Chapter 17: The Womb of Nature and Perhaps Her Grave

CALAIS TO DUNKIRK, NORD-PAS-DE-CALAIS, FRANCE

March 1918

Laura, Pim, and Mary landed in Calais, and spent the night in a hotel. They were tired with that unwholesome travel weariness that comes of sitting still for long periods while some conveyance heaves you into the unknown. Laura had a headache, steady and vicious, right between the eyes. Her face felt hot. Munster had been contagious. She drank whiskey and water, tried not to smoke, and prayed it would pass.

The streets of Calais were packed with soldiers on leave: faded blue uniforms for the French, khaki and drab for the rest. The French army was older than it had been. Most of the young men were dead; their fathers had been conscripted to take their places. Pim and Laura shared a hotel room, with Mary across the hall, in solitary state. Laura drank broth, refused supper, went to bed, and was lying still when Pim came up and felt her forehead.

“You look awful.” Pim’s fingers were cool and pleasant.

“It’s my clever scheme.” She did not take the cloth off her eyes. “I am going to terrify the Germans into retreat. Give me another day of this headache, and I’ll sweep them away with a glare.”

“I brought you a headache powder.”

“Thank God,” said Laura in a more human voice, lifting the cloth from her eyes. “Mary doesn’t have time for poor mortals’ headaches.”

“You must be all right if you can talk like that,” Pim observed, helping Laura sit up. She was mixing the powder into a glass of water.

Laura recalled herself and said, “Go away. Other side of the room with you, madam. I was in earnest that it may be catching.”

Pim tucked the blanket up round Laura’s shoulders, put the glass by her bed, and retreated. “You’ve a wretched color. That’s a nasty flu.”

“A very nasty flu. Just ask poor old Munster. But he had pneumonia in the bargain, and I don’t. I just feel vile; I’ll be all right tomorrow.” She gulped the headache powder and said, “Bless you.”

Pim said, after a small silence and in a different voice, “How are you—how are you going to look for Freddie? How do you even start? Whom do you ask?”

Laura said, “I’m not looking for him. I just want to know what happened to him. There’s a difference. Whatever—whatever mistake they made, in how they reported his death, he is dead.” When Pim was silent, Laura said, “You must accept the same for Jimmy, Pim. If you don’t, you’ll see him in every face. He wouldn’t want that for you.”

“I already do,” said Pim. Her face was in profile, her eyes on the darkling window.

Laura pulled the scratchy woolen covers up to her shoulders. “You mustn’t blame yourself.”

“I was proud of him.” Laura couldn’t see Pim’s face anymore. “Nate was dead. Jimmy was all I had. He looked such a man, in his uniform, and I was so proud of him.”

Laura said nothing. In Laura’s mind, Penelope and Jimmy Shaw belonged to that old world, the fairy-tale Calais, with its color, and glossy mustaches and heroism bright as banners. Now Pim was lost, alone in the wrong world.

Laura said, after a pause, “You are still proud of him, I hope.”

“Yes,” said Pim. “Always. But does it matter?”

Laura didn’t think it did. Pim’s love and her pride were like the Angels of Mons. Like the wild men. Even if they existed, they hadn’t changed anything. They belonged to the old world too.

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· · ·A troop train would take them east to Dunkirk, and a lorry would pick them up there, for the last kilometers to Couthove. Their train car the next day was crammed with soldiers, sitting on the floor or straw or empty ammunition crates, playing cards. Laura kept to herself. Her headache was worse, and all her bones ached. Mary eyed her. “I ought to have left you behind.”

“You couldn’t,” said Laura. “You wouldn’t leave anything that might do your precious hospital some good. I’ll be all right.”

The soldiers stared avidly at Pim, and Laura found herself glaring them off, red-eyed, as though she were a chaperone at the most absurd of balls.

Finally someone unearthed a pocket tome of Tennyson, of all things. It found its way to Pim, who, after a small hesitation, began reading. The soldiers in the car around them fell adoringly silent to listen.

Four gray walls, and four gray towers

Overlook a space of flowers,

And the silent isle imbowers

The Lady of Shalott.

Laura listened in a haze of fever. She could almost convince herself that the poem was real and everything else illusion. Why should a tower, a tapestry, a fairy woman, and a magic mirror be made up when the thing crouching in the east, jaws wide, was real? A rumble was growing in the distance. At first, it could have been mistaken for thunder. But it went on and on.

Pim stopped reading and turned to Laura. “Is that—?”

“Guns,” said Laura.

The light was beginning to draw in, gray mist over gray fields, where the crops hadn’t sprouted. The war had left its detritus: here a tire, a flipped lorry, an empty petrol can, there a dead cow, hooves stabbing the sky. Small houses with barred windows. Pim kept reading, her eyes going from the page to the sopping gray countryside and back.

In the stormy east-wind straining,

The pale yellow woods were waning,

The broad stream in his banks complaining,

Heavily the low sky raining

Over tower’d Camelot;

Outside the isle a shallow boat

Beneath a willow lay afloat,

Below the carven stern she wrote,

The Lady of Shalott—

Pim shook her head once and passed the poems to someone else.

