Dark Angel (66 page)

War was making Boy into a handsome man—there was an irony. Yet the anxiety in his eyes denied the new authority in his features. Boy looked like an actor who had forgotten his lines.

There was something Boy intended to say. First, though, it seemed he had to wind himself up. When he had finished the wine, he seemed to decide he was wound: levers and hairsprings. Boy cleared his throat. He shook his head to dislodge the imaginary water. He gazed at the condensation upon the window, through which Wexton’s drawings of men and boats were still visible. He turned his head a little to the left and addressed a potted palm. He had come here, he said, to discuss Constance.

He began in a general way. He became fluent, as if this part of his performance had been well rehearsed. He explained at some length that most people (he included Jane) did not understand Constance, whereas he did. He said that what one had to remember was that Constance was still a child; she was vulnerable.

Jane did not agree. She considered Constance’s engagement a disgraceful betrayal of Maud. This, she did not say; Boy gave her no chance. He was clearly not interested in Jane’s opinion. The clockwork was in motion; once begun, Boy seemed unable to stop.

“This marriage of Constance’s,” he said, very distinctly, “this marriage must be stopped.” There was then a great deal more. Boy said his father’s behavior was inexplicable—permission to marry should have been refused. He said he found Maud’s behavior inexplicable, also Stern’s, Freddie’s, Steenie’s—even his mother’s. Everyone’s behavior was inexplicable, it seemed, except that of Constance. Constance’s behavior Boy could explain. It was, he told the potted palm, a cry for help.

At this point in his speech Boy seemed to have reached some obstacle. He began to stammer, and the stammer was far worse than it had ever been. Boy’s tongue stuck on the letter
C.
This caused him some anguish; it made it very difficult to pronounce Constance’s name.

Having told the potted palm that Constance wanted help, Boy turned his anxious eyes back to Jane. He then explained the last thing, the thing that had brought him here that night, before he returned to England. Although he and Jane were no longer engaged, he had felt it correct that she should be the first to know his intentions. He intended to return to England. There, he would stop this marriage. That was the first thing. Then he would propose marriage to Constance himself.

“She must have been expecting it, you see.” Boy leaned across the table. “She must have expected it as soon as I ended the engagement to you. When I did not ask, she did this. Do you understand?” He spread his hands and gave Jane a smile of great sweetness. “A cry for help. She knows that I love her, of course.”

Jane began on this story to Wexton as they approached the railway station, where they would meet a train bearing the wounded from the field hospitals. The train was late, and they stood on the cold, black platform, side by side, shivering.

The story upset her. She found it difficult to recount in a coherent way, and kept rushing back and forth between the scene in the café and other scenes in the past. Gaps had opened up in a narrative Jane had presumed seamless, and these gaps worried her. She made little darts and rushes at them. She saw that she had never understood Boy, whom she had always thought so simple and straightforward. There was a Boy in this story she did not know. Suddenly the past jostled with questions. She blamed herself. She had been blind. Obsessed with her own feelings for Acland, it had never occurred to her that Boy, too, might have a secret life.

She began to pace up and down the icy platform. She waved her mittened hands in the air.

“Blind, blind,
blind
,” she cried—so the Lancashire nurses gave her a curious look. “I should have seen. I hate myself.”

Wexton listened. He did not comment. There was a stanza of a poem in his mind. As Jane spoke, it began to take shape. He stood still, hunched in his scarves and jackets and coats. He held on to the poles and rolled canvas of his stretcher. The canvas was wet; a thin crust of ice was forming on its surface. He felt he had a crust of ice on his upper lip as well.

He stared downwind, along the rail lines, in the direction from which the train would approach. He listened to Jane; he listened to the poem; he also listened to something else. Distant, but growing more distinct, he could hear the throb of an engine. The wind distorted the sound. He thought, but he was not sure, that what he heard was the engine of the hospital train.

From the past, Jane had moved on to the future. She was trying to explain the expression on Boy’s face: its gentle bewilderment, its unconvincing hope. This made Jane very agitated. She said she should have talked to Boy longer and tried to dissuade him. Turning back to Wexton, she began to explain that when she said goodbye to Boy she had had a premonition of misfortune.

