Gifts of War (53 page)

What did any of us deserve, I wondered.

The garden was emptying. The afternoon session was almost ready to begin.

“Shall we meet again?” I felt I had to say it.

“No,” he whispered. “Now that the horror is over, I’m not going to look back. I could, if I chose, say that I lost twice over. I was on the losing side in the fighting, and not there when Sam needed me. But I
tell you, Hal, anyone who was in this war, at the sharp end, and survived … you can’t call that losing.”

His voice almost broke. “Think of the people—the parts of people—that you and I buried between us, in our short stretch of the war, on just one day.” He shook his head. “I’m glad we met during the truce, I’m honored we were part of that, you and I. I don’t regret it, despite what has happened. I’m comforted to know that you told Sam about me and that she made her decision. I am sad, but I am free at last. I’m pleased we met today. What you have told me has freed me.” He put his cap back on and held out his hand again. “We shared a few moments of that precious truce, and now a few moments of the peace conference that will shape the world for Will and all the other children. How many can say that?”

He turned and walked away.

That encounter, and in particular my part in it, must count as the other really low point in my life. Now I had in effect betrayed Wilhelm twice: once in not giving Sam his photograph as I had promised, and a second time in not telling him of my first betrayal and not coming clean about his son.

How I got through the rest of the conference that day I don’t know. As soon as it was over I rushed back to the Majestic and collapsed onto the bed. I was shattered. Naturally, I kept wondering whether Sam had seen Wilhelm in Versailles but I kept coming back to the conclusion that she couldn’t have: her changed demeanor, her subtly different attitude had been there from the very first moment she arrived in Paris, well before our near encounter at the Hôtel des Réservoirs. It occurred to me that she was the way she was because she had always hoped to be introduced to Paris by him—he had said he had always planned to bring her, and maybe it had reawakened her
memory. But if that was the case, then at least part of Sam had never got over him, and she had been lying to me when she said, in the field at Edgewater, on the day we scattered Izzy’s ashes among the potatoes, in the field of the bull, that she had learned to love me.

Izzy. I couldn’t sleep that night and so, around two A.M., I picked up my sister’s journal and started to read. It was vivid—I’ll give my sister credit for that. It started off, in a girlish way, as you would expect, written with more enthusiasm and élan than skill, but that changed after war broke out. I found that she could be much more acerbic about her brother on the page than in the flesh, but by then Izzy’s voice came through with such painful verisimilitude that I could forgive her anything. Her reflections on the early disasters of war were original, pertinent, and often darkly funny. The journal was roughly chronological but was also full of asides, flashbacks, ruminations on things that took her fancy—how people decorated their uniforms in the trenches to mark out their individuality, the smell of the Front, the various accents, some of which were mutually incomprehensible: this was Izzy at her funniest. Some of the episodes I was familiar with already from her letters. Having been initially skeptical, I began to see what my father meant about the journal being published.

I reached an interesting section about her role as a nurse at the Front. She had of course sent me several letters in which she had described some of the horrors of what she had seen, and her multiple roles as a medical orderly, letter writer, part-time girlfriend, and confidante of the dying. But there were also some completely fresh reflections on the differences between the hospitals at the Front and those back home. I now learned that she—and my parents—had originally been misinformed about my own injuries. At first, they had been told I had lost a leg, even both legs, according to one account. She was beside herself with misery, railed against the war, and decided she would devote her life to taking care of me. Her relief when she found out
that my injuries were much less serious than she’d thought was palpable, and she couldn’t understand why I was so depressed when my plight could have been so much worse. She thought it a mistake that I had been brought back to England, maintaining that if I had remained in France, among men who were much worse off than me, I would have recovered more quickly and never have been brought so low.

