A World of Other People (15 page)

And as she stares at it — the garden, the lawn, the house and the three figures — it gradually assumes the air of a lost domain. One that she never possessed, but
could
have; now lost all the same. Her eyes drift to that broad sky above the suburban scene and she’s suddenly remembering those questions she asked him about his home in the park that first time when she was making comforting conversation, those questions about space and big skies that seemed so silly at the time, but which, she’s now thinking, may not have been so silly after all. For the sky is wide, the garden and the lawn broad. The world, beyond the borders of the photograph, going on and on and on. So, she tells herself, staring intently at the scene,
that’s
Australia.

It is not so much an observation as an exclamation, and one that bursts from her. As though for years she’d only ever entertained a vague and theoretical notion
of the place (whenever she thought about it at all), a vague notion reinforced by images such as deserts and leaping wildlife and endless beaches, images that ensured that her conception would have nothing more than a travel poster reality. But here, here was someone she had known (and she notes the past tense and the fact that already she has consigned him to the grammar of the gone, to the ranks of those lives, like those actions, that have become completed acts and are spoken of using the completed past), yes, someone she knew, there in front of her, surrounded by home and family. Just people. People like her, and not like her. Just a house, and a garden in which somebody potters, hitting on thoughts and losing them with the distracting entrance of a butterfly or whatnot. Just a house and a garden, like any other, and yet not like any other. And with that exclamation, that burst of sudden understanding, the whole picture acquires an actuality and an intimacy that takes her by surprise. Like suddenly ‘getting’ a line of poetry that you’ve only ever half thought about before. Yes, that’s it, she nods to herself,
that’s
the place. That’s Jim’s Australia.

At first she is simply curious when she turns to the next photograph. For it is a shot of his crew and
they are all standing in front of their plane. All six of them, arms around each other’s shoulders like a sporting team of some sort just before a match. And smiling, for God’s sake. Smiling. And it is while she is slowly shaking her head at those smiling eyes, and the young, impossibly young faces; it is while she is slowly shaking her head at it all that something more than sad curiosity overcomes her and she realises that the photograph contains something disturbing. Her eyes rove from face to face, trying to locate the source of the disturbance. It is a crew before take-off. They are smiling and their smiles are sad. Deeply so. But not disturbing. And it is only when her eyes shift from the faces of the crew to the plane itself that she sees it. Painted just below the cockpit. A dove. A white dove. Either ascending or descending. And if she weren’t seated she feels sure she would have fallen, for the blow is almost physical. You won’t forget me, you won’t forget …
Him
. All the time him.
This
is what happened to him. And she turns the photograph over and sees that it is dated: ‘“F” for Freddie, May 11th 1941’. And she knows that date because it is in her journal, and because she was there. And the sight, the sheer improbability of the spectacle, swoops over
her again. The plane, the flames, so near you could almost reach out and touch them. And the dove. You won’t forget me, you won’t forget … Was this why he was in the park that afternoon? Not for the lawns or the trees or the sun, but for the rooftop that his line of vision told her he was staring at? The rooftop that he couldn’t take his eyes off, even if he didn’t really know why? Was that it? Did he know
what
he was staring at? Or was it some dim impulse that brought him back? How often had he been there before that day? She stares down at the photograph, at the smiling face of Jim, recognising that this is the Jim she never knew. That this is the Jim who existed
before.
The Jim who died that night along with his crew. The Jim who never really came back.

Her watch tells her that the minutes are dwindling. That the ones remaining are precious. And as she packs the photographs back into the envelope she notices that there is a second shot of the crew. Standing in a line, Jim in the centre, all smoking and smiling in front of a hedge. A sign with an arrow pointing to the Officers’ Mess at the foot of the hedge. A glance and she puts it back in the envelope with the others. Then, knowing her time is almost up and that she
will have to leave soon, she stands, relieved that her legs can lift her, and turns to the papers on the bunk, those few things found on him. Things that he held and looked at and folded only two days before. And as she picks the things up the incomprehensibility of it hits her again. And death is a dream from which she will one day wake. And it is as she is turning all this over that she unfolds a small notice on yellow church paper. And not just any church. St Stephen’s. And she has no sooner asked herself what on earth he could have been doing with this than she sees it is an advertisement of sorts for a public reading at the church by Mr T.S. Eliot of his latest poem, ‘Little Gidding’. Of course, of course. Then the door opens and she is staring blank-faced at the captain whose name she has completely forgotten, for although she has only been alone for forty or so minutes, she is looking at him as if he is somebody she met years before and whom she is desperately trying to place.

