Dark Angel (63 page)

“A story?”

“An episode. I found it sad—bitter, perhaps. He didn’t speak bitterly, though. He seemed to think of it as a love story. He avoided that word all the way through, and then, when he had finished, he looked down at his hands. He had very beautiful hands. He said, ‘You see, I loved my wife.’”

There was a silence. Wexton turned away. “Well, yes,” he said. “I always imagined he did. Steenie used to say he was cold. I never thought that—the opposite, in fact. Whenever I met them, here at Winterscombe … He used to watch Constance, you know, all the time. And when he watched her, his whole face changed. It was like seeing a furnace door swing back. You couldn’t look at it. It burned your face. All that strength of feeling, held in check.” He paused. “A peep into the inferno, that marriage, I always thought. People manufacture their own hells. Did Constance love him, do you think?”

“She claims not to. And he goes to great lengths to deny he loves her—or so she says. You see? Just another thing I don’t understand.”

“What exactly?”

“Love. These letters, these journals, all these papers—they’re all so filled with love. The more I see the word, the more I distrust it. Everyone uses it. They all hijack it. They all mean something different by it. Which of them is right? Steenie? Gwen? Constance? Jane? Or you, Wexton—you’re here too. You know that.”

“Yes, I know that.” Wexton’s face had become puzzled. He patted at his pockets in an absent-minded way, frowned at the fire.

“
Jane?
Why do you call her that?”

“Because that’s what happened to me, Wexton.” I turned away. “That’s what I mean. I think of her in that way because I’ve read too much Constance. I know that.”

“Your own mother?”

“Yes.” I turned around angrily. “I was only eight when she died, Wexton—”

“Even so. You remember her, surely, as she was?”

“I don’t
know
anymore, Wexton. Sometimes, when I read her diaries, I think I do. Then I go back to Constance’s journals, and she slips away. She’s Jane again. The heiress. The nurse. A kind heart. No imagination. A life of good works.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

Wexton, I could see, was very distressed. He began to walk up and down the room in an angry way. He stopped and banged his hand down upon the desk.

“It’s not
right.
That happens—to people like your mother. The good get wiped out. The bad get the best dialogue, the best plot lines. While your godmother was dancing about in London drawing rooms, there was a
war
on. I told you that. I told you to look at the war. Your mother was there. She was in the thick of it. She was a nurse. She
did
things. What did Constance ever do? Mess about with men. Set about snaring a rich husband—”

“Wexton—”

“Okay, okay. But it’s wrong. You shouldn’t let Constance get away with it. She’s hogging the spotlight. But then that’s not surprising. She always did.”

I was chastened by this, because I knew Wexton was right. The outburst was fierce, from a man who was rarely immoderate except on the subject of literature. I listened, and I hope I learned.

Later that day I did return to my mother’s journals; I followed her to the war. I followed her to France. Over the next two days, when I read, I read my mother’s story exclusively. I listened to that quieter, very different voice. It was then, I think, that she began to come back to me for the first time. I saw her again as the woman I remembered. She emerged, to continue Wexton’s metaphor, from the wings; there she was, in the lights.

Wexton knew, I think, that there had been a change in me, and that an unfair bias was in the process of being corrected. He apologized for his outburst, even claimed a bias of his own: Constance was not as trivial, and certainly not as one-dimensional, as he had claimed. “I overstated,” he said.

One afternoon, returning from a walk by the lake, Wexton settled himself by the fire. We drank tea. Dusk fell. Wexton smoked some of Steenie’s Russian cigarettes. We sat there in a companionable silence for a while, the air aromatic, the room comfortable, the house at rest. It was that afternoon that Wexton told me about the war, and my mother, as he recalled them.

“You know,” he said, settling back in his chair, clasping his hands, stretching out his long legs, “your mother went out to France a month or so after I did. She was prickly, defensive, difficult to know at first. We remet in a town called Saint-Hilaire. It’s still there. I revisited it once, after the war. Does she write about that?”

“Your meeting? Yes, she does.”

