Hero (7 page)

And now, as my ears catch the dull opening and closing of car doors in the distance, I can sense that the dream was real after all, that my reply came too late for him. Now I am no more substantial to him than the wind.

My hand reaches towards the window. As my flesh meets the glass, a fog appears in halo around each fingertip. I think of Major Pickard's letter, of that brightly flickering hope that it gave me: even through the direst horrors, the sweetest kernel remained unharmed. Somehow the gentlest part of Simon's humanity had been not only protected, but enhanced, by the hardships and dangers. It made so little sense, this belief, but was magical simply because it was against logic. Like the calves and oxen kneeling at the stable, such impossibilities demand belief because they promise to transcend all losses, to act as balm for human pain.

Despite all that he has been through, I told myself, despite the suffering, the pain, and the degradation, Simon has remained true to his nature. And he will return to us, even gentler than before. I told myself over and over up to the very moment of hearing the car upon the road. Yet when he did not turn to our house I was not surprised. It is almost a relief now the suspense is over. I have been holding onto a hope that each day has slipped an inch, each day has seemed just a little more far-fetched. He was upon the cliff edge three months ago when he wrote that postscript, and there was a world of horrors between then and now.

I could cry and write love poems. I could lay myself at his feet and weep for all that is and all that has been. But regardless, one fact must remain: the soldier in the car is a stranger to me now.

The doorbell is so unexpected I let the book fall from my lap. I'm still dressed, but the lateness of the hour gives the proceeding hush an ominous feel.

Isabelle scurries through the hallway towards the sound. She hesitates for a moment at the open doorway, giving me a questioning look. I manage something between a nod and a shrug, as if to say we must know who it is before we can decide whether to grant or bar their entrance. She continues to the front door, and I hear her open it gingerly as though reluctant to wake a visitor who sleeps upon our threshold.

“Oh, Mr. Simon!” she exclaims. Like a jack-in-the-box, I shoot up and cross to the dying fire, where I stand irresolute, a moth expiring too close to a flame. I don't hear him say a word, but I hear his step—uneven, unfamiliar—as he approaches. He appears in the doorway, his face lean like a dark-furred greyhound, his grey suit too baggy for his shrunken figure. A pale pink groove—more like a washed out ribbon than a scar—begins at his temple and takes a jagged course through his hair until it disappears somewhere near his crown. He seems altogether smaller than I remember, and much smaller than my imagination has since painted him. His eyes are dark, questioning, almost feral in nervousness, and he is too close to the door frame. The Simon of old would have strode into the middle of the room and taken possession.

My breath has deserted me, but I will myself to recover. He has changed as I knew he would. A strange aura hangs about him, a pungent scent I have detected from other men but never from him. But he has come. Waves of feelings ancient and glorious are crashing in my heart. I suspect that very soon they will loosen my tongue and spill tears of joy onto my cheek. For the moment they are held at bay by the tension in Simon's face, by the knowledge that we cannot instantly return to where we once were, that we are entering a delicately balanced phase of re-acquaintanceship.

“Simon,” I manage at last, my voice a whisper. I take half a step from the fire towards him.

He shrinks away and his eyes grow pained.

“Didn't you know I was home?” he asks. His look darkens in a manner I can't interpret.

“I saw you from the window,” I say, a smile taking over my face despite the tension, moisture touching the rims of my eyelids.

“I've been here for five hours,” he says dully, as though the fact itself was hurtful to him.

“I know.”

I take a full step towards him then gesture him to an arm–chair, mouthing the word please.

He turns from me as though I have dealt him a blow, but then walks slowly towards the armchair, showing me his back until he turns to sit. Some impulse tugs at me, telling me to sink onto my knees in front of him, to take his shoes, or perhaps rest my cheek upon his knee. But something stops me. I move only a few paces nearer.

“So there is someone else.”

This is what I hear, but I can't take it in. They seem the words of a sleepwalker, or a quote from a melodrama. I search through our time together before the war for some clue to unlock the reference—endless games of charades, the plays and pantomimes we put on at home and in the village hall—but nothing comes. His eyes remain focussed on mine, and there is no humour or irony about his expression.

