Hero (22 page)
It was their faces that stayed with me, Baxter ruddy and healthy the way some of the young officers were, Jenson sterner, darker, and inscrutable. Both were prize stock to the army's officer class. I had heard both of them talk of war as though it were an extension of school sports day. I had never spoken directly to either as I liked to keep my distance, but I had absorbed the flavour of their personalities just as my uniform had absorbed the damp. And here they were before me, expressions full of bewilderment and confusion. At last, I thought, as Lieutenant Jenson, face crumpled into a mute apology, took his friend's weight. At last men were reacting to horror with horror! My hand reached towards them. I imagined for the moment that my fingers held the crayon with which I had made some sketches when first in the dugout. I knew no prayers, had no God, even now, but I needed some way to invoke my blessing upon these two. I wanted to die while capturing this moment of sublime triumph, this revelation that a human cannot be reduced so easily to the level of hive dwellers. An officer, regardless of training, can hesitate, have thoughts and feelings and can reject his “duty.” His mind and body can rebel from the unacceptable.
The question of how Lieutenant Baxter would cope with his actions occupied me little after the time in the infirmary. I knew I had played a pivotal role in the stories that circulated. I had never made a conscious decision to leave anything out of the story. I was too delirious, most of the time, to distinguish between the army's philosophy and mine, and could not have known that the ears into which I spilled my vision of heroism might have reacted very differently had I included the stark detail that it was Lieutenant Jenson's own blade that had pierced his friend. In the euphoric state in which I related the tale, I think I believed that the army, the government, the whole world in fact, had come around to my way of thinking regarding war, that through the incident on the battlefield my view had been conclusively proven correct. It was pure chance I did not let the cat out of the bag. My mind had focussed upon the tenderness, the fact that bewilderment and horror had given way to a kind of desperate love. Jenson had laid his friend upon the earth with an infinite care. Michelangelo himself could have used his expression as a model for a man whose soul had been flooded with spiritual love. This was an entirely natural progression for me: Horror at the barbarism of war translates into love. I had witnessed the whole journey in Lieutenant Baxter's death.
Once I heard about his decoration, I didn't think too much about Lieutenant Jenson. The memory was sacred to me, and there was an ironic justice in it all. In my mind Jenson had indeed achieved some kind of immortality, and he looked down upon us all from the clouds. Watching him through a trickle of passengers, white-faced, unhappy behind the steering wheel, with a girl who looked uncannily like Lieutenant Baxter, tore at the seams of my reality.
Janet soon told me all I needed to know. She has a network of spies spread all around the county and Isabelle, the Jensons' housekeeper, is a distant acquaintance of hers. Careful not to raise suspicions regarding the nature of my curiosity, I got her to feed me information, and pieced together how Mr. Jenson had married the sister of the man he slew.
Every time I closed my eyes over the days and nights that followed, I saw those two faces, father and daughter behind the wheel. The word announced itself each time I beheld the double blur of their features, a heavy two-syllable word like a lead bell falling from a tower:
penance
. His daughter is his sackcloth. The profound, static misery of his expression was explained.
Then, days later and quite by accident, I met Lucy in the park. Her governess had gone to the hut to buy her an ice cream, and the child had taken the opportunity to scrape up fistfuls of gravel and throw these missiles at passing ducks. I shouted at her to stop. She turned, fragments of stone falling from her hand. She stared at me for a long time. When she approached it was with a curious sense of respect, even appreciation, for being scolded.
What I saw in her questions, in the way she reacted when her father was mentioned, in the way she tried to trip up walkers with my crutch, was a kind of woundedness I had never encountered before. So this is the next generation, I thought. Here is what comes when a man kills his friend then marries his friend's sister to punish himself. She made me ache for a lost chance of my own; I had never even tried to find a wife. And she made me realize that the act I had witnessed and experienced as a triumph was in fact a mountain, impassable and vast, for the man who had erred. It must have been straining within him like an oversized parasite, threatening to break him in pieces. Here was my chance, I thought. After years of wincing every time I heard the words glory and war in the same sentence, after nights of helpless fury, of the nagging and relentless pain in my non-existent legsâghosts that would never let me forgetâhere was an opportunity to absolve a man in torment and rescue a child from certain misery.