Even here, though, I have to say, she was at times bitingly funny. Some passages needed editing but my father was right: Izzy’s journal was definitely publishable. All this and God knows how many lives she had saved, how many girlfriends she had written to, trying to console the inconsolable. On the platform at Stratford that morning I had told her I was proud of her. How pleased I was now that those had been my last spoken words to her. And how pleased I was, now, that she had fallen in love with Alan. Izzy had banged on about sex during our dinner at the Crown in Stratford, but there is a world of difference between sex and love and the fact that she had experienced love before she was killed… I was pleased for her for that. She had told me at Stratford about this new psychiatrist (“Sigmund somebody” she had said, meaning Sigmund Freud). Well, I’d read one of his books on her say-so (before Sam discovered Jung), and this Freud says that for a satisfying life we need two things and two things only: useful, productive work and love. Izzy, more than anyone, did useful work—not just giving blood transfusions but all that support for men about to meet their maker—and she also loved and was loved. My lovely sister, however short her life, had experienced the best of what this world has to offer. That was something for me to hold on to.

Then I read the next section and… well, this is the beginning of the end of my story. In addition to her vivid prose style and cheeky sense of humor, Izzy had an excellent memory. The section I was reading was a frank—and very full—account of her visit to me when I was recovering from my operation in Sedgeberrow, including how,
out of boredom, she had gone through my belongings, making the discovery that caused her to think that I was homosexual. Naturally, she then wrote up my explanation and description of the Christmas truce. She had read many of the press accounts of the truce and had neatly placed my experience in the wider context—my meeting with Wilhelm, our exchange of gifts, his request for me to give his girlfriend his photograph. Which she assumed I had done.

And Sam had read her account
.

It was about half past four when I reached Izzy’s visit to me in Sedgeberrow. Outside, in the Avenue Victor Hugo, it was raining, water lashing against the windows. I could hear the clatter of horses’ hooves on the wet cobbles of Paris, the occasional swish of automobile tires through the puddles. I recalled that day when it had rained equally hard as Sam and I walked along the canal in Middle Hill.

That Sam had read Izzy’s journal explained a lot. It explained everything. In particular it explained her manner with me while she had been here in Paris, for the break in the peace conference. The more I thought about it, however, the more puzzled I became. If she had read the passage, as I was sure she had, if she had decided that I had behaved—well, beyond all humanity—why had she come to Paris at all? Why not just turn her back on me and disappear, taking Will with her? Or why not have it out with me, there and then, in Paris— one hell of a fight, with every blunt truth aired? That she hadn’t followed either course of action didn’t make sense.

Five A.M. came. I stood at the window, looking out at the rain. There were a few stragglers going home from their revels, uncertain on their feet, but most of the people I saw were the solitary night people—policemen, off-duty waiters, newspaper deliverymen, early morning bakers who had no choice but to be up at this sad hour. Will would be fast asleep now, the smell of soap about him. Occasionally, he would turn in his sleep and absently rub the scar on his arm where
it had been slashed at the Battersea fair. I had watched him do that on countless evenings when I stood over him, before silently bidding him good night.

Five-thirty came, five forty-five. Was there a possibility still that Sam
had
learned to love me, and loved me even now; that she liked our life, looked forward to living in my father’s house; and that she understood my actions—that with a war on, with all the danger and uncertainty it implied, what I had done was forgivable? That I deserved some credit for saving Will’s life?

Then I asked myself again the question I had framed many times over—whether love, the slow burn when you have learned to love someone, is ever the same as the explosion of love at first sight?

Six o’clock came. I took a bath and, while I was in the bath, I finally realized what Sam had done.

Everything at last, and for the first time, was out in the open between us. Now she was saying: Hal, you have to decide what to do. You, the man who wrote the book on the moral cost of the war, have shown an amorality beyond all conscience. She had kept her promise and had never mentioned Wilhelm’s name since that day in the field when we had scattered Izzy’s ashes, not even in Paris. So she was saying, in effect: Your actions got us into this situation, this predicament, this love story of sorts, and all via dishonesty, opportunistic deception, and luck. What are
you
going to do?

Except, of course, that Sam
still
didn’t know everything. She thought she did, at long last, after a wartime of not knowing. But once again, and ironically—bitterly ironically—she didn’t have all the facts. But
I
did. I knew that Wilhelm was still alive, still in love with Sam.
I even knew where he was!
Once again, as before, at the very start, I was the only person who knew everything, who had the whole picture.

