The Repercussions

  THE REPERCUSSIONS

  Catherine Hall

  ALMA BOOKS LTD

  London House

  243–253 Lower Mortlake Road

  Richmond

  Surrey TW9 2LL

  United Kingdom

  www.almabooks.com

  First published by Alma Books Limited in 2014

  Copyright © Catherine Hall, 2014

  Bertolt Brecht epigram © Bertolt Brecht, 1949, translated by Tony Kushner, 2009, Mother Courage and Her Children, by permission of Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

  Cover design: Jem Butcher

  Catherine Hall asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  ISBN: 978-1-84688-334-7

  eBook ISBN : 978-1-84688-341-5

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  For Sandra D.,

  with love

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Acknowledgements

  One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one’s words as to endure one’s thoughts. The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated.

  HENRY JAMES

  If off the war you hope to live, Take what you can. You’ll also give.

  BERTOLT BRECHT

  THE REPERCUSSIONS

  One

  Susie, I think I’m in trouble.

  I’m not in Kabul any more. I’m not in London either. I’m in Brighton.

  Trouble or not, there’s a comfort to being at the very end of England, on the coast, right where ground meets sea. I could find my exact location on a map in a second, and after all those times of having no idea where I was, stuck somewhere dark and lost and dangerous, that’s a real relief.

  I’m sitting in one of those old-fashioned wicker chairs – Lloyd Loom, I think they’re called – on a balcony. Well, not quite a balcony: one of those covered-in terraces you get in seaside towns, like a greenhouse stuck to the wall, one floor up. A gulkhana, they’d call it in Afghanistan, a flower room for ladies to sit in and catch the winter sun, although that’s a grand word for such a small space, just enough for a chair, and a little glass-topped table, and plants, lots of them, all over the place, hanging from the ceiling, in pots on every surface, climbing up the window frames. I could almost imagine I was in a jungle, although after everything that’s happened it’s probably better I don’t.

  I can see the mad, glittery mess of the pier, lighting up the water, bouncing its reflection off jet-black sea.

  Wait, I’m going to open the window, I want to smell sea air, even though it’s freezing cold outside. There, it’s flooding in, as if the tide’s pushing it into the flat. I can hear the waves breaking, steady and soothing, calm.

  I need a bit of soothing. I feel strange tonight, like I always do when I get back, caught between different worlds. This morning, high up in the mountains, I heard the call to prayer as I packed my bags. Now it’s banging music and shouts from kids out on the town.

  My bags are in the corner, where I dumped them when I got here. I haven’t unpacked yet. It used to drive you crazy – didn’t it? – the way I’d come back home and leave my stuff in the corner for weeks, just pulling things out as I needed them. Presents too, though, always, for you – I was good at those, at least.

  I know there’s not much point in remembering. I know we can’t go back to what we were. But I wish I could crawl into bed and put my arms around you and know that I was home.

  I’m not at home, though, wherever that might be. Do you remember Edith, my ancient, fabulous great-aunt? This is her flat, right on the Brighton seafront. Or rather, it used to be – now it’s mine. She left it to me when she died, two weeks ago today. I hadn’t known she had cancer, hadn’t noticed anything wrong the last time I saw her, back in March. I’m still kicking myself for that. When the phone call came, I was still in Afghanistan. I couldn’t even make it back for the funeral – too much was going on. Bad stuff, this time, Suze, really bad, which meant I couldn’t leave.

  I loved Edith. She gave me my first camera, when I was eight, to take pictures of the animals at London Zoo. She’d tell me stories about the elephants she’d seen in India as a girl, all dressed up in ceremonial colours, with paintings on their foreheads and howdahs on their backs. I’d lick my ice cream slowly, fascinated, watching her bracelets jingle as she talked.

  It’s strange to be in the flat without her. It suited her so well. Each piece of Meissen china, the Persian rug on the floor, the jade vase on the sandalwood table – each of them has a story, and there, in the middle of them all, perched in her armchair, was always Edith, ready to tell me those stories over coffee served in tiny espresso cups she’d bought in Rome in 1968, from a shop just off the Via Condotti.

  She smoked two cigarettes a day, one after lunch and one with her first whisky of the evening, which she called her chota peg, in honour of her years in India. I’m doing the same now, in honour of her. I’ve poured myself some duty-free Johnnie Walker and lit up a Marlboro.

  To Edith: may she be as extraordinary in the next life as she was in this.

  The booze and fags aren’t working like they normally do. My mind’s churning, turning things over. Usually I switch on the radio when I get somewhere new, to get a feel for what’s happening. Edith’s old wireless is on the sideboard, marked with stickers for Radio 4 and the World Service, but I’m leaving it off. I don’t want to know what’s going on in the world, at least not for now.

