All the Beauty of the Sun (20 page)

At last Edmund said, ‘I had another brother. Neville. He was killed. First of July, 1916.'

Paul closed his eyes. Robbie had been there that day, and Patrick, and Patrick's brother, and Matthew, and it had been Matthew's birthday: happy birthday. He wouldn't tell Edmund this; he didn't want to take the focus away from this Neville by mentioning so many others, all of his platoon in fact, most of his regiment. He didn't want to mention that he should have been there but wasn't. He was on a beach in Dorset, fucking a sweet-faced second lieutenant; a second lieutenant just like him, gassed like him, recovering like him; recovering in the sand dunes, hidden by the sharp sea grass, grass that could cut paper-thin cuts, salt-stinging wounds, nothing, worth it for the chance to be obliterated by sex for a little while. But it seemed they could hear the guns like distant thunder rumbling relentlessly, doggedly, across the sea, and George was frightened, as he was, and they'd clung together. George Atkins – that was the second lieutenant's name. George.
Christ
, he'd almost said,
I wish you hadn't told me your name, George. I do wish you'd kept your mouth shut on the introductions.

‘Paul?'

He opened his eyes; he had forgotten Edmund, and that was inexcusable. ‘I'm sorry, Edmund. I'm sorry for your loss.'

Edmund had stood up; he took the cigarette from his fingers and stubbed it out, putting the plate-cum-ashtray on the floor. Paul thought he would go on talking, lie down beside him perhaps, but go on talking about his brother, telling him everything. But his face had become like that of all the officers he had ever known; men who had snubbed him, men he couldn't be brave enough for, no matter what he did, because they saw what he was and nothing mattered compared with that.

Paul found himself gazing at him. Edmund's transformation was horrible but it was only what he expected, he shouldn't be stunned, he shouldn't feel as stunned as this by an expression of such commonplace disgust; besides, he deserved it: hadn't he been remembering George Atkins? Edmund must have seen into his thoughts; he must think him worse than disgusting to think of such a thing as he was sharing his grief so diffidently.

Ashamed, he made to get up; he would go, of course, he had to go now. Only Bobby mattered anyway; and yet he couldn't face his son, which was why he was here, on a near-stranger's bed that smelled of sex, the sheets stained with him, with them both; how could he see Bobby again when he was such a man, how could he face anyone ever again? He gasped for breath and covered his face with his hands. He thought it might be possible to die of shame as Edmund lay down and with wordless resignation pulled him into his arms.

Chapter Twenty-four

O
N THE TRAIN TO
Victoria, Patrick stared out of the window and thought that he would never return to England again; this was the end of it. He thought of the station guard at Canterbury, where he had changed trains, who had stared at him with such hostility, muttering
wog
as he walked past him. Pasty-faced little bastard.

Patrick stared at his reflection in the train window. Who would have thought he could look like anyone other than an Englishman? Who would have thought he could pass for a
wog
as he stood on the platform of a provincial station? Catholic, queer and now this; what a good joke. If Matthew had been well he would have shared the joke; Matt would have laughed. If Matthew had been well he wouldn't have been on that station; he would have been in Soho, where no doubt
wogs
like him were so common as to be unremarkable.

The train stopped and more passengers boarded carriages that were already full, so that they stood in the corridors, trying to keep a little distance from each other, bags strategically placed. Patrick had given up his seat two stops ago to a bone-thin girl and her baby. She had smiled at him gratefully, wearily, as her child grizzled and worried at the buttons on her cheap coat. They all looked so
ill
, Patrick thought, pale and exhausted; their hair greasy rat-tails that the women valiantly tried to style, a losing battle in the damp air. The sun had shone for them today, though; some were burnt red, sore-looking, some even a gentle shade of brown, not so dark as him, more like honey, sweet like honey, too: he had forgotten how unwashed his countrymen were.

How could Paul miss this country? He knew he did miss it, although he never told him so. And it wasn't just his family he missed – his father and his son. He actually missed England. He supposed exiles did miss home more than those who had made a choice to leave.