Sam didn’t know that Wilhelm had been in Paris, where he had
promised to take her, at the same time she had. Wilhelm, having seen us, thought we were a family and because of that wouldn’t go looking for Sam, as he’d once vowed—to her and to me—that he would. If I pretended to Sam that I hadn’t yet had time to read Izzy’s journal, if I could spin it out for even a week or two, it would soon be more than six months since the Armistice. There was chaos, violence, and talk of revolution in Germany. Once the peace conference ended, Wilhelm would go back to Berlin and our lives would diverge forever. If I did absolutely nothing, nothing at all, the attractions of life with me would continue to grow even as Wilhelm’s prospects receded still further. Will loved me. I was engaged in work of historical importance, and Sam knew that. I was to be knighted; Sam could become Lady Montgomery if she wished. Life with me was a much better life than no life and was I
so
bad to do what I had done? Wilhelm was the enemy, and the enemy had killed my sister, killed Faye’s fiancé, and, in a sense, killed Lottie’s Reg.

All that happened a week ago. That morning I got out of the bath, put on my bathrobe, sat down, and began writing this story.

It is for you, Will, and now I address you directly for the first time. It is for you, though I do not doubt that your mother, Sam— Sally Ann Margaret—will read it first. She, after all, is the one who, following one of our visits to the Wigmore Hall, told me to write down my memories, for you to read one day.

I didn’t go back to the peace conference. I wrote to Malahyde to say that I wasn’t well, and since then I have stayed in my hotel room to set down this account. Now that I am reaching the end, I want to say three things more.

First, I want you, Will, and your mother to have the house in
Edgewater, plus anything else that my father leaves me when he dies. I shall write separately to my father but I ask, second, that you show him this account. I don’t want to be excused for what I have done, but I do wish to be understood. I am saddened that my mother will never read this. She always understood me instinctively—better than my father certainly—and, having had plenty of time to think it through, I grasp now that she fully appreciated the effect my wound might have on my life. She understood, as perhaps I did not, that few women could love a man—or wish to be a wife to a man—who could not have children.

She was always secretly concerned that I would lead a solitary life. And I know now, from talking to one of her sisters who came to her and Izzy’s funeral, that the story she told me during the last conversation I had with her, on her favorite bench, about her not really loving my father when they met, was a total fabrication. She made up a story that she thought would warm and comfort me inside and set my mind at rest. Is that a mother’s love?

Third, I ask that you do not try to find me, ever, not even if you have inherited your mother’s wanderlust. By the time Sam reads this, I shall be aboard a ship bound for somewhere a long way away—Australia maybe, Canada, Chile even. Who knows? I shall decide when I get to Le Havre and find out where the next ship is sailing for.

Sam set me a task, to decide what to do, and this is my decision, my reply, to set you and your mother free—free financially, free emotionally, free of the past, free of me. Seeing you sitting on my shoulders, thinking you were my son, freed Wilhelm, he said, to move on. I can’t allow that. It would be a false freedom: you are his son, not mine.

You will find the fact that I am not your father a terrible shock, a brutal blow. I am sorry for that, but it is why I have written this story. And you will, as time goes by and you grow older, learn that having a
German father in England, or an English mother in Germany, is not easy. I hope that the arrangements I have made will help ease the pain that you, your mother, and your father will have to go through. Your mother realized, at the end, I think, that anti-German feeling in England would not end with the war. That explains a lot.

Your mother… I have loved your mother, Will—oh! how I have loved her. Nothing will ever replace her in my heart. But I have loved you too. When I worried that you would die, at Battersea fair, on Chelsea Bridge, in the Lister Hospital, I thought I had discovered something worse than war itself. In your short life, my dear boy, you have had two sips of beer, and you gallantly pretended on each occasion that you liked them, for my sake. When you came into our bed, the morning after I had arrived home late, when I had been following Genevieve Afton, when you wanted to make sure I was still there, I felt the wriggle of your body, the clutch of your tiny fingers digging into the flesh of my shoulder, as you climbed over me, your small wet lips kissing my ear, and I suffered a bolt of electricity, a shock so vivid, so intense, so wonderful, that I realized I had only been half alive until then.