Wake: A Novel (18 page)

Evelyn rests her eyes on it briefly. For a moment she wonders what it looks like. The plastic instead of flesh. How it must have been, getting used to that.

“And it beats selling magazines door-to-door or matches in the street.” He leans forward, his fist around his glass. “I saw a man the other day. He had a barrel organ, and there were photographs on the side of all his children.”

“How many?”

“I counted nine.”

She lets out a low whistle.

“And beside all of that, a list of his service record.”

“Whereabouts?”

“The Somme, and others. The duration, from what I could tell.”

“God.” She picks up a beer mat and tears it in half. “They make me furious. It’s as though we’re walking around a pit, all of us. One of those awful bomb craters in the middle of the city, only a million men are inside it and no one is looking. People are just walking past, whistling, pretending not to see.”

“I don’t know about not seeing,” he says quietly.

“Well, all right.” She looks up at him. “Perhaps not that. But I just boil with fury that they should be there in the first place—reduced to begging in the street. It’s the older ones that always get me most; they stand there, in their best suits, and their hats, and they look so
patient
and they all have such—such
dignity
and we all just…” She trails off, shaking her head.

“Then why do you work for them?”

“Excuse me?”

That same look of challenge is on his face. “The people that put them there. If it isn’t the pensions service, then who is it? Surely if there were a fairer distribution, then…”

“You’re confusing the messenger with the message.”

“Perhaps. But you could always do something else.”

“Perhaps I could.” She leans back, opens her hands. “What do you suggest?”

He shrugs. “There must be many office jobs out there.”

“You know as well as I do that’s not true. Especially for women. Not now.”

Are they arguing? She’s not sure, but it feels like it; her blood is up.

“How long have you been there, then?” His tone is softer, conciliatory.

“Two years.”

“And before that?”

“Before the office, or before the war?”

“Both. You can start at the beginning, if you like.”

She gives a brief laugh. “We’d be here all night.”

“Well”—he looks down at her empty glass and his half-full one—“we could certainly have another drink.”

“Yes.” She smiles. “I suppose we could.”

He drains his glass, gets up, and goes over to the bar. His cigarette is still smoldering gently in the ashtray. She leans over, takes a couple of last drags, and crushes it out. She watches as he comes back with the drinks. It is difficult to tell from watching him walk that he has a false leg; he moves surprisingly well.

“How long have you had the leg for?” she says as he nears the table, then immediately regrets it; but he doesn’t flinch.

“Three years.” He puts the drinks down. “Though it took a while before I had one that fit. But hang on.” He lifts a finger. “We’re not finished yet. You were going to tell me what you did before this.”

“Munitions.”

He raises an eyebrow—seems surprised. “And how was that? Hard?”

“Hard enough.” She wonders if he will comment on her finger now.

“And before that?”

“I…well.” She puts her finger and thumb from her good hand into her drink and squeezes the little slice of orange. It bobs on the surface, bumping against the ice when she lets it go.
Before that I fell in love.
“I moved up to London. Shared a flat. Did this and that. Thought I had plenty of time to decide, and then the war came and…” She looks up at him. He is watching her so intently that she has to look away. “By the time it was finished I was here.” She picks up the last half of her beer mat and rips it in half again. “Well,” she says. “Your turn now. You’ve been very clever so far at making me talk.”

“I’m not sure you’ve really told me very much at all.” He smiles. “But, all right, then. Perhaps I could pretend to smoke another of your cigarettes?”

She pushes them across the table toward him.

He lights one up, but this time keeps it in his hand. “I was in university when the war broke out. I’d gone there late. Somehow I thought it would be the thing to travel first.”

“Whereabouts?”

“India, Nepal, the Levant.”

“How was that?”

“Have you ever visited?”

She shakes her head.

“You should go.”

She looks up at him. Surprised.
Should I?

“I lived on not very much and I spent rather a lot of my time away from people and things. And—it was rather wonderful.”

“What did you do?”