“I remember it very well. It was the worst winter of that war. Maybe this is infectious—for once, I feel like talking about the past. About the war. Your mother too. Listen. It was like this …”

Just outside Saint-Hilaire there was a narrow headland. It jutted out into the Channel. It was known locally as the Pointe Sublime.

It was not sublime in winter. It was cold. The wind cut. The view across the Channel was obscured by cloud. Jane ignored this. She turned up the collar of her coat and bent her head. She trudged along the narrow path above the dunes. She intended to reach the end of the headland, then walk back again.

Late afternoon; it was beginning to drizzle. The air was brackish; she could taste salt on her lips. When she reached the end of the headland, she looked back. She could see the cafés of Saint-Hilaire—their lights were being switched on. In one of the cafés an accordion was playing.

Next to the cafés was the larger bulk of the hospitals. There were five of them, and they had once been hotels. In that one—the third from the left—Jane now worked. She had been on duty there all night and all morning. There, on the first floor. She looked at the ranks of windows. They lit up, one by one. Her ward. It had once been the hotel ballroom.

The waters of the Channel were slick, oily. She watched them heave. To right and left the dunes were wired. She traced their lines: a zigzag of barbs. The beach below was more heavily fortified.

Impassable. She moved to one side, into the lee of the dunes. She wished she had worn a hat. The wind caught her smooth copper hair and blew it about. It whipped her face. Perhaps the wind veered, for she could no longer hear the accordion. She could hear the guns.

Heavy artillery, more than thirty kilometers away, a breathy reverberation.

Where was the war? Over there—always over there, where the guns boomed. And where was Jane? Always, she had decided, on the periphery; she was close, but she was not close enough.

She knew where the war was, in theory. If she had had a map, she could have traced it. The war was a snake, six hundred miles long. Its head was in Belgium, and the tip of its tail touched the border with Switzerland. The snake’s spine meandered. It was patterned with trenches. It was a somnolent snake, and sometimes it shifted its position, making a new curve here, a new loop there. It accommodated advances and retreats; its position never altered greatly. It was well fed, this snake; after all, it ingested a daily diet of men.

There was the war, in theory. She could trace it on a map. She had traced it on a map. She did not believe her finger when it traced; she believed something more frightening. She believed the war was everywhere, and nowhere. She believed she had glimpsed this war long before it was ever declared, and would continue to see it long after any armistice. She believed the war was both an exterior and an interior thing. She believed it could transmute. She had never seen cells through a microscope, she had never witnessed their capacity to divide and subdivide, but if she had she might have said, “Yes, war is like that.”

This made her afraid. What made her especially afraid was that she believed the war was inside herself. It had got in. She had let it in. It was there, and she might never get rid of it.

This belief seemed to Jane unreasonable, even mad. It was not a balanced way to think, and Jane told herself she thought in that way because she was tired. Because she ate poorly. Because her patients died, and their wounds were terrible. This happened. It was something all nurses must guard against. She must guard against it, too, for she had to be well enough to continue to nurse. That was it. Fix upon something simple. To continue.

That night, Boy would be passing through Saint-Hilaire on his way back to England. The letter from Boy, requesting a meeting (their first since she had broken their engagement), was in her pocket. Standing in the lee of the dunes, Jane took it out and read it again. The rain spotted the pages and blurred the ink. The wind teased the pages and tried to twist them out of her hand. It was not a communicative letter, in any case. It was, as she had come to think of Boy, opaque. It resisted understanding. It began, as Boy’s letters always had, “My dearest Jane.” It ended, equally predictably, “Yours most affectionately, Boy.”

Jane folded the letter back in her pocket. She would keep the appointment, although she did not want to. She turned to go back, and it was as she turned, glancing to her left, that she saw she was not alone, as she had thought. Not twenty feet away from her was a young man.

He was sitting in a shallow depression, on a shelf of sand and marram grass. He looked windswept. His hair stood up in curious quills and peaks. He wore around his shoulders an assortment of scarves, sweaters, and rumpled jackets. They were surmounted by a greatcoat, and gave him a hunched look. He was frowning. On his knees was a large notebook.

Whatever he wrote there seemed unsatisfactory. One minute he would write; then he would cross out. He would frown at the notebook, then at the sea, as if he blamed it in some way. Wexton. The American poet. Steenie’s friend from London. She had met him outside the hospital in his ambulance the previous day. She did not want to meet him again today.

