Eva Moves the Furniture Page 8

  It was during this time that I had the conversation with Father Wishart about the hospital ghost and what it is that makes the dead walk. I remember on the next occasion when I met the woman, I studied her with special care. It was a rainy afternoon, and I was at the library choosing books for Daphne when she sidled up to suggest a Thomas Hardy novel. I glanced anxiously around—our only witness was an elderly man, drowsing over the paper—and explained that Daphne had asked for Zane Grey.

  “Oh, I don’t know those. You’ll have to tell me about them.”

  She was as real to me as she had always been. I saw the pulse beating in her temple, the flicker of those deep grey eyes. She did not seem unhappy, but then she did not seem like a ghost either.

  In 1942, shortly after I passed the dreaded Preliminary exams, the burns unit opened. Modelled on the famous unit at East Grinstead near London, it made the front page of the newspapers: SCOTLAND CAN TREAT BURNS AT LAST. And the following year, soon after I became a fully qualified nurse, Daphne and I volunteered for duty there; she had heard the work was interesting and the hours better than in the main infirmary. Sister MacKenzie, a diminutive, sweet-faced woman with a reputation for discipline, greeted us. “I’ll tell you now,” she said, “this kind of nursing isn’t for everyone. The patients can be trying, and Dr. Rosenblum”—her eyes seemed to take in every square inch of our aprons—“has very particular standards.”

  As we approached the ward, the usual mix of disinfectant and cabbage filled the air, but the noise was extraordinary: music, shouts, the clatter of wheels, a sudden bang, more like a soccer match than a hospital.

  “Morning, Sister,” called a man near the door. “Introduce us to the pretty nurses?” Where his nose should have been were two white stumps.

  “Now, Archie, behave yourself.”

  I kept my eyes fixed on Sister’s apron, trying not to see the blurred features and twisted limbs. Some of the men sprouted tubes of flesh from unlikely places: a cheek, a forearm. Later I learned these were the pedicle grafts, known as “dangle ’ums,” and paid them no more heed than their owners; at the time, however, it was all I could do not to run from the ward. And on every side voices catcalled, shouted questions and compliments. These were not patients as I knew them. These were restless, insubordinate pilots, soldiers, men.

  Back at the entrance, Sister patted my arm and told Daphne to get me a cup of tea before rounds started. In the nurses’ room I sat near an open window while Daphne perched on the sill, chatting about what film to take her mother to and the new underwear at Baker’s. Ever since my first evening at the infirmary, I had loved watching her talk. All her features were slightly too large and so vivid that on half a dozen occasions I heard her unjustly reprimanded for wearing makeup. On the wards, patients reached towards her, hoping that her robust good health might be contagious.

  “Six coupons for a pair of knickers,” she exclaimed. “Still, I tried on Lydia’s and they were grand.”

  By the time an orderly came to fetch us, she had jollied me into a semblance of calm. I was able to join the other nurses and medical students around the first bed. From my position at the back the patient was happily hidden, but I had a clear view of the man standing over him. He was as tanned as if he had spent a whole summer on the beach. Glancing around, he caught my eye and gave a quick smile. One of those older medical students who were showing up more and more as the war dragged on, I thought, and let my gaze slide away. Then he said, “Good morning, everyone,” and I realised this was Dr. Rosenblum.

  “We have two choices,” he explained, gesturing towards the patient. “We can continue with the smaller grafts from the thigh, bacon strips, which lower the risk of infection but are often a little patchy. Or we can go for a larger graft, more susceptible to infection but with a better chance of making Phil resemble Valentino.” He verified a couple of points with Sister, then, turning back to the bed, said, “Any thoughts, Philip?”

  Beside me, I sensed my own astonishment mirrored in Daphne. For a doctor to consult a nurse was unheard of, let alone a patient. Philip’s response was inaudible, but Rosenblum was clearly pleased. “Good man,” he said, clapping him on the shoulder. “We’ll start on Tuesday and do our damnedest.”