“Someone else,” I repeat, trying to keep the confusion from my smile.

“Of course,” he says, his reduced frame shrinking further into the armchair, his eyes narrowing into what I now suspect is a permanent wince. “You should have told me. You shouldn't have allowed me to hope.”

Sparks of both anger and fear are emanating from his dark eyes.

“No, no, no!” The words rush out as I lunge forward and sink to my knees, my body following the impulse of a few moments ago. I watch myself from above as I bury my head on his lap, a fractured part of me critiquing this melodramatic flourish. But this is a new territory, and I must take risks. What is dignity, after all, to life and limb? I have blundered already by holding back. This new lexicon of risk and disclosure is one I will have to learn quickly.

“There is no one,” I sob quietly, aware that the door is still open and Isabelle may be lingering for orders. “How could there be?” A hot tear oozes from my eye and sinks into the fabric of Simon's trousers. I take in the alien scent once more, but this time I recognize it—whisky. “Everyone is like you, gone to war.”

No hand comes to rest upon my head, and I feel no warm yielding from his leg. After a moment, I draw away and look up at his face.

“Is that why there is no one?” he asks, an odd distemper quivering on his lips. “Simply because none were available?”

“Simon,” I say, “this is mad! It was only you from the start. I've waited for you. Today, at the window, I watched you go by. Why didn't you look?”

He lurches forward in his seat in such a way that I am forced back onto my ankles. He hangs sideways from the chair, half off, half on. The critic hovering above me smirks faintly. I told you, she says. You have fallen from tragedy to farce. But as I crouch before him in silence, watching his face twitch in response to some internal rhythm of pain, I hold on. I have glimpsed a new hope. All this time I thought of Simon as the returning hero, and of course he is. But he is wounded inside. His kindness and confidence have been shocked into jealousy and anger.

“Simon,” I say, laying a calm hand upon his knee, “it's all right. I'm here for you. I'll wait.” My voice sounds more like a nurse than a lover. But something in him buckles completely. His head comes down close to my shoulder, and he lets out a sound I have never heard before—something unformed. I reach out to bury it, holding his head in the crook of my shoulder and neck. His head is heavy and his skull digs into my collarbone. He is overtaken by spasms of crying.

I glance to the open doorway to catch Isabelle, aghast, on the threshold of the room. She turns and scoots away. Gratitude floods through me in two simple words: at last.

Here is my Olympian struggle. Here is my part in the war.

CHAPTER 8

Simon

M
y father's shed door drums hard against its frame as the wind gathers speed.
So you're home now
, it clatters from below my bedroom window. The squeal of hinge that follows is like an inward breath promising a new barrage of mocking.

I feel as though sleep has parted company forever with the night. Those two companions—slumber and darkness—always seemed ungainly together. Now, with my head motionless against the pillow, I see the mismatch as monstrous and absurd. Night draws forth fear, guilt, and imagination. How could rest possibly follow on its heels?

But sleep hardly matters to me now. I am merely the floating ether of damnation, and I belong to the night. This evening part of me floated away from myself, dispassionately observing the layers of humiliation through which I was falling as I accused Sarah and then crumpled before her, accepting pity where I had once commanded respect. I was like a man tumbling into a bottomless pit; I watched the changing bands of rock as the atmosphere heated and the sulphurous fumes rose to meet me.

A floor creaks somewhere and I suspect my father's cautious tread. He is wondering, perhaps, whether to try and secure the shed door, but he is afraid. He doesn't want to encounter me in the pantry with a bottle of Johnnie Walker, or find me passed out upon the living room sofa. He is afraid of Mrs. Cooper's judgment also. His eyes told me this much during and after our strange and mainly silent dinner together; each time his housekeeper entered the room, he would glance at the whisky glass in my hand.

The floorboards are silent again. He has decided not to move.

