Читать книгу The Camp Whore - Francois Smith - Страница 6

The train clicketty-clacks sedately from Harwich through Devon’s rich blend of green and brown, dissolving watercolours that trickle down the pane. But her mind still heaves with the swell of the grey sea and the ship’s listless rocking, as if her thoughts lie sunken below the deep cold waters.

For most of the voyage she had stood on the upper deck of the mailboat to Harwich, one of just a handful of women among a multitude of men, mainly crew, some officials, even a few soldiers, all with a special concession to navigate the warring seas, which would otherwise be impossible. With the ferry services suspended, the mailboat was the only means of travel from the Netherlands to Britain.

The last time she’d been on board a ship was shortly before the end of the Boer War when she’d left Cape Town – ironically to get away from another war. The thought came to her there on the creaking deck of the mailboat with its wet voices and sea spray: that war was mine. Not this one. And as the boat pushed through calm seas that occasionally groaned into a swell, it occurred to her how different the North Sea was to the silver shimmer of the sea she remembered, whipped by the north-wester into thundering, frothing waves pounding against the rocks at Three Anchor Bay. She briefly tried to recall something of her war, the one from sixteen years ago. By now she’d been in the Netherlands almost as long as she had been in South Africa. With some irritation, she pushed aside these thoughts. It’s over. My war is done.

What she does think about occasionally, almost reliving it each time, is how young she was in 1902 when Cape Town and Table Mountain had slipped from view behind her. Perhaps she should rather say she was young again, because before that she was so terribly old, at death’s door. How strange the thought seems now, but that is how it was. On that day, on the upper deck of the Glenart Castle, the cool metal of the railing in her hands and the wind against her body, she was young. That is the image she cherishes: removing her hat, pushing stray curls from her forehead and for the first time, yes, it must have been the first time, being aware of her blouse being blown against her body, and how deliciously she was her body, even now she can only find the Sotho word for it, monate, delicious. She had grabbed the railing with both hands and thrust her buttocks back, feeling the shock of her weight in her arms, with the receding country and the sea around her slap-slapping as she swung herself from side to side, and did she sigh, did she sob? Actually no, what she remembers is this: she was her body and that’s as it should be; beneath her feet she’d felt the cover plates shudder, the turbines pumping from deep within the hold, with the faraway land from whence she came growing faint.

And now she was on this boat, not unaware of what they were sailing towards, not away from a war, no, on the contrary, but her thoughts were full of the surf crashing on the Cape rocks, its almost frenzied energy, as handfuls of gulls were thrown into the moist air.

In the train through the British countryside she concentrates her mind to focus on recent events. She forces herself to retrace her steps, she believes in the value of being present in the moment, of not going through life blinkered.

She was on the mailboat, she had stood there in the embrace of an overcoat. The boat was nosing through a grey sea and grey sky, and that was portentous, because that boat, along with her, was bound for another, deeper darkness.

It had not fully dawned on her yet. In the Netherlands they live shielded from real violence. But on that boat … so ashen, as if everything had already been drained of life.

The deck was full of grey soldiers scurrying like ants, and if they’d come to a standstill, she now suspects, fear would have found a foothold. She had tried to imagine what they were up against, what the battlefield would look like, and what the men would be doing there. Looking at them, she tried to place one of the faces in a trench, a pale man with the sharply pointed nose and the bobbing head of a seagull. But she couldn’t. Strangely enough, she could only visualise him lying with his back propped up against an anthill – yes, an anthill of all things! – with a long thin cigarette in his mouth and the smoke curling lazily upwards.

She tries to imagine the fear, the horror, but the closest she can get is the pale vacant face of her friend Jacques before he left again for the front. When she tries to picture the war, she thinks of Jacques. Jacques la Mer, her friend from Dordrecht, a teacher set on becoming a soldier because his country, France, needed him. She’d once grabbed his hand as if to shake him awake, pushing his hand against her chest, but …

There is something upsetting and utterly unfathomable in that scene: Jacques’s hand against her chest. His hand under hers. Her heart beating wildly. His face stiffening, his lips slightly apart as if he wanted to say something. His hand slipping slowly from hers and falling back into his lap.

