Work Text:
Pauvres Beach, Étaples, France, 1917
Anne pushed her hair back off her face. It felt gritty to the touch. Her mind wandered as she walked. Who was she now? Who had she been back then in 1914 when she queued up for the Red Cross Selection Board, a naive recruit for the Royal Army Medical Corps volunteer nursing service, pampered and soft from a lifetime sheltered in swan's down? Training camp sleeping on a bag of straw, freezing cold, itchy clothes, eating out of a tin bowl. Part two in Tredegar House, Bow, the teeming heart of the East End. She had known that part of London was poor, but to see children with hollow eyes, no shoes, sores and lice, opened her eyes within hours. Then four months probation in the North. Lower class nurses who laughed at milady's vowels, taught her foul language, knocked the corners off her, as they called it, and she was forever grateful to them now. What lovely lasses, she missed them.
She could perfectly easily have gone to help one of those wealthy ladies who turned their London mansions into convalescent homes, taking in a few well-bred wounded officers, pushing them about in wicker wheelchairs and organising card games and little concerts for them. Maurice's sisters had done it, cool hand on the fevered brow and all that. Anne's mild exterior, her airy charms, belied a different type of woman entirely. She and Clive stored their best furniture, turned over Pendersleigh and the Renault to the Ministry, and headed their separate ways to war.
Hungry for education all her life, yet deprived of any serious achievement, now driven to work to the bone, give her all, spend herself on a higher cause, she had applied for the most dangerous and taxing posting she could find - notorious Étaples Camp. Pride now filled her chest that she had thrown herself into the hardships, but who had she become when she discovered the reality? She scanned the distant horizon. Some days one could see the lighthouse at Dungeness, if the weather was right.
This vast camp was like a factory, as she now saw it, where the materials under process were human flesh and souls. Flesh that was willingly sent to be expended by the generals. Not so much by the men, once their patriotic fervour had dissipated in the flooded trenches, and they relied on dissimulating it for the sake of their comrades. Anne had grown hardened. Strictness from nursing staff benefitted the dreadfully injured men; being soft on them did them no good. A pretty face and a hard heart. Her looks were a tonic, but who would want the suffering boys being distracted from their sweethearts at home? Hope was everything, to destroy it a crime.
Her softness was now balled up small inside her, protected. Sometimes she thought of Clive. How strange he had been in the months before the war. He had someone else, as did she, they kept an absolute and respectful silence to each other about their respective amours, but there was something else about him she could not fathom. As a virgin on marriage, she hadn't fully understood how cripplingly tense he was in the bedroom, not until Pippa had introduced her to George, and she finally learned about physical passion. What a revelation that was! And what a hypocrite she knew she had been, setting Reverend Borenius on the servants, and then doing that! She had to be careful how she spoke in front of her fellow nurses, when they discussed their husbands. Nevertheless she missed Clive, as much as her lover, for different reasons.
She stopped, hands on hips, and could clearly hear the distant guns. George was in the Crimea, Clive here in France. He wasn't nearby, but some days she had a terrible dread that he would be on the next stretcher. She wondered how many other women she worked with had two beloveds in their thoughts, as well as their fathers and brothers.
Camber Sands, Kent, England, 1920
Walking alone, Anne smoothed down her white skirt. It still seemed strange to be wearing a skirt on the knee, she had grown up being told to keep her ankles out of sight. One of these days she would put on one of those new tight bathing suits and run and run and plunge into the sea. Her face glowed from the sea air, and she cast her mind back to the beach at Étaples, her solace from that dreadful encampment full of suffering. One could see nearby Dungeness on a good day from there.
The world was so different now. She had never gone back to live at Pendersleigh. Clive lived an odd kind of servant life now, in one of the cottages, his main focus on the estate and farming. She and he had spent a strange day just after the war, getting their good furniture pulled out of the barn, ready to be auctioned off. They had decided to let the house go, to continue as a hospital in peacetime. She kept only one piece, her mirrored dressing table. The under gamekeeper had incompetently varnished it for her when she first came to Pendersleigh, doing it badly on purpose she suspected, she hadn't liked to say anything to Clive at the time, and now she left it that way. What did she care, she who had slept on camp beds in tents for four years? Clive kept just a little bedside cabinet, which she thought she remembered being in the blue bedroom. He abhorred luxury these days.
She remembered how in the early days of their marriage, Clive would come up behind her and embrace her as she did her toilette at the table, in his unwantedly platonic way, his pale face reflected in the mirrors, some kind of sadness he could not hide in his eyes. He didn't appear to have any lady friend since the divorce, but he seemed happier at least.
She stopped, lost in her thoughts, and was brought back to the present by a shout. George had bought ice creams. He caught up with her and handed over the sweet treat, gently running his now free hand over her growing belly, and knocking her ice cream a little, on purpose, so a bit caught on the end of her nose. She shook her head and they laughed...