The Dust That Falls From Dreams

by Louis de Bernières

  Daniel took it and looked inside. It was presentable and appetising. ‘How very kind,’ he said, touched by the gift, despite its eccentricity.

  Mrs McCosh inclined her face to him. ‘You may kiss me on the cheek,’ she said.

  He kissed her on the right cheek, felt suddenly sorry for all the bad blood between them and kissed her on the left.

  She blushed and said, ‘I do really think of you as a son, you know. I do hope…well…I’m sorry…you know.’

  ‘We’ll come back every year,’ said Daniel.

  ‘I do so look forward to seeing you again.’ She looked away. ‘It was such a pleasure to meet you at last.’

  Esther, who had been cuddling Caractacus, kissed the cat on the top of his head and handed him to her grandfather, saying, ‘Grandpa play with him now.’

  After they had gone, Mrs McCosh asked her husband if they would be back in time for tea, and added, ‘My dear, do remind me, was it Daniel or Ashbridge who died in the war?’

  Christabel and Gaskell were in Snowdonia, walking the Horseshoe and climbing Cadair Idris from both sides, but they had sent Esther a photograph of Caractacus, staring down from the top of the pelmet, and a little painting copied from it, admirably portraying him with his lopsided ginger moustache, yellow eyes, and humorous, slightly insane expression. Esther had been delighted, and everyone elsed laughed when they saw it.

  Only Ottilie was there at Southampton Harbour to wave the couple goodbye, having travelled down with Wragge in the AC, bringing with them the luggage that had not been sent in advance by train. As the ship hooted, and began to move away, it occurred to Rosie once again how little she really knew this particular sister of hers. Ottilie’s main interest was still going to lectures. She attended everything that was available locally, whether it was about Fabian Socialism, or eugenics, or psychoanalysis. She was engaged in an intellectual quest, but never talked about it. All Rosie really knew about Ottilie was that she had a heart brimming with love, and was waiting for someone to whom she could give it. She resolved that, when she returned, she would contrive to get to know Ottilie better.

  To this mysterious sister, Rosie, Daniel and Esther waved goodbye on that spring morning, her large brown eyes vivid in the white face beneath a dark blue cloche hat. Rosie then had the experience of sailing past the vast facade of Netley, where she had spent the war years, mostly on her knees, she now seemed to recall, hopelessly expiating the sin of having forgotten to pray for Ash the day before he was struck down. The great green dome flanked by its endless turrets and towers and innumerable windows was peaceful in the sunshine, and through Daniel’s binoculars, Rosie saw that there were very few patients out in their blue ‘hospital undress’, strolling away their injuries. She guessed that much of the hospital must by now have been mothballed.

  ‘There goes Spikey,’ she said to Daniel.

  ‘It must be a funny feeling,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all a blur now, just a sea of faces, fading away.’

  ‘You’ve never told me much about it. What was it like?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to start. It was the hardest work you can imagine, and absolutely piteous. The TB ward, and the syphilis ward, and the gas ward, oh dear. It’s hard…The gas victims gave off gas for ages, did you know that? They stank of it. And did you know there’s an elephant skeleton set up in the entrance? And huge sets of antlers, and a school of fish set into the plaster under the stairs? And dozens and dozens of pickled snakes in glass jars?’

  ‘Gracious! Really?’

  ‘And there’s a huge collection of skulls and mummified heads, called “Skull Alley”, skulls from all over the world, labelled. You know, “Hottentot”, “Bushman”, “Maori”. They looked the same really. And there’s a collection of deformed foetuses.’

  ‘I’d love to see all that.’

  ‘Oh, Daniel, really! Look, you can see the Seaweed Hut!’

  ‘One of my friends sent me a postcard of that once,’ said Daniel. ‘It doesn’t look as though it’s going to be there for much longer.’