She sees her eyes faintly mirrored in the train window. And behind the darkened sockets of her eyes, behind the dull reflection of her high forehead, her ash-blonde hair curling away and cascading down her cheek to her neck, she’s aware of a sense of relief, a landscape that, unlike the Netherlands, if only because of the tilting horizon, its rise and fall, asks for attention. But she cannot quite look beyond her reflection, and it seems as if something skittish sporadically appears next to her mirrored image. Every now and then she glances to the side, but there is no one there.

This journey has me totally beside myself, she thinks. Why? I am here just to do my work. It’s not as if I’m bound for the trenches.

She thinks again of Jacques; of the soldiers she’s seen on the mailboat. She’d squeezed past one of them to get to the deck; it was actually a rather comical tussle as both of them tried to get through a door at the same time. For a moment they were pressed up against each other in the doorframe, its sharp edge covered in flaking paint and the black metal showing underneath. She recalls it as sharply as if it were happening now: her coat brushing against his uniform, and she looking past his face and seeing the peeling metal next to his ear, and they said nothing, trying only to extricate themselves as quickly as possible from a wholly unforeseen, totally uncalled for intimacy. Yet her body seems to shudder again from the shock of the soldier’s body against hers, the uniform with its leather straps and clasps, the rough material and the hard metal, and below it the white, shuddering flesh, the smell of a bag filled with warm grain. After their bodies were freed from each other she’d taken a step back into the damp air, stood still, startled, not because of the unsolicited contact, quite the opposite, but why exactly, she could not say either.

That was also not the end of the bizarre dance – now the thought of a last waltz comes to her – it was just a prelude to something else, to something, yes, what should she call it, something far more sombre.

Up on deck, a group of people had huddled together against the railing, shouting and gesturing. She went and stood with them, next to all those men with their darting eyes, and looked at where they were gesturing into the fog, as if there were a fleck of colour visible somewhere. The mailboat sounded its horn, and then she saw it too: a ship looming from the mist, lifeless, lopsided in the water, unmistakably a wreck that might sink at any moment. The ship yawed in the water, rocking slowly in the swell, creaking, forlorn, metal plates peeling away from the bow, masts, smokestacks and cannons in rigor mortis. Everyone was transfixed. It was a ghost ship. She carefully turned her head, all the faces around her were petrified: it was indeed a phantasm driven towards them by the wind.

She pushed through the bodies to the railing, watching hypnotised as the ship receded into the gloom. What on earth was it? What was that thing that appeared and then simply disappeared again? She looked around for someone to talk to, someone she might ask, but everyone suddenly seemed occupied with matters that could not be interrupted except on pain of death. She was faced with a wall of grey backs.

That is what this war is, she thought, a phantom in the mist, nothing more. It is not my war. Nothing here can take anything away from me. I am alive, and my role is to ensure that life triumphs. That is why I came here. But the image of the ghost ship stays with her, and oddly enough it does not upset her.

When the train entered Newton Abbot station, she felt that she could still hear the ship in the mist – a sound like the plonggg of cut barbed wire in recoil, she could hear it on the deck of that dying ship, the sound echoes and echoes and echoes. And she is reminded of the soldier she had brushed up against, his soft, yielding body, and the sharp metal that must have dug into his back, and she wondered, as the train lurched to a standstill, whether that dance with the soldier would be the closest she would get to the war.

She is one of two women disembarking here, and up ahead she sees a young man in uniform, probably one of the hospital orderlies, stopping the other woman, who shakes her head and looks away. The man laughs ruefully, sees her, raises an arm expectantly as he strides towards her.

She walks towards him holding her hand out in greeting. But just before their hands meet, this being her first time on British soil, she becomes self-conscious about her accent. To him it should sound Dutch enough, she thinks, and her English is possibly better than that of most Dutchmen.

He listens to her, forlorn, as if he needs to make an effort to hear her above the din in the station, and then takes her largest suitcase. Jacobs is his name, private Patrick Jacobs, with large front teeth, the cause, perhaps, of his decidedly nasal tone.

Jacobs walks ahead through the exit. In the street in front of the station, under the soft, low skies, he turns to her and sweeps his arm in an arc as if he were sowing oats, and there it stands, like a giant metal spider: a motorbike with a sidecar.

She comes to an abrupt halt, sets her little suitcase down by her feet – or rather, drops it. It is inappropriate, she thinks, to react so spontaneously to the situation, but she nevertheless looks at the soldier with a smile. It is a Douglas. Yes, look, there is the name. Jacques had one of these, though without the sidecar. Such a pest, following her abroad like this. She steps forward and draws a finger across the cool round lid of the sleek petrol tank, takes hold of a cable on the handlebars, slides her thumb and finger across to … ah, the clutch! Jacques was oh so proud of his clutch, one of the very first. She gives the rubber bulb a light squeeze, and as it honks she glances up at the British private watching her with a bemused smile.