He was tired, he would like to sit down, lie down, close his eyes; he should have travelled first class, as Paul would have: officer class – Paul had always had a certain sense of
class
. ‘I'll call you sir if you like, you arrogant little get,' he had shouted at Paul once: a kind of truth that would surface during an argument.
Sir.
Sir, would you care to stop being a wanker and come home? Because I've come to fetch you, sir. Surprise.

Patrick leaned more heavily against the train window and closed his eyes; perhaps he could sleep on his feet, as he used to; he used to be able to sleep anywhere, in a shallow dip in the side of a trench, curled up in his greatcoat, ignoring the grunt and whisper of other men's voices, their snores and farts, ignoring the cold and discomfort, trying to at least, trying to think of something else: hot sausages and mashed potato, a clean, warm bed; trying not to think too much about the young lieutenant Paul Harris who could never look him in the eye but looked to his side, past him, away from him:
Thank you, sergeant, that will be all
.

Little Nancy, the men called Paul: tough little Nancy though, like he would kick your teeth down your throat if you looked at him sideways, raise his pistol and shoot you in the head if you didn't carry out his order at once: jump to, man, jump to. Jump to. Paul used to say that a lot, shout that a lot.
Get your bloody heads down! Keep your bloody heads down,
holding his watch, eyes fixed on its face, his other hand raised, waiting to fall when the time came, the signal to scramble up the ladders, Paul first, or sometimes last, making sure there were no stragglers. No one would dare to straggle when Paul was around. Lieutenant Harris aiming his pistol at you meant business.
Jump to, man, jump to.
The men respected him – they knew where they were with him, there was respect for his fairness, his willingness to lead, despite the dirty-queer jokes they made behind his back.

Curled up in a hollow in a trench, Patrick would try not to think about those jokes. It was difficult enough loving Paul as he did without all that filthy rubbish. Difficult! Easy, really, because Paul never looked at him, never spoke to him unless he had to, quick and to the point, looking to one side, away, as though he couldn't stand the sight of him; easy to love someone so secretly without the loved one's acknowledgement.

‘I actually wanted to throw myself on your body,' Paul had told him years later. He didn't believe him; it couldn't be true, they were both too exhausted, too bowed by responsibility, too scared too often, too cold and hungry and miserable to care about sex. At least he was. He only loved Paul, and it was a soft and sentimental feeling; he only wanted to protect him, to comfort him, keep him alive. Paul was the most beautiful man he had ever seen, and kind and tender when a man was sick to death: St Paul then, touchy little sod, beautiful and mad and foul-mouthed and up for it, always, always. Always up for a fight, for a fuck, always, always.
I actually wanted to throw myself on your body
. Perhaps it was true.

The train's motion was rocking him to sleep – he hadn't lost his old knack of sleeping anywhere, after all. He remembered sleeping on ferries in storms, too sick even to care about staying awake for fear of drowning. He had slept on trains that sped across Belgium and France, fast and straight as the French poplar-lined roads he had marched down on blistered feet. Marching, marching, either scorched by the sun or soaked by the rain, men to his side, men behind, men to the front; men staggering, out of step, look lively, keep up!
It's a long, long way
– fuck that, fuck the singing, just keep on, not thinking, not thinking, make the pain in your feet all that matters, the whole world, no past, no future, just a pair of feet bleeding into your boots.

Pat opened his eyes; he wouldn't think of this. He would think of the train in Italy, the wine, bread and tomatoes they had bought when the train stopped, passed to them through the windows from the vendors with their baskets, their quick smiling hands and faces coming at them through the windows.
Signori! Signori!
The smell of that bread, flat as a pebble, warm and delicious; the tomatoes that were so sweet, bursting pips on to his shirt, the wine so rough it made Paul splutter. And the train that was nothing like this one but rickety, more
wooden,
like a toy, rattling through the olive groves, slow as you liked. And Paul slept against him, his head on his shoulder, hardly able to talk to him.

Months passed before Paul could talk to him. Months of travelling from Durham gaol through Europe because it had seemed to him that they had to have this time as travellers, homeless, country-less; time for Paul to become used to him again away from any idea of being settled, pinned down to a life Patrick was so afraid he may not want.

