Strange that she should be thinking about this now. It’s early evening and the office has been quiet for a while already. In fact, her whole life is quieter now. The frenetic bustle is over. It’s not so much a case of waning strength, but simply the desire for silence. To be honest, she can now face silence. Only now. And so she spends more and more time in her office after work.
Quietly at her desk, before its smooth empty surface. She tolerates nothing on her desk, not even a book or a reading lamp, and when necessary takes a notebook out of a drawer. The walls, however, are an untidy tapestry of books, ornaments, artworks: a ceremonial mask from the Congo, a framed print of a clay pot and a woven mat brought to her from South Africa. This is her world; she finds the contradictions comforting. That is how she wants it. And it was here that she’d first seen herself in front of that door, realising that the world, her world, against all logic and without her realising it, had assumed the shape, the contours of that scene. As if the world in some macabre way was meddling in her affairs.
For a long time it was impossible, but now she can follow her train of thought, these days she can face it. The ride with Jacobs in his sidecar. That room in that hospital. And one of these days, she knows she will be able to face going back to where it all began.
The hospital is a fortress-like building, with red brick and ornamental plasterwork; the entrance is an archway below a watchtower with parapets. She emerges from the shadowy doorway into the blinding light of the morning sun reflecting off the ash-white gravel and the windows encircling the courtyard. She walks with her chin pulled in, giving the impression that she literally has to rein herself in.
It is not a graceful gait, but the rhythmic movement of the shoulders, from side to side, makes it seem as if she has dancing in mind, or even a soldier’s march. She walks lost in thought, her serene expression contradicting the pent-up energy of her stride.
Yesterday Jacobs showed her where to report. Hurst, the hospital chief, was not available then, and Jacobs’s careful knocking was met with silence. The hallways were nevertheless full of hospital activities, women scurrying around in nurses’ uniforms, a few deigning to throw her a sideways glance. From a corridor window she’d looked down on an overgrown garden. She’d seen two men in uniform walking in the shrubbery.
This time there is an answer when she knocks. He is sitting at a writing table watching her enter, and appears to be made of wax. For a moment she is convinced it is a wax statue, even though she should be used to the fact that European men look so different to the ones she’d grown up with. How freshly scrubbed they looked. Dr Arthur Hurst, however, looks almost transparent, his hair greased back and shiny, his top lip a taut line above the fleshy, mobile lower lip. The bottom lip and the eyes, she thinks, are the only parts of his face that have not been painted onto the blank visage with light brushstrokes. The eye sockets and the bottom lip have been roughly fashioned from potter’s clay, with a finger and thumb, and you’d need to be much, much closer to see what’s been put into those hollows.
As he rises from his desk, his voice comes from deep inside the curve of his body. “Seeing is believing,” he says in a tone that reminds her of the guilelessness of some of Jacobs’s hand gestures, and she feels an apprehension stirring within. “You are indeed a woman.” He walks around to her, his hand half-raised for a greeting. “I almost fell on my back when Rivers said he was sending …” His mouth falls silent, narrowing to little more than a skew sheepish pleat on his face.
“Would you have preferred a man?” she says coolly, after shaking his hand. She realises that it was his undisguised embarrassment that gave her the courage. Therein lies his charm.
“Lord, no, please don’t get me wrong …” He gestures towards a high-backed office chair. “Please sit down.”
He is in uniform. Not the khaki she’d become familiar with in South Africa, but an olive-green duffel fabric. The Sam Browne belt with its lanyard across the chest she knows well, and the puttees too. As he walks back to his chair, she also recognises the measured, deliberate steps that the puttees give to the wearer.
She is in her Dutch nurse’s uniform, and when she drops her chin she feels the cool bakelite of the yellow cross on her high collar.
She smoothes the white pinafore over her thighs, and at this moment, in this office and under the gaze of this man, she recalls of the only photograph of herself that she likes: her face angular rather than flat, her wide mouth with its pinched corners curling in barely perceptible scorn. Her face is turned away from the camera so that a shadow falls across the left side, but why she likes that photo most … no, “scorn” is not the right word, she’s not that way inclined, but there is nevertheless a certain defiance that she radiates. Or is it simply that she’d managed to completely ignore the attention of the camera?
When Hurst speaks again, she’s half-startled; for a moment she had been entirely lost in her thoughts. “After all, you are not the only woman here,” he says, though without any sharpness. “The place was also, and not so long ago, the headquarters of the Women’s Land Army – we’ve been here for, oh, barely a year.”
He stops speaking and watches her expectantly. She feels herself blushing involuntarily, and looks down at her hands in exasperation, hoping he has not noticed. But when she looks up at him again, he has leant forward in his chair, his elbows resting on the table.
Her reaction was evidently acceptable, or at least not suspect, because he now speaks with a noticeable uplift in his tone of voice: “Our warriors of the ploughshare. You must have heard of them, even perhaps come across them? How long have you been here? Oh, it doesn’t matter, the fact is the place is actually an agricultural college … or rather was, before headquarters decided it was more important to get shellshocked soldiers back to the front than to train women to take their place in the farmlands of the kingdom.”
Ah, she knows what he is talking about! She wonders for a moment whether he was being sarcastic, but his face betrays nothing. Now she knows why she blushed. Yes, she knows: when she was on her way to the hospital in the sidecar this morning they suddenly filled the road, these women. She’d grabbed hold of the sidecar, and felt Jacobs brake sharply. It took her a while to understand what she was seeing: the short overcoats, the pushed-up breeches, long grey socks, blue jerseys tucked into trousers, a couple of rubber boots, and here and there a hoe casually resting on the shoulder. But the hips and thighs and hair and breasts – they were indisputably women!
The group of labouring women, farming women, had given way to the motorbike in playful haste, with exuberance, even. Jacobs had accelerated and sped past and she tried to look back at the jubilant group, but Jacobs was trying to shout something at her above the roar of the engine, and she’d pulled her head back and leant across to him. He almost had to bring the bike to a halt before she could hear what he was saying and understand what his cackling laugh meant, his mouth agape and his tongue … yes, now that she thinks of it, it was quite obscene, the way he’d flapped his tongue between his teeth. She’d quickly looked away from him, stared intently at the road ahead, clinging to the flanks of the sidecar as they careened and bumped their way towards the hospital. Confused, she tried to make sense of Jacobs’s reaction to what they’d just seen. And above everything there was this strange anxiety inside her. There was something inappropriate about those silly women in men’s clothes, but – and this is what made her blush again – something deliciously exciting too.
She realises that Hurst is staring at her with a furrowed brow, and she looks down at her hands again. She is truly embarrassed by her reaction now. And why exactly, she does not know, because it has nothing to do with her.
It must be the strangeness of it all. The country is strange; she is a stranger. Yes, suddenly she even finds herself a bit odd. But then she hears Hurst speak and looks up halfway through his sentence and, noticing his questioning gaze, she tries to smile.