The Soldier's Song (36 page)

Redfern was a slight man with receding fair hair and watery blue eyes, and he had been blown up on three separate occasions. Miraculously, apart from the concussion, he had not received so much as a scratch – not even the last time, when his entire battery was destroyed and he was thrown twenty feet through the air after a German shell hit their ammunition dump. On the surface, he exhibited no obvious symptoms – at least not in the daytime. He neither stammered nor twitched and, apart from biting his nails constantly, he appeared to have no other nervous affliction.

Redfern’s problem was that he had no memory whatsoever of his life before the war. He could recite chapter and verse about his movements at the front: where his battery had been, fire plans, ranges, elevations, even the number of shells fired in any given day. But he couldn’t remember that he had been married for years. When his wife and teenage daughter came to see him they were complete strangers to him. Every week it was the same pantomime – and what made it worse was that he was so anxious to be polite to these people. After all, they had taken the trouble to come all this way to visit him; it was the least he could do. They brought him pots of homemade jam and knitted socks and the three of them would take tea on the lawn and spread the jam on thin slices of hard bread. Redfern always played along for all he was worth, sipping his tea in a genteel fashion, with his little finger extended. But when he looked at his wife and daughter he seemed to gaze right through them as if they weren’t there. His watery blue eyes betrayed the yawning gulf in his mind, and mother and daughter always left in silent tears, supporting each other down the long gravel drive.

But at least he was quiet, and that was why he shared a room with Stephen. The screamers were kept upstairs, and they were what really set his nerves on edge. It was worst on the quiet nights, when they would suddenly rip the silence apart with a long, piercing shriek, like the noise of a shell going over. Strangely, it seemed to relieve the pressure in him – as if the pent-up demons had been released – and once it was over he felt more at ease, the danger past.

But sometimes it was a longer process; he could hear the screams and shouts bubbling upstairs, gradually building to a crescendo. Tonight, it started with a series of low, shuddering sobs, as if some poor soul was suffocating. Christ! He twisted the coverlet under his chin, wishing he were deaf instead of dumb. Then came the howling, shattering the stillness as it rose in pitch and ended, quite abruptly, with an audible thump. He flinched, knowing the poor bastard had flung himself against a wall. He heard sobbing afterwards, then the hurried footfalls of the night nurse. There were worse things than not sleeping.

* * *

The next day, Hardcastle came to see him in his room. Redfern had gone to breakfast but Stephen was still in bed. His breakfast lay untouched on the tray Nurse Winslow had brought. It had been one thing after another last night. Another bout of screaming in the small hours had kept him awake most of the night, and now he felt groggy and slightly nauseous. Hardcastle seemed equally uneasy. He knocked politely on the door and then poked his head inside, grinning nervously, like a schoolboy sent to the headmaster.

‘Ah, Ryan. Thought I’d find you here. Mind if I come in?’

Stephen shook his head, and Hardcastle came in and sat gingerly on Redfern’s untouched bed.

‘How’s the leg?’ he asked, and when Stephen shrugged, he scratched his head absently and said, ‘Yes, yes . . .’ his voice trailing off. But then he seemed to remember himself and went on; ‘I had a meeting with that girl of yours yesterday. Quite a formidable young lady, is your Miss Bryce. I mean that in the nicest possible way, of course, but I’m sure you already know that, eh?’ Hardcastle grinned and Stephen smiled back politely.

‘Anyhow, I promised her I’d get a pal of mine to look at you. We were at Cambridge together, would you believe? Name of Rivers – he’s working with the Royal Flying Corps at the moment, but apparently he had quite a good run of it working at a hospital up in Scotland. Quite a lot of success with chaps who . . . who have problems similar to yours. So I rang him up and, lo and behold, he’s free this afternoon. Said he’d pop over to have a look – as a favour, you know. You don’t have any objection, do you?’

Stephen shook his head.

‘Good, good. Thought you’d say . . . Well, you know what I mean. Let’s say three o’clock then. I’ll have the orderlies bring you up.’

