Hero (20 page)
L
ucy says nothing. Her gaze is now drawn by the figure-of-eight patterns swallows weave over the river's green surface. She slowed to a stop five minutes ago to stare at a black beetle pattering along the dry earth. It disappeared into a crevice and emerged a moment later, pincers reaching into the warm air. I thought of engaging her interest further, perhaps telling her about nature and the glory of living things. Changing my mind, I moved her on quickly. I feared the stab of her angry shoe and the tearful regrets that might follow.
She no longer has her rag doll, which means she either dropped it in the tannery or somewhere along the path. I dread the moment she discovers the loss, though I suspect she may already know; that, in fact, she may have thrown it into the river while I was looking elsewhere. I half expect to see those helpless limbs churning slowly upon the rolling waters, drifting downstream like a bedraggled Ophelia.
I don't try to talk. Silence, I think, is good for her. She has seen what she has seen. There is no use denying it, and any explanation is bound to confuse her, especially as I can think of none that might be communicated to a child. Words cannot easily encompass the insight that has grown upon me since the summer of 1916: thatâin men, at leastâall paths of expression lead ultimately to violence. But the thought hovers around me as we walk, ankles tugging the high grass.
I am standing at Quidi Vidi Lake again, trying to pick out the faces of Jack, Michael, and Jimmy as the new recruits cheer and hurl their hats towards the clouds. The exhilaration washing over us all seemed like a breath from above. It was love they were expressing, love of adventure, love of one another, love of Newfoundland, love of an empire of which we were part when the mood struck us, love of everything we knew all rolled up into a single rush of ecstasy. Did they have any idea where all this love would lead? Did I? Did the other women who felt the deep tingle of pride for their boisterous men and the sense of the world opening up like never before? We were just as responsible. Our blindness and our quiet approval egged the men on. We provided the soft, compliant springs for their leap into glory.
But it wasn't just the war. The recruitment drive was no aberrant trickery. It was part of something that already dwelt in us all. I think of Michael and Jimmy, interlocked in an attachment as real and as warm as any that binds two brothers. How did these fine men demonstrate their love? Not with soft words, assurances, the calm hand laid on another's back, but with the smart thump to the shoulder, the taunt and yelp of mockery. A fainter, but no less painful, image passes through my mind of poor Noah Evans and his older brother, Fred, whose guidance came in brittle stares and goading phrases.
Is Mr. Jenson's insane attack today this same process magnified ten thousand times? The ingredients were the same: love and devotion for a brother-in-arms. At some point during the intervening years, somewhere between laying his dying comrade onto the ground and his encounter with Mr. Smith, love found its expression, and its expression was war. In men, the deepest love, the deadliest grief leads not to tears but to the purging fire of physical fury. It's the only expression available to them. I hardly need to know the details with regard to Mr. Jenson. The triggerâword, action, or even gesture made by Mr. Smithâis immaterial. Violence is the only logical outcome when a man is confronted with the source of his pain.
Perhaps it is some flaw in the plan, natural or divine. Perhaps weâMr. Jenson, Mr. Smith, Mrs. Jenson, and myselfâ are the generation for whom this fault revealed itself. We see nature as it is; at its very core is a profound and desperate ugliness. Once discovered, knowledge of this fact not only entraps ourselves, but it creates an apocalyptic landslide that must consume all who come after us.
A mute but searing anger zigzags through my brain, its focus changing from war, to generals, to Mr. and Mrs. Jenson, to me, to the collective us. But there is one life that my anger hopes to save. I am leading her to the station. The quietness, even serenity, of the act belies the utter lack of planning or sense behind it. Hot blood burns at my temples at the thought. I know it is madness to try and separate her from her parents and the war that still rages around them. But what are my options? It is cowardice and desertion to let disaster overcome the innocent.
The station buildings come into view around the river's next bend, and beyond these a white funnel of steam shoots up above the trees, likely the London train approaching the platform. I feel a hundred tiny wrenches tightening invisible bolts, and I know the moment is coming. I must decide whether I have the courage.
