Hero (10 page)

Now, as I descend to the warehouse floor, I watch her dancing a circle around some folded hides on a pallet. The image is like a dull blow to the stomach; the hides, sagging and shapeless, make me think of France, of coats half-buried in earth and twisted, legless trousers in the rising smoke. Looking up at my approach, she circles the pallet once more, then skips towards the exit. I follow her into the sunshine and watch her climb into the passenger seat, her folded rag doll bumping against the spare wheel and the horn. At least she likes the car. As the thought passes through me, I realize it comes with a hope: Everything merges in this new world of flesh and speeding steel.

After the war the boom for leather transferred itself almost without effort from boots and jackets to the motoring craze. The treated hide will always be with us, it seems, to connect us to our animal past. Neither guns, nor helmets, nor roads, nor races, can lever us from the primal comfort it gives. Leather is the go-between, a linking mechanization to the human pulse. Perhaps, in this new order, my daughter's love for a motorcar can merge into a growing affection for the driver. If she is more comet than moon, she blazes a trail of fire and vapour, and her contours are undefined. Fear or distaste may convert; they may burn away, alter their nature, and through some mysterious chemical change, crystallize into the shining rocks of admiration.

I crank the engine into motion, climb into the driver's seat, and put the engine into gear. Gravel crunches beneath the tires, and in a moment I feel the breeze upon my cheek. I turn quickly onto the road, overtaking a farm cart on its way to the cattle market, and steal a glance at Lucy, her gaze roaming the ever-changing scenes.

The world is spinning and I no longer feel trapped. Lucy, Sarah, myself: these three suddenly open up to forgiveness and change. The past is indeed the past, and the world is littered with souls entering and leaving by the thousandth of a second. Why should my life be defined by a moment?

CHAPTER 12

Sarah

E
lsa takes the purse from her lap and places it on the floor. A sign, I hope, she is relaxing. The waitress pours her tea first, and we both watch the steam rise. I catch Elsa's eye as the waitress tips the pot towards my cup. She gives a shy wriggle of the shoulders, usually an indication she has something to say to me. The sloshing sound is oddly comforting in the silence. The waitress withdraws with a slight nod, and disappears behind the angled wooden beam, one of many in the mock-Tudor interior, to take the order at another table. It's past twelve and I know that soon Simon will be here with Lucy. I'd like to think he might be a little late, that he might have decided to take her for a treat, a drive in the country perhaps. I can almost feel the father-daughter rapport that ought to be. I can hear the jovial tone of voice Simon might use were he to rib her gently as fathers do, and I can easily imagine myself shushing her, smiling, while she laughs with delight. But these are ghosts of possibilities unfulfilled. A tension lurks between my daughter and husband, some unspoken resentment as mysterious and unexpected as a wart on a butterfly. It ages my daughter unnaturally, and makes my husband—my war hero, Charles's saviour—seem somehow less than a man. It worries me all the more now that things are about to get so much more complex. A new addition to this family seems like a tumour growing where it shouldn't; there is no room and it will merely squeeze the barely coexisting organs even further out of place. It makes me almost wish that this morning had brought a different outcome.

“How was your doctor's visit, Mrs. Jenson?” asks Elsa in her quiet way as she carefully stirs her cup.

“Oh,” I reply, my expression no doubt a riot of contradictions, “very satisfactory, Elsa, thank you for asking.”

A shadow moves over us—a man wheeling a barrow out–side. His expression, caught fleetingly, as well as his obvious limp, suggests he is a veteran. It's a curious, blank stare I have seen many times, a wan-faced emptiness suggesting he is deliberately taking in nothing around him, not the sunshine that skims past the gables above the narrow street, not the skinny woman in the loose-fitting dress who passes him, nor her flesh-coloured stockings. Like a mole seeking the end of its tunnel, he is just getting through, trying to reach the end of the day.

I catch Elsa's stare. She has noticed the man too, and her pale grey eyes have narrowed, as though she is peering unhappily into fold upon fold of memory. Now she looks down into her cup, the hint of a bitter, embarrassed smile passing over her face.