The breeze now curls around me, tugging at my trousers, exposing the stilts of my legs. One of the bricklayers overturns his mug and lets the fluid drip into the earth. The distant boom and bash of drum and cymbal tumble on the wind, followed by competing brasses. The dubious music fades as the breeze changes direction then comes on again with increased energy. I remember now the new bandstand in Christchurch Park and the men in overalls giving the paintwork its final touches. I wonder whether Janet was right, after all. A looming anniversary is trouble indeed. My plan now seems both foolish and presumptuous, and I can barely credit my blindness.
He thinks me a blackmailer. How could he think otherwise, emerging as I did, limping and scraping, from his deep-buried past? I always had the face of a fox, designed, my teachers once told me, to be the object of suspicion. Now my body allies me even more decisively with seditious forces. I create unease wherever I go.
I think of my letter, that crass love song to tenderness and humanity. Would it even have made any difference if he had read and understood? If he is offended by attempted blackmail, would he not be doubly offended by pity? It's the knowledge I possess that drove him to fury, not the uses to which I might put it. How could I fail to see that?
When I am at large in the world, it seems, I am a walking catastrophe, a malformed stick-insect that offends every eye. Only in my proper sphere do I have a purpose. My true habitat is a subterranean place of lights and heavy equipment, an alternative to life where object and movement exist in two dimensions rather than three, where hands do not grab my collar and project me down staircases, and where I have the sense to turn feelings into scenery, not into words.
The breeze swells with a sudden pulse of military fervourâ crash, crash, blow. I don't recognize the tune but I can inhale the jingoism; it fills me with the urge to curtail this holiday and return to the safety of work. Only the anticipation of Janet's disappointment, tugging softly at my sleeve, gives me the slightest pause. Everything else about this town in sunâshine seems alien and repellent. Strike up the band and blow yourselves to kingdom come once more. I won't stand in your way.
I feel a smile slinking into my face. I realize that I don't quite mean it, that I remain in hope that some time, when the chafed flesh heals, I might crawl back into the daylight and explain, with patience and discretion, to ears that may wish to hear, that heroism is not what we believe it to be, that flesh and blood have their own standards and these do not conform to steel and fire, to nations and generals.
My eyes lose themselves in the mossy green of the river, in the rapid small spirals close to the near bank and in the much slower downstream lurch of the mid-channel. Movement, all movement, suddenly seems too slow to be endured: rivers snailing towards the sea, cliffs eroding by tenths of an inch, nerve endings dulling with infinitesimal gradualness, wounds closing at leisure, blind to the suffering of their hosts. At Twickenham, a group of us all think the same way about the war. Up until this moment a part of me had conned myself that the whole population of England, and beyond, had been steadily moving with us along the same route. But distant cymbals crash, the drum booms, and I realize that all this time, apart from our small, huddled group, and some others like us, there has been no movement at all.
A sudden eddy on the rim of the water draws my attention to an object, soft and pliant on the foamy wavelets that hiss against the sand. A clump of soaking orange woolâa rudimentary wigâtops a round head. I recognize the rag doll, and allow the chill, which, despite the warmth of the day, runs through me suddenly. Nothing you can do, I tell myself. It's time to go home.
T
hey are the first people I see when I come around the corner from the main station building and onto the platform. Lucy reclines within Elsa's embrace, while Elsa, in turn, leans back against the red brick wall facing the train. Her hands rhythmically stroke my daughter's shoulders. The one a miniature of the other. Anyone would assume they were mother and daughter.
When I catch Elsa's eye she doesn't exactly look away. Her gaze in fact meets my own, but her face tilts, looking askance. It is as though she was hoping not to be seen. I swoop upon Lucy, feeling like a wounded gull unsure of my aim. Elsa seems to shrink against the wall, an unusually elegant gargoyle caught in the act of living. Her hands move from Lucy's shoulders. Mine take their place. Lucy gazes up at me blankly.
“I've been looking for you.” These are the words that come from me, not in the sob I was expecting to hear, but in a voice perfectly calm and composed. I glance up towards Elsa. “I've been looking. I didn't know where you would be.”