  With the next couple of patients it was just Hello, how’s it going? Then we clustered round the bed of another heavily bandaged figure. Brian had crashed his plane last year, the nurse in front of me whispered. Nine days ago they had operated on his wrists to remove scar tissue and apply skin grafts. Today the theatre dressings would be changed and they would see if the grafts had taken. Almost in spite of myself I edged closer. The rowdy patients fell silent. With each layer of acriflavine gauze the staff nurse lifted I could feel the tension rise, until the ward radio—Harry Lauder singing “I’ll tak’ the high road”—was the only sound. Brian’s hands emerged unpromisingly scarlet, curled like chicken’s feet.

  Dr. Rosenblum bent to examine them, holding each hand in turn and gently flexing the fingers. “Brian,” he announced, “you’ll be playing the piano for Christmas.” And that was when he seized the sister and, to the last bars of Harry Lauder, waltzed her round the ward.

  For the next few days I continued to feel faint whenever I came on duty, but as I got to know the patients I soon learned to overlook their grotesque injuries. Most of them were airmen severely burned about the face and hands. In spite of all official warnings, they persisted in removing their goggles and gloves. “You can’t fight the Jerry with gloves on,” one pilot told me. Some of them had been in the unit since the beginning, and it was they who taught me how to identify the different kinds of infection that threatened a graft, how to manipulate dressings and syringe oral stitches.

  After my days on the ward, I sometimes found myself in the evenings lingering before the mirror. My face, which I had regarded as such an intimate part of me, seemed different now that I understood how provisional the features were. I could lose my nose or chin, have cheeks framed by the pale skin of my buttocks, a jaw built from a rib bone, a mouth that refused to stay in the centre of my face. Standing there, wiggling my eyebrows, stretching my lips, I wondered would I have been one of those women who stood by their damaged men, recognising the beloved person beneath the disfigurement? Or would I have fled? And of course the question was not always so simple, for some men were vastly altered, not just outwardly but inwardly. Our most difficult patient, a famous fighter pilot, treated everyone, from Samuel to the ward maid, with bitter contempt. After he called me a stupid bitch—I forgot the sugar in his tea—Sister had the porters wheel him out of the ward. His bed remained in the corridor for a week before he muttered, “Sorry.”

  I had been working on the unit for a little over a month when, coming off duty one afternoon, I discovered it had begun to rain. As I hesitated in the doorway, watching the fat drops bounce off the pavement and wishing I had brought an umbrella, the woman joined me. “Wait here,” she said. “It’ll ease up soon. And straighten your cap.” Briskly, in her raincoat, she headed down the drive.

  I stared after her, twitching my cap into place. She had never appeared at the infirmary before and I was furious at the breach of one more boundary. She was not even a good weather prophet; with each passing minute the rain grew heavier. At last, further delay seemed pointless and I plunged out. I was nearly at the street when a shout came: “Nurse McEwen!”

  Samuel—Dr. Rosenblum, as I still thought of him—was hurrying towards me, waving a black umbrella. He had just come from working on Donald Bullman’s ears.

  Donald was one of our few civilians, an accountant who’d been trapped in a burning office, trying to save the ledgers. We had had several conversations about homing pigeons, which in peacetime he bred and raced. I asked how the operation had gone, and Dr. Rosenblum held up crossed fingers. “Ears are tricky,” he said. “If only men could wear their hair long.” Past the pub and the row of shops, he talked about the difficulties of shaping cartilage. Daphne made fun of Samuel’s habit
of lecturing, but I found it endearing. Most doctors behaved as if we nurses weren’t capable of understanding anything more complicated than a tonsillectomy. Crossing the street to the hostel, Samuel checked himself. “Aren’t you due a day off soon?” he said.

  “This coming Wednesday.”

  “I’m off then too. Perhaps we could go to the cinema, have supper?”

  From the moment I first caught sight of Samuel standing beside Philip’s bed, I had watched him, but no more than everyone else did, patients and nurses alike; he was lord of the unit. Both rank and age—I guessed him, wrongly, to be in his late rather than his early thirties—had made him seem beyond daydreams. Now, under the shelter of the umbrella, he turned to me and I did not turn away. I had grown up among blue-eyed people, but gazing into Samuel’s brown eyes, I seemed to glimpse something I had been searching for for a long time. “I’m going to visit my family,” I said. “Would you like to come?”

