Chapter 11: Restraint She Will Not Brook

Two days after Mary agreed to take Laura with her to Europe, Pim wrote a note asking Laura to come by. Laura went after her shift and found, to her surprise, that Pim had got out a trunk, and that her bed was strewn with the most extraordinary collection of items—a mackintosh, winter stockings, an evening gown in mauve silk. A good flowered hat, a knit cap. Blouses.

“Pim, what on earth?” said Laura. “Are you going on holiday?”

“No.” Pim looked pleased. “I’m coming with you and Mary.”

Laura’s heart clenched. “No, you’re not.”

“I already have my ticket.”

“God, why?”

“I want to go,” Pim said. Earnest as a child, Laura thought with despair. “To see where Jimmy was. And—Laura, I want to be of use. The way you are, and Mary. I know I’m not trained like you, but I can help. I couldn’t help him but I can help someone else, don’t you see? I can write letters and things for wounded men. Wash syringes. Anything, really.” Her tone was fervent; the last four years had made them all cynical, but not Pim. “Do you think your brother is alive?”

Laura didn’t. He wasn’t. Despite anything Agatha Parkey had to say. “They sent me his tags.”

Pim said, “The Parkeys said he was alive. And I don’t think they lie just to make people happy. Or they’d have done it for me. But they said your brother is alive. Why would they lie?”

Damn the Parkeys. “How could they know? I don’t think he is.”

“But you think there’s a chance,” Pim pressed. “Or you wouldn’t be going.”

“Stop being romantic. I want to know what happened to him. Only that.”

“Well, then,” said Pim, “I can help you look.”

Half a dozen arguments ran through Laura’s mind, and all of them sounded hypocritical. Finally she bit the inside of her cheek and held up one of her hands. Pim, who had certainly been beautiful from birth, paled.

Laura didn’t want to talk about this. She never talked about this. She said, voice flattening suddenly to tonelessness, “You asked once what happened to my hands.”

Pim said, her voice small, “I did.”

“It happened over time,” said Laura. “The scarring.” The words would barely come. Speaking of the war conjured it as crisply as life: the smells, the sound of the rain. Cold nights, long days. Flies. The screaming. She forged ahead. “You’ll see the worst wounds in the world, over there. Wounds that shock you, that a man could be so hurt and not dead. You’ll have your bare hands all over those wounds as they go bad—and they will go bad. It’s all farmland, the battlefields; they’ve been spreading manure since the Middle Ages. If you’ve so much as a paper cut, or a blister on your own hand, well, that goes bad too. Over and over. It hurts very much. It scars. Do you want your hands to look like this?”

Pim looked younger than Laura. “It’s all right. I’m not afraid.”

“You should be,” said Laura. “There’s nothing noble about suffering. It’s an ugly, petty, crawling business. You’ll see men die with less dignity than dogs, cursing you sometimes, that you can’t save them. Pim, stay here and knit blankets. Don’t— You’ll never forget the things you see over there.” She couldn’t say any more. She was on the edge of being sick. She turned away sharply, to the coolness from the window.

“I can be brave, Laura, I can.”

Laura said, “You don’t owe this to Jimmy, Pim.”

She’d struck a nerve. “Don’t I? I could have kept him home, you know. He wanted to enlist. He was so angry after Nate died. I thought the army would steady him. I let him go.”

Laura said nothing. She met Pim’s eyes in silence. Recognized the look in them. God, Iven, who are you to judge what someone else thinks she owes the dead? Finally she said, “I’ll teach you to tie a tourniquet. On the ship.”

Pim smiled a little, and relaxed. “Only if you let me cut your hair. It looks like you went at it with pruning shears.”