White Feathers, page 9
Joseph remembered Croft and immediately felt ashamed of himself. He rubbed his hand across his eyes and said, ‘Oh God, Erin, I’m sorry, I really am.’
She patted his hand forgivingly. ‘Yes, I know.’ Then she stood up and smoothed her apron. ‘I’ve been on my break but I have to go back now. I’ll come and see you whenever I have a moment, shall I? I’m not on this ward today but I probably will be later in the week. In the meantime you could get to know your roommates. They’re not a bad bunch, if you don’t mind bad language and having your bottom pinched, but then I don’t expect that yours will be,’ she added wryly.
When she had gone Joseph looked around the room, saw that everyone was staring back at him with undisguised curiosity, except for Croft who was on his back snoring, and introduced himself. There were five others sharing the ward, two of them Maori whom he recognised but didn’t know by name, a man from the Otagos who introduced himself as Lofty Curtis, and another from the Mounteds, named Henry Ormsby.
‘Sonny Tahere, Ngati Maniapoto,’ announced the man opposite Joseph. ‘I seen you on that hill at Anzac. She was rough, eh?’
His neighbour, who introduced himself as Eru Te Moni from Ngati Tuwharetoa, said, ‘You in B Company, eh? We was in A. Yous were up near us at that push on the Sari. That’s where I got it,’ he added, pointing ostentatiously at his truncated left lower limb.
‘Eru, shut up about your bloody leg,’ said Sonny benignly. ‘You always going on about it.’
‘Well, it was a good one. It suited me,’ Eru replied with an affronted dignity that made Joseph smile. ‘What do I do with only one bloody leg?’
‘Same as you done before. Nothing,’ replied Sonny.
Joseph listened as the two traded amiable insults, suspecting, from the amused looks on the faces of Lofty Curtis and Henry Ormsby, that this was a routine the pair of them had been polishing for some time and thoroughly enjoyed. Henry looked over and gave him a broad wink and it occurred to Joseph for the first time since he had been wounded that, notwithstanding Erin’s unexpected presence, he might not have to face his recovery alone.
He came to know the men in his ward very quickly — it would have been very difficult not to. They lay within feet of each other, shared the minute details of each other’s progress, heard and smelt each other farting and emptying their bowels, and became very familiar with each other’s personal habits and idiosyncrasies. Their intimacy reminded Joseph of his relationship with the men in his section, and it comforted him.
With the exception of Croft, they all seemed, at least outwardly, to accept their injuries and subscribed strictly to the soldier’s creed of never exhibiting signs of weakness, never talking about dead mates and never admitting out loud that it hadn’t been worth it. But occasionally at night one of them could be heard weeping quietly; Joseph thought it was probably Lofty Curtis, whose right leg had been amputated almost at the hip and the other, shattered and deformed, was suspended by a complicated series of pulleys and weights above his bed, but he never asked and certainly nobody else ever mentioned it.
Croft, though, regularly slipped into deep troughs of depression that made him totally uncommunicative on some days, and on others sullen, sarcastic and aggressive. Because he could not get out of bed by himself, and the rest of his roommates had learnt to ignore his unpleasant behaviour, he often directed his unhappiness at the nurses. He would find fault with everything they did, complain that they didn’t treat him as well as they did the others, and make extra work for them. When he was especially miserable he would shit in his bed and sit in it until the smell wafted over to someone else’s nostrils and a nurse would have to be summoned to clean up the mess.
After the third time he had done this, Joseph, who vacillated between feeling intensely sympathetic for the man and despising him, threatened to drag himself out of his bed and belt Croft one. This elicited a round of cheers from the rest of the ward, and prompted Croft to retreat into a sulk that lasted three days because he’d thought he’d found an ally and it was clear he hadn’t. But Joseph was left with an unpleasant taste in his mouth: Croft could be quite pleasant when he wasn’t feeling down and it seemed obvious the man was suffering from some kind of serious emotional disruption. In the end Joseph more or less gave up — he had enough adjustments of his own to make without worrying about Croft.