M
y senses are numbed now, the headache gone, the jangle of panic subsided. A warm haze surrounds me, flooding my portion of the bar. The hues are softer than twilight here. No ray of sun enters, but I can see well enough to slip my fingers around the stem of my glass, and this is all I need. It has happened, the worst that can be imagined, and as death must be to a man long sickening, it is a kind of relief.
For a while after my escape from the tannery, I was half expecting a firm hand on my shoulder and a low warning voice telling me of the charges. It wasn't an arrestâthe public shame at my appalling actionsâthat worried me, but rather the loss of access to the blessed fluid that calms all ills. Locks and bars keeping me from the outside world might even be a comfort were it not for this fact.
Like the inhabitants of a newly disturbed hive, pictures buzz and circle my brain telling of possible scenarios after my departure. I imagine my wife and blackmailer rejoining Lucy and Elsa in the café. I see them huddling together under one of the beams, whispering of Charles's murder as serving maids shuffle discreetly around them. I see Sarah with a handkerchief to her face, mourning her broken family and the years of pointless sacrifice. With a momentary relief, I realize that, once communicated, this information loses its terrorizing power. Smith would hardly give away so easily all he has nurtured for so long. He is more likely to draw out the suspense and wait for some fresh chance to lay out his wares. So for the moment I am merely a bully who assaults a man without legs in front of his wife, child, governess, and all his employees, and Smith retains sole knowledge of my darkest crimes. My focus shifts to the letter. I try to imagine the sly phrases in the missive now crumpled unopened in my pocket, the velvet touch that weaves blackmail into insinuation. When I first arrived at this place an urge, electric and terrifying, lured my hand into the dark recess of my pocket; my shivering fingers touched the envelope but did not bring it forth. With each stinging kiss of whisky, each wave of radiating warmth in my stomach and head, the possibility of reading it comes closer, but I still don't possess the courage.
The wasps in my head are circling much more slowly now, and they are losing their sting. My mind begins to turn over thoughts with the languid carelessness of the barman's hands as he dries the glasses. He's a fat, glassy-eyed man and at the moment I love him for being too slow of movement and wit, too compromised by decades of ale, to ever think of blackmail.
Whatever happens I know it's all over for me. Smith, the man whose name is like a flesh-entering blade, has brought me to my knees. I am at best a madman who attacks the weak and infirm. His frailness proved his strength and, no doubt, I underestimated him. All he ever needed to do to destroy me was simply turn up. I would see to the rest.
M
y childlike gaze drops to the banister, to Mr. Smith's white, heavy-veined hand and the crossbeam of his crutch.
“I'm sorry about the job, anyway.”
Puzzlement crosses the veteran's face.
“The job?”
“I thought that's why you came to see my husband.”
“For a job?”
I blush even more deeply than before. On top of everything else, I appear to have insulted Mr. Smith's pride.
“Yes.” The word is shameful and moist on my lips. I force myself to look at his face. I see the hint of a wry smile. We are stranded now on the stairs, needing some reason, some prompt, to allow us to move on. Despite his crutches, his wooden legs, and the frailness of his build, his stance seems firmer than my own. Experience again, I think. Nothing will faze this man because he has been through everything. I have been through nothing.
“I don't need a job,” he says.
“No, of course.” My answer comes breathy and quick. I turn as though about to walk down the stairs, then sway back towards him, wishing there was some etiquette for helping a man who has just been seriously assaulted by one's husband.
“Well,” Mr. Smith says, with a nod at the tannery floor below us, “we should⦔ I follow the unspoken direction and descend the stairs a step or two ahead of him. Reaching the ground, I become instantly aware of Simon's employees as they concentrate upon their work, blunt knives scraping at the folds of leather in front of them. They avoid glancing in our direction, but I know they must be more than curious after the hideous scene. I turn to the veteran, determined not to rush away. I need to invoke a mask of confidence, however absurd it might seem in the situation. Dimly, I'm aware that stoicism is both a birthright and a duty. Vague nursery phrases mouthed by my fatherâ
calmness in adversity
,
hard work
,
diligence
âpass like sails through my mind, urging me to live up to my inheritance as daughter to a shipbuilding empire. I've felt this odd jingoism before in the vicinity of my husband's workplace. Now, as then, it disturbs me and sets me off-kilter.