  ‘No. It’s hopelessly rotten. There’s even an observatory. And we had ghats in the woods for burning Hindus, and the ashes got thrown into the Solent. The idea was that one day they’d float far enough to meet up with some water from the Ganges. The wards got so full that we filled the corridors with beds, and the poor men froze in the winter and got baked in the summer. You can imagine how long those corridors were. And the grounds were all full of Doecker huts and tents and Fairley fieldhouses, and a Welsh hospital and an Irish one that Lord Iveagh paid for. It was all in the land behind, so you wouldn’t have seen it from here. It was like a city, but all neat and set out in rows. Did you know that a hundred and fifty-one trains of wounded came in after the Somme?’

  ‘A hundred and fifty-one? How many men is that?’

  ‘God knows. We didn’t even have time to think about questions like that! You wouldn’t believe what I saw.’ She hung her head.

  He put his arm around her shoulder. ‘I know, I saw it all too, remember?’

  ‘Not so many all at once,’ said Rosie. ‘It wasn’t your job to mend them when they couldn’t be mended.’

  ‘I’ve pulled broken friends from burning aeroplanes,’ said Daniel softly. ‘But obviously it was far worse for you. It must have been.’

  But Rosie was off with her own thoughts. ‘There was a soldier who was haunted at night by a German that he’d bayoneted in the stomach. The German would turn up and say, “Now I’ve got you” and shoot him, and he’d wake up screaming.’

  ‘Did you have any Boche patients? Did they get treated here as well?’

  ‘Oh yes. But in the end they were taken away because of a riot by the local shipyard workers. They invaded because they said the Germans were getting better treatment than our own boys.’

  ‘Were they?’

  ‘Well, of course not. The reason they were kept in the wards and not the tents was so they couldn’t escape. They were padlocked in. It was just stupid. After that I’ll always despise a mob, I think. Baying like hounds. Oh, and there was a scrap shop.’

  ‘A scrap shop?’

  ‘They did experiments on animals. I went in and I couldn’t believe my eyes. That’s why I’m an antivivisectionist.’

  Daniel had not known any such thing. In fact he was increasingly realising that he barely knew his wife at all. ‘Funnily enough, I am too,’ he said. ‘Archie always used to say that they should conduct the experiments on criminals.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were an antivivisectionist too,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s nice that we agree. Did I tell you about the Grey Lady? Your Madame Valentine would have loved to know about her.’

  ‘I didn’t go to Madame Valentine. It was the others. It didn’t seem quite right to me somehow. I baulked. But I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned the Grey Lady.’

  ‘She was a nurse who accidentally killed a patient, so she committed suicide by jumping off a tower. An amazing number of people saw her ghost, including the switchboard operator, and the Catholic chaplain, and if one of the men saw her, you knew he’d die the next day. You could smell her perfume, so they said, and her silk dress rustled.’

  ‘A nurse in silk? Did you ever see her?’

  ‘No, not me. All the ones I see are in here,’ and she tapped the side of her head.

  He put his arm around her again, and squeezed her shoulder. ‘Think how lucky we’ve been,’ he said. ‘How lucky we are, to have a future.’

  ‘No more wars,’ said Rosie. ‘Not big ones, anyway.’

  ‘Just little ones, to keep Archie amused,’ said Daniel. ‘Just sideshows for the lost souls. I do miss flying, though.’

  ‘We ought to do more talking like this,’ said Rosie.

  Rosie quickly found that she was not a natural sailor, and that she felt nauseous if she did much walking about. Whenever possible, she sat or lay down, especially whilst passing through the Bay of Biscay. The result of this was that Daniel beg
an for the first time to get to know his daughter properly.

  Since Esther’s birth, he had been, as it seemed to him, the victim of a determined and coordinated female conspiracy to keep him out of the picture. If Esther cried, and he picked her up, she was immediately dragged from his arms by a woman who knew how to comfort a child properly. It might be Rosie, or Ottilie, or Mrs McCosh, or even a visitor. If he wanted to shovel food into her mouth, the spoon was wrested from him.

  He had found this very irritating, but the fact was that this is how everything was done, and this was how women saw the world. Bits of it belonged to them, and bits of it to the men, and that was that.

  Working in Birmingham at Henley’s had not made it any easier to forge a bond with Esther, and neither had the hiring of Mary FitzGerald St George, something which, although she was a lovely woman, Daniel had found inexplicable and pointless in a household where there were at least three women with very little to do, and where there were two other women who were somewhat busier but adored the child just as much. He had all but missed the periods when Esther had been a babe-in-arms, and when she had been crawling about at random, pulling books off shelves and chewing the tassels off the rugs.