After a week Joseph was allowed up and into a wheelchair, which gave him an immense sense of freedom and alleviated the crushing boredom of being confined to bed. Eru, Sonny and Henry were already mobile, either on crutches or in wheelchairs, and had regularly congregated around either his or Lofty’s bed to play cards or dominoes. Doctor Birch would not let him use crutches yet, as his left leg still hadn’t healed sufficiently to take his weight, but it now required only a light bandage at night, under which it itched fiercely and constantly. His stump was healing well, too, and in some ways was in better condition than his intact leg, but he was still having trouble with pain in places where there was no longer any flesh and bone. Birch assured him it would go away eventually and Joseph, sick of waking up in the middle of the night and catching himself in the act of reaching to massage non-existent toes, wished heartily that it would, and sooner rather than later.
His days were occupied, like everyone else’s, with resting, talking, writing letters assuring everyone at home he was fine and recovering well, going for short trundles around the hospital in his chair and outside for a smoke, speculating on what would be served for breakfast, lunch and dinner and then complaining when it arrived. Croft left, and was not missed. His bed was taken by a man called Noah Jackson who had lost both feet and was such a persistent joker that Joseph suspected he did it to stop himself from slitting his own wrists.
Joseph’s mood had improved markedly since his arrival, and he thought he knew why. Somewhere between his first week at the hospital and the third, it occurred to him that he might just have fallen in love with Erin McRae. She had been as good as her word and had come to sit with him at every opportunity. When she was assigned to his ward Joseph happily spent hours watching her tend to the other men, bathing poor old Lofty who was still attached to his traction device, changing dressings on the others, tidying their beds and generally jollying them along. He noted that when she worked, her shyness fell away like the outer petals of a rose opening into full bloom, and she shone. She chatted away, joked, laughed and cheerfully tolerated endless well-natured teasing — daily proposals of marriage from Henry, or Eru announcing that he had a shocking itch in his groin and could Nurse McRae please scratch it for him. Every nurse on the ward received the same treatment, except for Sister Griffin whose glare could freeze even Sonny’s backchat.
This was a side to Erin that Joseph had never seen before, and it enchanted him. She had always seemed so shy and self-conscious, but time and perhaps her nursing training had obviously allowed some very charming and appealing facets of her character to blossom. Or was it that perhaps he had just never looked hard enough? She was patient and kind and sympathetic without conveying a sense of pity for her charges.
He wondered how she felt about him, and spent much of his time devising ways of asking her. If Keely had been here it would have been easy — she would have confronted Erin and asked outright, then relayed the answer back to Joseph immediately. He couldn’t summon the nerve to ask Erin himself, fearing that her extra attention and frequent blushes and the intensity of her gaze when she thought he wasn’t looking might just be symptoms of her compassion for a man crippled by a random shell blast.
CHAPTER SEVEN
October, 1915
In the end, he didn’t need to ask, for Erin made her feelings perfectly clear herself. Until now, she had avoided taking him for his bath and shave in the bathroom down the corridor — whether deliberately or not, he didn’t know — but on this day she came to his bedside with a fresh towel folded under one arm and a very determined look on her face. She positioned his wheelchair at his bedside, toed the brake on, lowered the armrest and motioned for him to transfer himself into it, a manoeuvre he was now quite good at.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked, still on the bed and somewhat perturbed by the look of fierce resolution on her flushed face.
‘It’s time for your bath,’ she said, not looking at him.
‘Oh,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘One of the other nurses usually helps me with that.’
‘Yes, but I’m doing it today,’ she replied stiffly.
‘Oh,’ he said again, then lapsed into silence.
There was a short interlude during which neither moved, then Erin said, ‘Joseph, can you get into the chair, please?’
‘What? Oh, yes, sorry.’
He shuffled his backside over to the edge of his bed, put one hand on the outer arm of the wheelchair and heaved himself into the seat. She checked that his legs were in place, his left foot resting securely on the foot-plate, snapped the armrest back up and pushed the chair briskly towards the door.
