Hero (21 page)
“So you didn't fit in during the war,” I say. “What do you do now, Mr. Smith?”
“I design film sets at Twickenham.”
I have heard his answer but can't get the words to mean anything. He might as well have claimed to be a tightrope walker.
“Film sets?” I ask after a pause. “For the moving pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Like Charlie Chaplin.”
“Yes, except he's in Los Angeles.”
“And you fit in better designing scenery for films than you did in the army?”
I'm aware my voice has become more clipped, my manner more dismissive with each question. I have joined my husband, it seems, on the landing outside his office. My hands also are on Mr. Smith's collar, and I am about to launch him into space once again. Only the odd detachment of his answersâhe has surely noticed my change in toneâacts as a warning; there is too much I don't know. I have the sense I am in a high place and that the ledge could give way at any moment.
“Yes,” he replies after a pause. “Yes, I fit in better. I have friends, not comrades, and discussions, not singsongs.”
“And do you get many opportunities to practise your pacifism, painting scenes for the camera?”
“In a way,” he says, ignoring my obvious sarcasm. “Or at least I hope to.”
“Indeed?”
He is silent again. I notice he takes a glance towards my hands, which are twitching on my lap. I try to still them. “Just after the war,” he says, beginning to roll a cigarette, “a film was made in Germany. This is the plot: a mad old charlatan runs a concession at a fair. He exhibits a young sleepwalker, who wakes only to tell fortunes. He tells each customer he will die at dawn. Later, when the fair has closed for the night, the charlatan orders his sleepwalker to go out and fulfill his own prophesies. The film is remarkable, full of petrified trees, leaves like knives, grass like barbed wire.”
Grey smoke curls from his thin lips, dulling my view of the river.
“Very interesting.”
“Both your husband and I are familiar with this story. I'm sure he would recognize it too.”
“And your point is?”
“That in film, by bypassing the literal, you can tell an obvious truth that nobody wants to face.”
“What obvious truth?”
“That war is disgusting, vile, and sheer lunacy. It is the old enslaving the young. The survival of decency, in act, word, or gesture, is a near miracle.”
The last statement, corresponding with a soft-remembered chime, is delivered in more measured tones than everything before. He has half turned towards me as if conveying a secret he would rather keep from the water and from the swallows that spin and scoop along the surface. A mallard bobs close to the water's edge, its beak nudging a fragment of tree bark, which rolls off a little farther with each peck. Silence stretches until I become aware of my own heartbeat.
“My husband,” I say at last, nervousness oozing inside me. “Why did you want to see him?”
The question, now voiced, seems as momentous as thunder, even more so as it arises unexpectedly and from an eerie calm. Why should this be? What could Mr. Smith say that I do not already know? What could happen when the worst has surely come and gone?
The veteran slowly draws breath. “I wanted to tell him something of himself, something from my own vantage point, which I believe is different from anyone else's.”
A breeze cooler than all the others circles us now, scattering the ripples, spinning the duck's bark a few feet away. The bird swims in pursuit, neck straining to regain what he never quite had.
“Whatever you think of war,” Mr. Smith continues matter-of-factly, “however hellish and demeaning you imagine battle to be, the reality when you're up close is much worse. It only worksâthe machine of war, the relentless grinding motion, orders given and orders obeyedâif soldiers give themselves to it, if they forget that the bullet they fire invades the flesh of young men just like themselves.” He pauses, puts the cigarette to his lips and draws it away, emitting another pale blue cloud. “I told you I was different. I couldn't join in with the camaraâderie. I couldn't give myself to the madness. I was a coward.”
“But it's not cowardice,” I say feebly. Like a child who changes her mind several times during the same argument, I have retained only the determination to oppose. “Not if you disagreed with it all.”
He gives a short laugh and smooths his fingers over one of his crutch handles. “No, that wasn't cowardice. My cowardice was remaining where I didn't belong. If I'd been shot for desertion I might have believed myself a hero. I wanted to talk to your husband of heroism. I wanted to tell him that to remain human after months and years of bombardment, of expectations lived up to, that is a triumph. That's true heroism. To be soft and yielding in battle is heroism. This is what my letter was about. I doubt he will get to read it now.”
