Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

Rosie was duly dropped at Euston with her suitcase, and Wragge left the AC ticking over outside as they went into the station to buy a ticket and look for a porter. Finding none, Rosie bought Wragge a platform ticket and he carried the case on board the train himself. When he came out, he found that a small crowd had gathered round the AC because it had overheated, and was generating an interesting amount of steam from the radiator. He went to a cafe, ate jellied eels and drank tea, and when he returned he removed the radiator cap gingerly, and topped it up with water from the horse trough.

In Birmingham the weather was cold, damp and still. It smelled of soot and coal dust and wet smuts and sulphur. When she descended from the train it was impossible not to cough. A porter, also coughing, took her case and guided her to the hansom cabs.

She was surprised by the humble terrace in which Daniel had found lodgings. The houses were filthy but well cared for, and the cobbles glistened like dark fish underfoot. The women had been soaping their doorsteps, she noticed. There was no washing hanging across the streets, as one would have expected, because today the air was too full of soot. Urchin and ragamuffin children in hobnailed boots kicked cans in the street, fought and played their clapping games.

After she had paid the cabbie she knocked on the door and waited. She turned to look at the street and noticed to her left that there was a sizeable pack of people of all ages running towards her.

She then realised why. Chasing them along, as high as the houses, was a dense wave of roiling yellow smoke. She saw an old man stumble and fall, and two younger men seize him under the arms and drag him. She turned to the door and hammered on it again, desperate to get out of its way.

The door opened and a small woman in early old age poked her head out. She saw the wave of smog approaching, said, ‘Feckin’ Jaysus,’ and nipped aside for Rosie to enter. She stuck her head back out and shouted to the smog as it rolled by: ‘Missed again, yer feckin’ gobshite!’

‘Does that happen here often?’ asked Rosie.

‘Every day,’ replied Mary Burke, ‘give or take. It’s all the factories and coal fires and the bleedin’ rain and the cold. It’s a brew.’

‘It stinks,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s horrible.’

‘The stink’ll be the brimstone,’ said Mrs Burke with some satisfaction. ‘It’s the one true stench of Hell. It’s the twenty-four-carat fart of the Devil.’

‘We often get fogs like that in London. You can get completely lost quite suddenly, because you can’t see anything at all.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m Rosie Pitt,’ she said, and Mrs Burke replied, ‘I was hopin’ yer was. You’d better be coming up the stairs, and mind yer head on the low bit. This house was built for the faeries, so it was.’

‘Do you believe in the faeries?’ asked Rosie, who had been particularly fond of her Irish wounded at Netley, and had held many conversations with them on the subject of the Little People. Mary Burke replied, ‘Course I don’t. I’m not stupid.’ She paused and added, ‘They’re still there, though. But you shouldn’t be talking about them at all. It’s highly unlucky to go in for superstition, so it is.’

Rosie found that Mrs Burke had done her very best for Daniel. The small fire was generously banked up with incandescent orange coals, and the patient would certainly be warm enough. There were other signs of care. An apple, a jug of water. A crucifix with a rosary wrapped around it was on his bedside table, propped upright against the wall. Rosie looked down at the unconscious face, with its mouth open as Daniel’s sterterous breath rattled.

‘What happened?’

‘Well, he got a headache for two days, and that knocked him out. Then he was in and out of his mind for two days, and couldn’t do a thing, you know, too weak to talk even. Then he had the collywobbles and the vomits, and then he had the hot and cold shivers, and the hot and cold sweats, and then he was all right, or so I was thinking, and then I was just on my knees with thankfulness, and he goes back to bed and can hardly breathe at all and it hurts too much to cough, and he coughed up brown stuff. And it was then I sent for yer. Poor boy, poor boy.’

‘You must let me pay you back for the cost of the telegram,’ said Rosie.

‘Be gone wid yer!’ exclaimed Mrs Burke. ‘He’s like me own son. If you love that boy like I love that boy, he’s a lucky feller!’

‘He’s had influenza and now I think he’s got pneumonia,’ said Rosie.

‘I knew it, I knew it,’ muttered Mrs Burke.

‘Did you get in a doctor?’ asked Rosie.

‘Heavens, no. He was askin’ fer yerself. He was saying, “My Rosie’s a nurse, my Rosie’s a nurse.”’

Rosie said to Mrs Burke, ‘If you don’t mind I’ll be the only one in this room, just to keep out the risk of infection, and if you want to come in, could you put a mask across your mouth and nose? A clean tea towel would do.’

‘I’ll be glad to be handin’ ’im over,’ replied Mrs Burke. ‘The responsibility and the worry was surely killin’ me. How long d’you think you’ll be stayin’?’

‘The crisis comes in seven to nine days,’ said Rosie, ‘then the temperature drops and I’ll take him home if he’s still with us. Mind you, I suppose it could be PUO.’

‘PUO? What the devil would that be, I’m wondering?’

‘Pyrexia of unknown origin. There was a plague of it amongst the soldiers and airmen in the last year of the war. It was thought to be a bacterium and not a virus. It was just as bad as one. It sometimes turns into TB, or so I’m told.’

‘Jaysus, Jaysus,’ lamented Mrs Burke, and she retired down the stairs to put on the kettle.

Rosie settled happily back into nursing. She loved the sheer purpose of it, and she loved the caring of it. It took her completely out of herself, and it was a pleasure to be watching so eagerly for the signs of deliverance. If she had only one patient, it gave her an immense amount of time for thinking, reading and praying. She looked around the tiny room and memorised every single feature of it. She stood at the window and watched the rain.

She propped Daniel up, knowing that a pneumonia patient should not be lying down, and she listened to his chest. She was sure that the disease was single rather than double. She ran through all the possible complications and sequelae in her mind: pericarditis, meningitis, abcess, gangrene, colitis, nephritis, jaundice, empyrema, thrombosis — killers, all of them. When she washed him she discovered that he had three bullet wounds, and a burn, and wondered why she had never noticed them before. She thought often of Hutch, and of poor Millicent, rigid with grief and loss, but unable to let it show. She had lost Hutch, but she was certain that she could save Daniel.

Rosie slept in the only easy chair in Daniel’s room, and in the morning went out and returned with a bedroll and sleeping bag from the Army & Navy store. She also bought carbolic, a steel dish for the infected sputum, mouthwash and gargle for herself, Friar’s Balsam, imperial drink, sodium bicarbonate, calf’s foot jelly, Brand’s meat essence, Valentine’s meat juice, orange juice, cascara and Dover’s powder. She very much hoped that she would not need oxygen.

The first time Daniel opened his eyes and saw her, he just said, ‘Darling Rosie, I’m a complete WO,’ and closed them again.

‘Well, I’m not writing you off,’ said Rosie.

Rosie went to see Daniel’s colleagues at Henley Motorcycles, and was touched by their concern, and their insistence on Daniel taking off as much time as he needed. They told her that they had been making plans to export to France, and that then Daniel would be quite indispensible. They told her what prestige it brought them to have a colleague who was such a well-known fighter ace, with twenty-five victories and the DFC. It was the first time that Rosie had ever given a thought to him being anything other than the boy who used to live next door. It occurred to her that poor Ash, though no less a man, had not really managed to achieve anything at all. They said that when Daniel was ready to go home and convalesce, the boss would drive them both home personally in his Bentley, and he said that on the way he would show them a lovely little house in Wootton Wawen that might suit them very well.