It was then that Wexton’s large hand hit her hard in the small of her back. He said: “Get down!”

The blow knocked the breath out of her. She fell painfully, flat on the wet paving, the stones skinning the side of her face. One leg twisted under her; Wexton’s weight slammed against her back. The poles of the stretcher struck her across the head. Their bodies were a tangle of wet wool, canvas, mufflers. The air thundered, then lit. Wexton’s elbow jabbed her spine. He rubbed her face on the wet pavement. Jane fought him off. She wriggled an inch, then lifted her head.

Wexton was insane. The platform was insane. What had been black was light. The edge of the platform was bitten off and furred with smoke. Flames ran up the poles of the station canopy. They fluttered like flags. They licked along the roof. The blackness was ecstatic.

Someone screamed. A Red Cross nurse ran by, her cape alight. Her hair was burning. Her mouth was jagged. Jane knew that she must stand and do something about this, but Wexton would not let her. She lifted her head and he crammed it down again. She could feel his fist on her neck. This made her angry, in the most violent way. She fought Wexton; she hammered at his hands; she tried to hit his face.

Wexton was too heavy for her and too strong. This was fortunate, for it was at that moment that the pilot of the Zeppelin airplane jettisoned his second bomb. He had been, in fact, off course. With a precision then rare, he hit not only the station but also the engine of the oncoming train.

The engine reared itself up. It flung itself sideways. It erupted hot iron and steam. Hot coals flew into the air. Shrapnel whined. The carriages behind careened forward, lost impetus, collided, and skewed. An iron snake, chopped into fragments; these fragments veered off, one to the left, another to the right. The fourth mounted the third; metal copulated. There was silence, then a buzzing like flies, then a scream.

Wexton had saved her. Jane knew this, finally, when she lifted her head, when Wexton, who was shaking, helped her to her feet. Just a yard from her, where they had been standing a few moments before, was a metal pole of some kind, part of the train, or a rail, perhaps once a part of the station roof. With the precision of a javelin, it now impaled a paving stone.

The carriages of the train were burning. The wounded men inside them burned too. This sight, and this smell, Jane and Wexton never described, although when I was a child, Jane would tell part of the story, would recount how her friend Wexton saved her life.

There were other incidents she left out, but which Wexton retold for me, all those years later, sitting together at Winterscombe. This was one of them. Toward the end of the night, when the sky was lightening and the horizon was no longer black but gray, Jane returned to the train. She returned to the last carriage; less severely damaged than those to the front of the train, it had been slower to burn.

All the men in it except one had been brought out. That man, whose leg had been broken under the wheel of a gun carriage some days before, could be glimpsed through the broken door. He lay beneath a sheet of twisted metal. He made no sound. He was thought to be dead. The carriage was beginning to burn as Jane approached it.

As she walked forward, the remaining glass in the carriage windows exploded. There was a burst of flame, a scatter of vicious confetti. Jane ducked her head. She clambered down from the platform and across the rails, which ran with hot grease. She grasped the wheel of the carriage and began to haul herself up. Wexton tried to haul her back. Jane clung to the jagged metal of the door. It was like grasping ice; her palms sizzled. She looked down and watched her skin peel back. Somehow, she brought the man out.

Wexton helped her, along with one of the Lancashire nurses. The smoke made them blind. They lifted; they dragged; they pushed. The man was extracted; he was bundled upon a stretcher; he was conveyed to Wexton’s ambulance. There, her face blackened by smoke, her burnt hands hastily bandaged, my mother, Jane, attempted to dress his wounds. The man regained consciousness, but only briefly. Some three kilometers from Saint-Hilaire, he turned away his face and died.

That man—one of the Hennessy brothers, as it turned out—was the first of the Hennessy family to die. Two brothers were to follow him, one at the battle of Arras, one at Messines Ridge. Jack Hennessy was to be the sole survivor of the four tall sons who had once carried Edward Shawcross’s body back to Winterscombe on an improvised stretcher, and Jack Hennessy—or so he said to me as a child—never forgot my mother’s attempt to save his brother.