“You must tell me about yourself, Mr. Smith,” I say, loudly enough to be overheard, I think, above the scrape and rumble of work. “Let's go and sit by the river.”
The words echo in my head as we make our way side by side in silence, circling the tannery and the workers' houses, coming to an open patch of grassland by the water and the bench. Each time my voice returnsâ
You must tell me about
yourself, Mr. Smith
âit seems a little shriller, a little more presumptuous in its superiority.
I hold my tongue as I sit on the bench, hoping that Mr. Smith, who dismantles like a deck chair beside me, can read belated humility in my silence. He sighs, perhaps in pain at some bruise or abrasion, perhaps in self-consciousness. Squinting at the river's bright ripples, I ready myself, mind searching through various obvious questions in search of the least patronizing. But he is the first to speak.
“I'm on holiday, visiting my sister. That's why I'm in Ipswich. Not for work.”
“Oh,” I say, expecting something to suggest itself as a follow-up question, but nothing comes. I begin to shrink again, my sufferings paling. The woman who seven years ago promised to herself that she would live a life of heroic, Promethean struggles seems domestic, trivial, and neurotic. For the first time I notice the rather fine stitch of Mr. Smith's charcoal suitâa subtle plaid woven into the cloth adds to the texture without drawing attention to the patternâand the scent of new leather rising from his black shoes. How can I hope to heal my own husband or anyone else from maladies of the soul when I can't even gauge the nature of man's most obvious needs? I have failed to even notice whether this man is poor or comfortably situated, whether he needs work or may be insulted by such a suggestion.
“Elsa tells me you served with my husband.” I surprise myself with the statement, with its abruptness of tone and direct pertinence to all that has passed. There must be something about Mr. Smith I do not trust, some part of me taking Simon's part.
“We were in the same trenches, yes,” he says, and I notice with a sideways glance that his gaze is lost in the river's shifting sunlight. “âServed' seems a rather lofty term to describe my own part in the war.”
Glancing at his legs, I try to find a tactful way of alluding to his sacrifice. “It seems the least you have earned,” I say quietly.
Lines appear in the corner of his eyes, but his mouth remains unsmiling. He has seen some irony in my words, perhaps. “Mrs. Jenson, if I'd possessed any courage at all I would have registered as a conscientious objector, or failing that, I should have deserted at the first opportunity.”
I allow the words to hang, knowing they deserve space. Before she joined us, Elsa mentioned meeting men in London with such views. She was trying me out, I believe, making sure I was not the sort to judge. Is Mr. Smith's stance the reason for Simon's fury? Was the veteran on some political mission?
“You are a pacifist then?” I ask in a voice suddenly so meek I wonder if the soft breeze will carry my words away before they meet Mr. Smith's ears.
“I'm not sure I have a right to that title,” he replies through a single breath. “I just know I was a fish out of water in the army even before the fighting started. Now it's over I find the things that give comfort to many just make my stomach churn.”
“What kind of things?”
“Oh, words, the way people talk about the war.”
“Such as?”
“Such as âthose who gave their lives,' âthe fallen,' âour glorious dead.'”
“If people need comfort, why not let them have it?”
“Because it's a lie. Lives weren't given, they were taken. Soldiers don't fall, they are killed. There is nothing glorious about a skull invaded by shrapnel. If we lose ourselves in lies, it will happen again.”
His words are dry and quiet and, in the brightness and warmth of the day, perverse in their determination to be ugly. I feel a spark of understanding for my husband and I'm eager to kindle it. I suddenly know why this man might be offensive enough to assault and I want to goad him, to draw it out, so that Simon's actions will seem less monstrous.