“A lot of walking, mostly. Some climbing, too. Northern India and Nepal. I had a thought that I’d like to be attached to the colonial government, but when I was out there I decided that”—he smiles—“well, it was clear that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I thought I should do something constructive. So I took up my place at Cambridge and went to study classics.” He gives a short laugh. “God only knows why.”

“And was it? Constructive?”

He shakes his head. “I was already older than most of the other men. Only by three years or so, but I felt ancient. The only thing that I wanted was to get back out into the world again. So the minute war broke out I hassled for a commission. I wanted to get to Jerusalem. Thought there was a good chance a third front would open up there. And so I pushed for that.” He grimaces suddenly. “Does that sound terribly cynical?”

She shakes her head. “Did you get there?”

“No. Strings were pulled, but the wrong ones, and I ended up on the Western Front.”

“Unlucky.”

“Perhaps.”

“Where were you?”

“Ypres first. That’s where I got the gas. They sent me home for a few months after that. The leg happened in ’16.”

“And—how?” She doesn’t quite know how to ask.

He looks down at the cigarette in his hand, as though surprised to see it still there. He takes a swift, shallow drag. “I remember nothing at all of the shell. When I woke in the hospital and they told me the leg had gone I didn’t believe them at first. I could still feel it. I can still feel it now, sometimes. It’s—strange. And then”—a line appears in his brow—“all I could think of was those men. Standing at street corners with a crutch, and a tin. The fact of never climbing again. Perhaps not being able to walk. And I think I wanted to die.”

He says it matter-of-factly. She likes him the more for it.

“Then—that changed, too, and I felt…I’m not proud of it, but I felt relief.”

“Yes.” She leans forward.

“And then, when the relief had faded, I was overwhelmed with—”

“With guilt.”

He looks up at her.

“I’m sorry,” she says, drawing back, coloring. “Putting words into your mouth.”

“No.” He shakes his head. “You’re right.”

But it is as if some delicate membrane has broken, and sound floods her ears. The pub is busy, the air thick with smoke, men talking loudly at the tables on either side.

“I should be going,” says Robin, draining the last of his drink.

She has a fleeting vision of him, at home. Living alone? What is his home like? Suddenly she doesn’t want him to go. “Where do you live?” she says.

He looks surprised. “Hampstead,” he says with a smile. “The cheaper bit. Further from the Heath.”

She nods, unable to think of anything more to say.

They pull on their coats. He stands back to let her pass, and they walk side by side toward the door. Night has fallen properly now on the street outside. The air carries the scent of leaves and evening fires.

“Well,” he says, smiling and putting on his hat. “Thank you for the drink.”

“It was a pleasure.” As she buttons her coat to her chin, she feels again that same hollow, racing panic that she had in the office. Is it a terror of being alone? How did it begin—this fear? It is her brother’s fault, she thinks; it is the things he said this afternoon. “Robin?”

“Yes?” He turns to her.

“That—Dixie band that you mentioned. Thursday, wasn’t it? Are you still going to hear them play?” She can’t believe she’s saying it. She can’t believe the words are actually coming out of her mouth. “Or have you—found someone to go with you yet?”

“Yes, I am.” He looks surprised, pleased. “And no. I haven’t, no.”

“Well, would you—I wonder? Perhaps I could come, after all?”

Ada weaves in and out through the scrubby stand of plane trees in the park. She skirts the cricket pitch, the grass roped off for the winter now, and when she reaches the crumbling brick of the far north wall, turns around and makes her way back again, in and out, in and out, her thoughts thrumming with her footsteps.

Ivy is selfish,
selfish.
There with her pieces of paper, with her maps of graveyards. These are the things of riches; Ivy is rich. It may well cost pounds to visit France, but if she knew that there was a patch of land that held the body of her son, she wouldn’t complain about
money
. She would save everything she had until she could go and visit it. Sit by that piece of grass. Put her hands to it.

It is the lack of a body.

If she had had that, at least.