Elsa's face is rather pale. Her silence, her look, her refugee-like stance backed onto the wall, the way she has just removed her hands from my daughter's shoulders dispel any lingering doubt: Elsa was intending to take Lucy from me.
The roots of this fear have been growing for the last half-hour, muscling their way into my chest, crowding my breathless mouth with stems and leaves. But the seed, I realize, sprouted earlier, when I witnessed Elsa's strange composure in the tannery, when I saw her lead Lucy silently around my husband and down the staircase, the two of them gliding like pre-dawn spectres, their movements unsullied by sound.
My hands now squeeze Lucy's shoulders hard and plunge her limp body into my breast. Her small chin presses into my shoulder blade, and her hair is wound around my knuckles. She gasps a little but doesn't pull away. I steal another look over her shoulder, just to be sure, just to be certain I have not accused Elsa unjustly in my mind, but her face quite openly admits it, her eyes skimming in regret around Lucy's hair, then meeting my own in a kind of abject resignation. She straightens quite unexpectedly, eyes widening in alarm. She is looking beyond me, towards someone approaching.
The air changes. I am breathing something fiery yet stale, a horribly familiar stench. I turn, Lucy still clutched in my arms, my knee grazing the concrete.
It's Simon, his eyes a version of how they were in the tannery, wild and red-rimmedâthe eyes of a deranged Saturn about to devour his children. I prepare for the blow upon my face and even sink my hands deeper into Lucy's hair as though for protection. But nothing happens save for the waiting breath of our train and the faraway beat of a military drum. Simon's lips are trembling. His eyelids twitch. Within these movements is a sense of falling, a suggestion of imminent collapse. It is this that sets my spine tingling with an unlikely hope, and returns the nagging truism to my mind. No, I think, this is the darkest hour, not Simon's nightmare, not his desertion last night. This is the point of thickest, blackest pessimism. My husband has assaulted a cripple. A trusted employee has tried to abscond with my daughter. And now my drunk and shaking spouse stands over my daughter and me. Only the dullest of imaginations would have him thrash us in public. Only melodrama would have a scene play out this way. Taste, if nothing else, dictates some form of departure, some lightening of tone. Dawn has to break; it is a law of nature.
His hand moves towards us, an open hand, I note, though it still makes me scramble backward a half step, jiggling Lucy along the way. His lips move into an awkward, desperate smile; his eyes soften. The expression is new to me, one I have never seen during our marriage, during any point of our courtship, either after or before the outbreak of war. I could almost believe the soul of another has stepped into his skin.
“Everything's all right,” he says. His voice is raspy but delicate, a crocodile attempting a pirouette. “Let's all go home.”
I watch him for a moment and realize he is in earnest, that he has reached the rim and has backed away from some precipice glimpsed on the other side. Suddenly I'm sorry for scrambling from him, especially in the open, in the dazzling light, where porters and passengers might peer and wonder. He's had his fill of humiliation.
Trembling slightly, I rise to my feet, Lucy's arms around my neck, and look at him as though nothing is wrong.
“Yes, let's go home.”
I glance at Elsa. Whether I meant it as a warning shot or an invitation, I'm not sure. It's the latter message that gets conveyed and she comes closer into the group. I've no wish to argue either with her or myself. Conflict has strangled all our lives. I'm grateful for the blessed lull. The thinnest shard of desperation, it seems, has pierced the dome of night, spilling a long-imprisoned dawn. Is this not the essence of prayer, an impossible hope, magnified and sharpened by extreme misery? If so, then mine has been answered for the moment, and in words never before spoken by my husband: everything's all right. It's enough, this small miracle. I have glimpsed something.
I board, Lucy in arms, ahead of my husband and Elsa. The first chuff sounds and steam billows around us as Simon closes the door. I think to ask my husband about the car, but stop myself, remembering the last drunken ride to Dunwich, knowing how easily words can dispel a temporary calm. Settling into our compartment, hearing the brush of clothing upon seat fabric, the pat of warm leather as Simon checks his wallet for cash, I feel as though we are a troupe of stage actors, playing at cozy familiarity. I feel the heat of my husband's forearm against mine. It remains where it is, warmth gathering slowly beneath my skin. A glance reveals to me that he is looking down at his feet, awake, breathing evenly, his eyes bloodshot but calm.
