Hero (12 page)

“Well,” says Sarah, a too-broad smile veiling her anticipation, “what kind of day are you having? How did Lucy behave?”

She pours some tea in the third cup the waitress has placed before me. Her hand has the faintest hint of a tremor. I hate these innocent questions.

“Fine and fine,” I reply. “Everything is fine.” I'm a knot of agitation as the silence comes to rest upon our shoulders. Sarah's gaze falls to the table. She wriggles in her seat. “How was your doctor's visit?” I ask.

“Fine there too,” she answers, her voice laced with a sarcasm that, for her, is quite rare.

“Good,” I say seriously, holding her eye.

Her expression flickers in a manner I have grown used to. Most people would hardly notice, but to me the look conveys an ocean. It always comes after a slight thaw on my part. It tells me she understands and forgives, that she is prepared to wait it out providing I give her some sign of effort.

“I'm looking forward to going back to Dunwich this weekend,” she says with a sigh and slight smile.

I am momentarily winded. The word “Dunwich” has become a bolt that tightens in my brain when spoken. I have rested easier in the last two years, after we all started spending the week in Ipswich, returning only to the coast on Fridays. The heath and crumbling clifftops of Dunwich belong to Charles's grave, to Charles's mother, to the Baxters' house, to the house I lived in with my father when Charles, Sarah, and I used to run along the shingle beach in the years before the war. Even before my father died in his bed two years ago—an occurrence received with the muted, if sickening, thud of a mallet blow to a barrel of sand—Dunwich had become the dark space that inhabits my soul. It is the landscape of my nightmares, and I'm startled sometimes at the sheer lack of imagination that has prevented me from leaving it behind.

My gaze has been drawn to the window, to a young woman wheeling a pram.

“How about you?” Sarah asks, reclaiming my attention.

“There's a lot to do here. I might have to return to town on Saturday.”

A frown—part scorn, part sympathy—passes across her face, but I know she isn't really sorry. My absence will free her from the storm clouds of our marriage, and she will bask in the company of her mother, Elsa, her daughter, and even Isabelle, Mrs. Baxter's former maid, who has been, I firmly believe, quite unhappily transplanted to our own household. Were I to return suddenly half an hour after leaving, as I have had cause to do when forgetting something, I would find a rare and halcyon scene of carefree laughter and merriment. I try to resent the fact that she won't try to stop me returning to work, but the remnants of honesty that still slosh about inside my mind like some comfortless tonic won't let me. I actually don't blame her in the least.

“I suppose you're going to start hiring again soon,” says Sarah, and I can't tell whether it's a question.

“Coombs does that,” I reply. “He has the knack.”

She seems suddenly animated by something, her face an odd series of flexes as I used to see in high jumpers on school sports day. “I was wondering,” she says, voice rising in pitch, “Elsa was talking to a young man the other day. The poor fellow lost in legs in some…accident. We were talking about how terribly difficult it must be for such a man to find a job…” She stops and gives me a weak smile, no doubt noticing my own features change.

“This must be the stranger Lucy was talking to in a park,” I say dryly.

She shrugs and widens her eyes as though suggesting nothing can be wrong with such an occurrence.

“What do either you or Elsa know about this man? Why was my daughter alone in a park talking to him?” I can feel the heat rising within me and imagine smoke spiralling and coiling from my shoulders, reaching with grey, cloud-like fingers to the ceiling.

“She wasn't alone,” Sarah replies, a tentative smile playing about her lips. “Elsa was with her.”

“That's just a detail. Why on earth would Elsa be introducing my daughter to strangers in parks?”

Sarah leans forward and flashes her eyes at me, then glances sideways at a two women, one middle-aged, the other young, whose faces have turned in our direction. The elder of the two holds her cup handle in an affected, refined manner even as she cranes her neck for a better look. I merely feel the coals of annoyance glowing hotter inside me. Sarah is using the fact we are in public to shut my objections off. I sense the invisible web of a conspiracy.

“Simon, parks are public places,” Sarah whispers, “like cafés and restaurants. People are permitted to talk provided they do so in a quiet and civilized manner.”

I stare back at her. At home this would be a full-scale argument by now. Here, I am tied to my chair, and she knows it.

