Waterland (29 page)

(And of course history confirms that this isn’t the first time that the Atkinsons, for reasons that may or may not bear scrutiny, have established an asylum …)

Thus the good people, having affirmed their position and satisfied themselves on two counts, rubbed their hands and got on with sane and wholesome pursuits, such as the improvement of land drainage. The local systems had fallen into grave disrepair, not only through the deprivations of the war, but through the undeniable neglect (we must mention him again) of Ernest Atkinson, who, whilst his brewery was no more, his water transport company sold up and his agricultural interests whittled away, still held a nominal position of power on the Leem Drainage and Navigation Board.

And in a very short time they did indeed forget. They forgot about Ernest and Helen. They forgot about the Atkinsons who for a hundred years or more had ruled over their fortunes. They forgot about Coronation Ale (how easy it is to forget the awkward things). They forgot about the old world of breweries and malt barges and civic receptions – how much had been eclipsed, and so quickly, by those four dark years. Then they forgot about the war too, because that was the main point of their forgetfulness and the most awkward thing of all.

But Ernest and Helen couldn’t forget – not with that Home for the shell-shocked just over their back fence. And the inmates of the Home certainly couldn’t forget – because that’s why they were there. Five, ten years later – ten years after the end of the war, which, of course, was to end all wars, and much talk of things of the past being things of the past – some of them are still there. And even twenty-five years later, when Henry Crick tunes in religiously to his evening bulletin and bombers set the night sky rumbling, and young Tom Crick takes a keen interest in a certain bottle, there’s still a small core there – but who remembers them? – still in the throes of the old war, still trying to forget …

But let’s not jump ahead. One way or the other at Kessling, in the years following the Great War, there are quite a few who can’t forget what a mad place the world is.

Henry Crick forgets. He says: I remember nothing. But that’s just a trick of the brain. That’s like saying: I don’t care to remember, and I don’t want to talk about it. Yet it’s perfectly natural that Henry Crick wants to forget, it’s a perfectly good sign that he thinks he’s forgotten, because that’s how we get over things, by forgetting. So in June, 1921 (it wasn’t a quick process), when Henry Crick starts to say in a perfectly calm and collected voice, ‘I remember
nothing’, the doctors in London and elsewhere, who for some three years now have been wondering quite what to do with Henry Crick, decide it’s time he can go home. Yes, he’s recovered pretty well, and it’s time, now he’s got rid of all those nasty memories, that he revived some nice ones. So they deliver him back to Hockwell. Here’s the old village, remember? Here’s the river, and the bridge, and the railway station. And here’s the old home and your old Mum and Dad – they’ve aged a bit, but remember them? (But where’s brother George?) Yes, we think you’ll be all right now. Yes, it’s been a long trip, but you’re back now at last where you came from.

But that’s just where they’re wrong. Because it doesn’t take much or long – just a few walks by himself along the river-bank and around the fields, just a few weeks of autumn rain filling the dykes and turning the ground quaggy – and Henry Crick’s crying out again for treatment. Because this flat, bare, washed-out Fenland, which ought to be the perfect home of oblivion, the perfect place for getting used to forgetting, has quite the opposite effect on our limping veteran. And maybe that’s just the point: it’s oblivion he’d like to forget, it’s that sense of the dizzy void he can’t get away from. He could do without this feeling of nothing.

Henry Crick comes home from a long walk one October afternoon, a mass of twitches, trembles, shakes and jitters, unable to speak a sensible word. They pack him off to that place at Kessling, where it looks as though he might be staying a long while. For Mr and Mrs Edward Crick it’s all too much. One after the other – like two of those dazed, doomed Tommies advancing blindly into the same machine-gun skittle-alley – they topple into their graves. For poor Henry things couldn’t be worse. He’s back where he came from all right – in the old, old mud. But he’s also at Kessling Hall, and there— But we know what happened to him there …

In February, 1919, shortly before her twenty-third birthday, Helen Atkinson becomes a trainee auxiliary nurse (one of fourteen at the Kessling Home). Is this her choice – or her father’s wish? Or just the product of an inexorable logic? It’s his hospital, after all; and she’s his daughter. Every day, and sometimes at night too, lighting her way with a torch, she leaves the Lodge (which is no longer the Lodge proper, because the hospital has its own separate entrance, off the Kessling-Apton road) and, unlike the other nurses who either live-in or cycle from nearby lodgings, walks up the old Atkinson driveway to the scene of her duties. (This is something that Henry Crick won’t puzzle out – when he recovers the wherewithal to puzzle things out – why she always comes and goes
that
way.) In her nurse’s wimple and nurse’s cloak, she bids goodbye to her wifeless father (a man of forty-four, though to look at him you’d add on at least another ten years) and disappears amongst the ranks of trees.

And Ernest Atkinson is content to watch her go. Because Ernest Atkinson, though his mind may be touched, is not – unlike a certain ancestor of his – a jealous, a possessive man. Quite, quite the opposite. He pictures his daughter moving amongst those shattered creatures at the hospital, like some lady of the lamp. He imagines her effecting miracle cures, not by her nursely arts, but by the sheer magic of her beautiful presence. He sees, stepping out of the hospital portals, a redeemed race of men.

That’s how Ernest sees it. You don’t believe it? It’s in that journal.

And – believe it or not – miracles happen: with Henry Crick.

Ah yes, put it down, if you like, to improved methods of therapy, the know-how of doctors, or simply the passage of time, but Henry Crick will tell you it was none other than that angel in a nurse’s uniform, that white-aproned goddess. Her and her alone.