“We met a veteran yesterday in Christchurch Park, Lucy and I,” she says softly. “He served with your husband.”

I am silent for a moment.

“She told me about Mr. Smith,” I reply, taking a sip to mask my discomfort. Lucy told me about the man with wooden legs, but I had no idea until now he had served with Simon. I am afraid of this new information. Nothing good can come from old associations. Simon contracts into a thing of prickles and sudden temper whenever the subject of his old regiment looms. “She's at the age when disfigurement and handicap are novelties,” I add after a pause. “I hope she wasn't too curious about it.”

“He didn't seem to mind. I think he found Lucy's honesty refreshing.” Elsa leans towards me over the table, her shoulders hunched. “I wonder how many lies such a man encounters when looking for work, how many times he is told that a position advertised in the window has been filled.”

My hand moves involuntarily to my chest, fingers shielding the gold and onyx Venetian brooch Simon gave me in a rare moment of impulsiveness during last summer's trip to Italy—a rare adventure in itself. In truth the idea of Lucy's Mr. Smith working has taken me aback somewhat. I am suddenly aware, not for the first time, of a cultural divide between Elsa and I, a difference that comes and goes as a line of trees might emerge and disappear through the window of a speeding train.

When we first met, by appointment in Selfridges, Elsa had been too ill-at-ease to accept my offer of tea. Perching on the end of the chair as though reluctantly following an order to sit upon a bed of live coals, her eyes had darted around the room and she had given short and rather breathless answers to each parcel of encouragement that posed as a question.

“Mr. Eaves says you have attended some of the lectures he's organized,” I said quietly.

“Yes, Mrs. Jenson.”

“I hope you won't miss London too much when you come to Suffolk with us.”

“I think the lectures have stopped anyway.”

“Mr. Eaves said you taught in a school for a few years before coming to England.”

“Yes, there was a shortage of teachers.”

“My family was involved in the Newfoundland fishery, in the shipbuilding side.”

The most curious thing was happening. The pattern of my speech was becoming as disjointed as hers, the pauses between words longer. As a shaft of light spun from the revolving doors and threw itself between us, I felt as though I was looking not upon another woman, but into a mirror, and at myself. She didn't look like me. Her hair was rather dark, the bones of her shoulders and arms accentuated even through the loose clothing, yet we were, in that odd way that occasionally happens with strangers, facing each other with no barrier or shield in between.

And now, in the Beehive, Elsa has pointed out something she knows that I do not. Those in my husband's situation who have been seriously injured stay at home, or live in an institution with expansive grounds and flower beds where they are cared for by professional nurses. If Elsa's insight is correct, Mr. Smith must be from the ranks and not an officer. Elsa is my counterpart in loss, except that hers are multiplied in number, and the world she sees is harsher—a place of bread, shelter, and work. Why would it be otherwise for a veteran whose family has little money? Of course he would have to either live by charity or find a job. What a secluded garden Simon, Charles, and I had known in childhood. It was pride in our lessons and the inner feeling of accomplishment or failure that spurred us on, not hunger and homelessness should we fail.

This was simple. Mr. Smith might need a job. I look into Elsa's frank stare and in the communal spirit of all that is unspoken between us, I know this is as much my responsibility as hers. Who do we both know who is doing well enough to hire?

The question sends a spasm of panic through me. I avoid her eyes for a few moments, surveying the interior's beams and the odd shadows they cast, the whispering mother and grown-up daughter by the entrance, the white-faced young couple in the dim alcove beyond Elsa's shoulder. The place seems like a forest of long-dead trees. We are all like ghosts of the once wooded land, unable to move on to fresher habitation.

Elsa's suggestion, if I have understood her correctly, is as unthinkable as jumping into a bath of boiling water. I know my husband well enough to imagine the expression of deep betrayal that would be etched upon his face should I lobby him to bring the war into his workplace. And yet it is so entirely logical I can't think of a single rational argument against it. Simon has work to give. The legless veteran needs work.