  There’s always an element of having to sort my head out when I get back from a job, but this feels different. Afghanistan isn’t the worst place I’ve been to… no, forget that – comparing wars is pointless. What I mean is, the violence wasn’t there in front of me. War in Sierra Leone or the Congo is manic; in Afghanistan it’s more like a chronic depression. I wasn’t dodging snipers or facing stoned kids with wild eyes holding AK-47s. There weren’t piles
of bodies rotting under the sun or bombs going off all through the night. But under the surface there was a sense of things simmering, a dirty, dangerous soup that could boil over at any point and create a scalding mess.

  It did boil over. It did create a mess, one that’s not cleared up. I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t get it out of my head.

  I’ve been looking for distractions, poking about, trying to stop myself from thinking about it all. There’s an old wooden box on one of the bookshelves, rough-looking, out of place among the ornate china and fine silver. I’m intrigued. I don’t remember it from before. Perhaps Edith left it out for me on purpose.

  I’m going to open it, Suze. Let’s see what’s inside.

  There. Done. It smells musty, dry, of old paper and ink.

  A manila envelope has fallen out, stuffed with photographs, faded black and white. I’m laying them out on the hearthrug.

  A group portrait: formal, men standing in front of an Indian palace, all filigree and carved columns, domes and minarets. The men are in uniforms and turbans, their long beards neatly trimmed. They stare out at the camera with fixed expressions. They have injuries: legs in plaster, arms in slings. Some have no legs or arms at all, just bandaged stumps.

  A hospital ward: long rows of tightly tucked beds, each with a soldier sitting up in it, dressed in white pyjamas and a turban to match the sheets.

  An operating theatre: a gurney in the centre under a ceiling light, a washstand, instruments laid out neatly, bottles of disinfectant on a side table. Seven staff, dressed in surgical scrubs. All white, except for one who looks as if he’s Indian, like the patients. All male, apart from one woman: a nurse.

  At the bottom of this one is a description:

  Pavilion Hospital, Brighton 1915.

  There’s something else in the box – a small book, leather-bound, its pages filled with cramped black writing.

  There’s a little prickle of excitement I always get when I come across a story. I’m feeling it now.

  Two

  ELIZABETH WILLOUGHBY’S DIARY

  1st December 1914

  It is with great pleasure that I begin this diary, which is to be my record of this war. I do not pretend it to be anything more than that: I speak only for myself, to put down in writing my impressions and experiences so that in years to come I can look back and remember.

  It is no accident that I am starting now: at last, I have good reason to write. Tomorrow I am to take up a position at the Royal Pavilion. One might ask why nurses should be needed at a destination for day-trippers. The answer is that it is no longer that: the Pavilion has become a hospital.

  I found out from Hugo; his scout troop helped last week to clear things out so it could fit in the beds. He came home full of news. Apparently it was the King himself who told the Mayor to turn it into a military hospital. For me the thrilling thing is this: the patients will be Indian – soldiers who’ve been fighting for us at the Front.

  This was the announcement in the Gazette, which I cut out to keep:

  Valiant soldiers of our great Indian dependency, after fighting so nobly for their King-Emperor, are now to be cared for in a Royal Palace in the greatest of British watering places. It is like a chapter out of a wonderful romance. It will appeal to the world as a thing almost incredible. It will give the Brighton Pavilion a name it has never had before. Generations of Brightonians yet unborn will marvel in reading of these days.

  Of course, I thought of Robert immediately. If I am to marry a man whose whole life is the Indian Army, what better way to understand it than to nurse its soldiers? Perhaps some of them will even be from his regiment, which came here all the way from Bombay just last month. And so, as soon as I heard the news, I rushed down to Matron and asked if my name could be put forward. She was somewhat hesitant at first, and said that there’d been a terrible commotion about it all, but eventually, after some persuasion, she said that, if Mamma and Papa agreed, she would recommend me for a position. When I asked, Mamma looked anxious, and said she hoped the patients wouldn’t be in too awful a state, and Papa grunted and shuffled his newspaper, and said he was proud of me for following in his footsteps.

  I’m not, of course, since he is a surgeon and I am just a nurse, but I was glad all the same.

  I’ve decided not to tell Robert yet. I’m going to wait until his next leave. We never seem to be able to say what we really mean in our letters, and he’s not much of a writer, so I feel silly sending pages and pages. I will wait until he comes back, when I’ll be settled at the Pavilion, and can show him what I’m doing, instead of trying to explain it in words.

  Three

  What were they doing here, those soldiers, so far away from home, fighting in a war that had nothing to do with them? I guess that’s not so unusual. Poor men are always available for hire – I’ve seen enough ten-dollar Taliban to know that. I wonder what they thought about being put in a king’s palace to recuperate. How strange it must have seemed to them, although perhaps no stranger than the trenches at the Front.

