The Separation (52 page)

Soon I reached the top of the climb and was walking past the village houses of Rainow. I slowed my pace a little, because now that the road was shallowly slanting downhill there was no longer the need to push myself so hard. I glanced at each of the houses I passed, thinking that Rainow - which Birgit and I had originally discovered by chance - was in fact an attractive place to live. Every time I saw the expansive view across to the west I fell in love with the place again. Maybe we should wait for one of the larger houses to fall vacant, then try to buy it or rent it? Or again, because most of the disadvantages of our own house were to do with its leaks and draughts, and most of those were caused by the neglect of the landlord, maybe we could buy the house for ourselves? It was large enough, comfortable enough, or could easily be made to be.

Forming such harmless plans, I turned off the village road on to our lane, passing the house on the corner where Harry Gratton and his elderly mother lived. There was no sign of them there, although windows were open.

I came to Cliffe End, the familiar old house in which we had lived since we married, looking the same as always. I walked up the sloping path to the door, pressed my hand to it and found it closed. I fumbled for my keyring, then tried to get the key into the lock.

A new lock, shiny in the sunlight, forbade my key from entry. I tried the handle again, pushed against the door with my shoulder.

I hammered the flat of my hand on the door. I was trying not to think about why the lock had been changed, why I had to call for entry to my own home. I heard footsteps behind the door, a shape glimpsed through the frosted glass. The door was opened by Harry, looking round at me, blinking against the low evening sunlight. He looked grey and tired, unshaven, like someone who had not slept properly. As soon as he saw that it was me he held the door wide open, making a show of being welcoming, friendly. My house.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said churlishly.

‘It’s good to see you again, Joe,’ he replied. ‘Quite a surprise, I’d say, after your being away and that.’

‘Where’s Birgit?’ I said, trying to push past him, because he was blocking the narrow hall. I threw my bag on the floor, where it knocked against our low table in the hallway, the one where I stacked up newspapers after I had read them. No newspapers were there now. The table tottered, moved along and its feet scraped across the bare floorboards.

‘No need for that.’

‘Get out of my way!’ I shouted at him. ‘I don’t want you in my house all the time. Whenever I go away I always come back to find you round here, busying yourself with my wife!’

‘Listen, Joe, you watch what you’re saying to me!’

‘Harry, what’s going on?’ It was Birgit’s voice, sounding to me as if it came from the direction of the kitchen. I shouldered past him, collided with the side of the table I had dislodged, and staggered against the door post. The room was empty. I turned back, finding that Harry had moved behind me with his arms outstretched, as if to restrain me. I swung my arm against him, pushing him aside. I heard Birgit’s voice again, raised anxiously. This time it seemed to me to come from above, so I thrust myself past Harry, took the stairs two at a time and ran along the landing. She was not upstairs. I knew that I was not hearing, registering properly. There was a faint buzzing in my ears and I felt dizzy, unable to focus. I had gone too long without food and I was still tired after the excesses of the previous day. Harry positioned himself halfway up the stairs, watching me. He had a fearful look on his face, as if he expected my next move to hurt him.

I said, ‘Where’s Birgit, Harry?’

‘If you’d stop running around like that, you’d find her. We were in the living-room when you burst in.’

‘Is she all right?’ I began walking down the stairs. He retreated below me, taking the steps backwards.

‘Birgit’s fine. So is your baby boy. Where have you been? We’ve been trying to find you, but nobody knew where you were.’

‘A boy? I have a baby boy?’

Harry was suddenly grinning. ‘He’s asleep at the moment. Come and see him.’

I hurried down the stairs, Harry stepping to one side to make room for me. I pushed open the door to our living-room. Birgit was standing, facing the door as I blundered in. I took in an impression of chaos, of a huge pile of clothes, an ironing board, Mrs Gratton standing at the board with the flatiron in her hand, a scatter of knitted toys, small garments, squares of white cloth draped over the fireguard, a smell of boiled milk, steam, porridge, urine, talcum powder. In a wicker basket on a metal stand by the window, I could see the tiny shape of a baby.

‘Joe, he’s so beautiful!’ Birgit was radiant - she looked plump and well, her cheeks were pink, her face was round, her dark hair glistened on her shoulders.

‘Let me see him!’ I went to the cot and leaned over it. I gently pulled back the light blanket that was shrouding his head. Down there was the tiny, screwed-up face of my new son, his lips compressed, his eyes tight shut, wrinkles of pink flesh. I knew I shouldn’t wake him but I couldn’t resist. I reached in, picked up the tiny body with both hands, cradled him as well as I could, touched back the folds of the blanket with my fingertips so that I could see his face.

He opened his eyes: a truculent frown, a myopic stare past me, a tiny wet mouth opening and closing. I put my face closer to his, trying to make him see me. I moved my head back to take a better look. There, in his face, I saw myself, the resemblance, the knowledge of my family. All my own impressions and sensations of the day, everything that I had done and gone through in the past few hours, faded away. I felt something like a pause in the progress of the world beyond me, a halting. Silence briefly surrounded me and my son, emotions rising theatrically. There he was, alive in my arms, surprisingly solid and heavy. He had my father’s colouring, my shape of head, a look in his eyes that I recognized as a family look which was detectable even through the corrugations of a baby frown in a loosely fleshed face. I could see myself in his face, see Birgit’s familiar looks, all indefinable yet exact. I could see me and therefore I could see my brother. Everything of my life was contained there in that tiny fragment of new life.