He says nothing but his very presence tells her time is up. She picks up the photograph of herself and the rose.

‘Where did you say he was found?’

Her voice is weak, as if she has just woken up.

‘I didn’t. It was one of those tiny places that no one’s ever heard of. Odd name, Little …’ And he looks down at the floor, trying to remember the rest.

‘… Gidding?’ she says.

He looks up, puzzled.

‘Yes. You know it?’

‘I know
of
it.’

He stares at her, wondering, she imagines, if the place might have some private meaning, but discreetly choosing not to ask.

‘May I have these? The photograph of me won’t mean anything to his parents, and the rose is personal.’

He shrugs.

‘Yes. Of course. But we must go.’

‘Yes,’ she says, looking once more around the room, knowing full well that within a few hours it will be cleaned and become somebody else’s. So, this is where he came to and from. And with that thought she steps out into the fading light and hears the door close behind her.

It is late in the afternoon now and the winter sun is low. But the sky is clear and she can see the crews standing about or lounging on the grass, smoking and talking or just staring around. They are, she assumes,
waiting to be taken to their planes. Just as Jim would have waited once. One crew is standing in front of a hedge. They are quiet, legs shuffling about. Cigarette smoke rising from them into the cold air. And again she is astounded at how young they are. And at the same time she is looking at the hedge and thinking I know that hedge. And then she sees the sign, the arrow pointing to the Officers’ Mess, and realises that it is the hedge in front of which Jim and his crew stood.
They
stood there. On that precise spot. And she can picture him as he was in that snap. Absurdly young. And, stopping where she is for a moment, she imagines him on the afternoon before his last flight. Looking out over the airfield. Lighting a cigarette. His last evening as a free man. Before becoming a haunted one. There’s a kind of innocence about the Jim she conjures up. And a confidence. To have known him then. Just to have known him then. But of course, he was neither innocent nor confident. That was just the face he wore, like all the other faces out there now. All the same, there’s something untouched about the Jim she imagines. Untouched and untouchable and somehow whole. Still there, lighting up a ciggie and looking out over the airfield on his last night as a free man.

At the gate she thanks the captain for allowing her to see his room and his things and then adds, because the thought has puzzled her since she saw the photographs, ‘So his plane crash-landed near here, then?’

‘So I believe.’

She shakes her head. ‘It couldn’t have.’

It is his turn to look puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I saw his plane that night. I saw it. The dove. You couldn’t miss it. I was fire-watching in London and it passed over us, close enough to touch. One engine was in flames. It was so low, it could never have got to the country. Not this far. It couldn’t have.’

When she finishes, and she’s vaguely aware of her voice being louder than she intended, she looks directly at him, and his eyes … they’ve hardened. As if to say is this what I get? But there’s also a recognition in his stare, a suggestion that he just may have let trouble onto the base. That he won’t be doing this again. And looking her in the eyes in such a way as to leave her in no doubt that the conversation is about to finish, he says, slowly and distinctly as if speaking to a child or the remarkably ignorant, ‘You’d be surprised what a good pilot and a good plane can do.’

And with that he turns on his heel and is gone. And she is suddenly outside the gate. The barrier down. Without looking back, she leaves the road that leads to the front gate and walks towards the track that crosses the common. In her pocket is the rose. Too fragile to touch. But with the lighter, the only thing she’s got. The only things of his she has. Her only mementoes. She looks up to the sky, a small, lone figure on the common. A bird, a kestrel of some sort, wheels over her as the wind picks up. The fields stir, a rusted tractor sinks into the soil, a skulking fox in the distance pauses briefly in mid-stride, brazenly staring back at the intruder. The brows of the trees’ branches lift and sigh on a current of air.

As she enters the village high street she can see the bus that brought her from Huntingdon waiting. What luck! And she picks up her pace, noting as she does that the mere sight of the bus and her good luck in returning at just the right time have somehow given her a small moment of happiness on a day that has passed in a blur and on which she expected no such thing, however small or incidental. Then, like a sudden patch of sun in a cloudy sky, that flash of happiness is gone and the end of the day settles
over the village and the pale fields around it like the end of the world itself, and she’s sitting on the bus contemplating the poster that is once again asking her if her journey is really necessary, and answering what business is it of yours?

‘Somebody panicked.’

