Therefore Choose (17 page)

“George … George Smith.”

A woman was standing, waving, in front of a grocer's shop on Camden High Street.

“It's me, Bernardette,” she said. “Don't you recognize me?”

“How are you? I mean, I didn't recognize you at first, your hair …”

“I'm a good deal more grown up than before the war. What about you?”

“I'm fine.”

“You make it sound like the opposite. Let me look at you.”

She stepped slightly to one side and pantomimed peering at George. She looked first at his feet, then his knees, then his midriff and chest, and ended up looking into his eyes.

“Examination and history,” she said. “Before putting a hand on the patient, observe. Pause, reflect on what you see.”

She was able to make George smile; evidently she thought she would continue.

“Don't rush. Patients don't mind waiting. That's why they're called patients. Remember Dr. Bell, Conan Doyle's model for Sherlock Holmes. He could spot the features of disease the moment the patient walked through the door.”

George had an image of Bernardette at the first lecture of their clinical course, and another of them leaning towards each other over plates of shepherd's pie in the refectory.

“And the diagnosis?” George said.

“Shoes not recently cleaned, and, despite new demob suit, appearance dishevelled. Eyes darting about in a thoroughly evasive manner. Not trench fever. Shell shock, perhaps.”

“Shocked that we were shelling people, killing civilians, and I can't help thinking about it. Could that be it?”

“I didn't have to do that. But that doesn't mean it was just you. It was all of us. We're all in it. But the war's over and you seem to have survived. You're finding it more than you'd thought … to survive the peace?”

“I'm fine, really.” He spoke without conviction, and she eyed him sharply.

“I'll buy you a drink,” she said.

“I'm sorry. Our house, my mother's house, where I was living when you and I first met — it was destroyed by a V-2.”

George felt suddenly disoriented. He didn't know why he'd blurted this out: someone he'd been fond of had shown she cared about him. Now his head was full of his mother, and wondering whether she'd suffered.

“She had a Morrison shelter,” he said. “In our hallway, just inside the front door. It wouldn't have been the slightest good. She was killed outright. A few more months and she'd have made it. I didn't even know until the peace broke out.”

“Oh, George …”

She put down her shopping bag, stepped across three feet of pavement to clasp George in her arms, like the oldest friend, like a mother, like a lover.

“I'd better be taking you home,” she said. “I'm just round the corner. I'll pour you a toddy, and you can tell me the worst. It does you good to talk to a doctor.”

They walked up Delancey Street, turned onto Arlington Road.

Bernardette had stayed in London after she qualified, and during the war she'd stayed on to work at University College Hospital.

“Here's my castle,” she said.

In her kitchen George sat on a wooden chair while she cooked bacon and fetched from a cupboard a piece of fruit cake, which they shared. He spoke about the only thing he knew, the bleakness he felt.

“In the midst of death, we are in life,” she said.

“Living and partly living.”

“You should find yourself a woman. I'm told they do wonders for a fellow's morale.”

“I found one a couple of weeks ago. It didn't really work. The thing is, I had a woman, before the war, when I met you. I think I told you.”

“You didn't tell me,” said Bernardette. “I had no idea what you were up to.”

“She was German, and she wanted me to stay and live with her in Germany.”

“And the parting was painful?”

“I had medical school. That was when you and I met.”

“That's when you thought of me as a bit on the side.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You weren't very frank.”

“I think I was wondering if I should put it behind me, the other person, I mean, in Germany. Her name was Anna…Anna von Kleist.”

“A
von
,” said Bernardette. “An aristocrat?”

“Not exactly. From an aristocratic family, I suppose.”

“But you didn't manage to put her behind you?”

“I still wonder sometimes if I should have stayed in Berlin.”

Bernardette raised her eyebrows at this implausible proposition.

“We visited each other a few times, back and forth, Berlin and London.”

“Not behind you at all.”

“Just before the war broke out, she wrote and said she had married someone who had been my best friend. He was German.”

“And you're still thinking about her, after all these years?”

“Off and on. There were times when it became very intense, almost a hallucination. For a while I thought I was going mad.”

“About her, or about the war?”

“About her … about the war.”

When George thought back to this conversation, he couldn't understand how he had blurted all this out, to someone he hadn't seen for years. And he couldn't remember how they managed the transition from talking to bed, but they did. It must not have been too difficult. He could not have managed anything difficult.

“It's good to feel your body, your skin against me,” George said. “Is there anything you like? Would you like me to nibble your ear, or pinch your bum?”

“Why, thank you, sir. I've never been asked,” she said. “Why don't you experiment with a little of this and a little of that. Then I'll have a more extensive basis for my decision. I'm not very experienced.”

“Neither am I.”

“You must have had a few women.”

“Grasping at straws.”

Bernardette was not a straw. On his chest he felt her breasts, until recently enclosed in a Utility brassiere, pressed softly against him. They moved him more than he had allowed for. Surprising tears started in his eyes.

“You can cry if you need to,” she said. “We've been through terrible things. My brother died, not long before you and I met, when we were students. It was too painful. I probably didn't even tell you. Earlier this year, three months ago, my father died. Not from the war. But that doesn't make it easier.”

“I'm sorry.”

“The rest of us have to keep going, else what would there be?”

He did not know what to say.

“You can tousle my hair a bit at the nape of the neck,” she said. “Then you can put on a prophylactic device that even in these days of austerity, with me being a doctor and all, not only can I prescribe but I can provide, and we can be getting on with it.”

Which he did. And he was welcomed, and slowly, slowly, until he felt her moving and was sure, he allowed himself as well.

“Goodness,” she said. “Quite a revelation.”

It took George a little while to understand this.

