holes but the hair was caked solid and the eyebrows were worms of mud, and the lips were thick and brown. Dorothy picked and wiped. Griselda said “He’s got shrapnel down here, where his trousers were, I’ve got his pants off, it doesn’t look nice.”
The man trembled. Dorothy said “There’s a lot in his back, as well.” She washed him, quickly but gently, and then again, as though the mud layer was inexhaustible, always renewing itself.
The man said “I always said you had good hands.” His voice was clogged, as though he had swallowed mud. Dorothy said
“Philip?”
Philip said, with great difficulty, “When I went under, I thought, it’s a good end for a potter, to sink in a sea of clay. Clay and blood.”
“Don’t talk.”
“I didn’t think they’d pull me out. They’re not meant to.”
Dorothy said “Can you move your fingers? Good. Toes? Not so good. Turn your head? Not too far. Good. There’s shrapnel in your back, and in your legs, and in your bottom. It needs to come out, or it festers. You’re lucky, this is an ambulance attached to the Women’s Hospital, we have Bipp.”
“Bipp?”
“It’s a patent antiseptic paste. You put it on and leave it for ten or even twenty-one days. It seals the healing. And it is good for the healing not to be disturbed. You’ll need a lot of Bipp. Some of the army doctors think they can sterilise needles and blades with olive oil. We are cleverer than that.”
There was no other surgical emergency, so Dorothy sat by Philip’s muddy body in the lamplight, picking out the pieces of shrapnel, delicately, precisely. He said
“The feeling’s coming back. I was all numb.”
“That’s good, though you may not think so. I can give you morphine.”
“Dorothy—”
She searched with tweezers for a deep scrap of metal, in his flesh. “Dorothy, you’re crying.”
“I do, sometimes. All this is hard. You don’t expect to find a friend in a cake of mud.”
“I can’t laugh, it hurts. What are you doing?”
“You’ve got a deep bit, here between the legs. I shall need to get it out under anaesthetic. That can wait till tomorrow. I’ll get out all I can, and apply the Bipp. And give you morphine, and make you comfortable. I think your leg’s broken, too. You’ll have to go back to England.”
Philip gave a great sigh. Dorothy injected morphine. She slapped on Bipp, where the shrapnel had been extracted. Philip said “I don’t really believe you’re here. I often wished you were. I mean, not in the mud, in the abstract.”
Dorothy said “Not abstract. Concrete.”
55
May 1919. A cab drew up outside the house in Portman Square. A man got out, a skeletal man, whose cheap clothes hung on him like a coat hanger. He hesitated a moment or two, then rang the doorbell. A young maid answered and looked at him doubtfully. He went past her, like a shadow, and into the drawing-room, where he heard voices.
He stood in the doorway. The maid stood doubtfully behind him. He was puzzled by the group of people there. There was a man with a strapped leg and thigh lying on the chaise longue. There was a thin young girl in a smart short skirt. There was a nursemaid. There was an elegantly dressed young woman, with fashionable short hair, on a low chair, with her back to him.
Basil and Katharina Wellwood were sitting side by side on a sofa, admiring the baby the young woman was holding. It was not as he had imagined it. He cleared his throat. He said, as people all over the world were saying, “Did you not get my letter?” Katharina sprang to her feet like a wire uncoiled, all of a tremble.
“Karl. Charles. It is not.”
“It is,” he said. His father stood up. The red hair was almost grey. Basil said
“You need to sit down.”
Katharina came unsteadily towards him. The fashionable young woman rose to her feet, still holding the baby, who had white-blond hair and well-defined features, not pudgy. He said
“Elsie.”
Katharina pulled at his hand. “Sit down, sit down.”
She could not say how deathly she thought he looked. Elsie said, matter-of-fact, “You’ve had a bad time.” And began to cry. She said
“This is Charles. We all wanted to call him Charles, because we thought—”
He sat down on the sofa, surrounded by his family, and tried to work out the wounded soldier on the chaise longue. He was, of course, Philip Warren. The room had changed, not only because of the baby and the nursemaid, but because two great golden jars of Philip’s were there, either side of the hearth, covered with twined, climbing, tiny demons.
“I can’t really get up,” said Philip. “I am glad to see you.”
“Where did you get hit?”