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· · ·They got off the train, trailed by a chorus of yearning farewells. A lorry was waiting for them at the station. “Can’t we just change trains?” said Laura, eyeing the lorry, thinking of how much slower it would be, and how a few hours of lurching on Belgian roads would hurt her aching head. The branch railway ran east as far as Poperinghe.

“You’re not in the army now, Iven,” Mary said, coming up briskly. “No room on the train going east for oddities like us. It’s drive or march.” Soldiers would march, Laura knew. But her leg would never take it.

Their lorry was driven by one of the orderlies from the hospital, called Fouquet. He was a Walloon, a French-speaking Belgian. Without a word, he helped them with their trunks. Mary’s donated supplies would follow. A train whistled behind them, high and lonely, as they drove off into the dusk.

The road grew worse, and worse still as they went east, destroyed by tires and marching feet. It smelled of earth and petrol and that indescribable hovering stink of unwashed men congregated together. Laura tried to run her mind over what she knew of Freddie’s last known billets, the name of his company commander, a list of hospitals that might have seen him, taken his clothes. But her mind slid away from it all, exhausted.

Pim tried to give Laura her coat, and was only restrained by the combined protest of Laura and Mary. The road swam in Laura’s gaze like water, and for a second she imagined it was water, black water, sweeping them all along in its current. She blinked the illusion away. Then the lorry was slowing.

“Checkpoint,” Mary said. “They’ve been trying for four years to keep the spies, the tourists, and the bereaved out of the forbidden zone. Pim, for God’s sake, you’re going to work in a field hospital. Try not to look like you’re about to wash anyone’s feet with your tears.”

Laura was silent. They put up checkpoints to keep men from deserting too.

The checkpoint guards had a plum job, fairly safe and relatively dry. They emerged with a bit of swagger: big men with massive knitted comforters wound about their throats so that only the tips of their noses and their eyes poked out. One stuck the muzzle of his rifle into the back of the lorry. The other one shone a pocket torch. “What we got here?” said one and grinned, predictably. “Cannon fodder?”

“Just say that again when the next show starts,” said Mary, leaning forward so that the light caught her face.

The man started. He looked like a grimy scarecrow, decayed by the rain. “Mrs. Borden,” he said. “I thought you’d gone to America.”

Mary said, “I came back.”

A faint, disreputable grin was her answer, and a wet cough. The soldier had a violent cold. Was everyone ill, this side of the Atlantic?

“We’re for Couthove,” added Mary. “With new staff.”

Their driver, Fouquet, had come round the back. He had spent all those miles hunched like a gargoyle over wheel and gearbox. He had been an under-gardener at Couthove before the war, or so Mary said. An expert in roses.

Fouquet said, “Problem?”

“I can’t imagine,” Mary said.

Laura could. The guards were bored.

“Canadian?” said the second soldier to Laura.

“Yes,” said Mary.

Christ, now he was making agreeable small talk, barely hindered by his cough. “I should like to go to Canada one day. If Flanders gets any wetter, they’ll have to call in the Canadian fishing fleet to bring up men, instead of lorries. Here, miss. You look like you could use this.” He handed Laura a flask.

Well, that was more like it. Laura took it, drank. Unwatered rum. She coughed, eyes stinging, and the spirit burned as it went down, but it lit a small fire in her stomach, quieted the chills. “If you’ve a cigarette,” said Laura, “I’ll light candles to your memory after you catch a bullet, sir.”

“Laura!” gasped Pim. But the man was already laughing; he pulled an army-issue cigarette out of his pocket and lit it for her. The smoke calmed her a little. She’d been wrestling involuntary panic as the noise of the Front crept closer.

Mary said, “Done with the pleasantries? Good. It’s wretchedly cold. May we go on or not?”

The men looked disappointed, but Mary had fixed them with a steely look. “Be careful on the road,” the first man said finally, stepping back. “There’s old Fritz’s aeroplanes, there’s the ghosts, there’s the madmen, and then there’s the fiddler.”

Pim said, “Fiddler?”

“Well,” said the soldier, “they say he roams the back area, and if he catches you, wham. Alive or dead you’ll always—”

“I am going to be a ghost if I stay here much longer,” interrupted Laura, just as Mary said, “Can we get on or not?”

“I suppose,” said the soldier reluctantly. “Watch out,” he added to Fouquet, man-to-man. “They’ve been flying sorties toward the coast.”

Fouquet just grunted and went back to the front of the lorry. The engine snarled to life and changed gears.

Behind them the soldiers were calling “Good luck, Mrs. Borden! Let the little lady watch for officers; they love nurses!”

Pim blushed, but Mary replied, unruffled, “Until you’re peeling off their dressings.”

Twinned barks of laughter chased the lorry out onto the road. Laura looked toward the receding checkpoint and was startled by a trick of the shadows, and perhaps of her rising fever. It looked, in the uncertain light, as though a great gate arced across the road, barring the way back.