“But you've had lovers?” he said.

“Only one real one. He's older. I'm as cross as the bee at the beekeeper with him just now, or I wouldn't have been letting you have your way with me …”

“You're engaged?”

“Bless you, no. He's married. You know him: Pardou. He's a consultant.”

“Pardou?”

“The same. His wife was in a car accident, years ago. Paraplegic, in a wheelchair.”

“You love him?”

“He was in Dublin before he came here. They were friends of the family … when my brother died, he was very comforting.”

George wondered, Was he the reason she said no when they were students?

“You're wondering if I was involved with him before,” she said. “My secret is out.”

“So you were keeping something from me too?”

“When my brother died, I left Dublin to do the clinical course here. Part of the reason I moved to London was that I was ashamed to be involved with him, but I nipped back to Dublin a couple of times.”

“Then he moved here too.”

“Nothing to do with me, that bit.”

“Not very satisfactory, I mean, not for you.”

“I've had a fella from time to time, if that's what you're concerned with. Not very many, but this way suits me.”

“Don't you want to get married?”

“I'd be no good with children; it's not in my plan.”

“I don't even have a plan for tomorrow.”

“You could get a job. Do you want me to see if there's anything at the hospital?”

“I'm not sure I want to do doctoring.”

“Because of what you were doing in the war?”

“I didn't go in as a medic. I was an artillery officer. I ordered the guns to fire.”

They were silent a long time.

“I've not had the responsibility of that kind of thing.”

“I'm not saying we weren't doing the right thing. When you see some of the things the Nazis did, you can see it was the right thing.”

“But the methods.”

“Scarcely better than them.”

“You could go back into medicine, healing and suchlike. You remember we thought that when we were young: doing good in the world. It'd probably make you feel better.”

“Give me a sense of purpose.”

“I don't mean to be giving prescriptions.”

“I don't know what I want.”

They lay silent, not touching each other.

“Pardou,” said George. “Is he what you want? And why are you cross with him?”

“Let's not be talking about that just now. Can we do it again?”

“You mean this?”

“Only if you're up for it.”

“I'd like to.”

So they did.

George thought about the book
he was reading. Remembering how he used to comfort himself in languages, he had gone to a French-language bookshop. There were books presented in that distinctive French way, without covers, because of course a gentleman would want his books bound in his own morocco. Then he noticed
La Nausée
by a certain Jean-Paul Sartre, whom he remembered had been discussed with approval by Anna and her colleagues at the magazine.

He bought the book, and though his French was musty, with the aid of a dictionary, he had got halfway through. The book mirrored his own dejection. It was written as a diary of one Antoine Roquentin, who was trying to write a book on a certain eighteenth-century marquis but was beset by feelings of nausea about his life, about his visits to the library, about the streets he walked, about the café where he would have a beer and go upstairs to have sex with the patronne, Françoise.

We can't help putting events together as narratives, so that they seem to make sense, says Roquentin. But all this yields is the illusion of meaning. It merely removes us from our experience. You have to choose, he says, live or tell.

George was thinking about the book as he walked up Camden High Street to the lock. Is that what's nauseating? he thought. Live or tell. Or is it that, even when one achieves a meaning, it doesn't make sense?

At the lock George turned left, along the towpath. A man in a grey mackintosh was walking slowly towards him. The man had not shaved for several days, and he wore workboots that sounded heavily as he walked. A trouser leg was caught in the top of his right boot. With him was a dog, golden-brown with a tail like a flag. It trotted forward, stopped, glanced back at the man, walked to the side of the towpath where rank grass grew against a wall, lifted its leg, trotted on again.

“Good morning,” said George to the man.

“You think so?”

After they had passed each other, George looked back over his shoulder to see the man stop, step to one side, then kick a piece of brick into the water. There was a splash.

George walked on and saw one of those ramps set into the bank of the canal so that when a barge horse fell in, it could be led by its towrope and encouraged to climb up the ramp onto the towpath to continue its toil. These ramps were a feature of the canals, installed by the builders, based on experience, presumably, of the first canals in which there were no ramps so that horses that fell in simply drowned.

There was a bicycle on the ramp, its handlebars and front wheel protruding above the brown water. The wheel was bent like a piece of cardboard that someone had folded. George hoisted the bicycle out of the water and leaned it against the wall that ran beside the towpath.

He walked back to the road and along a street with several bombsites. A memory came to him of when he was travelling with Werner, on the train as it left Cologne, watching the houses they passed and trying to imagine the people in each one. These houses here, he thought, some are still here, and now some aren't. In that house that isn't here a couple was making love. There, a family was eating a meal. In that one, an elderly woman was sick in bed. Now because an unknowing bomb aimer aged about twenty pulled a lever at one moment rather than another, this house was obliterated, this couple, this meal. And we try to think life is meaningful. Why did the man kick that brick into the canal? Why fish out the bicycle? Reflexes of the nervous system.

George walked up to Primrose Hill, where there had been a lot of bombs, in one place half a street destroyed. He walked up to the hill itself, to look over the city, which was quiet, with grey cotton wool clouds obscuring the whole sky in a very London kind of way. He tried to identify Bloomsbury, the hospital in Gower Street, University College, the Senate House, through Russell Square and then down Southampton Row, past the Aldwych to the river. Parts were reassuring, parts no longer existed. It was not the devastation of Bremen, but here, and then here, and here again, were huge gaps in terraces, straggling weeds growing where there had been carpets and children. Then he imagined a route from the riverside, into the tube at the embankment, coming northwards again on the Northern Line, Leicester Square, Goodge Street — towards where he was standing — the platforms no longer serving as bomb shelters, the people's underground bunkers.