  In the days that followed, I regretted my invitation twenty times over. When I tried to imagine Ballintyre through Samuel’s eyes, everything seemed shabby and old. And of course I worried about Lily’s and David’s reactions. I wrote saying I was bringing a guest, Dr. Rosenblum, I underlined, both glad and sorry that there was no time for a reply. On Wednesday when I came into the bus station and saw him standing beside the ticket office, I would gladly have fled. But he was already walking towards me, looking surprisingly dapper in a dark hat and navy suit, the waistcoat buttoned snugly over his girth. Ian and Roy—even Bernard—had shared a boyish quality; you could still picture them kicking a football in the playground, but Samuel was a man, solidly planted in his life and his work.

  While we waited, he told me that the Russians had entered Romania, and by the time we boarded the bus I was remembering again how much I liked him. Halfway down the aisle he slid into a seat and I followed. A bell sounded. The driver, a young woman not much older than myself and no taller than the unit sister, started up the engine. As we bumped through the suburbs of Glasgow and into the open countryside, Samuel told me about his family. He had grown up in Edinburgh, where his father was a jeweller; his two brothers were both doctors and his sister taught at the university.

  “They sound awfully clever,” I said.

  “That is the one thing everyone agrees on about Jews.”

  “Are you a Jew?”

  He burst out laughing, and I caught the flash of his fillings. “With a name like Samuel Rosenblum?” Then he saw my face. “I’m sorry, Eva. Most people guess.”

  He began to talk about how his grandfather had come to Edinburgh from Vienna. I nodded, trying to recall what I knew. Disraeli was a Jew, so was Dreyfus. At Sunday school we read stories about the chosen people. Moses had led them to safety across the Red Sea. And they had different customs, like not eating pork. What if Lily served ham for lunch?

  At the next village the bus slowed; a number of passengers rose to their feet. Suddenly a voice said, “I wish I had a white feather for you, my lad.”

  An elderly woman in a threadbare coat shuffled past. It must be she who had spoken, but what on earth did she mean? Then I recalled David’s describing the gangs of women who had roamed the streets during the last war, handing out white feathers to young men not in uniform.

  I reached the front of the bus just as she was negotiating the first step. “Excuse me,” I said. “He’s a doctor at the infirmary, a surgeon.”

  The woman turned and I saw skin the colour of plaster, eyes swimming behind thick spectacles. “What use is a doctor to me? I lost three sons in the Great War.” With painful slowness, she clambered down the remaining steps into the village street.

  I returned to my seat, cheeks burning, not daring to meet Samuel’s gaze. What a fool he must think me. But for the second time since we boarded the bus, he was apologising to me. “I should have warned you,” he said. “All of us younger doctors get comments.”

  I teased the fingers of my gloves and told him about her sons. “It must be as if they died in vain.”

  “Poor woman,” said Samuel. “I don’t know about the last war, the casualties were appalling, but I do know that nothing is more important than stopping Hitler.” It was exactly what everyone said, but something in his voice made me understand that he meant it quite literally.

  For the rest of the journey he asked about my family. I told the familiar stories about Barbara’s saving Keith Hanscombe and meeting David at the optician’s, her death, and Lily coming to take care of me. Soon we were in Troon, passing the grammar school and Saint Cuthbert’s. Lily was waiting outside the Co-op, wearing her best blue felt hat.

  She greeted Samuel warmly and he shook her hand and said she mustn’t dare call him doctor. As we walked back to Ballintyre he asked about the convalescents’ home, and she waxed eloquent on the subject of diet and bandages. At the forge I glimpsed a figure bent over the glowing furnace. Ian, I thought. Then I remembered he had died the previous spring, of dysentery, in North Africa; his mother’s hair had turned white overnight.

  David was in the garden, planting potatoes. He put aside his spade to welcome Samuel. While I helped Lily with lunch, thankfully no ham in sight, the two of them discussed the Second Front. They shared similar views about American involvement: Pearl Harbor was a tragedy; still, it had got us what we needed.