What she knows about motorbikes she’d learnt from Jacques. Jacques la Mer, a Frenchman in Holland. The Frenchman-with-the-motorbike. That Saturday morning of her first weekend in Dordrecht she’d heard a noise in the street, quickly run to the window and seen a man sitting legs astride the monster. He’d looked up at her and made the engine roar. She felt butterflies against her belly.

The private picked up the bag behind her. “It’s about three and a half miles to the hospital,” he said, looking up at her with a wry smile as he bent down. “Let’s enjoy life while we can, don’t you think?”

Then he laughed loudly, rather derisively, and fastened her luggage to the tailboard. He shoved a pair of goggles into her hand and held his elbow out to steady her as she climbed in.

Enjoy life … What does he mean, exactly? But the orderly is already battling to kick-start the engine – at least, that is what she presumes. She’s seen it before, the kicking, but with Jacques’s motorbike you had to push-start and then quickly jump on while running. Prrr, prrr, prrr, he kicks, and she continues with what she has been doing ever since Harwich: trying to concentrate on what is going on around her, trying to get a grip on the landscape, the buildings, trying to comprehend this part of the world.

Is there really a war on the go somewhere? And why is it not evident? There is nevertheless a strange, vague sort of disquiet in her, not exactly relating to this country and its war, but rather to her inability to concentrate fully on anything outside of herself. She is plagued by a persistent feeling that there is something else, just out of view, that actually merits her attention.

Jacobs’s unrelenting kicking does not make it any easier, and before she knows it her gaze is fixed on the blush rising from his jaw across his smooth cheeks – without a trace of beard – and the uniform jacket bouncing up and down above his seat. Oh, dear Lord, even in that she sees Jacques. But the fact is, even when she was driving the bike, in Dordrecht, he first had to warm the engine before they could push-start it, pumping at a lever on the engine. And now, in this strange town in this strange country and with a soldier who is a total stranger under orders to accompany her, this is what rises to the fore: how she sat on the back of Jacques la Mer’s motorbike put-put-putting along little paths through Biesbosch’s reed and grass meadows. Later, she drove herself, but he first had to show her: here are the gears, one, two, three; there you slowly release the petrol; get your fingers properly around the brake.

Back and forth, they charged along the paths of Biesbosch, with her unsteady on the tailboard – through the sea breeze, through shafts of sunlight and shadow, gasping as they descended into bogs filled with cool air to suddenly emerge into languid clarity, her hands under his coat, his jerking ribs below her fingertips, below the pumping lungs, the headlong rush of blood. Reed-cutters pulling themselves upright and gesturing with their sickles; she, laughing loudly, deliberately, scornfully into the back of Jacques’s head, and feeling him flinch. Yes, that she remembers now, how often he shrank from her touch.

Why would she remember that now …? Once, after they’d driven back to the apartment, Jacques remained seated, his hands clamped onto the handlebars. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Are you coming in?”

He did not look up, it was as if he were talking to the motorbike. “I don’t think we should do it,” he said.

“Do what? What are you talking about?”

He climbed off and pushed past her. “You know only too well,” he muttered.

She stared at his back. His long, duck-like strides, his sunken shoulders. Poor thing, she thought, and recoiled, as if it were he who’d turned and hurled the words at her. Poor, poor thing! But he had simply walked up the stairs and let the front door slam shut behind him.

Jacobs swings his leg over the sputtering motorbike’s saddle, glances at her over his shoulder before slipping into gear and roaring down the street. The momentum pushes her against the seat; alarmed, she glances first to her left and then to her right and grabs hold of the rim of the sidecar. She thought she had already figured it out, that thing with Jacques, but it kept churning in her thoughts as houses, people and trees flashed past, a strange, strange confrontation. After all, there had been nothing between them. He was an occasional companion of sorts. Yes, that’s the word, companion. Perhaps the problem was that the occasions had been determined by her, and by her alone. Anyhow, that’s the conclusion she had come to: that he had found her too presumptuous, too controlling. But now she wonders. Once again, she sees the reed-cutters slowly standing up, their sickles swing, she hears the blades slicing through the grass, she feels his trembling skin under her fingertips. He must have felt it too. But what, exactly?