When I left the house at ten o'clock it was without a word. My father's head jerked towards me as I drained my glass and stood. He was about to speak. But he, like I, had discovered that words have lost all currency. They are weightless objects now, without meaning or use. They merely draw attention to the emptiness around them. His eyes met mine for a moment as I touched the door and opened it, then his gaze fell away.

Like a badger in search of food I crept outside and stood in the patch of scrub between our garden and the Baxters' and watched Sarah's house—only that at first. I had no plans, and it was getting too late to call. I watched the sturdy brick wall with the shimmering ivy and tried to imagine how it would be when we met. I thought of the slow, agonizing stages of disillusionment that would inevitably follow as I failed to act the noble warrior. How long, I wondered, would it take before they lost patience and interest? The question was deeply troubling, as I knew the Baxters would not easily give up on me.

A light suddenly went off—Mrs. Baxter's room if my memory of the layout was correct—and the house, viewed from the side, seemed suddenly like a stage backdrop, lacking all relief and contour. It was Mrs. Baxter who scared me most. When I passed by the house in the car, I could not look for fear of catching her face in the window. When I imagined myself sometime in the not-too-distant future blurting the horrendous truth over dinner, it was her horrified expression, rather than Sarah's, that I saw in the flickering candlelight.

Now that it seemed likely she was in bed, I found myself stirring from the undergrowth. I could strike now, I thought. I could precipitate my fall from grace rapidly, and in lurid colour. I could save the days, weeks, and months of frustrated kindness and attention. I tried to conceive some pointless act of vandalism, taking a kitchen knife to their most treasured family portraits, perhaps, or throwing their hearth rug onto the fire.

A dancing twig prodded my leg as I passed and quite unexpectedly visions of Sarah scattered into my thoughts like brightly coloured playing cards fumbled during a hasty shuffle.

All the worry and sorrow of years, the pain of being parted from Sarah, came upon me in a rush, until—the gravel of the driveway now under my feet—I was almost choking with it.

My crime was all but stripped away. Suddenly, the manner of Charles's death was an aberration, a detail of no sense or importance that the whole world had, in any case, conspired to bury. Why had the world conspired to bury it? As my fingers took the bell and hesitated, skin against cold metal, the thought came to me that perhaps it had not happened after all.

The idea quickly took root. Assuming some cosmic record existed of human action, how would Charles's death be footnoted? Surely as a tragic accident; the question of whose blade entered his flesh was one of no consequence. It was war and by definition a bloody, noisy mess of confusion and mistakes. I asked myself why this misstep should matter more than all the others.

Something churned inside me as I pulled the bell cord. I had no idea what I would do or say. A muffled ring sounded.

My previous self, he who had stood here so many times before the war, leaned upon my shoulder siphoning into me emotions I had assumed to have long ago withered and dried to powder. The door rattled, then opened, and like an intruder upon my own past, I was admitted into the house.

And then the silent fury, the wordless accusations, and finally the sentences spilled like burning coals from an overfilled grate. What was the purpose of the tears, accusations, and jealousy?

I was like a Vandal entering Rome, besmirching the beauty I could not create, burning the buildings I could no longer inhabit. Truth was the only tool forbidden to me in this act of destruction. I latched onto anything else. She was unfaithful.

She was cruel. The energy of bitterness was real, but the target was false.

What a pitiful barbarian! Sarah's sympathy, as fresh as it had been in her letters, as warm as I remembered it, reunited me briefly with myself. Despite all the humiliation this seemed like a good thing. I had come through the war.

Now, as I lie awake listening to the shed door slam, creak open, and slam once more, I realize my mistake. It would be better for me to keep on living as the floating ether of damnation, attempting nothing, expecting nothing. Murder heals over and accepts itself. It is beauty and love that churn up the soul. In trying to return to Sarah, I let an inappropriate hope intrude upon darkness. Before tonight I was a creature of guilt and unreality. Now I am a riot of irreconcilable forces. Like a poorly made garment, with hems exposed and limbs sewn inside out, I make my wearer clownish and bizarre, unable to move at all without pain.