The History Room (5 page)

‘Risks, risks, everywhere,’ my father muttered as he read yet another health and safety recommendation. ‘This house was once a training base for boys barely older than the
sixth form who landed on the beaches to liberate Europe. Many of them were dead before they were out of the water. But we are not allowed to risk a bruise.’

I was not a risk-taker. Hugh found my desire to preserve my limbs amusing. ‘Live dangerously,’ he’d yell from the bottom of an icy mogul field in the French Alps, as I cowered
at the top. But then he really had lived dangerously. The blast in Helmand Province had wrenched off one of the lower legs that had carried him so swiftly and effortlessly down the slope. Two of
the fingers on the hand waving a ski pole at me had been severed at the same time. And Hugh’s blood, red as his ski jacket, had poured onto the dusty earth beside the road.

They’d told me how it had happened. At the same time as my husband was haemorrhaging into the dirt I’d probably been getting ready for work: cursing the dog for mucking around and
not coming in from the garden when I called him. Lamenting the state of my freshly washed hair. Wondering whether I had time to cycle to school or whether I could cop out and drive. Mundane, silly
preoccupations.

If I’d been more organized perhaps I’d have found a moment that early morning to think about my husband. Perhaps that moment’s thought could have transmitted itself to him.
Perhaps he’d have decided they’d gone far enough. ‘We were about to radio in and say we were turning round,’ his driver had told me in the email he’d sent a week after
the explosion. ‘We were just driving round the next bend. Then we were going to call it a day.’

I’d wanted to ask why they’d chosen that bend and not another, earlier, bend, but I didn’t. I studied the maps of the area, looking at the Internet for satellite images so I
could work out where in Helmand Province the patrol had been to within a ten-mile or so radius. A country the colour of this baseball cap when seen from above. Hard to imagine anyone living in
those dun fields and villages. Impossible to trace the logic of the events that had brought my husband to that dusty track at that particular time on that particular day.

‘Just go, Meredith,’ Hugh had told me the last time I’d visited him. ‘You can’t help me now. Don’t waste more of your energy on me.’

‘Tell me what to do, how to be with you.’ I focused hard on the get-well cards adorning the bedside table.

He stared down at the hand that had lost the fingers. ‘There’s nothing you can do. It’s not fair on you. For God’s sake, you’ve been through enough.’

‘But you’re making real progress. They’re going to fit the cosmetic leg soon.’ The new leg would look like a real one, unlike the prosthesis he was wearing now.
‘They might give you a running leg, you said. And your hand’s healing too.’

‘This wasn’t how I imagined our marriage.’ A pause. ‘And seeing you makes it worse for me.’

‘It won’t always be like that. Once you’ve got used to the leg, you—’

He held out his right hand in admonition, the one that still had all its fingers. ‘Please leave now.’ He sounded as though he were addressing one of his soldiers. ‘I
don’t want to say these things, I don’t want to hurt you. God knows, you’ve had enough pain.’

‘Is it true?’ I’d asked the male nurse who’d comforted me as I’d staggered away, still clutching the paper bag of fruit and the biography of Wellington I
hadn’t had time to give him. ‘Am I making it harder for him?’ We sat in a small office, undrunk mugs of tea between us on the table.

The nurse hadn’t responded at first. He’d removed his hand from mine, resting it on the table. ‘He’s angry at the moment. He’s lost a leg. His life will never be
the same again. Some men turn the anger on themselves; that’s what Hugh’s doing.’ He looked directly at me. ‘And we don’t really know what bomb blast does to the
brain.’ He opened the paper bag, took out an orange and banged it against the table. ‘Imagine this is the brain bouncing against the skull as the force of the explosion hits it. Nobody
knows exactly what’s happened to those cells.’

‘He might be . . .’ I swallowed. ‘Brain-damaged?’

‘His ability to respond to stress might be affected. His concentration. His self-control. And then bear in mind all the drugs he’s been on and off in the last months. Some of those
can cause short-term personality changes. That may be what’s making him so’ – he gave an apologetic grin – ‘bloody insufferable. To you. He controls himself when
he’s with us. That’s good, by the way.’

‘Is it?’