The man speaking to Iris has, she’s always thought, a vague resemblance to the old Prince of Wales. He’s got that upper-class English look, probably got a title tucked away somewhere. Even the occasional stammer fits. They know each other from university, the Communist Party club of all things, and he’s in Intelligence. Then again, they let her into the Treasury. It’s the war doing that, she smiles faintly.

Everybody’s got a contact and he’s hers. She gave him two pieces of information last week: ‘F’ for Freddie, and a date, 11th May, 1941. Now he’s telling her what he found.

‘Somebody panicked?’

‘Probably. We’re all human.’ He gazes thoughtfully over the small Westminster square they’re sitting in, green in the brief January sun, while she shoots him a look suggesting she’s not too sure about that. ‘The night before, you may remember,’ he continues, ‘was the biggest raid of the war. Over three thousand dead, God knows how many suddenly without a home, half the city blown to smithereens. In one night. The general feeling around here was another night like that and we’re done for. Everybody was jumpy. Jittery. We’d read about it in books, comrade.’ There is only the barest hint of irony in his use of the party greeting and she wonders if he’s still in contact with the old crowd. ‘You know, polite society falls apart, the stiff upper lip turns to jelly, the streets teem with anarchy and all those good little shopkeepers are afraid to open their doors. Don’t imagine it could never happen here. Like the man said, civilisation looks good and solid — until the last ten minutes. Maybe our friend Mr Arnold was right, comrade. Anarchy, it’s never far away. Of course, there
wasn’t
another night like that. That was it. Blitz over. But we didn’t know that then. Everybody was jumpy. Quietly jumpy, but jumpy. Mannered hysteria. One more night like that …’

He pauses, lights a cigarette and offers one to Iris, who shakes her head. He leans back on the bench, breathing out, and it’s hard to tell what’s smoke and what’s condensation in the chilled air.

‘And into all this comes your man. Just drops out of the sky the next night while everyone’s still jittery and half dead from the night before. And doesn’t have the good form to drop onto a country field where nobody can see him.’

‘Where? Where
did
he land?’

He draws on his cigarette again and half smiles as he gently shakes his head. ‘Regent’s bloody Park.

‘Of course.’

And now she recalls the distant explosion that night which everybody chose to conclude was a delayed-action bomb.

‘A burned-out Wellington in Regent’s Park full of charred British airmen. Not the sort of thing you want people to see on their way to work. Not exactly the sort of thing that picks up everybody’s spirits and puts a song in their bulldog hearts. Somebody panicked. Personally, I think we always underestimate the people, comrade.’ And, once again, part of her is contemplating the fleeting hint
of irony, or whether there is any there at all this time, and she is seriously wondering if he
is
still in touch with the old crowd. ‘I mean, they threw everything they had at us and we
didn’t
crumple. We
could
take it,’ and here he smiles openly, ‘just like the signs said. Jolly us. But perhaps we can say we didn’t know that then either. One more night like that and we just might …’

His face turns grim as he tosses the cigarette away.

‘“F” for Freddie was hosed down and carted away before morning. There was no raid that night, so there were fire trucks and transports everywhere. Come first light there was nothing left apart from the tracks and the scorching where it had been. Nothing for people to see. Nothing for the newspapers. It never happened. Your man—’

‘Stop saying “your man”. He’s dead. He’s nobody’s man.’

He eyes her, as if pondering how to go on. ‘We know …’ and he pauses, suggesting without saying as much that we know a lot more besides, ‘… that he wasn’t expected to live either. He was out to it for weeks. And when he came round it was easier, for everyone, for it to be understood that he crash-landed
in a country field just outside his base. Besides, his memory wasn’t all back. There was a bit missing.’

‘I know.’

‘It’s common. They call it,’ and here he winces at the clinical nature of the term, ‘amnesic syndrome in war.’

‘I know that too. I looked it up.’

‘Hundreds of those poor bastards who came back from Dunkirk had it. Marching through the French countryside one minute, back in Dover the next. No idea how they got there.’

He stops, checks his watch, then looks back at Iris levelly.

‘So, there you are. In the big scheme of things a footnote, really. But what we don’t get is how he found out. And we’re assuming he did. Correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘How? What was his source?’

And here Iris smiles at the sheer improbability of the answer, savouring the moment before she speaks.

‘A poem .’

He nods slowly, with a slight creasing of the brow.

‘Nothing like a good poem.’

‘No.’