“It must be terribly frustrating,” I say at last, as though Mr. Smith's problems are really consuming my thoughts. “I wonder there isn't an institution somewhere…” My cheek stings with sudden heat, and I despise the toad-like creature inside me who is busily preparing my husband's alibi.

I catch a slight deepening of Elsa's frown, a twitch of the shoulders and a half-turn as though disturbed by a presence behind her. Then a look comes into her face that is more curious than disparaging. “He's twenty-eight years old, Mrs. Jenson,” she says. “Forty or fifty years in an institution is a long time, even if one could be found to take him.”

I nudge my cup and saucer away with my fingertips and move back in my chair, surprised at a sudden urge to tell her everything—my husband's moods, his nightmares, my own helplessness—some of which she no doubt guesses anyway, living under the same roof, breathing the same atmosphere, experiencing the same silent static before or after a disagreement. Conversant as she might be with the entrails of our marriage, her close proximity to our family makes these subjects all the more forbidden. If I whisper a truly personal word into the light of day, Simon at least would expect Elsa and I to part. And loyalty is a tiger that has never departed my heart. I have to take his wishes seriously.

“I suppose it must be a desk job,” I say, defeated, aware that I am a razor's edge from acknowledging some theoretical connection between Mr. Smith's predicament and my husband's business. “I can't think what might be available in that line,” I add, making it even worse.

“Surely most jobs can be done sitting down, Mrs. Jenson,” Elsa says in a low voice. “At least you'd think after all that's happened the world might arrange it that way.”

“You would think so, yes,” I say, touching the cool metal clamp of my purse, longing for one of Simon's Turkish cigarettes, which I never smoke outside the house. I feel like a traitor, evading Elsa's steady, hopeful gaze. Why is it so out of the question that I should ask my husband whether he has a job for a man who has lost both his legs? Anyone would think the bond between them—same regiment, same battle—would cement such a plan, at the very least make him approachable on the subject. What makes Elsa and I more like friends— albeit rather timid ones—if not a sense of shared experience and destiny?

“My husband…” I pause, my fingertips still touching the purse clamp, “does not talk about the war. You might have noticed.”

Elsa nods slightly and colours. “Yes,” she says, her upper lip becoming pale from the pressure of her front teeth. I sense she is battling with herself not to continue. At last she loses the struggle. “But there really would be no need to mention it, would there?”

I feel the turning of a lock somewhere deep in my chest, and I am trapped. The fire that has been my companion these last seven years intensifies. The smoke thickens and rises.
You
wanted a heroic role to match that of your betrothed
, a mocking voice whispers in my ear.
Well, here it is for you. Feelings you must
respect but don't understand. Demands that pull you in opposite
directions.
The voice brings me back to the night Simon came to me, smelling of whisky, an all-too-familiar scent now. I remember how I strapped and fastened the armour of self-sacrifice upon myself. Who was I vowing to save all those years ago? Whose burden—that of Simon or that of Mr. Smith—was I taking on? I used to believe that it was the same burden. I had no way of knowing my husband would turn against his companions.

I can help a drunken man. I can put him to bed, soothe his nightmares, withstand his rages, but this feeling of being torn is more than I ever bargained for. The heroism I envisaged has become ugly and lopsided because it requires me to shut out the world I had set out to help. It requires me to help my husband turn enemy to himself. And here before me is Elsa—my twin whose passion for peace and healing grew in the same fiery womb—who hopes and expects me to act for Mr. Smith. And I know she is right. I know that in protecting my husband from his own rage, I am merely helping him to betray his kind. A flame leaps and scorches the inside of my brain as I think of the battle that will inevitably arise between Simon and me when I broach the subject. It is nothing compared with the volcano that will erupt when I give him the news from Dr. Hopkins. It will be Lucy all over again. Rarely could the genesis of a child have been greeted with such anguish. But I have time, a month or two anyway, and I must take each battle as it comes.

The look I am giving Elsa, I suspect, is defeated, helpless, but assenting, as I detect a familiar figure weaving through the tables towards us, a rag doll with bright orange hair under her arm.