Homeland (40 page)

‘At least they gave you the choice.’

‘But I
wanted
the police,’ Jozef argued fiercely, with a wild outward fling of one palm. ‘I wanted to clear my name and stay in London. As it was, I was dragged away, I
was made to look guilty as hell.’

‘Your friends dragged you away?’

‘No – Linder!’ Jozef exclaimed. ‘Linder panicked me into leaving before I had the chance to think. He told me I was about to be arrested. But it was a lie – I know
it was a lie! He was only saying that to get rid of me and save himself trouble. That was all he cared about – how it looked for him. He rushed me into leaving, he made it look as though I
was running away. He made me look guilty. And now,
now
– ’ Jozef’s voice rose in anger and self-pity, he clutched a hand to his forehead.

‘Who is this’ – Wladyslaw hesitated over the name, thinking he might have misheard – ‘person exactly? This Lin-whatever?’

‘Linder.
Linder
,’ Jozef repeated impatiently, as if Wladyslaw were being particularly stupid.

‘Do you mean
Lyndon
?’ Wladyslaw enquired carefully.

‘That’s what I said – Linder.’

‘Hanley?’

When Jozef nodded, Wladyslaw began to struggle with a number of conflicting thoughts, all of them disturbing. ‘I don’t understand – how was he involved?’

‘Oh, he got me the job. For which
big
thanks, I don’t think!
Big
favour, for which he can go to hell! He never even listened to my side of the story. No, well, they
were
his
friends, weren’t they?’

‘Who were?’

‘Him and the store owner’s son. War comrades. So I never had a chance, did I? A nothing Polish boy from nowhere.’

‘And you honestly cannot think of why you should have been accused?’

Jozef clapped a hand against his chest. ‘On my heart – there was no reason! I did nothing wrong, I swear to you.’

Wladyslaw stubbed out his cigarette in the saucer that served as an ashtray, and kept stubbing it long after the last spark had been extinguished. Eventually he stood up. ‘I’ll bring
some food at six then,’ he said. ‘The old man cooks well enough. You won’t be disappointed.’

The mare had one pace, slow and steady. Bennett had long since decided that this was just as well. Both of them were rather long in the tooth for anything more adventurous,
even on the rare occasions when the weather and road conditions might have allowed it. The mare had been lent to him by a farmer immediately after the first snowfall, and within the space of two
days he had discovered the joys of riding high above the hedgerows in rare sunshine with a wide unimpeded view of the snow-drenched landscape, and the misery of a fierce blizzard taken head on,
with a wind that cut straight through his waxed coat, and no reference points to guide him on his way.

Early this morning he had ridden through swirling snow to a remote farmhouse on North Moor to attend a breech birth which gave him several anxious hours until he was able to deliver the baby
buttocks first. It was a boy for the farm, and the parents wept with joy. On his way back through Burrowbridge he called on two elderly patients to find both tucked up in their cottages with fires
blazing and enough food to keep them going until the neighbours brought more supplies. Then, hungry and thirsty, he stopped at the King Alfred pub under Burrow Mump and treated himself to a couple
of whiskies with a plate of bread and cheese.

It was almost three by the time he set out again. A sulphurous sky had brought an early dusk, while a hard wind ruffled the mare’s mane and sent whorls of snow skittering across the packed
surface of the road ahead. A scattering of flakes flew on the rushing air, marking the end of the last storm or the start of the next.

Taking the road towards home, the mare’s pace seemed to pick up a fraction in anticipation of her stable, and Bennett felt duty-bound to lean forward and tell her, ‘Not quite done,
old girl. One last call to make.’

Riding into the Hanleys’ yard, Bennett led the mare into the shelter of the tractor shed before going to the front of the house and ringing the bell. He heard the closing of a distant door
and the approaching steps of Arthur Hanley. Preparing for the small talk that was always something of a trial for him, Bennett was taken aback when the door opened to reveal not Arthur Hanley but
his son.

Lyndon Hanley ushered him in with a lift of one arm. ‘My father said you might be coming.’

They shook hands.

‘Good to see you back,’ Bennett said. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine.’ Dispensing with further niceties, Lyndon took his coat and hat and said, ‘You’ll let me know how she is? My father’s out at the moment.’