Jane edged away from the dune. He appeared not to have seen her. She had nothing against Wexton—who, whenever she had encountered him, seemed pleasant—but she preferred to be alone. She took a furtive step toward the path.

“Hello!” Wexton shouted. He shouted in a very loud voice, so it was impossible to pretend not to hear him. Jane stopped.

“Hello.” He made an encouraging gesture. “Come and join me. Are you hungry? Would you like a sandwich?”

“I was about to walk back. I ought to go back.”

Jane approached the square of mackintosh cape on which Wexton sat. She looked at him but kept her body turned to the path. Poised for flight.

“Me too,” Wexton said cheerfully. He patted the cape. “Sit down for a minute. I’ll walk back with you if that’s okay. Have some of this sandwich first. The sea air always makes me hungry. Poems too. Here—it’s cheese. French cheese, but it’s not bad once you’re used to it.”

He held out to her a squashed baton of bread, and brushed away the sand that clung to it. Jane took the sandwich and bit into it. Cheese, and mustard, and what might have been pickles of some kind—gherkins, perhaps. Jane did not usually like gherkins, but the sandwich was excellent.

“Have some coffee.” Wexton was unscrewing a flask. “I put a bit of brandy in it. Just a drop. It’s cheap brandy, but it perks it up a bit.”

He handed her the lid of the flask, which was fashioned into a cup. Jane took a sip.

“Good?” Wexton was looking at her anxiously.

“Very good.”

“Caffeine and brandy. It’s unbeatable. Whisky’s not bad either, but I can’t get that.”

This lack seemed to worry him, for he frowned, then turned back to stare at the sea. He seemed to feel no further need for conversation. Once or twice, making odd huffing and puffing noises, he wrote a few words in his notebook, looked back at the sea, then crossed them out.

Jane had always imagined that writing poetry must be a secretive and exalted process. She felt flattered that she should sit here and Wexton should continue to write. She took several more sips of the coffee. She stole a look at the notebook. She made out a list of words, most of them illegible. She began to feel relaxed—almost tranquil. The sandwich was good. The coffee was good. Wexton wrote a poem. He made no demands on her.

After they had sat in silence for perhaps ten minutes, she clasped her hands together in her lap. She cleared her throat.

“What is the poem about?”

To her relief, Wexton seemed unoffended. He sucked on the stub of his pencil. He poked his pouchy cheeks with the tip of it. Wexton, who was then twenty-five, appeared to Jane much older. He had been born looking forty-five, he used to say to me, and remained that way whether he was twenty or sixty. Jane considered his heavy cheeks, his furrowed brow; she thought he was as large and as ruffled as a bear, but that he also had the look of a hamster.

“It’s about Steenie and me.” He did not sound too certain. “I think. And the war, I guess.”

He nibbled the pencil, spat out a splinter, and turned to look at Jane.

“I came to France to find the war, you see. And now I’m here, I discover it’s someplace else. It’s like trying to stand on the tip of a rainbow. I expect you find the same. Yes?”

He made this remark in a simple, direct, almost apologetic way. The inquiry was cautiously optimistic. He sounded like a man hoping to retrieve a suitcase from lost-luggage.

“Over there,” he went on before Jane could reply, pointing in the direction of the boom of guns. “I guess the war is over there. But you know, they sent me up to the front line last week, and even then …” He shrugged. “You know what I think? I think it’s waiting. It’ll wait a good long time, years maybe, until we’re all back home—someplace else anyway. Then up it will pop. A jack-in-the-box. Here I am. This is the war. Remember me?” He looked back at Jane. “I’m not looking forward to that. Are you?”

“No. I’m not.”

Jane was drawing in the sand with her finger. She looked down. She saw she had written the letters of Acland’s name. She scrabbled them out, quickly.

“But you do know what I mean? I hope you do. I hope someone does. After all, it could just be me. I wonder about that.” He turned upon her a beseeching gaze. Jane drank the last of the coffee. The wind blew her hair in her eyes, then made it stand up in points, a jagged copper crown.