‘Perhaps it shows that he still trusts you enough to let you see him at his angriest and most vulnerable. But at the same time it’s unbearable for him.’

So I was to be punished, sent away.

‘Hugh simply needs to conserve some emotional energy, channel it into learning to walk again. We work them hard. Four or five hours of physical activity a day. While he’s here
he’s got all the banter from the others. They’re rude to him when he sounds off and that makes him feel safe. Accepted.’ He gave a shrug. ‘I know it sounds strange but
that’s how it is. They understand him. Eventually they’ll all start going out together to pubs and cafes and local swimming pools. That’ll help get them back into real life
again.’

‘He told me that he had no bloody intention of being a being a fuc . . . a burden on anyone.’ I heard my voice tremble.

‘He does need you, Meredith.’ He put the orange back in the bag and scribbled a note on a pad. ‘I’ll talk to the doctors about his drug regime. And the occupational
therapist will have some ideas, too.’

‘What should I do?’ I sounded like a frightened little girl rather than a professional woman who kept unruly classes under control. I reminded myself that it was my husband
who’d been wounded, not me. But when that explosive device had gone off it had blasted both our lives into shards.

‘Only you can really decide. But if it was me I’d give it some time before I came to visit again. Weeks. Perhaps even months.’

‘Months?’ I heard desperation in my voice.

He nodded. ‘Let him get through the next lot of rehab. It’ll be tough. Painful. He’s set his heart on skiing again.’

Had he?

‘He’ll need every ounce of courage to get there. As he gets used to the prosthesis he’ll be like a mother learning how to manage life with a newborn.’ He shook his head.
‘They’d kill me if they heard me say that.’

I could imagine. ‘I’m abandoning him.’

‘You’re doing what he wants.’

I slid the biography of Wellington and the fruit across the table. ‘Someone else might like these.’ And I’d walked out of the centre without looking back at the window of
Hugh’s ward.

My father had already told me that he’d have a vacancy for an English teacher at Letchford after Easter; a teacher was going on maternity leave. Fate had nudged me back to my old home with
its honey-stoned walls and mature gardens, to my mother with her sewing basket and her vegetable garden. And to my father with his obsessive concern for the school and the pupils. All this had been
waiting for me, quietly accepting and welcoming.

I knew from Hugh’s mother that he was now living independently in a small flat near the rehabilitation unit and was training hard to become strong on his new prosthetic leg. He was still
planning a ski trip at Christmas. ‘Perhaps he’ll be more like the old Hugh if he goes off to the Alps,’ she said, voice breaking. It seemed as though my heart was bleeding into my
chest, spurting acid through my veins. Perhaps Hugh hadn’t encouraged his mother’s visits either. But at least he hadn’t told her to stay away. Every time the post arrived I
expected to see a large white envelope from a law firm telling me my husband wanted a divorce.

I needed to sort myself out. I was back at the family home, surrounded by hundreds of children and two dozen teachers. I wasn’t exactly banished to a hermit’s cave. But since my
mother’s death it had felt lonely at Letchford.

My mother herself must have felt lonely when both her parents had died and she’d inherited the large house with its acres of grounds.

After her funeral, when all the guests had gone home, Clara and I had gone downstairs and stood in front of the mural, looking at her image. Following my attack with the Harpic, Dad had painted
Mum back in all her glory, covering up that other woman. I wondered again about the identity of this person but today was not the day to think about her. Let her stay buried under my mother’s
radiant image.

‘Mum was tough.’ Clara had sounded proud. ‘Tough enough to train as a teacher and do all she could to start this school so she could keep the family house.’ Mum had been
a county girl by birth; pearls and hunters. But she’d chosen something else.

‘She had Dad to help her.’ Starting the school had really been his idea. That’s what she’d always told us.

They’d met at teacher training college. Both had been young people fired up with the desire to shake things up in the educational world. I couldn’t imagine myself at that age with
the self-confidence to set such a high bar. My mother had acquired her teaching certificate and completed a few years in a girls’ school in Bristol. My father had taught in London. Their
friendship would probably have fizzled out if it hadn’t been for a chance meeting in a bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London. She’d told him about the old family house she’d
inherited. ‘It’s hundreds of years old and it’s decaying away,’ she’d said. ‘A nursing home has made me an offer but I’m not sure. I don’t know what
to do.’