  That evening on the bus back to Glasgow, Samuel said how much he liked Lily and David. Oh, good, I said vaguely. All I could think about was whether he liked me. Then, at last, he put his arm around my shoulders. I glanced anxiously up and down the aisle. The bus was darker than any cinema; the couple in the seat behind us were snoring softly. At first I could not help looking around every few minutes, but as the miles slid by and Samuel held me close and I felt nothing other than his embrace, the intervals between my searching grew longer and longer.

  9

  A fortnight after our trip to Troon, Samuel took me to his favourite restaurant, the Trattoria. He ordered us spaghetti with sardines. “And a bottle of chianti.”

  “Chianti?” jeered the waiter. “Not a chance, guv. We’ve been dry as a Sunday school since last year.”

  Samuel watched him limp off towards the kitchen with a frown. “I must have fallen from grace,” he said. “I had a nice bottle here just a couple of months ago.”

  “I don’t mind. Wine makes me dizzy.” I fingered a small ochre stain on the tablecloth. “I didn’t mean to offend you the other day, on the bus. I really didn’t know you were a Jew.”

  “Eva, I’m the one who should apologise for being so touchy. The world is full of people who don’t like us.”

  “But you’re the most popular doctor at the hospital.”

  His face changed in a way I hadn’t seen before, not the tightening of the lips when he discovered a failed graft nor the widened eyes that greeted good news, but a sharp twist, as if all the muscles under the skin were tugging in different directions. “Up to a point,” he said. “Last Christmas I went out to dinner with some friends. I was working late, and I hadn’t had a chance to go to the bank. When the bill came I asked Hugh Bailey, the cardiologist, for a loan. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the pound of flesh.’ Even with people I’ve known for years, I only have to do the smallest thing and I’m a kike, a Yid, a person they despise.”

  The waiter placed large bowls before us and filled our water glasses, ostentatiously, to the brim. I found the long thin strands of spaghetti hard to manage, but Samuel seemed to have no trouble twirling them into neat mouthfuls. He told me about celebrating the Sabbath at home, about Passover and Hanukkah. “I was always out of step with the other boys. While everyone else was listening to stories of Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, my mother was reading me Jewish folk tales. My favourite was about a boy who goes hunting for treasure and, after many adventures, meets a wise man instead.” He smiled. “Then there was the tale of the dybbuk. You’ve probably never heard of that. A dybbuk is a spirit who takes possession of a person.”

  I felt as if my skin had suddenly e
xpanded, as if every nerve in my body were reaching towards him, like that Indian goddess with so many hands, trying to grasp his meaning. I asked Samuel to explain.

  “A young woman is possessed by the spirit of a dead man. She looks the same but she acts like him, and when she speaks, his words come out of her mouth. My mother loves charades, and she always read the dybbuk’s part in a hoarse, deep voice. After she finished, I would lie in bed terrified. Every sound was a spirit trying to climb in the window.”

  I remembered the giant of David’s stories and how I had had similar imaginings. “What happens?” I asked.

  “Eventually the spirit is exorcised, by a rabbi.”

  “And the girl?” I managed.

  “Oh.” He gave a small nod. “She dies.”

  While he organised another mouthful of spaghetti, I stared unseeing at my plate. I had grown so used to dividing myself into the spoken and the unspoken that I seldom considered the alternative. Now the pleasure of sharing my secret shimmered before me. I saw my life become a simple room, the floor polished, the walls white as wood anemones.

  Samuel was talking again, about his father. Someone had scrawled FIFTH COLUMNIST across his shop window because he’d written a letter to the newspaper about the Struma. “He’s been on George Street for thirty years, and suddenly he’s a spy and seven hundred Jews are allowed to drown.” Samuel’s indignant gesture sent a strand of spaghetti flying across the room, but he was too busy to notice. Mr. Rosenblum was on the board of several charities and had personally taught a dozen boys to read. “He’s never turned away a soul,” Samuel said, “on the basis of creed, class, or money.”

  Dimly I recalled the Struma, the boat filled with Jewish refugees moored for months outside Istanbul, but before I could question him further a bearded man stood over our table, flourishing a bottle of red wine. Samuel had fixed his daughter’s cleft palate last spring—his brother-in-law owned the Trattoria—and so our evening ended as a jolly threesome.