‘Of course,’ he says, rising from the bench, ‘we never met up. And this conversation never happened.’

‘Just like “F” for Freddie.’

‘What?’ he calls, walking away with a broad smile. ‘What was that?’

She stays on the bench, watching the square and the sun coming and going. At least she knows that much. But the thing she accepts she’ll never know is just what it was he saw when the world stopped going black. When his memory came back. For she is certain it did. When he heard the poem and that missing page floated back into his mind. What was so terrible that it had to be passed over in silence? So terrible that it took him away? What was that terrible thing? That’s the bit she
could
have known, and that’s the bit that
he
could have known all along, and which he might eventually have told her, or
somebody
at least, if only he hadn’t been fed a pack of lies. And maybe, just maybe, he could have been walked through it. And the terrible thing might have gone away. With the right people to talk to, and time enough to do it.

He’d still be here, then. Beside her. Now. On the bench. Instead of winding up under a tree, in a field in the snow, and nobody in the world to talk to.

She’s not sure how long she’s been sitting there. Or if she’s moved at all in that time. A statue in the park? Lunch hour must be over. She rises, watching a slowly passing barge on the river, squinting into the pale January sun. Maybe. They’ll never know. Life is filled with if onlys … and there’s only ever one story in the end. Is that the ultimate mystery of love? That it’s on you before you know, and gone before you realise? She drifts out onto the street and floats away. Back to work. People passing like phantoms.

At the traffic lights a young woman is clinging in the cold to an American soldier, for the Americans are everywhere now, and they’re kissing, these two. In public. Brazenly happy. And beside Iris a small group of men and women are silently tut-tutting, disapproval in their eyes. This is them, the army of the miserable. Look at them, no wild emotions to carry them away. No runaway horses in their hearts. No forbidden words to quietly mouth in the privacy of their rooms as if having personally discovered them. Look at them, and she smiles faintly to herself as she crosses with the lights and pronounces farewell judgement: look at them — cuntless, cockless and fuckless, the whole miserable bunch.

And she remembers the faint smile on her face as she answered, ‘A poem.’ And drifting, floating back along the wide street, vaguely aware of the sandbags and the soldiers on guard at the occasional public building, it’s the power of words that she’s dwelling on: to bring pleasure, to bring pain, to bring comfort, or to bring the terror of hard truth. Like many of those around her, she’s beginning to believe that the war will end, after all. And when it does there’ll be no old life to go back to because it won’t be there any more. And she could never go back to it in any case. She’s already decided. To pursue words. Whatever the cost. To make them go BOOM. And to
live.
Here and now. To be brazenly happy again, if she’s ever lucky enough. To chase the runaway horse of life and love, and never stop chasing it. Anything else, anything else at all, would be a betrayal of all they’ve been through.

The weeks pass in a blur: work, the pubs, Pip, friends, even her journal entries, in which she records that the weeks pass in a blur. And near the end of this procession of days and weeks she sits at her desk, mechanically working through files one morning,
when the telephone rings. And whereas once her pulse may have quickened in anticipation, now it doesn’t. All the same, it is not a work voice at the other end. And for a moment she can’t place where she knows this voice from. The voice is shaky with emotion — the speaker, a woman, may even be crying. And then she informs Iris that Frank is no longer missing. That he is, after all this time, alive and well. And will even be home on leave soon. Isn’t this wonderful? his mother is saying. And Iris is remembering their last conversation, remembering the control, the nothing else for it but to get on with things tone in the woman’s voice, and noting how that control has now collapsed. And for the first time in weeks, her heart goes out to someone other than herself. It’s the relief doing that, she thinks. Her heart goes out to this woman who has been shaken by happiness and whose son is coming home soon. But at the same time she is puzzling over the name ‘Frank’, as if trying to remember someone she met a long time ago at a party somewhere. For a moment she has trouble picturing him. And, even as she tries, she knows full well that the Frank she pictures will not be the same Frank who is no longer missing and who will be home soon.

And as she puts the telephone down, after telling Frank’s mother that yes, it is wonderful news, she is thinking of that ring still in her drawer and contemplating the Iris who put it there. For she is a distant woman, this Iris who accepted the ring because she couldn’t bear to let the young man down and who, in accepting it, took on the weight of his fate and pledged herself to its care in a small church in Maiden Lane all that time ago. She stares out the window, a January grey that seems to have been there for weeks filling the sky. My, how we’ve all grown.