‘Of course.’

‘You know the way?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

Bennett went upstairs to the draughty front bedroom to find Janet Hanley deeply asleep in the old-fashioned brass bed, her face drained of colour, her lips dry, her hair stuck to her forehead.
When he spoke her name she opened her eyes and muttered a faint greeting. She had been seriously ill with pneumonia but even before he examined her he could tell that the fever had gone and the
worst was over.

‘It’ll be some time before you get your strength back,’ he told her when he had finished listening to her chest. ‘You’ll have to take things gently for quite a
while.’

‘My son . . .’ she murmured. ‘Is he . . .?’

‘He’s downstairs.’

She breathed fretfully, ‘Did he say if he was staying?’

‘I don’t know. He didn’t tell me.’

‘He’s going away again. I know he is.’

‘Well, he’s here now. I’m sure he’ll be up to see you shortly.’ Bennett put a hand over hers, but she drew no comfort from it.

He helped her to drink some water, then sponged her face with a flannel from the bathroom. She was asleep before he left the room.

Lyndon Hanley was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. ‘How is she?’

‘The fever’s passed. But she’ll need a long period of convalescence. Several weeks at least.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘Can you cook?’

‘Badly.’

‘Well, she’ll need invalid food. Chicken broth, stewed apple, rice pudding, that kind of thing.’

‘I can but try.’

‘And look, it’s awfully cold up there. Might it be possible to light a fire?’

‘I’ll see what I can do. But my father doesn’t usually allow fires in bedrooms. He thinks it’s unhealthy. Fancy a drink, Doctor?’

‘A bit early for me.’

‘Tea?’

‘That would be lovely, thank you.’

They went into the kitchen. Bennett sat at the table while Lyndon filled the kettle and plopped it onto the stove with a crash.

‘When did you arrive?’ Bennett asked.

‘A couple of hours ago.’ Lyndon leant back against the stove rail and, heaving his shoulders high, crossed his arms and squeezed them against his angular body as if he were very cold
or very tense. With his unruly hair and penetrating gaze, he was an uncomfortable presence; his mind seemed altogether too sharp, his senses too raw.

‘You didn’t come on the Norton, did you?’ Bennett asked.

‘There aren’t any trains.’

‘Of course. I’d forgotten about the trains. You must have had an interesting ride.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t too bad till we got onto the smaller roads.’

Bennett noted the ‘we’ in passing, and half supposed he was referring to the bike. ‘Well, I hope you don’t feel you were summoned unnecessarily. Your mother gave us real
cause for concern a couple of days ago.’

‘That’s the thing – I never got my father’s telegram. He sent it to my club, but I haven’t been there for ages. I didn’t know my mother was ill till I got
here.’

‘Good heavens. So you’d decided to come anyway?’

‘I was intending to come in a couple of weeks. Then . . . well, I changed my mind. I decided to come earlier.’

‘Extraordinary. But then these things happen all the time, don’t they? And the more they happen the more one suspects they can’t always be put down to coincidence.’

‘Of course it was coincidence,’ Lyndon said firmly. ‘Come on, Doctor, you can’t believe all that claptrap about intuition.’

‘When I was young I would have agreed with you. I thought it was complete poppycock. But then – well, a couple of things happened to me on the Front to make me think
again.’

‘I would have thought war was the last thing to make you believe in the possibility of benevolent forces.’

‘Ah yes . . .’

‘Well? What happened?’

‘The first time was soon after I arrived in Flanders. I was put in charge of a dressing station a short distance behind the front line. When I arrived the men had got the main tent half
erected. But I had this extraordinary conviction that we should move it somewhere else. Tents, staff, supplies, the whole damn show. Well, you can imagine how popular that was. I dreamt up an
excuse about insanitary conditions – but that was all it was, an excuse. Luckily my CO wasn’t around. He was further up the line and didn’t return till the next day. By which time
we’d moved a hundred yards away and the original site had been blown to smithereens during the morning bombardment. Nothing but a crater.’

‘The site was too close to the front line,’ Lyndon declared. ‘It was just common sense to move it.’

‘But the second site was no further away, just further to the west. And the shell that fell on the first site was the only one to fall so far behind the lines.’