“In any case,” she continues, a tired frown appearing on her face, “he's an old friend of yours.”

“Mine?”

“A comrade, rather. You served with him.”

I'm distracted for a moment by a look of defeat on her face, as though she has conceded something against her will. I can't imagine what.

“I know of no such person,” I reply. Suddenly Coombs's message slips back into my mind—the “old comrade from the war” who could only walk up my stairs with great difficulty. Can Coombs's old comrade and Lucy's friend with the wooden legs be one and the same? If so, it seems the man was remarkably determined to get hold of me. Yet I know no one personally who sustained such injuries and survived.

“What was his name?”

“Smith.”

The name is a blade, sleek and swift-entering. A sharp sting gives way to a dull ache which, in turn, radiates from the well-defined point of entry. My gaze has fixed upon the lips that have spoken the word. They snuggle together like self-satisfied invertebrates, twitching, rolling, then lying flat one upon the other. The lips seem increasingly disconnected from their owner just as my mind seems increasingly disconnected from my body. I float towards the ceiling, passing the faux-Tudor beam with its decorative wormholes. In a moment I am gazing down upon myself—a white-faced, youngish man, dark hair sweating around the temples. Sarah leans over the table towards the disoriented figure, says his name, once, twice, but I hear no sound. She says it again and grips the fingers that lie upon the table. This time I catch her echo, and I begin to drift back to myself.

“What's the matter?” comes her urgent hiss, like the voice from a wireless, muffled and crackling.

I manage a shake of the head. Each movement repeats in an after-blur, and I hold my head steady to be sure of its position.

“Nothing,” I say. “Just hot.”

CHAPTER 15

Sarah

I
'd seen the look before, eyes as wide as poached eggs, terrified but unseeing. It's the same look that greets me if I turn on the light during one of his nightmares and try to rouse him. But in six and a half years of marriage, I'd never seen him look this way during the day. A spasm of worry ran through me, worry not so much about what it might mean with regards to his health—the beginning of a slow descent into alcoholic hallucination, perhaps, or even premature senility brought on by trauma or stress—as to how I was going to get through the next few hours. How would I get Simon, Lucy, Elsa, and myself back to Dunwich? How does one lug an unconscious man aboard a train, and where would I arrange to store his car? Illness is so very inconvenient, so embarrassing. The smallness of this reaction—its cold detachment when soaring anguish regarding my husband's long-term well-being might have seemed the natural response—filled me with a profound sense of unworthiness. Even now, as Simon's car speeds by the hedgerows, hugging the contours of the road, I'm trying to shake the vision of myself as a flighty, superficial creature, an imaginary feather in my hat and a soft muff about my hands.

When on that autumn day of Simon's return I determined that my destiny was to shoulder the burdens of war, I formed a mental picture. I have since seen this vision replicated so exactly in a well-known photograph of the war I have wondered at the power of my mind to send and receive images through time and space. The picture was of a soldier, his face grimed with mud, his intelligent eyes looking out hopefully from under a domed helmet. Over his shoulders was the body of another man. It was impossible to tell whether he was living or dead. Somehow it was an image of hope, a suggestion that out of all the pain, the horror, and the despair, this—the simple dignity of co-operation and kindness—might survive. Simon had been just like that soldier on at least one occasion, gently laying my own Charles upon the ground, perhaps whispering something beautiful in his ear, the kind of manly assurance that women can never imagine, and that men like Simon—even the open, uninhibited Simon who had first set out for war—can never bring themselves to repeat.

I never sought to drive an ambulance to the front or to minister in some desperate, makeshift operating room. Still, I hoped to commune, through the sheer power of will, with such heroism. If my face couldn't know the crust of days-old mud it could at least carry the signs of emotional stress that come from looking after a veteran. My back, though shouldering no physical weight, could at least ache with the effort of soothing his troubled dreams. And this has indeed been the case—more so, I sometimes feel, than I might originally have wished. But when Simon gave every appearance of being seriously ill in the restaurant, my mind was consumed with vain and trifling details. The sense of relief that he returned to his full senses was so deep, the joy of not having to deal with a public collapse so palpable, that every other concern—Mr. Smith, what Elsa would think—fizzled away into nothing. A soundless alarm rang inside me at the ease and speed with which concerns about my personal comfort took over my core, and part of me gave up the battle there and then. You can never truly take on the burden of war as you once hoped, a voice told me. You know nothing of the urgency of physical pain and danger. You don't know the feel of shrapnel piercing the skin, or the horror of looking down to see an empty sleeve where a hand ought to be. How can you think to preach to your husband or plead for him to take a certain course for his redemption when you know so little? I was dwarfed just as I had been seven years ago by a lover who had been through it all.

