“Left pocket of my jacket. Pillbox. Take two out, would you, and find me a drink of water?”
The man fished out the pills and brought Alistair a canteen. The truth was that the pain was a bore, worse than it had been before the amputation. The phenacetin helped only a little, and in the meantime his evacuation number was taking forever to come up. He was still only eightieth in the queue, with a mail flight leaving the island every day that enemy action permitted. Often one’s number rose up the queue only to fall down again when some brass hat pulled strings for a favorite of theirs. And the mail plane carried only two casualties home at a time, sometimes one. It depended whether the island’s garrison had found much to write home about.
“Anything else?” said Briggs.
His subaltern was skin and bone, painful to look at. Alistair supposed he might not look any prettier himself. He nodded at the painting.
“I need us to take this back to a church near the Bingemma Gap. I want you to persuade the quartermaster, using all the arts at your disposal, to issue us with a truck and a ration of petrol. Note that I have spent three months restoring this painting. It is the best work I have ever done, and it means everything to me to get it back. I don’t suppose you can help the QM not to be a bore about it?”
Briggs thought for a moment. “I shall tell him it’s maps for the anti-invasion plans, sir. If that doesn’t work, I’ll tell him I know what he does with His Majesty’s Vaseline.”
“Thank you Briggs, you are wicked in a way that is thoroughly expeditious. Bring me the QM’s chit and I’ll sign it. Don’t speak a word of this. In return, I shall issue orders for all bombs and shrapnel to miss you by at least two hundred feet from now until the day of our victory.”
“Thank you, sir. Very handy indeed.”
When Briggs brought the Bedford up and loaded the painting into the truck bed, Alistair got the cab door open and struggled into the passenger seat. Briggs drove them across the drawbridge, the fort’s gates swung closed behind them, and they were out in the blue morning.
Alistair closed his eyes, too weary for chat. At least the nausea of the infection was gone. In its place he felt a sort of grief. He must have loved the arm, in a way. He didn’t know what had become of it—whether it had been incinerated or buried. There had been no words to mark its demise. There was no ritual when one fell apart, society preferring to wait until one was lost entirely.
The surgeon had given Alistair a briefing that lacked no medical detail. Disarticulation of the elbow with amputation through the joint, pronator and dermal flaps to be folded over, stitches to effect closure, the whole to be done under anesthesia induced by intravenous barbiturate. Sound about right to you, old man? Any questions?
None, Alistair had said, since the obvious one—how will I possibly bear it?—seemed unwelcome. The operation would have seemed less daunting if the surgeon had been able to acknowledge, even tangentially, that it was an awful thing to happen to a person. Perhaps there were simply certain procedures, such as wielding a scalpel or firing a 3.7-inch anti-aircraft piece, that were always going to affect the subject more than the operator.
The truck lurched and swayed on the ruined roads. Briggs whistled. In the intervals between the deepest potholes the motion was soothing.
“Isn’t it something, sir?”
Alistair opened his eyes. Briggs was indicating a sweep of countryside beyond the walls of Valletta.
“Oh, you like it?” said Alistair. “Me, too.”
“The people can’t do enough for you. It’s like Liverpool, only with beaches.”
“Think you’ll come back on holiday?”
“After the war I’ll bring my wife here and we’ll open a pub.”
“Good show. Germanic or traditional, do you think?”
“I think the English style might be more of a hit with the locals, sir, at least for the next thousand years or so.”
“You have it all worked out.”
“Don’t you, sir?”
‘Oh, I don’t know what I’ll do after the war. But that’s officers for you, isn’t it? Each pip on these epaulettes represents a point we are missing.”
“I’m glad you said it, sir. I couldn’t possibly.”