Birgit had moved so that she was standing beside me. She rested a hand on the arm that I was using to support the little boy’s weight and I felt her squeeze my muscles.

‘Joe, he’s such a lovely baby!’

‘What’s his name? Have you named him yet?’

‘I wanted to wait for you, but everyone has been pressing me to call him something.’

‘I’d no idea he was coming now. I thought he wasn’t due for another three weeks!’ I stared down blissfully at my son, trying to think of a good name to call him.

‘It happened at the weekend, while you were away,’ Birgit said. ‘It started on Saturday afternoon. He was early, but he’s almost up to normal weight. He’s going to be OK, Joe!’

We stood together, beaming down at the tiny child, waves of happiness radiating from us.

‘We decided to call him after my dad, Joe.’ I turned in surprise. It was Harry Gratton, standing behind me. I could feel his weight on my arm as he too leaned forward to peer down at the baby. ‘His name is Stuart.’

‘You named my baby?’ I said incredulously.
‘You
called him Stuart! How the hell-?’

‘It was my decision, Joe,’ Birgit said. ‘My idea to call him Stuart. It is what I wanted also. Stuart is a good British name, I think.’

Beyond Mrs Gratton, who had paused in her ironing to watch me cuddle the baby, I saw a movement. A man had been sitting in the armchair behind her, facing away from me. He stood up now and turned towards me, smiling and beaming, joining in my difficult moment of paternity. Happiness swung full circle to tragedy in that moment. It was Jack, standing there in his RAF uniform, standing in my house, already there with Birgit and the baby when I arrived. Jack, who I had been told was unconscious in hospital somewhere, Jack who haunted my lucid imaginings, who thrust me back to reality.

I stared at him in amazement, knowing that it could not be him. Not really. I glanced once more at the little child, who looked so like me, so like Jack, but then I thrust him away. Birgit took the baby from me, cradling her arm around him protectively, pressing him closely to her soft body. I was losing control as exhaustion and emotions overtook me at last. I moved back, one halting step, then another. My heel caught on something behind me and I tripped at once. I fell backwards, crashing to the floor, my arm colliding with the wicker cradle, pushing it to the side. I hit the back of my head hard on the floor and for a moment I thought I was going to lose consciousness. The others rushed towards me, Birgit reaching me first, kneeling down with the baby clutched against her chest, a hand reaching out to me. Jack moved to stand behind her, over her, towering above me. They were both speaking but I was deaf to their words. I looked away from them both, up at the ceiling immediately above me. It was cream-painted, made of metal, held in place by a line of tiny painted-over rivets. The vehicle was lurching as we bumped along, but my legs and waist were held in place by straps. I was finding it difficult to breathe, as if other straps had been tightened across my chest. Panic rose in me. I could raise my upper body, twist to look around, but in the cold and dimly lit interior of the ambulance there was little to see.

On the stretcher shelf across from me was a young woman, sleeping. I remembered her name was Phyllida. Phyllida managed to look at ease in spite of the swaying of the vehicle, the endless racket from the engine and transmission. Her eyelids lay quietly at rest. Her lips were slightly parted and one of her arms dangled over the side. The stiff, utilitarian cut of her Red Cross jacket took on softer lines as she slept. Even as I was struggling for breath I was captivated by the unexpected intimacy of finding her there with me.

I gripped the side of the shelf as the ambulance ran across a pothole in the road’s surface. The jolt expelled breath from me. I knew where I was, what had happened. Everything I feared about my lucid imaginings had come to be. Six months of my life had reversed, slipped away from me. The vehicle rumbled on through the night. All that I thought I had gained and put solidly and unarguably behind me, the flying journeys abroad, the meetings in great houses, the deal between Hess and Churchill, the outbreak of a final peace, once again lay ahead in that delusional future. All of it would be lost if I gave way at the end.

Yet also ahead of me lay that life which was obscurely rejecting me: my alienated brother, the marriage that was failing, the son who had been born and named in my absence, the intrusion of others, all of it the product of my own neglect.

I lay on my back, staring up at the neutral ceiling, watching helplessly as my vision slowly dimmed. Desperation for life rose in me. I wanted to hold on so that I could re-awake in that post-war world. I dared not lose what I had gained, whatever the personal price, but each breath was becoming harder to take in and use. Darkness spread within me, bringing a feeling of stillness, an end to turbulence, to the struggles. The close of my life, the loss of that peace.

Surely it had not all been an illusion, the noble peace we had struck, the separation of the two great countries away from the horrors of war?

The pitching motion of the ambulance stabilized, the harsh sound of the engine died away, the dim lights faded. I struggled against it for a while, but gradually a sense of calm began to flow meekly through me, offering me peace - not the kind I had always sought, but an alternative to it. I felt the encroachment of final darkness, its cold and endless embrace.

The terror of it made me resist, however, through that night.

I clung to my life, forcing myself to breathe evenly, without anxiety, watching Phyllida sleep and dreaming of waking to a better future.

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