Home? Oscar heard the word, but it had no ring to it. Berne, Berlin, London, he had lost his home long since.
Kate let herself into her flat at the quieter end of Barkston Gardens, just off Earls Court Road. She could hear the muffled rumble of traffic on the busy main road, the occasional hoot of a car or a bus, the wail of a fire engine or an ambulance. Kate liked the place. She went through to her balcony and surveyed the communal garden below, to which only the Barkston residents had a key The noise did not bother her at all. The wider world did not really impinge on her consciousness.
London, late May, 1941. War or no war, the gardener hoed and pruned, the sun shone and birds hopped about in the grass. Kate looked at the buildings across the way: with their gables and roof edging they could have been lifted straight from an Amsterdam canal-side. From her balcony Holland seemed but a small step away, and yet, curiously, she did not miss it. She was aware that she had little thought for the people back home, who had faded into the background of her life as a diplomat’s wife. A life that had become splintered in recent years. Oscar at the embassy in Berne, Emma married and living in Berlin, and she working in a London hospital. True, Oscar came over now and then, but she was unhappy about him taking the risk, since the Germans shot at anything airborne. She was preoccupied more by her work than by Oscar and Emma and her son-in-law Carl. Never before had she known the feeling she now experienced daily: that of being needed. Kate felt markedly light and attentive, shaken awake by the war. She was not a nurse – there were plenty of those – her work at the hospital was as a volunteer. Her activities were uncircumscribed and largely unseen, no bandages or blood or thermometers came into it. Mopping a brow here, holding a hand there, tucking in a stray blanket, reading out a letter. Small acts, but of value to the bed-bound.
Kate enjoyed visiting the wards, or the smaller sick rooms with only one or two occupants. She came in from the open air, fresh from the street with a newspaper under her arm, into a world that stood still. The domain of the infirm: a small town of beds criss-crossed by lanes reflecting a hierarchy of diseases and injuries, a laboratory of whispers and groans and tears interspersed now and then with a smile or a kind word. An incomprehensible world of gestures and codes and nameless sorrow, all under the harsh rule of war, the feared and hated war, the spectre all endeavoured to ignore, in vain.
How the young black soldier managed to make landfall in the Richmond Royal Hospital was unclear. He had been brought over from Africa badly wounded, no-one expected him to pull through. But he recovered, little by little. She visited him every day, remaining at his bedside for an hour or so, giving him drink when he was thirsty or plumping his pillows. Small acts, to be sure. The boy responded almost exclusively with his eyes, he hardly spoke. Sometimes he said “Thank you” in an unfamiliar accent, dusky and warm. More often he dipped his head, or briefly lifted his hand.
Kate knew his name from the medical dossier: Matteous Tunga, soldier in an umpteenth infantry division, wounded en route to Abyssinia. Sucked into the morass of the war, fighting here, fighting there, winning, losing, marching on, nearly drowning, overtaken by storms, caught in a sniper’s sights.
Matteous occupied a cubicle on his own – by chance or by design? – and met Kate’s eyes the first time she put her head round the door. He lay very still, lifted a few fingers, said nothing, yet all of him cried out for answers. Kate stepped inside, patted the blanket and told him her name. She asked if there was anything she could do for him. No response. She saw the fever in his eyes and hesitated before sitting down on the chair beside his bed. The cramped space, designated for the seriously injured, was more of a storeroom for medical equipment with a bed and a chair squeezed in. Fortunately, there was a window overlooking a courtyard, or rather, there were treetops to be seen and beyond them the wall of another building. The hospital bore a close resemblance to its supply station: the military barracks. Efficient, austere, straightforward. Only the inner courtyard was spared the rigour, having been turned into an English garden with rose beds, apple trees, a long oval beech hedge, jasmine bushes, poppies.
Kate stayed no longer than five minutes the first time. During that short visit she offered him a glass of water and helped him as he drank, her hand cupping the nape of his neck, where the short, bushy hair began. She sensed the fever rising from him, and caught the unusual scent of his skin. She had never been so close to anyone so dark. A wounded man, a black boy thousands of miles from home, a frontline soldier in London, of all places – she would have thrown her arms about him had she dared.