A new head-shrinker at three o’clock. Well, it couldn’t hurt – but before that he had to undergo the ordeal of the parallel bars. Nurse Winslow wheeled him down to the gymnasium and left him in the care of Jardine, a huge Scot who was strong enough to lift him bodily out of the wheelchair. Before they began, Stephen looked at the bars as a prisoner might regard the rack. Even though he knew he was making progress, it was slow and painful progress. The splinter had cut tendons in his knee that were slow to heal, and there was nerve damage that made it feel as if he was walking with somebody else’s leg. After half an hour he was exhausted, and when he fell on the floor, pain seared through his leg and right up his spine. More than once Jardine had to haul him up by the scruff of his pyjamas – but he never flagged, he never stopped his musical flow of encouraging banter. The last time he fell he thought he was at the end of his tether. Exhausted, he lay with his face on the floorboards, feeling tears starting to well up into his eyes. Jardine hauled him up with a cheery bellow.

‘Come along now, Mr Ryan. This is no time for lying about. Up you get!’

Stephen wanted to lash out at him, kick him with his good leg, slap that bloody smile off his face. But instead his hands found the bars, the blisters burning on his palms, and he held himself upright until the shooting pain became bearable. Jardine winked at him.

‘That’s a good lad!’

Jardine was also an incurable gossip and, like most people, he seemed to think Stephen’s muteness somehow affected his hearing as well. He often interrupted himself to offer, in a loud rasping voice, whatever little scraps of gossip were going around the hospital. Today, the news was bad.

‘You heard about wee Mr Mitchell, the other Irish gentleman? Och! Terrible, terrible! The poor wee man!’

Stephen knew Mitchell only by sight. He was a small, dark-haired young man with an unnaturally pale face and piercing eyes. While most of the men at the hospital were withdrawn to one degree or another, Mitchell was the worst he had seen. He took his meals alone and said hardly a word to anybody – not to the nurses, not to his room-mate. In the evenings he would take a book or a magazine and sit by himself in the corner of the common room. If anybody sat near him, he would get up and go to bed.

Most of what Stephen knew about him, he had overheard. He was, as Jardine said, the other Irish gentleman; he had been a second lieutenant in the Royal Irish Fusiliers. This struck a chord with Stephen, because it was the Royal Irish who led the attack on the left flank, and Mitchell had been with the first wave. He was only a replacement officer, rushed into the thick of it after barely a week in France and the phrase baptism of fire hardly did it justice. Every other officer in his company was killed within the first fifteen minutes. Two of them were close friends of Mitchell, and were blown apart in front of him by the same shell. In spite of this, he had kept his cool, gathering up the remnants of his shattered company and leading them to safety. He seemed to have passed the hardest test; he was mentioned in dispatches and made acting company commander – but when his battalion mustered to move into reserve he was nowhere to be found. They eventually discovered him in a communication trench, sawing the head off a German corpse with a bayonet, singing softly to himself as he worked.

‘He tried to kill hiself,’ Jardine whispered, tears in his voice. ‘Poor lad was near dead when they found him. Hanged himself with a pillowcase. Och, I don’t know what they’re going to do with him, the poor wee man.’

Jardine tried to lead him to the end of the bars, but Stephen stiffened, pushing him away.
Christ!
It was this place. He felt the walls pressing in on him, cold nausea, and tremors ravaging his body.
Christ Almighty!
Blackness dimmed the edge of his vision and he lost his grip on the bars, feeling shards of pain piercing his knee. Jardine held him and gently dragged him back to the wheelchair, but it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter. He sat there, racked by sobs, shivering. Jardine looked distraught.

‘There, there, son! It’ll be all right now, don’t you worry.’

At lunchtime, Nurse Winslow came to his room with his shaving kit and he wrote two lines on his notepad and showed it to her:

Want to wear my uniform.

Don’t want to go in wheelchair.

She pursed her lips doubtfully, ‘Hmm, we’ll just have to see about the second one. I suppose we can get you into your uniform, and then we’ll see if you can manage with a stick.’

Redfern came in and sat on the other bed, biting his nails vigorously as she helped Stephen on with his breeches and boots. He could have managed the rest himself, but here at last was something that she could do for him, and she fussed over him, brushing his tunic and straightening his tie. At last, when he was almost ready, he sat on the bed, buttoning up his tunic, and she sat on the bed beside him, buckling his Sam Browne.