Shoveling coke in the basement, his instincts more than ever feudal, he would tell me war stories. He would tell me how, and where, he lost his left arm (an amputation that put paid to his ambitions to be head carpenter); he would tell me how, and where, his brothers died; and—undeterred by the fact that he himself had not witnessed it—he would give me this account of my mother’s heroism.

Was it true? Wexton says that it was; my mother always claimed that Hennessy exaggerated. In her diaries she makes no mention of the incident—but Constance, in her journals, does. Its ironies amused her.

So,
she wrote some weeks later, when the news reached her.
A Hennessy has died—assisted by Jane. The wrong Hennessy, alas, Acland. Still, I feel we both tried.

Boy stood in the rain at the foot of the steps that led up to the Corinthian Club in Pall Mall. He looked up at the gray and august façade of the club. He was to meet there with Sir Montague Stern. It was evening, two days before Constance’s marriage.

He had spent the day fasting; he felt he must prepare for this—a crucial meeting—in the correct way. He must be alert. He must not listen to the sound of guns he knew were the other side of the Channel. He must take his father’s role, since his father had ducked out of it. He must behave like an officer and a gentleman—reliable and predictable rails, they ran dead straight.

He was confident. He was wearing uniform, a deliberate choice. He had a Sam Browne belt around his waist and, attached to that belt, a holster containing his service pistol. His cap felt like a helmet. Boy looked at the steps. He walked up them with firm strides.

Boy’s choice of the Corinthian was an obvious one. His grandfather had been a member, as well as his father; Boy had been made a life member at the age of twenty-one. He might dislike the place, but he felt he had a right to it in a way Stern certainly did not. It was a mystery to Boy that a man like Stern had contrived to become a member at all. He expected Stern to look ill at ease and out of place.

At first, all went well. The club porter greeted him instantly by name and correct rank, despite the fact that it was years since Boy had been there. His greatcoat was taken, his army cap, his swagger stick. Several old men, deep in leather chairs, looked up as he passed and greeted him with a nod. His father’s son.

Boy now felt safe only when playing a role. His confidence increased. This confidence was strong in the hall; it was strong on the stairs; it remained strong when he entered the smoking room. Then he glimpsed Stern: Stern was standing at the far end of the room, his back to the fire; a club servant hovered. To his left was an elderly duke; to his right was the Foreign Secretary. They appeared to hang upon his words. Boy was outraged.

It was then that everything began to go wrong. Stern greeted him with an easy warmth; he held out his hand, which Boy (who would have liked to punch him in the jaw) felt forced to take. The duke and the Foreign Secretary moved discreetly aside. Before Boy quite knew what had happened, he and Stern were both seated in leather chairs by the fire, and it was Stern, not he, who had placed the order for the whiskies. The servant returned with them speedily. Stern reached for a cigar case.

Boy focused his eyes first on Stern’s waistcoat, which he considered monstrous, its colors loud. They moved on to the jacket Stern wore, which was too new and too aggressively waisted. They dropped to Stern’s shoes, which were handmade but likewise too new. Boy stared at them, transfixed with loathing.

Boy, like his father and grandfather before him, despised new shoes. The point about shoes was that, once made, they lasted a lifetime. If new shoes were unavoidable, then they must be broken in first, boned and polished daily by a well-trained servant for at least a year before they graced the feet. Stern’s shoes looked as if they had come out of their box that morning. His suit shouted money, which was unforgivable. His sleek hair, as tawny as a fox, was well cut and a fraction too long. His shirt cuffs were too white, the links on those cuffs too large. He was offering a cigar, and that cigar was a Havana. Boy took it, then almost dropped it; he felt his fingers burned.

The next moment Boy was glad of the cigar. He must remove the band, wait while its end was clipped, light it, puff at it; all these activities gave him time to think. He had already rehearsed what he would say; it merely remained to say it in the correct manner. Boy, aware that he was sitting on the edge of his chair, moved back. He crossed his legs, then uncrossed them again. He squared his shoulders. He ignored the nearby back of the Foreign Secretary. He attempted to fix Stern with the gaze he had planned, the same gaze he used when addressing his men before battle: the direct approach, man to man, no sign of fear and no need to insist on superiority of rank, for that superiority was innate, the essence of command.