  I’m feeling strange too, can’t stop thinking about Kabul. This morning I decided to go for a walk to try to clear my head. I pulled on a pair of old jeans and my big boots, wrapped up warm in a scarf and gloves and took myself off to the beach. The cold wind, fresh and salty, hit me like a slap. I crunched over the pebbles, glad of the lack of sand, glad of many things, of not needing to ask permission to be there, of not being stared at by curious eyes, of being able to walk without thinking and not be scared of being blown up.

  I smoked as I walked, like always, thinking of you. Do you remember how I used to say it wasn’t an addiction, that in the places I work it’s practically a requirement? Cigarettes are bribes when you want to pass a checkpoint. When the snipers have stopped and you’re planning your next move, a fag fills the pause. Soldiers all want something to do while they wait for the next bit of action. For the five minutes that you’re smoking together you’re almost one of them.

  You weren’t having any of it. You said I was a filthy addict who didn’t want to give up, and it was all excuses, and they would kill me in the end. You were right of course, but it was hard to care. You don’t think much about your long-term future in a war zone.

  I wasn’t thinking of my future on the beach, either. I was thinking of the past, of when you took me to Madrid to see Goya at the Prado because – you said – he knew more about war than any other painter. We walked along cool corridors, a soft May breeze coming through the open windows. We’d spent the morning in bed between crisp sheets, drinking coffee and feeding each other oranges. I could smell the juice of them still on your skin.

  You took me first to see The Third of May 1808. I stood and looked at the enormous canvas, a firing squad focused on a man, brilliantly lit. He faced it on his knees, his hands raised like Christ on the cross. At his feet a pile of corpses, to his side a group of other captives, panicking, knowing what was going to come next. The look on their faces was one I recognized too well.

  “If I’d photographed that,” I said, “I’d have had to question being so close, in case they were acting up for the cameras.”

  You said nothing, just nodded, and took me to his Black Paintings, the ones he painted straight onto the walls of his house just after the Napoleonic Wars, when he was pretty much a recluse. He was scared of going insane, and when I saw those fourteen pictures, the people eating their children, beating each other with cudgels, a decapitation, a witches’ Sabbath, all in tones of black and sludgy brown, I saw why.

  “Don’t go crazy like that,” you whispered in my ear.

  “No,” I said. “I won’t.”

  Standing at the water’s edge, thinking, smoking, I looked back up to the seafront. Kabul’s brown, a thousand shades of desert dust. On my first trip there, I’d lie in bed, unable to sleep, listening to the crack and shatter of the air strikes, and I’d play our game in which we’d compete to think of all the words we knew for a colour.

  Cho
colate, khaki, mouse. Chestnut, hazel, beige. Ochre, copper, bronze.

  Brighton’s white (chalk, cheese), from the foam of the waves to the dirty seagulls and the peeling Regency townhouses – even, today, the sky. I walked right along the beach, all the way to the part reserved for nudists. An old man was sitting in a deckchair, naked except for a pair of flip-flops, shielded by a stripy windbreak flapping in the breeze. He caught my eye as I passed.

  “Lovely day for it,” he said.

  And suddenly it was a lovely day. I loved the man and his happy nakedness. When I got back to the flat, I turned on the gas fire full blast and stripped off all my clothes. I got out Elizabeth’s diary, put on my sunglasses and sat on the chair in the gulkhana with my feet up on a Moroccan-leather pouffe, reading and grinning to myself and feeling the winter sun on my body, just because I could.

  Perhaps it’ll be all right, Suze. Perhaps I won’t go crazy, like I promised you back in Madrid. Perhaps I’ll be all right too.

  Four

  ELIZABETH WILLOUGHBY’S DIARY

  5th December 1914

  Our first patients are safely installed.

  It looks very different to when I gave a nursing demonstration here just weeks ago. All the beautiful Persian carpets have been taken up and replaced with rather drab khaki linoleum. They have put boards up in the banqueting and music rooms to protect the wallpaper, and taken down the curtains. It’s much more practical, I suppose, but I do miss the fantastical dragons and those life-sized Chinese figures, who looked as if they were going for a moonlit walk across the walls.

  The kitchen has become an operating theatre. Not, it seems, that I’ll have much to do with that. When we reported for duty, Colonel MacLeod, our commanding officer, said that all medical treatment is to be carried out by British doctors and surgeons from the Indian Medical Service, assisted by some Indian doctors and a few Indian medical students who were studying here when the war began.

  He didn’t mention the Queen’s Nurses. After a while, I could contain myself no longer and put up my hand to ask. The Colonel frowned, and said that it had been decided that no nursing was to be carried out by Englishwomen. I waited for him to explain why not, but he simply nodded, as if that settled it. I was not bold enough to ask again, but while he went on speaking of hospital protocol I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and so afterwards I followed him to his office.