Free Return to Fourwinds by Elisabeth Gifford

spreading out over the snow – the gas attack on Nancy airbase. He told her it looked like sherry, pools of thick Christmas sherry across the snow. A fog was rising up from the sludge, sickly yellow in the flares. And he was already breathing the gas in, coughing, his eyes burning, scrambling for his mask, his fingers numb and thick; but he couldn’t get the strap over his head, the balaclava bunched up and in the way. He’d tried to run to clean air, to cool his lungs down. But he blundered on through the thick fog. Burning his breath. Burning his lungs. The siren sounding too late.
    You couldn’t tell how bad you’d got it. Not at first. You just had to lie in your bunk and wait to see how bad it would get. When his blisters had dried, when he could get back into clothes again, they packed him in a troop train with hundreds of others like him to go home. Rusty iron in his mouth each time he spat into a cloth. The bandages still over his eyes.
    She was there on the ward in the Manchester hospital, the assisting nurse, when the doctor had the bandages taken off. Jim told them the room was all misty, shapes that wouldn’t come properly into focus. The doctor said the gas had carried on eating into the surface of his eyes, but given the circumstances he could see fairly well.
    Then he showed Jim the grey night-map of his lung X-ray. ‘These areas here, they’re the permanent damage. I would say you’ve got half capacity.’
    â€˜You mean the rest won’t come back then?’
    â€˜I’m sorry. You will need to look for less physical employment in future.’
    â€˜Maybe I’ll get meself a job in a bank,’ he said.
    But he was still sure he was going to get better. Spring was coming out in swathes of blurred purple and yellow in the hospital gardens. There were nurses to tease and flirt with, and the nurses were game and said, ‘Oh Jim, you are a right one.’ And how Alf was going to have all the ladies running after him once he got out – as if it never crossed their minds that Jim was half blind, or that Alf had his leg missing. It was a form of kindness really, not taken seriously.
    But Jim was different around her, serious, noticing everything she did. She wasn’t young, not like a lot of the nurses, and she didn’t know how to flirt with a man. When she took his temperature he stared right into her eyes and held her wrist, said, ‘How’s my gorgeous girl?’ She’d try to be haughty then and boss him about, but he’d got her. He saw how she was hopeful in spite of herself, half ashamed of the feelings he stirred up in her.
    It was as if he knew her life. Given up on marriage, a sweetheart lost early in the war, the one slice of toast in front of the small gas fire in her small nurse’s room, washing with the jug and pitcher in the cold, hurrying under the sheets and knowing tomorrow would be as it was ordained. The visits home in a best coat to be bullied byher father, the small pot of rouge bought to keep her pretty. For what: the withdrawing into hard work and self-sufficiency?
    He said she smelled good, of soap and ironing and books. For the first time in years she was aware of all that she was holding back; the way her arm jumped if he touched it when she smoothed his sheets; the feel of his hand suddenly grasping hers, thanking her, his palm warm and calloused.
    It was an imposing institutional building, miles of corridors, entrances and stairwells that were forgotten, deserted at different parts of the day. There were acres of dishevelled parkland where gentry had once taken their evening stroll. A damp, heady spring turning into summer. They worked out ways to meet and she thought, I’m courting. She was giddy with the tender pressure of being wanted so much.
    One night she sat alone on her nurse’s bed in her rayon slip, her hand over her mouth, trying not to wake the girl sleeping in the other bed.