Passing Sonny’s bed Joseph caught a smirking, head-nodding wink, and as they went through the doorway he heard behind him the voices of several of his roommates joined in a gleeful and speculatory ‘Ooooh, eh?’
He resisted the temptation to turn and look up at Erin to see if she’d also heard, but evidently she hadn’t, or if she had she was doing a good job of ignoring it; in silence she wheeled him at a vigorous rate down the corridor, not even giving him the opportunity to propel the chair himself. Parking him outside the bathroom, she propped open the heavy door, wheeled him through, then locked the door behind them.
The bathroom was cool and smelt of disinfectant that masked a suggestion of mould, its thick walls tiled in white and the polished porcelain of the two urinals gleaming in the diffused light spilling through a single high window. There was also a heavy cast-iron bath on clawed feet, and two toilet stalls he hadn’t been able to avail himself of yet because they would not accommodate his wheelchair. He yearned for the day Doctor Birch promoted him to crutches; they would not only mean more mobility, but also the luxury of sitting on the toilet to move his bowels instead of the humiliation of perching on a pan in his bed and trying to clean himself up afterwards.
Erin reached over and turned on the taps, and they waited in silence as the plumbing clanked and rattled and slowly filled the bath with tepid water.
Joseph could not think how to diffuse the suddenly amplified tension between them. Instead he sat dumbly in his chair, watching the water swirl around the tub. Eventually Erin judged the bath full enough and briskly turned off the taps. She secured the wooden board Joseph would use to ease himself down into the tub, then stood back.
She looked him in the eye at last, took a deep breath and said, ‘I’ll need to help you in, and I’m not leaving you alone in case you have an accident.’ Then, when he didn’t move, and with another flush staining her cheeks, she added, ‘Er, you’ll need to take your pyjamas off.’
Joseph nodded and fiddled with the buttons on his jacket, then stopped, struggling with an urgent and overwhelming urge not to reveal to her his body and his ruined legs.
She read his mind and said gently, ‘Oh, Joseph, I’ve seen so much worse than what’s happened to you. You’re still the same person to me. Please.’
In that instant he was aware she was encouraging him to lay himself open to her, to let her see him as he was now and allow her to accept him.
‘Here, let me help,’ she murmured, leaning over and undoing his jacket. This close to her, he could smell the chemical acidity of the dressings and lotions she handled in the course of her work, the warm scent of her skin and a faint hint of fresh, feminine sweat. She slid the jacket off his shoulders and down his arms, tugged it out from between him and the back of the wheelchair, and let it fall to the floor. Then she knelt in front of him, untied the cord securing his pyjama pants at his waist and ordered, ‘Lift.’
He placed his hands on the arms of the chair and raised his buttocks an inch off the seat, allowing her to slip the cotton trousers down over his slim hips and across his lap, where his penis, flaccid with his shame and discomfort, lay in its nest of wiry black pubic hair. Finally she slid the trousers down his brown thighs and to his knees. Filled with sudden panic, he grabbed her wrists and said, ‘Stop.’
‘No,’ she replied.
‘Yes.’
‘No, Joseph!’ She sat back on her heels and gazed up at him. ‘Can’t you see? It doesn’t make any difference to me. How you were before and how you are now, it hasn’t changed anything. It hasn’t changed how I feel at all!’
He heard urgent desperation in her voice, as if she were the one broken and scarred and craving reassurance, not him. But he also heard her words, and they gave him hope.
To Erin the moment was critical: she had of course already seen the state of his legs, many times in fact, but this was different and they both knew it. This was about what they might be together.
Joseph, for his part, knew that if he shut her out now, there would be no possibility of a shared future; she would dart back behind her emotional armour and he would be left alone to flounder in a morass of misery and paralysing self-pity. He let go of her wrists then and, almost imperceptibly, he nodded.
With a touch as light as thistledown she drew the pyjama pants down to his ankles, lifted his foot and pulled them clear. Then, so gently he could barely feel her fingers, she traced the path of the deep purple scars scoring the inside of his left leg from knee to ankle, then did the same to the puckered seam running across the stump of his right leg. He lay his hand on her veiled head and closed his eyes.