He is talking of the moment, the one onto which I've clung for seven years, about which I've thought for all that time, losing myself in a thousand related fantasies, the laying upon the ground, the soft words, the murmured prayer. The tiny hairs upon the back of my hands and the skin around my neck tingle in unison. HeâMr. Smithâwas the witness, the one who passed the story on to nurses, to Major Pickard, and to others.
“You saw it?”
“Yes. I suppose he doesn't talk about it.”
“Never.”
The pools of dancing sunlight blur upon the water, and I realize tears are welling.
“I'm sure he never will,” he says, looking across at me for the first time since we sat down. “But perhaps you can find a way to tell him that's what I meant.”
Taking a last draw from his cigarette, Mr. Smith prepares to stand, crutches folding beneath him in a weight-receiving triangle. In a moment he is moving away, smoke clouds rising over his shoulder.
T
he train stands, doors agape. Sun glints upon the black metal as upon a stallion's flank. The engine sighs and spews a funnel of steam. Lucy's shoulders are compliant under my hands. In a few minutes we could be speeding through the countryside towards the metropolis. Neither of us have clothes or supplies of any kind, but as a foreigner here I always travel with money. I have five one-pound notes crumpled in the bottom of my purse, together with a half crown, several shillings, and a scattering of smaller change, enough to see us through until I can get to the bank where I have my inheritance, a deposit of almost a hundred pounds. This would be enough to last some time even in London. Unless things have changed since I came away, there are positions to apply for, even for a woman with a child.
Still, as I stare beyond the open door into the dark corridor, a bat-like, cowering impulse clings upside down inside my gut. It's not that the action I'm contemplating would be difficult to achieve. Quite the opposite. It would be only too simple to achieve my immediate ends. I fear the unbroken fall, the continuous tunnel with no snags, no opportunity to turn and reconsider. A porter yelps to the post office men to hurry loading parcels. Steam floats by my shoulders. It's simple, I tell myself: a child must be saved, a train is in front of you. And yet I can't move.
What about clothes
? squeaks the bat, digging its tiny claws deeper into my entrails. The objection is feeble. London possesses many shops, after all. I can purchase clothes and food for the two of us with the money I have on me. But as the postmen finish with their parcels, as doors slam, one after the other, along the train, and as the porter looks at his watch, I become aware that my feet have become heavier, more attached to the concrete of the platform, and that I will not board the train with Lucy. Lucy, who needs freedom from the war, will not be saved by me, not now. The whistle blows, and the flag is raised and smartly brought down. The door facing us is the last to be shut. The clang makes Lucy's shoulders wriggle under my hands. One slow chug is followed by another and another and the iron wheels begin to scrape along their tracks. Lucy turns, looking up at me.
“I thought we were going to get on the train,” she says. She seems to gaze right through me, seeing into and beyond my anxiety.
“No,” I reply weakly. “We must wait for your parents.”
The words, given blandly, carry the weight of the revelation. They explain the cowering bat and my heavy feet. She belongs, this child of war, to others and not to me. She belongs to Dunwich and its crumbling cliffs, to the man whose screams terrorize the night, and to the woman whose colour has been drained by years of grief and uncertainty. Who am I to act as rescuer, after all? Am I not as damaged as them? As amputees are said to feel the ghosts of their former limbs, I am feeling in Lucy the daughter I never had. I have been imagining Jack's features, not in the girl's own face, which is shaped too differently even for imagination to re-mould into a parody of my husband's, but in her vicinity. The very shadow she casts is flavoured with the life I lost in 1916.
Like Mr. Smith, I am defined by my missing parts. The void within me, screaming for fulfillment, for the reattachment of flesh and blood long gone, almost robbed the Jensons of their own small piece of hope. As long as they have their child there is some chance at least that a river long clogged with refuse, discarded metal, and brown foam, might become clearer around the next turn, might know rejuvenated grass along its banks, the flap of wings upon its shores, and the stir of fins beneath its surface. While this is hardly fair to Lucy, her parents do belong to her, just as she belongs to them. They, the war, and its never-ending consequences, are her heritage. I have no right to rob her.
