‘Back on the ward. Long since.’
‘Did you get anything out of him?’
‘No, and I’m not sure there’s anything to get.’
‘Yes there is. And you know it.’
‘This isn’t helping you, you know. It just stops you —’
‘Go on. Stops me what?’
He shook his head.
‘No, go on. I’m interested.’
‘Moving on with your life.’
‘I am. Moving on.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Well, if you really want to know I just spent the last half-hour talking to Tonks and he’s offered me a job.’
‘What sort of job?’
‘Medical illustration.’
‘Here?’
‘Ye-es?’
‘I wasn’t … I mean, I think you’d be very good at it.’ He waited. ‘Will you take it?’
‘I’m coming in on Thursday, I’ll know more then.’
They set off down the drive. Up till now Elinor hadn’t seriously considered taking the job. In fact, she’d been trying to work out ways of refusing it without appearing to Tonks — whose opinion she valued more than anybody else’s — as egotistical, silly, uncaring and trivial. She thought she was quite possibly all these things, but she didn’t want Tonks thinking so. But then, Paul’s advice to ‘move on with her life’ had been incredibly irritating — not to mention trite — and, almost simultaneously, she’d realized that working at the hospital would give her unfettered access to Kit.
‘I probably will take it.’
‘Good.’
They walked the rest of the way in silence.
Sixteen
The following morning, after a sleepless night, Neville underwent his first operation.
He came round to find himself alone in a small cubicle, not on the main ward as he’d been last night. Couldn’t move his hands. He pulled against the restraints and, when that didn’t work, let out a great bellow of rage.
A face appeared above him.
‘Now, now, we mustn’t get ourselves upset, must we?’
‘Good God, woman, I’ve lost half my fucking face, why wouldn’t I be upset?’
‘Lang-widge!’
He wanted to ask for water, but she went away and he was left crying big, fat baby tears of anguish and despair.
He squinted down, trying to see if he had one of those tube things attached to the stump of his nose, and sure enough, there it was. Couldn’t remember what it was for, what it was supposed to do. He wanted to demand that they come back, explain, answer questions, give him a drink of water. There was water, in a jug on the bedside table, but he had no way of reaching it. He groaned with frustration.
‘They’ll give you some more morphine soon.’
Knew that voice. Looking up, he saw an unfeasibly tall man preparing to jackknife himself into a chair. Tonks. My God, Henry Tonks.
‘Now I know I’m in hell.’
Tonks laughed — which at least established he was real. All sorts of shadowy figures crowded the suburbs of Neville’s mind, or crept out of the darkness and pressed in on him. He coughed to scatter them.
‘What on earth are you doing here?’
‘I’m going to draw you.’
‘Oh, please, God, let me wake up.’
Through the miasma of morphine, Neville was aware of the cadaverous figure leaning in close to get a better view.
‘Somebody,’ he said, as clearly and distinctly as he could manage, ‘has given me a trunk.’
Tonks looked puzzled. ‘Oh, the pedicle.’
‘The what?’
‘The pedicle.’
‘That’s a chair leg, you idiot.’
‘I don’t think it is.’
He flicked his swollen tongue across his lips. ‘How long do I have to be like this?’
‘Three weeks? Something like that.’
‘Fucking Elephant Man.’
‘I knew him,’ Tonks said, unexpectedly.
‘Who?’
‘Joseph Merrick. The Elephant Man. I was working at the London Hospital when he was living there. He didn’t look anything like that — and unfortunately, poor man, the flesh was rotting on him so there was the most appalling smell.’ He looked from Neville to his drawing pad and back again. ‘In spite of which, he was a great favourite with the ladies.’
‘Hope for me, then.’
For a few minutes Tonks went on drawing in silence. Neville endured his gaze, hunched up, brooding bitterly over the fate that had brought him here.
‘All we need you to do is stay cheerful,’ Tonks said. ‘It’s a different sort of courage from what you need out there …’
‘I was never very brave out there.’
‘We-ell, you must’ve been facing the enemy when you got that.’
‘Pity, really, I could’ve spared a chunk of arse.’
‘There, that’s it, I’m done.’
Neville was aware of the long frame unfolding itself. In a minute he’d be gone, and though he couldn’t bear to ask Tonks for help, he knew he must.
‘Would you mind giving me some water, please?’
Tonks poured a glass and held it to his lips. Neville slurped it in, cringing with shame. He hated himself for being weak, though not nearly as much as he hated Tonks for witnessing it.
‘More?’
Gulped, swallowed, gulped again. Blessed water dribbling down his chin, running into the creases on his neck.
‘Now try to sleep,’ Tonks said.
His lids flickered shut, as if the word ‘sleep’ had been a hypnotist’s command. When he opened them again, Tonks was gone.
‘Do you know,’ he said to the nurse who came to wash him down, ‘I keep having these really weird dreams. I dreamt my old drawing teacher was here.’
Not long after, the morphine began to wear off and for the next hour or so he could think of nothing but pain: pain in his chest, pain in his face, pain in the bloody tube where there wasn’t supposed to be pain. The injection went in just as he felt he might start to scream. Tube, trunk. Elephant. Darkness.
When he came round, a tall, straight-backed woman with white hair was standing at the foot of his bed. Gillies was there too: Gillies, the surgeon, the elephant-maker, smiling obsequiously, inclining his droopy eyes and droopier moustache towards her. Their voices mingled: clipped, aristocratic English salted with Gillies’s Antipodean twang. Fellow sat on your bed, called you ‘honey’, called you ‘dear’, stuck a trunk on the end of your nose and tied you up so you couldn’t pull it off. Bloody good mind to tell him what he thought of him. He opened his mouth to protest, words bubbling up like sewage out of a blocked drain, and immediately the straight-backed lady was whisked away, and Sister Lang-widge! took her place.
‘Clench your fist for me now, there’s a good boy,’ she said. ‘Just a little, tiny prick …’
Insult to injury. Bollocks like a bull, he wanted to say, but then, before he could speak, the darkness rushed in and the waters closed over his head.
The bed started moving. He was travelling, seasick, train sick, didn’t know what sort of sick, sick anyway. There was a smell of engine oil. The officers had colonized all the best spaces: the lounge bar, the dining room. High-ranking officers had cabins; junior officers played cards in the bar. The men, other ranks, privates, the poor bloody fucking infantry — of whom he was one, a source of mingled pride and shame — slept in the corridors. There were puddles on the floor where rainwater had dripped off their capes as they settled in. Then the engines started up, everything shook, and the noise restored him, briefly, to his sweaty bed. Bound hands, the shadowy figures of nurses all around, Gillies’s face looming in. A crackle of speech, some of it addressed to him, but it faded and he was back on the ship, trying to make himself comfortable with his kitbag for a pillow and a buckle scraping his neck.