Pat Barker - Life Class

But I enjoyed meeting her. In the end I wasn’t nervous or intimidated at all. And yet I came away with a bad taste in my mouth in spite of her lovely cream cakes and her real genuine unaffected kindness. It all seemed so false somehow but the falsity was not in her but in me.

When I got back, I started decorating. I’d intended to put it off because it’s so time-consuming. I was going to live with the Victorian wallpaper — huge green roses that look like cabbages — perhaps they are cabbages — but I can’t live with it, Paul, I simply can’t. It all has to come off and then I might be able to work again. So you must think of me wielding that horrible triangular scraper thing that hurts your hands, moving along the paper row by row, murdering cabbages. I’m sure you’re much more usefully employed.

He knew he’d cut himself, the minute he did it. He felt a sharp pain as the scalpel sliced through his glove, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. He was cutting the dressing from a twitching stump of amputated leg at the time, and needed both hands, one to cut, one to keep the leg still. Gangrene had set in and the discarded dressing was yellow with pus.

As soon as he’d finished, he scrubbed his hands, the peeled-off gloves lying by the side of the sink like sloughed-off skin. Blood flowed from the cut. It was at the top of his right index finger, not big, but deep. A quotation was teasing the fringes of his mind. What was it? Not so wide as a church, door, nor so deep as a well, but t’will serve. Morbid bugger. He scrubbed his chilblained hands till the flesh stung, stuck a wad of cotton wool over the cut and hoped for the best.

The following day was his day off. When he reached the end of his shift he decided to walk into town and stay overnight in the room in order to be able to start work at dawn. He was nearing the end of a painting and so excited he couldn’t bear to be away from it. Even woke up in the middle of the night and lay thinking about it, unable to get back to sleep. It was a tricky time, though. At the end of his last painting session, a week ago now, it crossed his mind that it might be finished. At any event, he was aware of the danger of doing too much. This was when somebody else’s eye would have been invaluable. Elinor’s, or better still, Tonks’s, though what Tonks would have made of it he hardly dared think.

At last he was free to go. His cut finger was throbbing, but it had been painful for the last few days because of the chilblains, so that was nothing new. He felt tired and sweaty, but he felt like that at the end of every shift. Unusually, he changed out of his uniform before going out and the cool touch of clean cotton on his skin soothed him and persuaded him that he didn’t feel too bad after all. Nothing that a good night’s sleep wouldn’t cure. He always slept more deeply in the room than in the hut, though he’d long since become accustomed to Lewis’s presence and even welcomed it. Something about the proximity of the wards and the theatre kept him on permanent alert. He woke if a mouse ran over the floor.

The walk into town in the fresh clear air, stars pricking overhead, revived him. He turned the key in the familiar lock, brimming with excitement and hope. The room was not so powerfully full of Elinor’s presence as it had been even a week ago. Now it was the figure on the canvas he hurried up the stairs to meet, but once in the room he didn’t go immediately to the easel. Instead, he sat down on the edge of the bed, unconsciously cradling his right hand in the left. When he became aware of what he was doing he made a conscious effort to separate the hands. He was treating it like a real injury and that was ridiculous. Children playing in a playground get worse cuts than that everyday.

The easel had a cloth draped over it. Ideally, he shouldn’t look at the painting at all tonight. The gaslight flickered, its bluish tinge changing every colour and tone in the room. No, no, it would be a complete waste of time. But the painting seemed to call to him. At last he could stand it no longer. He jumped up and pulled off the cloth.

My God. It looked as it had been painted by somebody else. That was his first thought. It had an authority that he didn’t associate with his stumbling, uncertain, inadequate self. It seemed to stand alone. Really, to have nothing much to do with him.

He’d painted the worst aspect of his duties as an orderly: infusing hydrogen peroxide or carbolic acid into a gangrenous wound. Though the figure by the bed, carrying out this unpleasant task, was by no means a self-portrait. Indeed, it was so wrapped up in rubber and white cloth: gown, apron, cap, mask, gloves — ah, yes, the all-important gloves — that it had no individual features. Its anonymity, alone, made it appear threatening. No ministering angel, this. A white-swaddled mummy intent on causing pain. The patient was nothing: merely a blob of tortured nerves.

It shook him. He stood back from it, looked, looked away, back again. It must be the gaslight that was so transforming his view of it. And he was no nearer knowing if it was finished, though at the moment he felt he wouldn’t dare do anything else.

Cover it up. Once it was safely back behind the cloth, he relaxed a little, even began to wonder if he were not flattering himself a little. Perhaps it was his own feverish state that accounted for the painting’s impact. He raised a hand to his brow and wiped the sweat away. Probably he should have an early night, but the thought of lying in that bed, alone, with only the painting for company, was not attractive. He’d do better to go out and get some food. Not to any of the usual places, though. He wasn’t fit for company tonight.

The night air restored him. By the time he reached the café he was feeling almost normal again. It was very strange how this thing came in waves. He sat down and ordered a carafe of red wine feeling almost elated, but no sooner had he drunk the first glass than he was starting to sweat again. The café that had seemed so welcoming when he pushed open the door now looked yellow with dark dancing shapes all over the walls. Nothing was the right size. The barmaid’s face loomed and receded, all bulbous nose and fish eyes like a face seen in the back of a spoon. There was a ringing in his ears and the French being spoken at tables all around him had suddenly become incomprehensible. A man with a drooping moustache and eyes to match asked him a question. Was this chair taken? Was that it? Paul stared blankly back at him, unable to attach meaning to the words.

There was a cellar underneath the bar, no doubt opened up since the bombardment to give customers somewhere to shelter should the worst happen again. He’d go down there. It might be quieter there. Draining his glass, he picked up the carafe and stumbled down the stairs.

It was slightly quieter and there were alcoves where you were secluded from the general crush. He made his way towards one of them, thinking it was empty, but then, there at the back, in the shadows, he saw a smudge of white face. He was turning away, not wanting to intrude on the solitude of somebody who’d clearly chosen to drink alone, when something about the breadth of the man’s shoulders, the pudgy, truculent features staring up at him, as if daring him to occupy one of the vacant chairs, struck a chord. Kit Neville.

Simultaneously, Neville’s expression changed and he jumped to his feet. They shook hands and then, finding that inadequate, pulled each other into a bear hug. So much back-slapping and smiling and hand-pumping, and all of it sincere, and yet they’d made no attempt in the last two months to seek each other out, though the hospitals where they worked could not have been more than five kilometres apart. Ten, at most, Paul reminded himself, sitting down.