From the prison gates they travelled through England, boarding a ferry to cross the sea to France, a country they couldn't escape fast enough. Then down more slowly through Switzerland, slower through Italy. And at the end of Italy, at the very toe of the Italian boot, they took another ferry to Sicily and it had seemed to Paul like the end of the world: he'd told him so on a Sicilian beach:
I have nothing left to live for.
You have me. Paul had nodded, pressing the heels of his hands hard into his eyes as if he could squeeze out the few tears he had left.
All right
, Paul said eventually, dropping his hands from his eyes to look at him, pitifully brave.
All right.

Finally he took Paul to the life he'd made in Tangiers, the life he'd first escaped to when Paul had decided he must at least try to be honourable towards his wife, try to be faithful, to be
ordinary
as he put it. Ordinary. Patrick had even imagined he'd understood. He had imagined Paul could live this ordinary life.

He had imagined this for a few weeks, long enough for him to leave England and travel to the place he had an idea of, a tolerant and cosmopolitan place where he could be ordinary in his way. Only then, after those few weeks, did he realise that Paul had merely been testing him and he should have stayed until Paul realised this, too. Paul would have realised that he could live with his wife and still have him, it would be fine, fine … He would have stopped Paul walking out one dark evening. He would have stopped him following that stranger; he would have pulled him back. He imagined his anger as he dragged Paul away from that place; but his anger would have been tempered by the knowledge that Paul had to go there: there could never be enough sex for Paul, there never had been enough, and there never would be enough.

A man edged past him in the train's corridor saying, ‘Sorry, mate, sorry.'

Patrick pressed himself against the window, trying to take up as little space as possible. He was a big man; there were times when other men looked at him fearfully, looked at him slyly, sizing him up:
big bastard – looking for trouble.
Well, he was in the right place for trouble: England with all its pettiness and snobbery and its
You have committed an offence that is debauched in the extreme and must be dealt with accordingly, properly and severely. Two years hard labour. Take him down.

He remembered standing up in the public gallery, shouting, ‘No! No – that's not right!' Not right, not just. ‘Do you call that justice?' Paul's father had shouted. Paul's father, George, who had wept, who wouldn't allow him to speak even when he tried to tell him that Paul would survive, that he was tough, the toughest little Nancy in the world.

And soon he would be with him again in the Queen's Hotel. There'd be two queens staying at the Queen's. He tried to smile at this joke.

The train slowed into Victoria Station. Patrick rubbed his hands across his face, he needed to shave; he was beginning to smell like them, the men pushing past him now to be the first off, his compatriots. Perhaps Paul and he would share a bath.

The train stopped and doors were flung open; the platform was crowded because this was Victoria, London, not some backwater. No one would see him here; no one would take any notice of him. All the same he hesitated before he stepped down.

Chapter Twenty-five

P
AUL HAD FALLEN ASLEEP
on his bed and Edmund covered him with a quilt as carefully as he could; he couldn't wake him, he was afraid that Paul might begin to cry again. He didn't want to think less of him for this crying; he truly didn't. He had asked him not to cry, but only as one might ask a child, knowing that it was just a way of saying something, a reassurance:
Don't cry, I'm here.
In all truth he had wanted to say don't cry because he was embarrassed; at least he was at first. But eventually he became used to this crying, he had stroked his head and kept silent, waiting for him to stop. He had no idea how long this would take because he had never seen a man cry before, not even his father when they received the telegram advising that Neville was missing in action.

‘They presume dead,' his father had said, and his voice was as calm as it ever was, except for the inflection on that
presume
, as though the word was one he had never come across before, as though he didn't know what
they
were talking about, sending out their incomprehensible nonsense. Edmund had been home from school for the weekend and he had wished desperately that he hadn't come home, that he hadn't witnessed the boy resting his bike against the railings outside their house, walking up the steps, adjusting his cap, his hesitation before pulling on the doorbell. All this was seen from his father's study, over his father's shoulder as his father had reprimanded him for his poor school report. He couldn't take his eyes off this boy in his cap and uniform, this harbinger of bad news, only bad news, how could he do such a job? And his father had sighed, ‘Edmund. What are you staring at now?' A moment later and the doorbell rang and Edmund had run out into the hall, racing the maid to the door.

