Silence for the Dead(29)
Jack Yates simply said he had not been sleeping. No one had requested to see him.
Thornton had made notes in his small book all afternoon, his pen scratching busily, but Dr. Oliver had had to remind him of the names of each of the men. I’d sat quietly in my corner as instructed, rousing myself only when voices were raised.
There had been a single nightmarish moment when Somersham had spoken about his dead sister—he became hysterical and had to be sedated. Thornton had turned to me with a simple barked command: “The syringes in my case, Nurse Weekes.” I’d grabbed the small black bag and unlatched it with damp fingers, but when I hesitated, Dr. Oliver reached in, removed a syringe, and quickly injected the patient as I stared in panicked nausea. It had taken me half an hour afterward, sitting in a corner with my hands pressed into my skirts, to stop shaking.
It was a long afternoon of misery. Patients were a means to an end, part of my job—not my friends, as Dr. Thornton had demonstrated. Lunatics. And yet as I heard a man plead to see his mother or his sweetheart, or burn with shame as he admitted to uncontrolled vomiting or the inability to sleep with a simple blanket touching his arms, I felt the stirrings of a burning, angry dissatisfaction. I started trying to understand.
I’d spent the war in London, going from shared flat to factory shifts or shopgirl work. The war had loomed large and encompassing, yet in the background. It was the topic among the girls at the lunch counter or the pubs, sweethearts shipping out, sweethearts home on leave. It was felt in the rationing, in the black-blazoned headlines that shouted at me from newspapers left in discarded trash bins or on park benches in early dawn on my way to work—stark, angry words like Mons and Passchendaele and Ypres, incalculable numbers of dead, ships sunk, blurry photographs of battles.
My brother, Sydney, had enlisted in the first weeks of war and had never sent home a single postcard. The first few months after he’d gone were the worst of my life; then I’d left home myself, and the war had sunk into a miserable background din, and I was certain he was dead. I had enough problems of my own to worry about what happened in France anymore.
Or so I had told myself.
But these men had been there. They had experienced something so otherworldly, so catastrophically horrible, that I would never know what they saw when they closed their eyes at night. Or what they heard when a plate banged on a table. They’d washed off the mud and the blood and been sent home, unlike Syd, and it had been so bad they couldn’t cope with it. They’d ended up here. Something sounded in me, deep down like a bell being struck in the depths of the ocean, something that saddened and frightened me and made me exhausted in the same way one is exhausted after vigorously, repeatedly vomiting up one’s supper.
Mabry hadn’t seen his children because of me. You are not their friend.
“I hope that was instructive,” Dr. Thornton said to me as the last few men filed from the room. “Have you any questions, Nurse?”
“No, Doctor.”
“Come now,” Dr. Oliver chimed in. “There must be something?”
I turned to them. “It just seems . . . it just seems that it isn’t actually treatment the men get. Medical treatment, I mean. They’re just . . . motivated to behave.” Like in a prison.
Dr. Thornton nodded. “You’ve come from casualty cases, so the confusion is understandable. Mental cases are very different, Nurse Weekes, especially cases of shell shock. Did you think we could give them a bandage, perhaps, or a pill, and cure them?”
“These men,” said Dr. Oliver, “need to learn.”
I looked from one man to the other. “What about Jack Yates? Does he need to learn?”
“Ah,” Thornton said. “That went better than expected, did it not? Perhaps I should explain. Patient Sixteen came to us with instructions from the highest level of government—the highest, I repeat—that his stay here was to remain confidential. I don’t think anyone will trust a madman’s account, but it’s good to be certain. You’ve been given great trust today. I hope you can keep it.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why the secrecy?”
Thornton leaned in so he could not possibly be overheard by anyone except Dr. Oliver. “Mr. Yates was a great hero to this country. To know that he has fallen to this . . .” He gestured around the room. “To know that he has fallen to such a low level would, I think, be detrimental to morale.”
My head throbbed with pain. “But the war is over.”
“Our great country is involved in many operations the world over,” he replied, “and will continue to be. The will of the people behind government is important. If it were to be known that Jack Yates had become a coward . . .”
I choked, any anger I’d ever felt at Jack evaporating. “Jack Yates is not a coward.”
Dr. Oliver patted my hand. “You’re a loyal lady, and we admire you for it. But you must understand that there is nothing lower for a man than this, than to come here. To be one of . . . these.”
“Nothing lower,” Dr. Thornton agreed.
I followed them to the corridor, the two of them conferring quietly together. I waited for them to finish their conversation, for them to dismiss me at last. There was a single crack in the wall, hairline thin, making its way down from the ceiling. Outside, the sun struggled to break through a thick cotton layer of cloud. I had the sudden desire to walk out the door and keep walking, walking, breathing the warm, damp air.