‘I’ve never seen one of those before.’ Her fingers touched the little purple and white ribbon over his left breast pocket, ‘What is it?’

He picked up the notepad and wrote:

Military Cross

‘Oh goodness me!’ Her eyes widened, ‘Is that what it is? I really didn’t know. What a terrible ninny I am! You must be awfully brave!’

Stephen smiled, blushing deeply. Redfern stopped biting his nails for a moment to give him the thumbs up and a wink.

Hardcastle’s office was on the first floor. Usually Stephen was carried up in his wheelchair by a pair of porters, but this time he hauled himself up the banister, leaning heavily on Nurse Winslow, and wondering with each wincing step if he’d let his pride get the better of him. By the time they reached the landing his forehead was beaded with sweat and his hands were shaking. Nurse Winslow gave him a worried look as she pressed the stick into his hand and straightened his tunic.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ she asked, and he nodded vigorously. He put his arm around her narrow shoulders and they set off along the landing. When they reached the door, Stephen leaned against the wall and put all his weight on his good leg. Nurse Winslow knocked on the door and pushed it open for him. ‘Good luck!’ she whispered and he stumped hastily towards the desk under his own steam.

Rivers was standing at the window, gazing out over the lawns. Between them stood the desk, a big ornate affair with a green leather top, and Stephen fetched up against it with a loud clank of his stick, quickly shifting his weight to his free hand. He straightened as best he could when Rivers turned from the window and looked him up and down. ‘Captain Ryan, isn’t it? How’s the leg? Getting about on it, I see. Good, good. Please, take a seat. No need to flog it too hard, what?’

Stephen lowered himself carefully into the armchair and rested the stick against the front of the desk. While Rivers seated himself and opened his file, he looked around the office. He liked it in here; it was all wood panelling and bookcases, heavy with the odour of beeswax polish, and it reminded him of the study in Billy Standing’s house. The tall window was filled with treetops and blue sky and he could clearly read the spines in the bookcases; quality stuff – gold lettering in tooled leather. Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall,
Aristotle’s
Poetics,
Lucretius, Ovid, Homer. Familiar names, but from another life. Nevertheless, he could picture himself spending a pleasant afternoon in here with a glass of good whiskey, reading and savouring the silence and the slow ticking of the clock.

Rivers’s head was bowed, intent on the file, and Stephen studied him for a moment. He was short and chubby; thinning grey hair and a pencil moustache lending him a somewhat trim look in his captain’s uniform, with its bronze caduceus on his lapel. Shortsighted, too – the afternoon sun glowing white in the flat, vitreous discs of his spectacles as he finally lifted his head and took them off, his eyes flickering towards the little purple and white ribbon.

Not shirking,
Stephen thought and, as if he had read his mind, Rivers looked at him and smiled.

‘I see more of those than you might think in my line of work,’ he said, ‘and the other sort, too. There is no shortage of heroes in hospital.’ He had the air of a pleasant schoolmaster and Stephen realized he was paying compliments to put him at his ease. Maybe it was part of the new technique. He smiled back, but let his eye travel down to his file, lying open between them on the desk. The page was filled with short paragraphs of dense handwriting. Furthest away, he could see the last paragraph contained only two words, but he couldn’t read them. Barking Mad, perhaps?

Rivers leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers together. ‘I wonder, do you happen to know the clinical term for your condition, captain?’

He shook his head, though he was thinking of those two words at the bottom of the page.

‘It’s called aphasia,’ said Rivers. ‘Do you know what that means?’

Once again, he shook his head.
You won’t catch me out that easily.

‘It’s from the Greek. Literally, it means without speech. A curious state, don’t you think? After all, it is the power of speech that set us apart from the apes. So, it’s fair to say that losing one’s ability to speak is a fairly serious turn of events.’ Rivers got up and went to the window. ‘And, when we examine your case, captain, it is also quite curious. Aphasia is a rather common symptom of repressed trauma – but it is usually only seen in enlisted men. Officers almost always develop a stammer rather than being struck completely dumb, as you have. A remarkable division of class, don’t you think?’