  Mrs McCosh had flatly declined to allow Mary FitzGerald St George to go with her charge to Ceylon, because ‘she is quite indispensible to me’, and so it was that Daniel and Rosie had hired a ‘travelling nurse’ to accompany them as far as Ceylon, where they would hire a resident one. Daniel reflected again that it was just as well that Mary was not coming. There was something dispiriting about having to face temptation, and an inevitable sense of impending catastrophe if one gave way to it.

  The travelling nurse, it transpired, had travelled a great deal in trains, even going to Constantinople on the Orient Express, but had never gone very far by sea. The ship was a small one, about twenty-five years old, with three exiguous masts and one funnel, set back at a jaunty angle. It sat low in the water, and earned its keep on the run to India and back, through Suez. Thanks to its constant rolling and yawing, the travelling nurse was prostrate with sickness almost from the moment of departure, and Rosie and Daniel saw very little of her during the whole voyage, even forgetting her name within a few months of arrival. She was the kind of person whose photograph would turn up in a family album, and nobody would be able to remember who she was or why she was there.

  Rosie’s lack of sea legs meant that Daniel had to look after Esther whether he wanted to or not, and he found that for the most part it came very naturally, especially as she was such a sweet-natured child. She was by now two years old, frolicsome and skipping, and very pretty, her hair still in golden yellow curls, and her eyes as periwinkle blue as her mother’s. Fortunately she was extremely fond of Robinson’s Patent Groats, which Mme Pitt had donated in enormous quantities, and loved boiled eggs with soldiers, so he had no trouble persuading her to eat. She was very attached to her father, and would gaze at him adoringly with one thumb in her mouth, and French Bear clamped under her arm.

  The SS Derbyshire was a fantastically hazardous place for a child, with its steel staircases and gangways, and sudden lurches, and so he found himself spending almost all of Esther’s waking hours either holding her hand, carrying her, or with her on his knee as he struggled to read one of his books about Ceylon. Esther liked to fall asleep on her father, thumb in mouth despite Rosie’s fear that she would end up with crooked teeth, and he found himself pinned down for much longer periods than he would have liked. Many hours were devoted to looking for French Bear, which she abandoned in all sorts of strange places, only to panic about it later.

  During that time he came to love the sweet scent of her hair and the milky scent of her flesh, the patch of heat she created against his chest and stomach. He liked to point things out to her – ship! – seagull! – aeroplane! – and she would say the words after him. He taught her nonsense rhymes:

  Yesterday upon the stair I saw a man who wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t there again today. Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

  He taught her some Royal Flying Corps songs, since he had never had any time for nursery rhymes, and neither did he know any. In her quavering, tuneless little voice, she sang:

  ‘Take the pistons out of my kidley,

  And the gugjon pins out of my brain,

  From the smallamabak take the clankshaft,

  An assemmel the engines gain.’

  Daniel crooned:

  ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières, parlez-vous?

  Mademoiselle from Armentières, parlez-vous?

  Mademoiselle from Armentières, hasn’t been kissed for many a year,

  With an inky-pinky parlez-vous.’

  He taught her ‘Frère Jacques’, of course, and ‘Chevaliers de la Table Ronde’, and ‘Sous le Pont d’Avignon’.

  They made paper aeroplanes and launched them off the stern, and played a clapping game that Daniel remembered his father teaching him when he was about Esther’s age, which went:

  A sailor went to sea sea sea

  To see what he could see see see,

  But all that he did see see see

  Was the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea.

  They did it faster and faster until their hands were a blur, and finally Esther was laughing too much and the game collapsed, whereupon Esther would throw herself into his arms, giggling with delight. Then she would cry, ‘Again! Again!’ and off they would go, very slowly at first. Then Esther taught it to Ali Bey, a solemn and dignified Egyptian gentleman whom Daniel had befriended on board. She made him learn to do ‘This is the way the gentleman rides’ and he assisted in the games of ‘One two three whee’ upon which Esther insisted as they promenaded about the decks. They tossed the little girl to each other and pretended that they were going to throw her over the side, which of course she did not believe for a second. Ali Bey was not only very taken with Esther, but was interested in the politics and culture of France. He presented Daniel with a fez, and they sat together on deck after Esther and Rosie were in bed, talking nostalgically about the Loire Valley, the novels of Zola or the effects of the Franco–Prussian war.