When her father died, Ada was eight. She stood at the entrance to the downstairs room into which they’d moved him, staring in at where he lay on his back. He was a large man but looked small on the table, as though death had taken more than his life from him. Her mother asked Ada to boil a pail of water, fetch a washcloth, and bring it to the room. “You can go now,” she said, touching her gently on the top of her head and closing the door. But Ada stayed and listened, her ear pressed up against the wood. She could hear the dipping of the cloth in water, the small sounds of washing, and her mother, sobbing quietly. When she came back out, her mother’s face was calm, as though it, too, had been washed clean. Even then, Ada could see there was sense in that.

Not like this, though; not this…
absence
. No body and no grave.

A gust threatens to take her hat, and she clamps it down onto her head, as damp, sticky leaves whirl and eddy in the air. There are odd figures scattered in the dusk: dog walkers, people coming home from work. Jack may be among them. She turns back, heading for the north end of the grass where there are only the trees.

If she had had Michael’s body at home, then she would have washed it. However injured, however broken, she would have washed him, gently, as she did for him when he was a baby, when he was a boy. And if not that—if that last rite is to be denied to her, and to all of them, all the mothers, wives, sisters, lovers—then to know where the body lies in the ground at least.

It is the least that they are due.

The wind whips her hair across her face.

Why did Ivy’s daughters not get her a ticket to France instead of those stupid, ill-fitting teeth? Why will they not go with her to the burial on Thursday, if that is what she wants? Those silly, preening girls.

She is being unfair. She knows she is. She knows she should leave it. That Ivy is right. That Jack is right, that she should stop picking, stop scratching at this wound that she cannot let heal. But he will not let her. Her son will not let her. It is as though he is pulling at her, tugging at her sleeve, as he used to when he was a little boy.

She comes to a stop, the only figure on this patch of grass, where the trees are purple against the sky. The first lights are coming on in the houses alongside the park. Shapes are moving at the windows, the women at work in their kitchens, preparing the evening meal for their families, for their children, for their men. It is odd, standing here, looking from the outside, at the rhythms and routines of life. It seems suddenly so clear. Some contract has been broken. Something has been ruptured. How have they all agreed to carry on?

She should go inside. She should make some food for their dinner, or there will be nothing to eat for the second night in a row. But at the thought of it, of her and Jack facing each other, silent across the kitchen table, she could scream.

Why doesn’t one of them do something about it? Just stand up and shout into the silence, “That’s it! I’m not doing it anymore!” Say the unsayable, release the charges, let the explosions blast it all away.

But then what? Where would she go? Nowhere. There is nowhere else to go at all.

She makes her way out of the darkened park, turning left down her road, feeling life claim her with each step. In the kitchen she wipes her face with her sleeve, takes a couple of dirty potatoes from the pantry and begins scrubbing them, hard. There’s a knock at the front door. She ignores it. Whoever it is knocks again, louder this time, and she is forced to give up and go out into the hall.

It is Ivy, wind-blustered, standing on the step. “Can I come in?”

“Why?”

“I’m sorry, Ada.”

“All right. You don’t need to come in to tell me that.” She goes to close the door.

Ivy puts a hand out to stop her. “She lived up in Walthamstow. An ordinary house. Ordinary street. Can I come in, Ada? Please?”

They go into the kitchen. Ada crosses her arms over her chest.

“Go on, then. What did she do? How did she do it?”

“I’m not sure.” Ivy hovers, nervous. “She—just—asked me to take something along: a photograph of Joe and then…something that had meant something to him. I didn’t know what to take. I scratched about for ages trying to think. In the end I took an old bit of cloth he’d had when he was little. He used to drag it around with him for years.”

“I remember that.”

“You remember?” Ivy’s face softens. “If I ever washed it he would cry and cry. I didn’t have the heart to take it off him. Anyway, I’d kept a bit of it all this time. Had it in the Bible for years.” She gives a rueful laugh. “Never took it down to read it, so that was all right. I felt a bit daft, I can tell you, sitting there in her parlor, bringing it out of the bag.”

“And what did she do with it?”

“I think she just—sat with it there in her hands. Held it for a bit. And then…she started to say things.”