They sat that way for several minutes, both motionless and silent and aware that together they had sent the invisible blocks of some great, emotional barricade tumbling to the ground.
He ran his hand down her cheek then and, in a voice hoarse with feeling, asked, ‘Are you sure, Erin? Will you be with me? After this, I mean? For always?’
‘Yes,’ she replied simply, as if in her mind at least there could never have been any other answer. She had wanted him for so long, and in such aching silence, and she marvelled that he might now feel the same way about her.
‘Good,’ he said softly. ‘Good. I need you.’ And he enveloped her in his arms and brushed his lips against her forehead.
She smiled and said, ‘You need a bath, too.’
He raised his left arm and sniffed at his armpit. ‘Oh. Sorry, I do too,’ he laughed, suddenly feeling absurdly light-hearted and as if, after this, nothing else could really matter.
He kissed her again, on the lips this time, then gently disentangled her from his arms. ‘Help me?’ he asked.
She nodded and positioned his chair parallel to the bath, dropped the armrests and watched while he hoisted himself onto the wooden board, admiring the well-defined muscles of his arms and chest and noting with pleasure the amount of condition he had regained since arriving at Port Said. From his perch on the board he was able to lower himself into the water until he was immersed up to his armpits. He closed his eyes again, enjoying the luxurious feel of the warm water on his skin, then submerged himself completely. Suddenly worried that he might have slipped, Erin grabbed for him but he popped up by himself, shaking his head and flinging drops of water every where.
He wiped the water out of his eyes. ‘God, I miss the sea.’
‘You’ll be able to swim as much as you like when you get home,’ she countered, pushing the wheelchair out of the way and settling herself on the floor beside the tub. She began to soap his back with a facecloth, fascinated by the brown smoothness of his skin and the long, graceful muscles that moved sleekly under it. ‘Your hair’s getting long again,’ she added softly.
‘Yes, a bloke came around yesterday doing haircuts, but I decided against it.’
‘I know. Corporal Bell. He’s an orderly, you know, not a barber.’
Joseph had a vision of the dreadful haircuts his roommates had suffered at the hands of the singularly unqualified corporal, and laughed out loud. ‘Yes, I could see that.’
‘Will you cut it again?’ she asked, hoping he’d say no.
‘I don’t think so. Well, I won’t have to now I’m not a soldier any more.’
‘No, but you’ll still be in the military until you get home and get your discharge, and that might be months away yet.’
‘Then I’ll just have to be a soldier with scruffy hair, won’t I? I’ve done my bit, Erin. I’m not giving up anything more.’
She rubbed soap onto her hands and ran them through his wet hair, working up a lather and massaging his skull slowly as he relaxed against the end of the tub. He closed his eyes and sighed at the heavy sensuality of it, aware now that he had an erection.
Erin noticed it too, and was grateful he couldn’t see her face. She’d experienced this before, of course — patients becoming aroused during the course of her professional ministrations — and had learnt to ignore the embarrassment it caused her and all but the cheekiest of men, but this was not like that. This erection belonged to the man she loved, and although not naive she was sexually inexperienced and wasn’t at all sure what to do about it.
‘Do you want to rinse the soap out?’ she asked.
He ducked under the water, rinsed his hair, then reappeared, noting her pink cheeks.
‘I can do the rest,’ he said, not wanting her to do anything she didn’t want to do.
She nodded. He completed his wash, wrung out the facecloth and draped it over the edge of the bath.
‘I’ll need a hand to get out. I can put some weight on my left leg now but if you could help pull me up, I’ll dry myself sitting on the board and then get into the chair.’
They clasped wrists and she pulled him out of the water, then guided him onto the board and handed him his towel. He dried himself quickly while she repositioned the wheelchair next to the bath, then held it still as he moved into it. Seated, he bunched the towel in his lap, self-conscious now about the erection which refused to go away.
