Except for you, I thought. But I said, “Yes, sir.”
“Please explain, in your capacity as a medical professional, what Mr. Mabry experienced.”
“Cap— Mr. Mabry experienced a nosebleed, sir.”
“It seemed to spontaneously bleed?”
“Yes.”
“And when it spontaneously bled, did Mr. Mabry ask you for assistance?”
“No.”
“And why was that?”
I could feel something closing in on me, like the drawstrings of a bag tightening over my head. “He wasn’t speaking.”
“He chose not to speak? Or he could not speak?”
I said nothing.
“Answer the question, Nurse Weekes.”
I looked around the room. Mabry was staring straight ahead, at nothing; the others gazed down at their laps. Even Creeton was subdued. They all had their own requests to make, their own cases to plead. Jack Yates still leaned forward on his elbows, his body somehow coiled and tense in his casual pose. He was, I thought, the only man who could have helped—if he had been in the dining room to witness it, and not shut in his room.
I’d be dismissed if I lied, and everyone knew it. I choked out the words. “He couldn’t speak.”
Thornton’s gaze drilled into me. “Because he was lying on the floor barely conscious—is that correct? Precision is the most important part of diagnosis, Nurse Weekes. Please be precise.”
I gritted my teeth. I could not look at Mabry again. “He was lying on the floor, unable to speak.”
Thornton turned back around in his chair and wrote in his notebook. “This request is denied, Mr. Mabry. And next time, don’t try to lie to me.”
It was hard to understand, the feeling that settled downward on my shoulders and my chest, the feeling that I could be sick if only I had the ambition to move. I’d done as I’d been asked; I’d told the truth. I’d avoided getting sacked, my only goal in this job. I risked a glance at Captain Mabry, who had not moved, had not spoken, and yet his entire demeanor had sunk into despair. Thornton had taught me a lesson, intentional or not: You are not their friend. You are not ever their friend. Not ever.
It had to be public, of course. We’d had a supervisor in the wool factory who always chastised girls in public, in the middle of the work floor. He’d fired girls in front of us, sending them out the door in tears as we watched. It was the same with these sessions; nothing—no humiliation or lesson—could be private. I’d never cared about being fired from the wool factory—which, of course, I was. But I cared about keeping my job at Portis House. I cared.
“We’ll move on to you, Mr. Creeton,” said Dr. Thornton now.
Creeton shrugged. “There’s nothing to say about me, gov.”
“Your parents have filed an application to visit you.”
For a second, sheer surprise crossed Creeton’s face; then he lit up with a gleeful smile. “Wouldn’t you know!” He turned to Captain Mabry. “Sorry about that, old chap. Looks like you can’t see your family, but I can see mine.”
“Leave him be,” said Mr. MacInnes. He was whip thin, with graying hair and a close-trimmed mottled beard. “Just leave him be.”
Creeton turned on him. “You changed bedpans in the war, you drunken old sot. They won’t let you see your family, either.”
“I did change bedpans,” MacInnes shot back as if grateful the tension had finally broken, “and I wiped the bums of men better than you.”
Archie laughed; Creeton turned on him next. “Shut it, you idiot. I shouldn’t even be in here with the likes of you.”
“Gentlemen,” said Dr. Oliver.
“Tell them,” said Archie. “Tell them about—about the nightmares and see if they say you’re not crazy. Do it—do it.”
“You think I won’t beat you stupid just because you were in the infirmary?” Creeton’s beefy hands curled over the arms of his cheap wooden chair. “Do you?” I started wondering whether Paulus Vries was outside the door as promised.
No one moved.
“Creeton,” said Jack Yates into the silence. “Enough.”
Jack’s elbows were still on his thighs. He raised his head, his hands still dangling between his knees, and the pose immediately went from casual to that of a man ready to spring. He and Creeton exchanged a long look I could not read.
“I don’t have nightmares,” said Creeton at last.
“We all have nightmares,” said Jack. “It doesn’t matter.”
The other men exchanged alarmed looks. “Not me,” said MacInnes.
“No,” said Archie. “No.”
Jack looked at all of them and sighed.
Dr. Thornton finally broke in. “Right, then, Mr. Yates. Do we have the session under control now?”
Jack leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest. “Go ahead.”
“Thank you,” said Thornton, his voice cool. He turned back to the room. “Gentlemen. Let’s continue, shall we?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
By five o’clock the day felt endless, as if it had begun far back in a tunnel I could no longer see the entrance to. My head throbbed and a sinister pulse of pain had started behind my eyes, growing with bloody force with each successive heartbeat. I blinked my sandpaper eyes and tried to keep focus.
We had finished all the groups; every patient at Portis House had been evaluated, or at least checked off a list. Dr. Thornton spoke the name of the man; the man mumbled something about how he was feeling much better; Dr. Thornton told him what request had been made by family, if any, and publicly told him whether it was granted or denied.
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.