“Damn,” said Captain Fitzwilliam. “You’ll excuse me.”
He strode to the door, and I turned to look for Corporal Pritchard. But Pritchard had gone as well, and I was left standing alone near the entrance to the operating theater, a useless obstruction, a thick American branch tossed into the orderly flow of treatment and evacuation, treatment and evacuation. We were two years late, weren’t we? In the early months of invasion and repulsion, the race to the sea—before so many clearing stations were established, before the base hospitals were built on the northern coast, before all the manuals were written and the procedures put in place—when the trains were stuffed with casualties and the depots lined with stretchers and panic, a hospital like ours might have made a difference.
In this brutal, methodical February of 1917, our zeal was nothing but vanity.
I stood there, feet planted on the old wooden boards of that French barn, and watched Captain Fitzwilliam approach the stretcher and trade a few words with the man in front. Step forward and bend his head to address the wounded soldier inside. Behind them, the door was still open, and the corner of an ambulance flashed in and out of view as the driver and the orderly secured the doors. A nurse hurried past, carrying a tub of soiled and stinking bandages. Fitzwilliam stepped away from the stretcher and issued some direction to the stretcher-bearers, pointing his finger to one of the empty cots, bleached new sheets yellow-white under the electric bulbs, and I thought, It is time to go, Virginia.
Time to go.
I stepped aside for the stretcher party, and the soldier’s pale face jogged by. Every roof beam, the arrangement of every cot was familiar to me, as if I’d known them for years. As if I’d been born and raised here, and maybe I had. Maybe I had lived an entire new life inside the space of the last twenty-four hours, been reborn and struggled and hoped and strived, and now . . . and now . . .
What now?
Did I die and return to the old life?
“Miss Fortescue,” said a voice next to my shoulder, “will you come to my office? I’m afraid some paperwork remains to be sorted out.”
And so I came, without even striving for it, to stand inside that canvas-partitioned square that constituted Captain Fitzwilliam’s office, while he made his final notes on the papers that would accompany my new patients to the Chateau de Créouville. He had offered me coffee, and I had refused it. I didn’t want him to see how my hands shook. I gazed at the pink lobe of his right ear and said, Of course.
“I don’t know how to say this—I’m sure you’ll think me a little mad . . .”
I leaned forward and gathered up the papers from the desk. He was standing on the other side; he reached out and stopped my hands.
“You don’t need to speak. I’ll speak. I’ll tell you something I’m not supposed to tell you, which is that we’re moving. The unit, I mean. Next week. Long overdue. We’ve got a proper site, modern regulation huts, that sort of thing, just yards away from the railway, about two miles from here. Your Mrs. DeForest ought to be perfectly mollified about that, at any rate.”
“No more barns,” I said throatily.
“Of course we shall continue to send patients your way for rehabilitation; we stand very much in need, as I said before, of a hospital to manage all the ambulatory cases, trench foot and frostbite and that kind of thing, and while it’s not as glamorous as—”
“Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t care about that.”
“No, of course not. You wouldn’t. But I’m afraid Mrs. DeForest has loftier dreams.”
“Well, she doesn’t have a choice, does she?”
“No.”
I stared at the desk before us. My hands still rested on either side of the sheaf of documents, held at the wrist by Captain Fitzwilliam’s agile, gentle fingers. A surgeon’s fingers, trained at great expense. His thumbs lay upon the backs of my bare hands, like a pair of anchors. The intimate contact seemed at odds with our businesslike communication, but what did I know? No man had ever held my wrists like this before.
And then his hands sprang back, as if only just realizing what they were doing, and settled behind his back. I gathered up the papers to my chest. From beyond the canvas partition came a metallic crash, an angry shout. I thought, Someone’s going to walk in, right this second. Someone’s going to see us like this, standing here without speaking. The desk between us was one of those collapsible designs, made of thin, light wood: a camp desk, bearing only a kerosene lantern, a couple of medical volumes topped by a messy leather notebook, a tin of pens, and a silver-framed photograph of a woman in a white dress.
I said, without moving, “If that’s all, then—”
“Wait! Damn.” He turned, stepped a few paces to the right, and stopped square. Behind his back, his thumbs dug into his palms.
“Yes, sir?”
“Don’t call me that. Don’t call me sir, in that voice.”
The lantern was lit, and the glow fell on the silver frame of the photograph. The metal was tarnished from the damp. From this angle, I couldn’t see the subject very well, but she seemed to be smiling. I leaned forward an inch or two and tilted my head for a better look. The photograph, it seemed, was not taken in a studio. The girl sat on a large boulder, both shoes visible beneath the hem of her frothy white dress, and she carried her hat in her hand. Her hair seemed to be escaping its pins. There was an inscription at the bottom. I couldn’t read it.
“That’s a lovely photograph,” I said.
“Photograph?”
“On your desk.”
He turned back. His face was pale, except for a pair of reddish patches on the outer edges of his cheekbones. You might have thought he would look at the photograph, but he didn’t. He looked at me instead, fixing his gaze so intently on my face, I almost turned away. Instead, I said, in a high voice, “She’s lovely. Is she your sister?”
“Yes. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Of course not.”
He reached inside the breast pocket of his tunic and pulled out a gold cigarette case. There were initials engraved on the outside, in plain Roman lettering. My heart beat in such enormous, galloping strokes, I couldn’t breathe. “It must be difficult, being apart from your family like this,” I said.
“Yes. Well. We do what we must.” He lit the cigarette quickly and shook out the match. “I seem to have lost my train of thought. What were we saying?”
“I don’t recall. Something about the unit moving elsewhere.”
“You seem upset.”
“I’m not upset.”
“I hope I haven’t made you ill at ease. I never meant—you see, it’s the strangest thing. Since yesterday, I have been struck—I have wanted—I want most intently—most unaccountably—to see you again, to see how you’re getting on—to be a friend, I suppose.” The cigarette twitched between his fingers. “Do you see what I mean?”
“I—not really, no. I’m afraid I don’t. I think it would be better if—”