‘I don’t care. There must have been something wrong with the first site, something that you logged subconsciously, that your mind never articulated. Perhaps you realised that the
place had been used before, as a divisional HQ perhaps. Something that was an obvious target. No, I’m sorry, Doctor – that one won’t wash.’

For the sake of argument, Bennett conceded with a turn of one hand.

‘And the other experience?’

‘That was even more striking. It was about six months later. I was assigned to a casualty clearing station near Maricourt. I’d come off duty after a twelve-hour stint and gone back
to my billet to get some sleep. I was dog-tired, but try as I might I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about my family – my parents and two brothers. Nothing unusual in that, you might
say, but I’d only been married a short while and it was usually Marjorie who was in the forefront of my mind. My family were rather more – well, not in the background exactly, but less
conspicuous. Anyway, I tossed and turned for a couple of hours before I felt this compulsion to return to the clearing station. It had never happened before, I couldn’t explain it at all, yet
I felt absolutely no doubt that I must go. When I got there it was about five. The bombardment had started earlier than usual that night and large numbers of casualties were arriving from the
dressing stations. I walked into one barn – there were three to choose from, but I knew exactly which one – and went straight up the middle, looking to my right. Not to my left, but to
my right. And there, second from the end, was my younger brother.’

At Lyndon’s back the kettle was hissing noisily but he ignored it.

Bennett added, ‘I knew he was somewhere on the Front of course, but I thought his regiment was much further to the west, near Thiepval. I had no idea they’d been moved to our
section.’

Finally Lyndon reached back to slide the kettle off the hotplate. He stared intently at Bennett before saying, ‘I’m glad you found your brother, Doctor, but I cannot accept your
basic proposition, that you were guided to him by some extrasensory force. I imagine you were working long hours under appalling conditions. I suggest that in the hubbub and confusion you overheard
someone mentioning your brother’s regiment, and that this information stayed buried in the back of your mind until you tried to sleep, when it came to the fore, and you made the connection
between the regiment, your brother and the beginning of the bombardment, which alerted you to the possibility of his being in danger.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

Lyndon pulled out a chair and sat down. Leaning forward, he spread an emphatic hand palm down on the table in front of him. ‘I cannot explain why you should have gone straight to the right
barn, except for the obvious reason, that there was always going to be a one-in-three chance of getting it right. But if you want to call it intuition – well, that’s up to you.’
His long fingers flexed and lifted off the table, his eyes glittered. ‘But I can’t accept the idea that a force can be both benevolent and arbitrary. It’s a total contradiction.
Any force that picks and chooses, that warns you of one bullet but fails to warn you of the next – which by definition is the one that’s going to kill you – is at best fickle, at
worst sadistic, because it’s toyed with you, it’s given you the illusion of protection. No, the idea of forewarning, of intuition, is just another form of voodoo. Another tyrannical
deity to add to all the rest.’

Bennett wondered if Lyndon was an atheist or an agnostic, and decided atheist. Though not without a struggle, he suspected; not without doubts.

‘And if this force relies on some sort of telepathic communication, some sort of magic
waves
’ – Lyndon drew some contemptuously in the air – ‘then why
doesn’t it function when we really need it? Why doesn’t it work when the people closest to us are in danger? How can such a force let us believe that someone we love is just close
by’ – the arc of his hand indicated a point behind his shoulder – ‘safe and sound, when in fact they’ve vanished, gone for ever? How can it let us think
everything’s all right when at that very instant this person we love is being subjected to the most appalling suffering?’

Something in Lyndon’s expression made Bennett stay silent.

‘How is it’ – and now Lyndon took his time, choosing his words with care – ‘that we can have an extraordinary affinity with someone, that we can feel so highly
attuned to them that we can almost read their thoughts – and your force fails to scream and shout and rage at us when they’re in pain?’

Lyndon’s gaze sharpened, inviting a response.

‘I cannot answer that,’ Bennett said.

‘Of course you can’t. Because your force doesn’t exist.’ Lyndon sat back in his chair and said in an altogether brisker tone, ‘No, Doctor, it’s all a matter
of luck. Good or bad. Nothing more. The mistake is to start wondering why you had the luck to survive when other people didn’t. That way guilt and religious conversion lie.’