Out of the corner of her eye she sees a great structure flashing past and she turns her head: in the middle of the street is a clock tower, squat, massive, seemingly the remains of a collapsed church, the ruins half-covered in ivy, but with the clock intact. Now her attention is again fully focused on the surrounds; she is aware of the bumpy, noisy motorbike with the soldier holding on to the handlebars. A commonplace sight, it seems, as a man pushing a bike does not lift his head, and people walk along the street lost in thought. She presses her cloche tighter against her head, and with the other hand holds onto the rim of the sidecar.

Jacobs points out the landmarks along the way, the sights, things she should know if she’ll be living and working in this community for a while.

Once or twice he stops at a crossing, pushes up his goggles and delivers a schoolboy explanation: the house where some cricketer was born, the hospital staff’s favourite bar. Some of the nurses come here, he says with the croaking laugh she’d heard earlier. She laughs with him, totally receptive to his excitement, leaning forward and speaking loudly above the roar of the engine: “I probably won’t be able to come without a companion.”

“I am sure that can be arranged,” he says and winks.

She looks away. Suddenly annoyed. She has allowed him too much; she encouraged him. She hears him speaking, but intentionally diverts her thoughts away from him, away from all boy soldiers on motorbikes. She knows the excitement, the inherent daring in the union of man and machine. Carefully now, carefully … she feels a prickliness crawling up her sides and glances at Jacobs. He has been watching her all along, she realises, but he looks away quickly to something he imagines has attracted her attention. He searches around, and then, nodding his head, he says, “No, I don’t know, they’re just ordinary houses.”

She laughs, relieved, dismissing her question with a wave of the hand, stretching an arm towards him and flicking her fingertips: Drive, just drive.

On the outskirts of the town he stops once more, lifts the goggles over the shield of his cap, rather laboriously takes the motorbike out of gear, rests an elbow on the handlebars and indicates with a long forefinger: “Do you see that house?” he asks, and points to a row of pitched roofs, terraced houses jutting from behind a newly built circular wall. “the one on the far left is where one of our greatest generals was born, Leslie Rundle.” He allows the name to sink in. “Fought mostly in Africa. Against the Zulus, the Boers.” He nods approvingly at the white façade with the single sash window visible above the stone wall.

Her gaze, which moments before was still gliding, flicking freely along walls and roofs from horizon to street level, is suddenly arrested. She turns to look, feels her discomfort become something else, not irritation exactly, although Jacobs’s undisguised admiration makes her think for a moment that she is reacting childishly. Something else however stirs in her consciousness; for some or other reason she does not succeed in giving herself over to this landscape with full attention.

For a good mile or so on the bumpy road out of town she tries to overcome this dead-end, this darkening of her gaze. Later she tried to recall the journey, trying to remember what she had seen. Leaves gathering against low stone walls; a woman leaning out of a window, arms spread wide as if asking for money; trees spreading their branches across the road in an almost exact re-enactment of her gesture. Images following one upon the other.

Jacobs starts to slow down and nods at the building in front of them, but she hardly notices the hospital lying up ahead. She does notice the turreted gateway, but her thoughts keep turning around that white terraced house, over and over again, like a gear that keeps slipping. It’s unusual; she is not one for digging into the past. Impulsive, yes, often even impetuous, but she does not get bogged down in things.

She can hardly wait for Jacobs to complete his wide turn as they come to a standstill right at the entrance. She climbs out of the sidecar and starts speaking immediately. He is still pondering over the last snort of the engine, or busy with one of those studied intimacies that exist between men and their machines, when she almost shouts at him: “Why did you show me that?” She sees him look up, startled, immediately loses steam, but takes a deep breath and tries again: “Why did you show me that house?”

He obviously doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “That house?”

“Yes, that house. That belongs to the general. Why?”

He removes his goggles slowly, and that lazy, carefree gesture is all it takes to bring her to her senses. Only then, and at a distance, can she hear herself and see herself standing there in a new world – woman, man and machine, and behind them the large hospital.

“Never mind,” she says and takes her suitcase from him. “Never mind.” And she turns around and walks into the hospital for the very first time. How could I? she thinks, and she knows that Jacobs is staring at her. I am completely daft. She lifts her chin and strides away from the clear afternoon light into the hospital’s shadowy arches.