She’d looked amused as she’d related the story to me. ‘Your father thought it would make a good school, Merry. We must have been a pair of naive fools. In our twenties and
thinking we knew enough to start a school. You’d never be allowed to do it these days.’

‘Do you ever regret having done this?’ I’d asked her only weeks before her death.

She’d looked past me, towards the front door leading to the gardens and grounds. ‘It would all have gone if it hadn’t become a school. But perhaps our family life would have
been easier, Merry. We’d have been less on display all the time.’

I’d thought about that quite a bit. Bringing up a family, having a relationship with your husband, all under the scrutiny of three hundred pairs of young eyes, plus teachers. It
couldn’t have been easy. Perhaps she’d regretted it. She’d never have admitted this was the case, but sometimes I wondered. My father could be very hard to deflect once he’d
decided on something.

‘Sometimes I think the England your father thought he was taking a stake in was an England that never really existed.’ She’d spoken in a quiet, almost dreamy, voice. ‘He
had such high expectations, as though he was hoping it would make up for everything he’d left behind.’

Karel, 1973

‘I can almost smell this place falling apart,’ Susan said. They were sitting on the chaise longue in the entrance hall, cool and marbled, smelling of beeswax and
the flowers outside in the garden. But something undercut the aroma: an over-sweetness that lingered at the back of his nose.

She’d come straight here when term had finished and spent days cleaning. Shadows under her eyes told him how hard she’d worked. But what needed doing here was more than cleaning: it
was the stripping away of old wallpaper, rewiring, fitting new window frames, moving old furniture away from walls to air damp patches. Karel had watched his mother struggle to do all these things
in the old house in Bohemia after they’d taken his father away. She hadn’t managed. There hadn’t been the materials in post-war Czechoslovakia. The past and its humiliations had
hung round them like the cobwebs. Eventually strangers had been sent to live with them – really to keep an eye on them, his mother had muttered, make sure they were reliable. The newcomers
had put down lino on the wooden floors and painted over the wallpaper and wooden panels. The house had died.

‘I still think you should turn Letchworth into a school.’ He looked around, almost expecting to see a third person who’d spoken the words. ‘You’ve got the space.
You’re a teacher.’ He imagined kids running around and shouting, clearing out the ghosts. He imagined himself showing them how to make wonderful things with paint and paper.

She blinked. ‘A pretty inexperienced teacher.’

‘So? Employ people who are more experienced to run it for you. Start small.’ He sounded quite the capitalist these days.

‘Suppose so.’ Susan had already told him that her parents had left her money. But most of it was blowing out of the badly insulated windows, or oozing into damp walls.

‘My father might have liked the place to become a school.’ She sounded dreamy. ‘He and I talked about education quite a bit before he died. They were surprised when I said I
wanted to become a teacher. It wasn’t what people from my family were supposed to do.’

So many aspects of English social structure baffled him. His friend John Andrews had done his best to explain the nuances but Karel hadn’t been here long enough to pick it all up.

She must have picked up his bafflement, and smiled. ‘I was supposed to go to finishing school in Switzerland and then find a husband.’ She was frowning slightly. ‘You look
disapproving.’

‘It’s so different from what young women did where I grew up.’ Unbidden,
she
, the other one, came into his mind. He couldn’t help smiling at the thought of
her
being sent to learn how to scoop up a husband. An afternoon in Prague flittered into his mind. She’d lain in her aunt’s apartment on the colourful rug she’d woven
herself. Her Aunt Maria was out queuing for meat. She’d been completely naked and the sun had gilded her skin.

‘Perhaps I’ll never bother about marriage,’ she’d said. ‘Perhaps we could just live like this for the rest of our lives.’ Ever since the spring it had been
like this in Prague. The shadows were there, massing just out of sight. But for the moment it was just her, naked, on the bright rug with its folk print. Longing for her burned through
Karel’s veins.

Go away, he told her again. Not now, not here, not in this English house where I am learning how to be an Englishman for this English girl.