Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

I have read the Bishop of Stepney’s book, as you recommended, and I did find great comfort in it.

I look forward to meeting you in person one of these days.

Yours most sincerely,

Rosemary McCosh (Miss)

SOPHIE CAME INTO the drawing room and flopped down on the sofa next to Christabel. ‘Look!’ she said. ‘My fiftieth hospital bag!’

‘Fifty!’ exclaimed Christabel. ‘Why, Sophickles, you’ve turned into a positive factory. I don’t know how you do it. And every one with a cheerful little elephant embroidered on it.’

‘It’s my last one,’ said Sophie. ‘I really can’t face making any more.’

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘I’ve hatched a plot, a very ingenuous plot.’

‘Ingenious?’

‘Ingenuous and ingenious. I’ve joined the Women’s Legion Auxiliary! I’m going to be a driver for the Royal Flying Corps, I hope. And I’ll learn how to mend engines and things. It’ll be topping. Ain’t I a kink?’

‘Sophie, you’re priceless! What will Daddy say?’

‘Oh, I spoke to Daddy, and he said, “Gracious me, Sophie bairn, what will your mother say?”’

‘Is that all?’

‘Daddy likes spunky girls,’ said Sophie happily. ‘He said, “What if they send you to France?” and I said, “I’m starting at Suttons Farm,” and he said, “But you have no idea how to drive tenders and mend engines,” and I said, “Daddy, you didn’t know anything about gas masks and artificial limbs until you started manufacturing them.”’

‘Well, you know what Mama will say. She’ll say, “Oh, you can’t possibly! I absolutely forbid it!’

‘I won’t tell her until after I’ve gone. I shall write and tell her that I am living in a compound with high walls, and any man attempting to enter will be shot dead by one of our fearsome lady guards. Mama doesn’t really care about anything but telling us to keep our legs crossed.’

‘Sophie!’

‘Well, it’s true, you know it is. She wouldn’t mind at all if we were footpads and murderers. Anyway, I’ve no intention of having babies until I’m married, and then I’m going to have dozens and dozens. Positive plenitudes of them.’

‘Where are you actually going to live?’

‘In a nice little farmhouse. They’re going to build us some special huts later on, I think. Won’t it be fun? I’m terribly braced. No more balaclavas and hospital bags. Hooray! And if I get sent to France I shan’t mind at all.’

‘You’ll have to cut off your fingernails.’

Sophie held up her hands. ‘Already have! I have been most prescient and not at all nescient, if not omniscient. And I was frightfully good at French at school. I got the prize for dictée and conversation. I could be an interrupter. I shall wax Molièresque.’

‘Interrupter?’

‘You know, French into English and English into French, that kind of thing.’

‘Oh, you mean an interpreter!’

‘Do I? Silly me.’

‘With your love for messing about with words, and scrambling them up, I think you’d better stick to driving. Just think, you might fall in love with a pilot! Wouldn’t that be romantic!’

‘Frantically. But they do get killed an awful lot. Better not, really.’

‘The trouble with love,’ observed Christabel, ‘is that one really has no choice as to who one falls in love with.’

‘RUPERT BROOKE’S DIED,’ said Ottilie.

‘Oh,’ said Rosie, ‘he hasn’t, has he? Why? I mean, how?’

They were sitting in the tea room of a hotel on North Street, Chichester, having met halfway between Brighton and Southampton on an afternoon off. They were waiting for Christabel, who was coming down by train. Outside, a light rain pattered on windows that overlooked a garden that was coming to life as if there wasn’t a war on.

‘He wasn’t shot or anything. It was an infected mosquito bite, somewhere near the Dardanelles. I think he got bitten in Egypt.’

‘What a thing to die of! You’d think that God would’ve been kind enough to let him die of something else. Something more glorious.’

‘I don’t know how you’ve clung to your faith,’ said Ottilie.

‘Why?’ said Rosie. ‘Haven’t you?’

Ottilie looked straight ahead and said, ‘It doesn’t come naturally any more.’

‘I couldn’t live without it,’ said Rosie. ‘I would die of the horror and loneliness.’

‘I do know what you mean.’

‘There’s a VAD at Netley,’ said Rosie. ‘She can see the souls of the dead as they leave their bodies. She discovered it by accident, and she says that after the war she’s going to be a medium.’

Ottilie looked at her sister sceptically.

‘She isn’t mad,’ said Rosie. ‘She’s quite normal. She says that when you die there are people who come to fetch you away, sometimes one, or two, or three. And there was a soldier who told me that on the battlefield there are hundreds of angels collecting the souls of the dead. He said that lots of people see them.’

‘I’ve heard soldiers say all sorts of things,’ said Ottilie.

‘I’ve watched a lot of men die,’ said Rosie. ‘You have too. You know what it’s like. The moment they go, they don’t even look like themselves any more. You can tell the body’s uninhabited, that’s someone’s left it behind. It’s just discarded.’

‘I’ve noticed that too, but, Rosie, it doesn’t tell you anything about God, does it? They could be leaving to go on to something else, but it doesn’t mean there’s a God at all. If there’s an afterlife, it might be like going to stay in Hastings or something.’

‘How can you have an afterlife without God?’

‘Well, why can’t you?’

Rosie was stuck. This possibility had never occurred to her before. ‘All I know,’ she said at length, ‘is that God looks after me and answers me.’

They looked out over the lawn again. It all seemed too peaceful. ‘I am worried about Mama and Papa when the Zeppelins and Gothas come over,’ said Ottilie. ‘Mind you, they seem to be bombing anything and anywhere, don’t they? It could just as easily be us.’ She looked sideways and saw that her sister was crying silently. ‘Oh, Rosie, whatever is the matter? Is it Ash?’

Rosie hung her head and wept, her thin shoulders heaving. ‘I’m just so tired,’ she said. ‘I’m so exhausted. I could sleep for a year. I only wish I could.’

‘I know what it’s like,’ said Ottilie, ‘I really do.’

‘They work us so hard,’ said Rosie. ‘We get up so early and we aren’t allowed to sit down all day, and we work so late, and I’m still in a tent because there’s no accommodation, and one of the other women snores, and it’s so cold that when you undress all you actually do is take your shoes off, and I never seem to get a decent wash, and the trained nurses are so horrible to us and call us amateurs and pretend nurses, and say that we’re undermining their profession, and the doctors treat us like vermin, and I’m spending all my time polishing brasses and sweeping floors when I want to be helping properly. Ottilie, it’s just too awful, and you see all those beautiful boys mutilated and dying or going mad, and they’ve got a whole ward for men with syphilis and everyone calls it “Hell” because it really is hell. And I got into big trouble because I said to the matron that officers and men shouldn’t be treated separately, but they shouldn’t, should they?’

‘The Pavilion is quite nice,’ said Ottilie, ‘but everything’s governed by caste and religion. It drives you mad. We have to have lots of separate kitchens — we’ve got nine of them — and separate water for Hindus and Mahommedans, and different loos, and the notices have to be in Hindi and Urdu and Gurmukhi, and all the laundry’s done by untouchables who have to live in a tent on the lawn. If it worries you separating the officers and men at Netley, you can’t possibly imagine what it’s like for us in the Pavilion. One has to have the expertise of an anthropologist. Do you know what the worst thing is?’