The Last Enemy Richard Hillary (14 page)

While the bombs were dropping on London (and they were dropping every night in my time in the hospital), and while half London was enjoying itself, the other half was not asleep. It was striving to make London as normal a city by night as it had become by day. Anti-aircraft crews, studded around fields, parks, and streets, were momentarily silhouetted against the sky by the sudden flash of their guns. The Auxiliary Fire Service, spread out in a network of squads through the capital, was standing by, ready at a moment’s notice to deal with the inevitable fires; air-raid wardens, tireless in their care of shelters and work of rescue, patrolled their areas watchfully. One heavy night I poked my nose out of the Dorchester, which was rocking gently, to find a cab calmly coasting down Park Lane. I hailed it and was driven back to the hospital. The driver turned to me: ‘Thank God, sir,’ he said, ‘Jerry’s wasting ‘is time trying to break our morale, when ‘e might be doing real damage on some small town.’

With the break of day London shook herself and went back to work. Women with husbands in Government jobs were no longer to be seen at noon draped along the bars of the West End as their first appointment of the day. They were up and at work with determined efficiency in administrative posts of the Red Cross, the women’s voluntary services, and the prisoners of war organizations. The Home Guards and air-raid wardens of the previous night would return home, take a bath, and go off to their respective offices. The soldier was back with his regiment, the airman with his squadron; the charming frivolous creatures with whom they had dined were themselves in uniform, effective in their jobs of driving, typing, or nursing.

That, I discovered, was a little of what London was doing. But what was London feeling? Perhaps a not irrelevant example was an experience of Sheep Gilroy’s when flying with the Squadron. He was sitting in his bath when a ‘flap’ was announced. Pulling on a few clothes and not bothering to put on his tunic, he dashed out to his plane and took off. A few minutes later he was hit by an incendiary bullet and the machine caught fire. He baled out, quite badly burned, and landed by a parachute in one of the poorer districts of London. With no identifying tunic, he was at once set upon by two hundred silent and coldly angry women, armed with knives and rolling-pins. For him no doubt it was a harrowing experience, until he finally established his nationality by producing all the most lurid words in his vocabulary; but as an omen for the day when the cream of Hitler’s Aryan youth should attempt to land in Britain it was most interesting.

All this went on at a time when night after night the East End was taking a terrible beating, and it was rumoured that the people were ominously quiet. Could their morale be cracking? The answer was provided in a story that was going the rounds. A young man went down to see a chaplain whom he knew in the East End. He noticed not only that the damage was considerable but that the people were saying practically nothing at all. ‘How are they taking it?’ he asked nervously. The chaplain shook his head. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that my people have fallen from grace: they are beginning to feel a little bitter towards the Germans.’

The understatement in that remark was impressive because it was typical. The war was practically never discussed except as a joke. The casual observer might easily have drawn one of two conclusions: either that London was spent of all feeling, or that it was a city waiting like a blind man, unseeing, uncaring, for the end. Either conclusion would have been wide of the mark. Londoners are slow to anger. They had shown for long enough that they could take it; now they were waiting on the time when it would be their turn to dish it out, when their cold rage would need more than a Panzer division to stamp it out.

Now and then I lunched at home with my mother, who was working all day in the Prisoners of War Organization, or my father would leave his desk long enough to give me lunch at his club. On one of these occasions we ran into Bill Aitken, and I had coffee with him afterwards. He was still in Army Cooperation and reminded me of our conversation at Old Sarum. ‘Do you remember,’ he asked, ‘telling me that I should have to eat my words about Nigel Bicknell and Frank Waldron? Well, you were certainly right about Nigel.’

‘I haven’t heard anything,’ I said, ‘but you sound as though he had renounced his career as Air Force Psychologist.’

Bill laughed. ‘He’s done more than that. He was flying his Blenheim to make some attack on France when one engine cut. He carried on, bombed his objective, and was on his way back when the other engine cut out too, and his machine came down in the sea. For six hours, until dawn when a boat saw them, he held his observer up. He’s got the D.F.C.’

