt they thought she and Freddy had been lovers. She did not care for the other nurses; on the whole, they were primarily interested in any ambulant man they could get hold of. The nursing assistants were more sympathetic, but they came and went, and she’d refused to join in their homemade entertainments, it was like being at some awful boarding school.
Thirty minutes was one thousand eight hundred slow, tedious seconds. Even the hospital was a little like being back at school, only here you learnt how to tell if someone should be left to die, and how to close the eyes of the dead.
In the lavatory she glanced in the mirror. She wanted to look as pretty as she could, in case Freddy’s dark eyes met hers in the good-humoured quizzical way they used to. But she looked pale and dreary, great bags under her eyes.
As she went up the stairs, she thought about Freddy when she’d first known him. They’d had such fun in Berlin. They’d loved dancing together, he’d taught her the foxtrot and the tango. They were a fine couple, Puppi had said in that sweet, soft way she had. In London they’d gone dancing again, though not often, because she was still not much more than a schoolgirl, and he was a young man working in the City, and they had to take a chaperone. He had teased her a great deal, he loved making her blush, which was not difficult. When he was sitting in the drawing room before dinner, reading the newspaper, he would ask the meaning of difficult English words, and she would lean companionably on the back of his chair and look over his shoulder, reading sentences aloud in a playful German-English accent. Now and again, she would rest her hand lightly on his shoulder or stroke his head. She admired his silky black hair. She’d say, ‘This pomade, where on earth did you find it? Your hair is like an oil field.’ And he, half-listening, half-reading the business pages, would laugh and reach up his hand to hers for a second. It was very easy, like being brother and sister, though at the back of their minds they were always aware that his much-admired brother was married to her much-admired sister, and this made their friendship special. But she was sure, she thought she was sure, they’d never been in love.
She reached the top of the curving stone staircase. One minute to go – timings were precise in the hospital. She stopped on the landing, listening to the ward’s horrid symphony of groans and shouts. For a moment she could imagine how one could be like the senior nursing staff, dissociating oneself from the patients, seeing them as malfunctioning machines, wanting them as fast as possible either to work properly again or expire.
Sometimes she’d thought Freddy and she might marry one day. But not yet, she’d wanted to see more of the world, meet lots of people, have adventures, not settle down yet. Then she’d gone to Paris.
It was time to enter the ward. The sister was standing by the door and nodded to her.
‘You must be very quiet. Captain Curtius must not be stimulated. You may speak to him if he opens his eyes and looks at you, but softly.’
Sophia was not sure she had her eyes completely under control, but she tried her best.
‘You must be brave, Nurse,’ said the sister.
Why, Sophia wondered, why must she be brave? ‘I suppose I mustn’t touch him?’
The sister was silent for a moment. ‘You may hold his hand, if it seems right. You will know, as a nurse. The last thing they lose is their hearing, so if you speak to him, he may respond.’
‘Half an hour?’
The sister hesitated again. ‘Don’t you worry too much about that.’
They had put a chair beside his bed. She sat down. She looked at him properly for the first time. She had been unable to bring herself to do this earlier. There he was, sweet-natured, humorous Freddy, who, she now recalled for some peculiar reason, had never quite mastered the present continuous form in English – ‘I am doing this’. What was he doing now? He was lying dead pale on a hospital bed, with a great bandage across the right side of his head and his hair chopped off. Dandyish Freddy who had taken such pleasure in clothes, scrumpled into a rough, yellowish night shirt.
She held his hand and spoke to him, as the sister had suggested. ‘Freddy, it’s Sophia, do you remember me? Irene’s sister. Do you remember me, Freddy?’ For a moment she thought she felt the faintest pressure, one finger pressed lightly against her hand. But she could only say a few words, now and again.
She was aware of the man in the bed behind her, staring. She did not mind. The ward was quiet for once, only the man who kept begging to be allowed to go home still made a noise.
She thought back to her sister’s wedding, and Freddy’s speech. He had been so full of life and hope and friendliness. Like a puppy, she’d thought on first view. Now he was no puppy but a dead dog. The words insinuated themselves into her mind.
Freddy only opened his eyes once. She thought they flickered at the sight of her, but then they closed again. She tried to give him water, he would not take it.
She sat for what seemed an age. In the end, the sister came and stood beside her. Sophia nodded, and stood up, looking once more at Freddy. The sister touched her arm as she went past, and it was comforting in this place where touching other people was mostly confined to handling dead or damaged bodies. She went back to her own ward, where the sister said to her, ‘You should go to bed, Nurse, you look done in.’
Freddy died the next day. Usually there was only a very brief ceremony for an enemy soldier, if his religious affiliation was known. Then his coffin would be sent for burial in one of the cemeteries that were spreading over the landscape like an unnatural crop of weeds. Sophia took action. She caught an Anglican chaplain making one of his visits to the hospital, told him that Captain Curtius was a devout Lutheran (as he should know, she told him), and should be given a proper funeral in the chapel.
‘But he will not be buried here, I can’t commit him to the earth,’ said the chaplain, flustered. He was a large, florid-faced young man, with a slightly false heartiness, like a prefect at a fourth-rate public school, Sophia thought contemptuously.
‘I don’t care, do as much of the service as you can,’ she said.
And so a little service took place. Sophia was surprised that she was not the only mourner, several of the nurses attended too, including Matron. It was kind of them, she thought, they did not know Freddy, they’d never seen him when he was the flower of the field, only as a wreck, a number in a ward. She did not cry, she held her head high. Matron said to her, ‘Well done, Nurse.’ She went back to her duties, because there was no alternative. Battling on, that was the only thing to do.
She felt horribly old – as though the girl who’d gone dancing in Berlin had existed a century ago, and now she was quite another person.