Henry Crick has discovered love. All through that
spring of 1922 (it’s 1922 – is that possible? Not 1917?) he is indeed in paradise. And it’s no dream. Because she loves him too. She says so. And it’s no airy and imaginary thing, this love. It gets more palpable, more passionate, the more Henry Crick recovers. Having missed, because of the intrusion on his time – not to say his sanity – of the affairs of the wide world, a good many of his youthful, amorous years, Henry Crick has learnt little about love, is an inexperienced lover. But Helen Atkinson teaches him. She is an able teacher (now where has she gained her knowledge?). And heals him.

Does Helen Atkinson, too, then, believe in miracles? No, but she believes in stories. She believes that they’re a way of bearing what won’t go away, a way of making sense of madness. Inside the nurse there lurks the mother, and in three years at the Kessling Home for Neurasthenics Helen has come to regard these poor, deranged inmates as children. Like frightened children, what they most want is to be told stories. And out of this discovery she evolves a precept: No, don’t forget. Don’t erase it. You can’t erase it. But make it into a story. Just a story. Yes, everything’s crazy. What’s real? All a story. Only a story …

So Henry Crick, who is learning about love, learns, also, to tell those stories of old Flanders which he will tell again, more embellished, more refined, by the lockside, by the fireside and during the nocturnal lowering and raising of eel-traps, and which will lead on to other stories, till the pain, save for sporadic twinges in the knee, is almost gone. (Though other pains …) He retrieves that old knack of his Crick ancestors which his little trip to the trenches nearly put paid to for good and all. He even saves up, for some future time, though perhaps without knowing it, the story of this same extraordinary adventure he is now undergoing, this encounter with a nurse (for how can you explain a miracle except by saying: this is how it was?). Though he won’t do that,
he won’t tell that story, till much, much later, till he’s a dying man, and another woman is nursing him …

They not only become lovers, this strangely matched pair, they tell each other stories.

And what story does Henry hear issuing from the lips of Helen Atkinson?

Once upon a time there was a father who fell in love with his daughter (now let’s be clear, we’re not just talking about ordinary paternal affection). And the father – who’d lost his wife many years before – and the daughter lived alone in a former lodge on the edge of the grounds of a hospital. Hemmed in by tall trees and standing all by itself, this lodge was like a house in a fairy-tale – a gingerbread house, a woodcutter’s cottage; but in fact the father had once been a rich and influential man – amongst other things he owned a brewery – though, one way or another, he’d fallen on bad times; and once he’d lived in the grand building which was now a hospital. Far away, across the sea, there’d been a great war and the hospital was full of soldiers, some of them wounded in their bodies but all of them wounded in the mind. And this was true even though the war had ended three years before.

Before it began, the father had spoken out against the war, which everyone felt was coming like a great adventure. He told the people that when it came it would be a terrible, a disastrous thing. But the people scoffed and scorned the father. On top of this, one night, his brewery burnt down. So he went to live, like a banished man, with his daughter in the big house in the country which would one day be a hospital.

Then the war began and became all the things the father said it would be, and the father grew sick at heart, with only his daughter to comfort him. Sometimes, in that lonely house, where, to while away the heavy hours, they told each other stories and dabbled still in beer-brewing,
he would tell his daughter that the world was dying; it would never be the same again. All its youth and bloom were being sucked away. But even as he said these things he could not deny (a man who was neither young nor old but ageing rapidly) that his daughter was blooming before his eyes. And even as he said these things he must have already fallen in love with his daughter. And the daughter must have known it. Because one night they stopped telling stories and fell into each other’s arms, the way a father and a daughter shouldn’t.

Now love, which always finds a way, has its stages. It begins with adoration. Then adoration turns to desire, and desire to cleaving, and cleaving to union. And all these stages it is possible, if it is not natural, for a father and daughter to undergo together. To all these stages the daughter assented, because indeed she adored her poor father and pitied his sorrows, and having been his close and only companion since she was a child, how should she know what was natural and what wasn’t? But as for that other stage which follows union, as for the bearing of love’s fruits (for this was the father’s wish – he wanted a child, a very special sort of child), she baulked and trembled at this.

So in order to divert her father’s designs, she sowed in his mind the plan of turning their country home, which was far too large, in any case, for just the two of them, into a hospital for victims of the war. Wasn’t that a better plan? To rescue all those poor, sad cases, all of whom would be in a sense their wards, their children. They could move somewhere near, into the Lodge perhaps (no, no, she would never leave him). And she herself would become a nurse.

But this hospital, into which, indeed, the father put reawakened energies, imagining great things (even miracles), only served to remind them how evil lingers and how things of the past aren’t things of the past. For though the great war ended, the broken-minded soldiers
still came and remained. For them life had stopped, though they must go on living. It only deepened the father’s sorrows, this home for hopelessness. And now he wanted a child more than ever. And not just a child either. Because he began to speak of this child as the Saviour of the World. For perhaps, like those poor soldier boys, his mind had become wounded too.

The daughter reasoned with the father. How would they bring up this child – he a father, and she his daughter?

Because, working each day at the hospital, she had got used to speaking reasonably about madness, as if it were the normal thing. Coming and going, through the trees, between the lodge and the hospital, she would ask herself, which is the madder place? Who is madder, the crazy soldiers, or the man in the gingerbread house? And sometimes on these journeys to and fro she would stop, while an acorn dropped, a woodpecker drilled, a breeze swung through the beech trees, and say to herself: these are the only sane interludes of my life – if this is what sanity is. She would think: the truth of it is, I’m trapped. My life’s stopped too. Because when fathers love daughters and daughters love fathers it’s like tying up into a knot the thread that runs into the future, it’s like a stream wanting to flow backwards.