His sisters had cried for Neville; his mother went to her room and didn't come out very much until the memorial service. He, his father and Rupert had not cried, at least not in front of anyone. For all he knew his father cried every night and as for Rupert, he only looked dazed when he came home on leave. ‘It should have been me, old son,' he'd told him. ‘Neville was the good one.'

So, no tears; dry your eyes, be strong, a man. Hold your head up, face the world, proudly, straight and direct. This is what he was taught at school; this is what his father taught him, when he wasn't telling him not to go tilting at windmills. Who would have thought his father had read Don Quixote? Who would have imagined he would allow him to go after the giants who were not giants? Perhaps he wouldn't have allowed it if Neville had lived; if Neville had lived his father might still have believed that everything was as it purported to be and that propriety truly mattered.

He sat down on the chair; he couldn't go on standing over Paul, couldn't lie down next to him, couldn't leave him, although he would like to go outside, to draw himself up straight, stretch and fill his lungs with air tainted only by traffic fumes and not the stink of cigarettes, of Paul's hot, salty, snotty grief.

When Paul had eventually stopped crying he hadn't known what to do, how to hold him, what to say; Paul had frightened him, but what was there to be frightened of? Paul. A stranger; more strange than ever, now, with his little child and, therefore, presumably, a wife he had loved. He presumed he'd loved her, perhaps he still did, or perhaps he never had; perhaps he had never married, just fucked a girl, fucked off when things became messy. He didn't know. He felt he could almost believe anything of a man who cried as Paul had cried this afternoon.

It occurred to him to wish he had never met him, to wish that he had stayed in bed with Ann the other evening. The
other evening
! He closed his eyes, remembering that restaurant, the taste of garlic and spaghetti, the sound of Day and Andrew laughing at the other end of the table, the sight of Paul looking up at him, so handsome, wry, the question in his eyes, the smile in his voice as he asked,
What conclusion have you reached?
He remembered how Paul had made something in him rise to the surface, an urgent, needy feeling he hadn't recognised until later.

Before Paul had begun to cry he had talked until he was almost hoarse and Paul had listened, or seemed to listen, smoking, smoking, one pristine cigarette lit from the disgusting remnants of the last. When he told him about Neville he seemed hardly to have heard him at all and this was excruciating, because it had taken a lot to tell him, a lot of working himself up. He had wanted him to ask about Neville, even the kind of inane questions he imagined Paul, a veteran, would ask: regiment, rank, length of service, comparing these details with his own record, contrasting their fortunes, being secretly relieved that Neville was the dead one and not him: he had been in a luckier place further up or down the line. But Paul had kept silent, behaving as if Neville didn't matter enough even for those questions in the scheme of things, and in the scheme of things he didn't, he understood that, he understood that Paul had seen it all, everything; he understood.

But understanding didn't stop him thinking that Barnes was right: Paul was a self-centred bastard, and pathetic in his self-pitying silence. Edmund had gazed at him, hardly able to believe such a person was there on his bed. And then Paul had started to cry. He didn't know if he'd felt repelled or not; still didn't, there was just a worm of a feeling he couldn't bear to examine too closely.

He stood up, unable to sit still. Paul's jacket had slipped from the end of the bed to the floor, and he picked it up. At once he was lifting it to his face, inhaling Paul's scent, feeling the weight of his wallet in the pocket bump against his body. He remembered snatching the wallet up from the table in his hotel room, going after Paul, afraid for him, needing to take care of him. He remembered the intimacy of another man's wallet in his hand as he ran down the hotel's stairs, and yet at the time he had thought nothing of this intimacy: it was just Paul's wallet and Paul was everything; nothing was too much a part of Paul that was not also a part of him.

He hung up the jacket, smoothing out a sleeve; he closed the window, the evening had become windy, the curtains were billowing into the room; Paul would be cold. Sitting back down, he watched over him as he slept.