They walk down a long, shadowy hall with a gleaming polished floor. She is aware of her dress flapping against her legs, of the thudding of Hurst’s heavy boots. They walk through a strange, ethereal shimmering of darkness and light – past open doors where electric beams fall almost blindingly bright across the dark passageway. As if she and Hurst have sheathed themselves in a thin membrane of modern knowledge, the latest scientific terms, a delicate net of words, and in this bright bubble they are adrift on an ancient sea, surrounded by convulsing bodies, writhing limbs, and eyes that plop glassily through the porous surface of antediluvian mud and slime. Gradually, something of the primordial soup starts seeping into their clarity, pushing through the molecules of the membrane and forcing open cracks for figures, faces and sounds to penetrate. Along with Hurst’s descriptions there is also another voice in her head, one of the old voices that still visit her sometimes, that of Dr Molesworth in a dark carriage en route to Bloemfontein: “What is it that you saw, Perry?”And while Hurst’s voice charts the new terrain for her, her attention is constantly diverted along these other, older roads – the roads she walked to get here, to this hospital. “It’s the war, isn’t it?” she hears Reymaker speaking, and sees his pale wrinkled finger stroking his cat’s tail. “You are not your war,” she wants to shout at him; she wants to see him shutting his eyes and recoiling, but Hurst has suddenly come to a standstill.
It was not unexpected; she was just lost in thought. Hurst had in fact been stopping all along to explain things. She’d noticed, for example, that he pauses before descending a flight of stairs, or when they’re out of earshot of the staff they periodically encounter in the hallways. “Shellshock is a misleading term,” he then says. “Initially, the medical fraternity thought it was nerve damage due to explosions. No, correction, initially they thought it was the scheming of cowards trying to escape the front. So they were treated pretty roughly. Solitary confinement. Punishment. You can imagine what it entailed. Electric shock. Emotional manipulation. But these days we know that many of the soldiers, the ones you see here, haven’t even been near a bomb, and that’s why we speak of ‘battle fatigue’ rather than ‘shellshock’. In many cases, it’s rather the ceaseless exposure to fear, tension, and simply days and weeks and months of waiting in a trench that causes the damage.”
They walk into halls, past beds with drab blankets, white sheets and grey faces. Some of the patients don’t even see them, staring at the ceiling instead, or out of a window. The nurses whom they come across in the wards are generally so busy that they don’t look up. Hurst occasionally bends down next to a bed to speak to a patient; sometimes he elicits a smile, a few words, but mostly just an anxious, bewildered stare. Sometimes Susan wants to ask something, comment, but everything she wants to say feels inadequate. It’s as if she’s lost her clinical distance and can only respond with personal impressions or emotional statements.
After Hurst has pulled shut the umpteenth door behind them, she wants to grasp the opportunity before the next one to say something that has nothing to do with her. She raises a hand towards him to draw his attention, but just then the door opens on the opposite end of the hallway and a nurse stands in the opening, her expression inscrutable. Susan swallows, her throat dry. She literally swallows her words, and her hand slowly drops to her side. Above the nurse’s head, in that fraction of a second before the door closed behind her again, she’d seen a body recoiling upwards from a bed, as if the sheets were a white-hot flame – that was a human being.
The door clicks shut, and Susan and the woman face each other in silence. That was a human being, Susan thinks, and feels the delayed shock of adrenalin pricking her fingertips. She hears Hurst speak from behind. “Anne,” Hurst says to the nurse, “won’t you show Nurse Susan Nell the ropes?”
The woman opposite her, Anne, her blue eyes, her whole face is immobile, only her mouth moves when she speaks, and then with an almost cynical slant to the full bottom lip. She is Anne Maxwell, apparently one of the senior nurses in the hospital, but exactly where she fits into the hierarchy is not clear. She seems to be aware of the arrival of the “Dutchwoman”, but she listens to Hurst’s brief introduction with a deadpan look, almost absent, similar to that of hospital staff when taking a pulse reading. She watches Hurst as he walks away, and once he is out of earshot, she addresses his receding back: “What has he already shown you? One of his miracles?”
It is a flat, somewhat bored tone, but the blue eyes flash at Susan and then glare pointedly to where Hurst has disappeared around a corner. Susan suspects that the woman is parodying the typically strict matron. She is not certain how to react to it. Is Anne Maxwell mocking Hurst? She ignores Anne’s sideways glance and says softly: “The people I’ve seen looked pretty haggard.”
Anne immediately starts to stride ahead. “Come,” she says, “come, let me show you.” Susan falls into step with her, and with her gaze still fixed ahead she says: “Those who are healed, miraculously healed, or on the verge of improvement, you will see in the library, or in the music room, or strolling in the garden.”
Susan is unsure of the exact import of the woman’s words. Miraculous … is she being sarcastic? It is merely a passing thought, though, because what really occupies her mind is what she had fleetingly seen behind that door. She lengthens her stride so as to walk just ahead of Anne Maxwell, looks over her shoulder, and asks, “What was that in the ward behind us, where you’ve just come from?”
Anne’s eyes swivel towards her and then back again, a fleeting gesture, meaning what exactly? Was it a confirmation? A warning? But before Susan can even ask, Anne speaks. “Percy Meek,” she says, and then: “Not yet ready for the library or a stroll in the garden, would you agree?” Susan stares at her. What is the woman talking about? Anne continues undeter-red: “You should have seen him when he was admitted.” She bangs the door open with her left hand and they enter a room with a long table and chairs; emanating from somewhere are kitchen sounds and the smell of food being steamed. “The staff dining room,” says Anne, standing at the head of the table, folding her hands in front of her chest and continuing without a pause: “He thought he was still in a trench when he got here, lying prostrate and dodging bombs, his pupils as large as saucers.” She looks Susan squarely in the eye for the first time, and then Susan notices it: her irises have a navy, almost purple edge. And below those eyes, the lips scarcely seem to move as they shoot out volleys of words: “There in his bed, totally spastic, he sweated like a horse, his pulse a hundred and forty, and his head, trunk, legs, everything, shaking. He sees ghosts,” she says, “the ghosts of the Germans he brought down with his bayonet. They’re coming for him, he hears their bullets smashing down next to him, they’re coming for him.”
Susan still does not know how to react. Beneath Anne’s severe exterior, her expressionless face and the monotone of her description, a keen intelligence shines through; the account even sounds rehearsed, and the mouth, Susan notices, yes, the mouth is always just a hair’s breadth away from a smile.
Susan begins to suspect a playful irony, but again Anne continues before she can say anything. This time, though, she has a question: “But why did you come and work here? Why not in a general hospital? That’s where the staff shortages are. To treat trench foot, or the thousands of cases of venereal disease. Not to mention those who’ve been blown to bits. Shell-shock is but a drop in the ocean.”
The woman is pulling her leg, no doubt about it. Susan drops her defences, and the words jump right out of her mouth. “Thousands of cases … what do you mean?”
“Oh, it’s common …” Anne begins, but Susan’s spontaneous response is immediately overcome by a sombre suspicion that she has said something untoward, something improper, that she has exposed herself. “I’m sorry,” she backtracks, alarmed, “I didn’t answer your question.” She examines Anne’s face to gauge the effect of her words, but the blue irises with the dark rim betray nothing. “I was trained as a psychiatric nurse,” she then says, her voice strong, the delivery firm.
This time Anne raises an eyebrow. “Oh, really?” she says. “Do