‘I must write to him,’ I said. ‘But I was right about Frank too. Do you remember your quotation that war was “a period of great boredom, interspersed with moments of great excitement”; and how you said that the real test came in the periods of boredom, since anyone can rise to a crisis?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘Well, I think I’m right in saying that Frank has come through on that score. He’s in the Scots Guards with very little to do; but he’s considerably more subdued than you’ll remember him. When he first got out of the Air Force he thought he could waltz straight into the Guards, but they wouldn’t take him until he had been through an O.C.T.U. That was his first surprise. The second was when there was no vacancy in the O.C.T.U. for three months. Our Frank, undismayed, hied himself off to France and kicked up his heels in Meg?ve with the Chasseurs Alpins, and then in Cannes with the local lovelies. But he came back and went through his course. He was a year behind all his friends—or rather all those that were left, and it sobered him up. I think you’d be surprised if you saw him now.’

Bill got up to leave. ‘I should like to see him again,’ he said with a smile, ‘but of the ex-bad boys, I think you are the best example of a change for the better.’

‘Perhaps it’s as well that you can’t stay,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid it wouldn’t take you long to see that you’re mistaken. If anything, I believe even more strongly in the ideas which I held before. Sometime we’ll discuss it.’

I spent most evenings with Denise at the house in Eaton Place. It was the usual London house, tall, narrow, and comfortable. Denise was living there alone with a housekeeper, for her father was about to marry again and had moved to the country. At tea-time I would come and find her curled up on the sofa behind the tray, gazing into the fire; and from then until eight o’clock, when I had to drive back to the Masonic, we would sit and talk—mostly of Peter, for it eased her to speak of him, but also of the war, of life, and death, and many lesser things.

Two years before the war she had joined the A.T.S. Sensibility and shyness might well have made her unsuited for this service, but when her family said as much, they merely fortified her in her determination. After she was commissioned, she fainted on her first parade, but she was not deterred, and she succeeded. She had left the A.T.S. to marry Peter. I was not surprised to learn that she had published a novel, nor that she refused to tell me under what pseudonym, in spite of all my accusations of inverted snobbery. She wished to see nobody but Colin and me, Peter’s friends; and though often she would have preferred to be alone, she welcomed me every day nevertheless. So warm and sincere was her nature, that I might almost have thought myself her only interest. Try as I would, I could not make her think of herself it was as if she considered that as a person she was dead. Minutes would go by while she sat lost in reverie, her chin cupped in her hand. There seemed nothing I could do to rouse her to consciousness of herself, thaw out that terrible numbness, breathe life into that beautiful ghost. Concern with self was gone out of her. I tried pity, I tried understanding, and finally I tried brutality.

It was one evening before dinner, and Denise was leaning against the mantelpiece, one black heel resting on the fender.

‘When are you coming out of mourning?’ I asked.

She had been standing with her chin lowered; and now, without lifting it, she raised her eyes and looked at me a moment.

‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly. ‘Maybe I never shall.’

I think she sensed that the seemingly innocent question had been put deliberately, though she couldn’t yet see why. It had surprised her; it had hurt her, as I had meant it to. Up to now I had been at pains to tread delicately. Now the time had come, I felt, for a direct attack upon her sensibility under the guise of outward stupidity.

‘Oh, come, Denise,’ I said. ‘That’s not like you. You know life better than that. You know there’s no creeping away to hide in a dream world. When something really tragic happens—the cutting-off of a man at a moment when he has most reason to live, when he has planned great things for himself—the result for those who love him isn’t a whimpering pathos; it’s growth, not decline. It makes you a richer person, not a poorer one; better fitted to tackle life, not less fitted for it. I loved Peter too. But I’m not going to pretend I feel sorry for you; and you ought to be grateful to the gods for having enriched you. Instead, you mope.’

I knew well enough that she wouldn’t go under, that this present numb resignation was transitory. But I had been worried too long by her numbness, her rejection of life, and I wanted to end it. She said nothing, and I dared not look at her. I could see her fingers move as I went doggedly on.

