Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

Mrs McCosh inclined her face to him. ‘You may kiss me on the cheek,’ she said.

He kissed her on the right cheek, felt suddenly sorry for all the bad blood between them and kissed her on the left.

She blushed and said, ‘I do really think of you as a son, you know. I do hope … well … I’m sorry … you know.’

‘We’ll come back every year,’ said Daniel.

‘I do so look forward to seeing you again.’ She looked away. ‘It was such a pleasure to meet you at last.’

Esther, who had been cuddling Caractacus, kissed the cat on the top of his head and handed him to her grandfather, saying, ‘Grandpa play with him now.’

After they had gone, Mrs McCosh asked her husband if they would be back in time for tea, and added, ‘My dear, do remind me, was it Daniel or Ashbridge who died in the war?’

Christabel and Gaskell were in Snowdonia, walking the Horseshoe and climbing Cadair Idris from both sides, but they had sent Esther a photograph of Caractacus, staring down from the top of the pelmet, and a little painting copied from it, admirably portraying him with his lopsided ginger moustache, yellow eyes, and humorous, slightly insane expression. Esther had been delighted, and everyone elsed laughed when they saw it.

Only Ottilie was there at Southampton Harbour to wave the couple goodbye, having travelled down with Wragge in the AC, bringing with them the luggage that had not been sent in advance by train. As the ship hooted, and began to move away, it occurred to Rosie once again how little she really knew this particular sister of hers. Ottilie’s main interest was still going to lectures. She attended everything that was available locally, whether it was about Fabian Socialism, or eugenics, or psychoanalysis. She was engaged in an intellectual quest, but never talked about it. All Rosie really knew about Ottilie was that she had a heart brimming with love, and was waiting for someone to whom she could give it. She resolved that, when she returned, she would contrive to get to know Ottilie better.

To this mysterious sister, Rosie, Daniel and Esther waved goodbye on that spring morning, her large brown eyes vivid in the white face beneath a dark blue cloche hat. Rosie then had the experience of sailing past the vast facade of Netley, where she had spent the war years, mostly on her knees, she now seemed to recall, hopelessly expiating the sin of having forgotten to pray for Ash the day before he was struck down. The great green dome flanked by its endless turrets and towers and innumerable windows was peaceful in the sunshine, and through Daniel’s binoculars, Rosie saw that there were very few patients out in their blue ‘hospital undress’, strolling away their injuries. She guessed that much of the hospital must by now have been mothballed.

‘There goes Spikey,’ she said to Daniel.

‘It must be a funny feeling,’ he said.

‘It’s all a blur now, just a sea of faces, fading away.’

‘You’ve never told me much about it. What was it like?’

‘I wouldn’t know where to start. It was the hardest work you can imagine, and absolutely piteous. The TB ward, and the syphilis ward, and the gas ward, oh dear. It’s hard … The gas victims gave off gas for ages, did you know that? They stank of it. And did you know there’s an elephant skeleton set up in the entrance? And huge sets of antlers, and a school of fish set into the plaster under the stairs? And dozens and dozens of pickled snakes in glass jars?’

‘Gracious! Really?’

‘And there’s a huge collection of skulls and mummified heads, called “Skull Alley”, skulls from all over the world, labelled. You know, “Hottentot”, “Bushman”, “Maori”. They looked the same really. And there’s a collection of deformed foetuses.’

‘I’d love to see all that.’

‘Oh, Daniel, really! Look, you can see the Seaweed Hut!’

‘One of my friends sent me a postcard of that once,’ said Daniel. ‘It doesn’t look as though it’s going to be there for much longer.’

‘No. It’s hopelessly rotten. There’s even an observatory. And we had ghats in the woods for burning Hindus, and the ashes got thrown into the Solent. The idea was that one day they’d float far enough to meet up with some water from the Ganges. The wards got so full that we filled the corridors with beds, and the poor men froze in the winter and got baked in the summer. You can imagine how long those corridors were. And the grounds were all full of Doecker huts and tents and Fairley fieldhouses, and a Welsh hospital and an Irish one that Lord Iveagh paid for. It was all in the land behind, so you wouldn’t have seen it from here. It was like a city, but all neat and set out in rows. Did you know that a hundred and fifty-one trains of wounded came in after the Somme?’

‘A hundred and fifty-one? How many men is that?’

‘God knows. We didn’t even have time to think about questions like that! You wouldn’t believe what I saw.’ She hung her head.

He put his arm around her shoulder. ‘I know, I saw it all too, remember?’

‘Not so many all at once,’ said Rosie. ‘It wasn’t your job to mend them when they couldn’t be mended.’

‘I’ve pulled broken friends from burning aeroplanes,’ said Daniel softly. ‘But obviously it was far worse for you. It must have been.’

But Rosie was off with her own thoughts. ‘There was a soldier who was haunted at night by a German that he’d bayoneted in the stomach. The German would turn up and say, “Now I’ve got you” and shoot him, and he’d wake up screaming.’

‘Did you have any Boche patients? Did they get treated here as well?’

‘Oh yes. But in the end they were taken away because of a riot by the local shipyard workers. They invaded because they said the Germans were getting better treatment than our own boys.’

‘Were they?’

‘Well, of course not. The reason they were kept in the wards and not the tents was so they couldn’t escape. They were padlocked in. It was just stupid. After that I’ll always despise a mob, I think. Baying like hounds. Oh, and there was a scrap shop.’

‘A scrap shop?’

‘They did experiments on animals. I went in and I couldn’t believe my eyes. That’s why I’m an antivivisectionist.’

Daniel had not known any such thing. In fact he was increasingly realising that he barely knew his wife at all. ‘Funnily enough, I am too,’ he said. ‘Archie always used to say that they should conduct the experiments on criminals.’

‘Oh, I didn’t know you were an antivivisectionist too,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s nice that we agree. Did I tell you about the Grey Lady? Your Madame Valentine would have loved to know about her.’

‘I didn’t go to Madame Valentine. It was the others. It didn’t seem quite right to me somehow. I baulked. But I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned the Grey Lady.’

‘She was a nurse who accidentally killed a patient, so she committed suicide by jumping off a tower. An amazing number of people saw her ghost, including the switchboard operator, and the Catholic chaplain, and if one of the men saw her, you knew he’d die the next day. You could smell her perfume, so they said, and her silk dress rustled.’

‘A nurse in silk? Did you ever see her?’

‘No, not me. All the ones I see are in here,’ and she tapped the side of her head.

He put his arm around her again, and squeezed her shoulder. ‘Think how lucky we’ve been,’ he said. ‘How lucky we are, to have a future.’

‘No more wars,’ said Rosie. ‘Not big ones, anyway.’

‘Just little ones, to keep Archie amused,’ said Daniel. ‘Just sideshows for the lost souls. I do miss flying, though.’

‘We ought to do more talking like this,’ said Rosie.