The car lurches as we hit a stony patch in the road and Simon reacts by accelerating. I'm certain many a motorist would slow down, but this isn't his practice. Elsa has taken Lucy by train, as is sometimes our habit, and we are to pick them up at Darsham station.

I am glad they are not with us. Simon's driving is more erratic than usual, and the presence of Elsa would undoubtedly have made it worse. I have other reasons for wanting to travel with my husband alone. I can well imagine the soft cloud of expectation that would have hung like a halo around Elsa if she were in the rear seat alongside my daughter. At this moment the back of my neck would be prickling under the influence of her inquisitive eyes. How disillusioned she would be to discover both my husband's reaction and my own swift abandonment of Mr. Smith's cause.

“Are you sure you must return to town tomorrow?” I ask, raising my voice above the steady growl of the engine.

“Yes, first thing,” Simon yells sideways, his eyes fixed upon the road like those of a snake charmer waiting for a scaly head to poke its head over the basket rim. At our motorcar's approach birds drop from the undergrowth and dart from one side of the road to the other. The warm breeze teases my ears, and I let my gaze drift over the tapestry of rolling farmland and woods.

I find myself settling into a truer vision of myself, not the martyr-heroine the war would have liked me to become, and not quite one of the bright young things who flap their way from music hall to theatre to private party. Perhaps I would indeed be like one of those exotic creatures had I not been guilty of the very bad timing to be both wife and mother before the gloomy clouds of war parted. For the first time, I understand the ebullience and the frenzy of fashion that has swept over England in the last few years. The young simply have no choice but to be carefree and foolish. They have seen the alternative. They have caught a glimpse of the dark orb and have gravitated pendulum-like to the opposite extreme.

With the stone wall Simon has thrown before me, with the realization that I no longer have the strength or the inclination to chip away at its surface, I have been released from a pact. I can join the legions of fellow countrywomen and men who have turned their backs on memory. I too can siphon the energy I was hurling so pointlessly at the past, at reforming my husband, and redirect it to the cause of mindless hedonism. Taking brief stock of the trappings of luxury we already possess—a car, a governess, a housekeeper, a grand piano nobody plays, a disused tennis court, a large home, or two large homes as I am the only one left to inherit among the Baxters—then adding some I know we can afford—a London flat, a larger house, another motorcar—I realize with some consternation that each component of this opulence tolls in my heart like a leaden bell. The subtle pleasures of frivolity would be entirely wasted on me. I have become so coiled with anxiety, so intent upon a search for meaning, that despite my worst efforts, I cannot betray the young woman with the missionary zeal who married the broken hero. Beneath all the layers of pointlessness there is still the itch of an unanswered question. Charles in a grave, barely eighteen, and the thousands upon thousands like him. Why?

The car swerves once more, its tires spitting gravel sideways. Simon grunts with impatience, as though fully expecting this machine should fly weightless above the earth. A crow springs off an overhanging branch and takes to the air, and for the first time since our journey began, I catch the smell of salt air. I almost wish we could leave Elsa behind at Darsham station and go on just the two of us together—would-be heroine and broken soldier—to Dunwich to heal or not heal as the case may be. In this moment of shame Lucy is not much more than an afterthought. Children root us where we stand. I dwelt in a graveyard when poor Lucy was conceived, and I knew the husband with whom I copulated was not in his right mind. It isn't her fault, this inauspicious beginning. But it means that my feelings for her are weighed towards the guilt-ridden, and I have a constant fear she will one day suspect the joyless, desperate nature of her beginning. I'm sure that Simon and I leak some clues every time we are together in her company, and that she has already absorbed into her personality a sense of gloom. I wonder whether the cluster of anxieties I feel for Lucy qualifies as love.