As the train grinds faster along the tracks, steam billowing above, a kind of relief descends at last. It wasn't cowardice that stopped me; I merely came to my senses.
N
ow that the shock is beginning to fade, I am becoming sore, pain dancing around my body, confusing my mind as to its exact location. One moment the throbbing seems to come from my elbow, next it shifts to my hip, then to my right stump, squeezed tight within bandage and rubber.
Or is it below that? Is it my invisible foot that pulses, sending emissaries of discomfort towards the parts of me still living? You'd think I'd be used to pain by now, but the more it's felt, even mildly, the less patient I am. My main fear is that the soreness will get so bad I won't be able to hide it from Janet. My sister's anxiety was palpable this morning when she insisted on helping me on with my jacket. “How do you think I cope the other fifty-one weeks of the year?” I asked her in protest.
Only after some probing of my own could I prize out of her the real reason for her concern: it is July 1, an anniversary of sorts. I had forgotten. Or perhaps it was too inconsequential to make forgetting necessary. If I tell her of my mishap, my fall down a staircase (I certainly won't mention I was thrown), she will be justified, and I will never again be able to shrug off her belief in signs and the power of coincidence.
Tired of being on my crutches, tired of my broken insect walk, which today, as ever, draws the gazes of children playing football, women with strollers, and every other human form I come close to, I stop and rest. It's a relief to hear the silence, or at least the absence of the relentless
scuff
,
scuff
, of crutch against burned soil and gravel. I hear instead the faint slosh of water and the shimmering of dry grasses in the breeze. Here the river path is wider and some men taking a break from bricklaying stare at me without a hint of embarrassment. One of them nods slightly, and the others, even from a distance, seem to meet my eyes. They know, without being told, the reason a young man with crutches would be dragging lifeless feet through the midday heat. They were there too.
I'm fed up with the cycle of sympathy and pain. As the most reluctant soldier in the battalion, I deserve neither. But war is a beast of paradox. I and only I could have told Lieutenant Jenson's whole story, and I am the only one who, knowing the truth, would not begrudge him his medal.
Less than a quarter of a mile away, the departing London train is picking up speed. I glimpse its funnel and its shining doors as it chugs through the tall trees, swaying closer, then bending away to my right. I think of Lieutenant Jenson's daughter. Last week, when I came out of the station building, scanning the crowds for Janet, I caught sight of her for the first time. It was astounding. In returning to Ipswich I had re-entered some dream-like distortion of the past. In the driver's seat of the car was Lieutenant Jenson, leaner than I remembered him, his high forehead white against the sun, drawing attention to an unflattering baldness. Next to him was a child.
My eyes skimmed away. I wanted to distract my vision, feeling, superstitiously perhaps, that this would keep him from seeing me. For some moments I lost myself in passing shoulders, gloves, handbags, and suitcases on trolleys, until one nagging detail regarding the child reclaimed my attention. I looked again. She had a round face; its colour, the contours of cheek and mouth, were those of Lieutenant Baxter. I shifted backwards, further into the shade, lodging the base of my spine against the wall.
The scrape of wheel against concrete, the thump of an unloading trunk together with the faint scent of wildflowers from the river or some nearby parkâa collaboration of senses inexplicably close in flavour to my experience of northern Franceâbrought back the moment: Once more I saw a clearing mist, an officer far behind his troops. Once more a white pain blinded me one moment then faded the next, wafting me into a lightheaded serenity. I was dying, I thought, and really quite happy about it. I was happy because I had been watching men reduce themselves willingly to the level of ants, an army of them marching into murder and self-destruction. And I was no differentâthis was the chief among all horrors. I was marching too, until something blew me out of my feet. The bomb had saved me. This and the sight of an officer who lagged behind, a glimmer of human intelligence in a cesspool of criminal idiocy, gave me sudden hope. And then there were two of them, the first with the bayonet drawn, the second with his hand like a hesitant dance partner holding onto the shoulder of the first.