‘You can’t run away from life,’ I said. ‘You’re a living vital person. Your heart tells you that Peter will be with you always, but your senses know that absence blots people out. Your senses are the boundaries of your feeling world, and their power stops with death. To go back and back to places where you were happy with Peter, to touch his clothes, dress in black for him, say his name, is pure self-deception. You drug your senses in a world of dreams, but reality cannot be shut out for long.’

Still she said nothing, and I had a quick look at her. This was far worse than badgering Peter in the train. Her face was tense, slightly flushed, and her eyes were wide-open and staring with what I hoped was anger, not pain. I wished to rouse her, and prayed only that I would not reduce her to tears.

‘Death is love’s crucifixion,’ I said brutally. ‘Now you go out with Colin and me because we were his friends, we are a link. But we are not only his friends, we are men. When I leave you, and say good-night, it’s not Peter’s hand that takes yours, it’s mine. It’s Colin’s touch you feel when he helps you on with your coat. Colin will go away. I shall go back to hospital. What are you going to do then? Live alone? You’ll try, but you won’t be able. You will go out again-and with people who didn’t know Peter, people your senses will force you to accept as flesh and blood, and not fellow players in a tragedy.’

She went over to a sofa opposite me and sat looking out of the window. I could see her breast rise and fall with her breathing. Her face was still tense. The set of her head on her shoulders was so graceful, the lines of her figure were so delicate as she sat outlined against the light, that I became aware with a shock of never before having thought of her as a woman, a creature of flesh and blood. I who had made the senses the crux of my argument had never thought of her except as disembodied spirit. Minutes passed; she said no word; and her silence began almost to frighten me. If she should go on saying nothing, and I had to do all the talking, I didn’t know quite what I should end by saying. I was about to attack her again when she spoke, but in a voice so gentle that at first I had trouble hearing her.

‘You’re wrong, Richard,’ she said. ‘You are so afraid of anything mystical, anything you can’t analyse, that you always begin rationalizing instinctively, in self-defence, fearing your own blind spots. You like to think of yourself as a man who sees things too clearly, too realistically, to be able to have any respect for the emotions. Perhaps you don’t feel sorry for me; but I do feel sorry for you.

‘I know that everything is not over for Peter and me. I know it with all the faith that you are so contemptuous of. We shall be together again. We are together now. I feel him constantly close to me; and that is my answer to your cheap talk about the senses. Peter lives within me. He neither comes nor goes, he is ever-present. Even while he was alive there was never quite the tenderness and closeness between us that now is there.’

She looked straight at me and there was a kind of triumph in her face. Her voice was now so strong that I felt there was no defeating her any more, no drawing her out of that morass of mysticism from which I so instinctively recoiled.

‘I suppose you’re trying to hurt me to give me strength, Richard,’ she said; ‘but you’re only hurting yourself. I have the strength. And let me explain where it comes from, so that we need never revert to the subject again. I believe that in this life we live as in a room with the blinds down and the lights on. Once or twice, perhaps, it is granted us to switch off the lights and raise the blinds. Then for a moment the darkness outside becomes brightness, and we have a glimpse of what lies beyond this life. I believe not only in life after death, but in life before death. This life is to me an intermission lived in spiritual darkness. In this life we are in a state not of being, but of becoming.

‘Peter and I are eternally bound up together; our destinies are the same. And you, with your unawakened heart, are in some curious way bound up with us. Oh, yes you are! In spite of all your intellectual subterfuges and attempts to hide behind the cry of self-realization! You lay in hospital and saw Peter die as clearly as if you had been with him. You told me so yourself. Ever since Peter’s death you have been different. It has worked on you; and it’s only because it has that I tell you these things. Colin says he would never have believed that anyone could change as you have.’

‘That,’ said I, ‘was pure hallucination. I don’t pretend to account for it exactly, but it was that hundredth example of instinct, or intuition, that people are always boasting of while they never mention the ninety-nine other premonitions that were pure fantasy.’