  Daniel was at first wary of the intimacies of caring for an infant. He felt dubious and nervous about having to wash her at bedtime, and clean her up after going to the lavatory, as if he were worried that she might share in the abashment of a mature woman, or as if he might accidentally damage what his mother always referred to as ‘sa belle chose’. It was as good a euphemism as any, so he began to use it himself. Esther was quite frank and unembarrassed, however, and would simply announce, ‘My bottom’s ready, Daddy,’ when she needed cleaning up. When the travelling nurse was indisposed, which was most of the time, he fretted about how to dress her properly. He watched the nurse or Rosie doing it, and quickly realised that it could not have been simpler. Esther had distinct preferences that changed every day, and she would rummage through her own small suitcase throwing unwanted garments onto the floor of the cabin. She had exceedingly fine hair, and Daniel found it difficult to brush it or comb it without causing shrieks of protest.

  When Esther was asleep Daniel and Rosie played vingt-et-un, which Rosie won, or chess, which was always won by Daniel. Rosie taught him how to play draughts, and racing demon, a furious game which inevitably ended up in the destruction of the cards. For the first time in their acquaintance they had long hours to fill with reminiscence and conversation, and began to know each other ever better. Rosie had mostly avoided being alone with him for any length of time, but now she beqan to perceive that he was not only handsome, a fact obvious to all, but also amusing and interesting. In this sense, the long journey had the reverse effect to that had on most couples by such voyages. The other passengers were becoming more and more wild with the racheting up of the temperature, and relationships and infidelities were being created and destroyed on a daily basis. Daniel found it entertaining, but Rosie was shocked.

  He had the good fortune to befriend the captain of the sh
ip. Captain Franklin had a naval beard, and very much resembled the King, causing Daniel to reflect how much he would have been admired by his mother-in-law. Franklin had served on HMS Hood during the war, and the two men felt comfortable with each other, as those who have seen action commonly do. Captain Franklin also took a liking to Esther, who therefore spent time up on the bridge gazing out of the windows at the sea whilst the former explained all the workings of the ship to her father, let him take the wheel, and pull on the lever that signalled engine speed to those below.

  Daniel had guided tours of the machinery from the engineers and stokers, and was repeatedly amazed by the size of the cranks and pistons, rods and shafts. The boiler room was as hot as Hell, manned by sweating men, wild-eyed sailors who worked like devils. The engines of aeroplanes seemed such bijou contraptions by comparison that Daniel felt obscurely ashamed of having been so fascinated by them.

  Rosie only sprang to life during those hours when the ship was in port. Even so, she felt quite nauseous when she got onto land and found that it was not moving. She staggered as if to allow for movement that was no longer occurring. In Gibraltar they went to see the apes, and Rosie had a handkerchief snatched out of her hand when she was just about to blow her nose. Daniel tried to retrieve it, but was no match for the ribald, scampering thief, which skipped away and bared its teeth at him. There was a left-handed ape that liked to pick up its excrement and hurl it at people, causing gratifying screams and panics.

  In Valetta, having learned their lesson in Gibraltar, they left the impractically huge perambulator on the ship, and Daniel hoisted Esther onto his shoulders. They strolled around the small walled town in a very short time, and then made another circuit. The place was full of British sailors in sparkling white uniforms, and vast grey warships lay at anchor in the harbour. Daniel insisted on going down there to look at the seaplanes. The heat radiated from the stones, and the light cut precise black shadows. Rosie felt the heat entering the bones and muscles of her body, freeing both her limbs and her spirit. After her eyes had adjusted to the light, she began to feel her mood lift with every step. The distance from home, and all that home implied, was releasing her from the loops that had been going round in her thoughts for so many months. She thought of Ash’s letters and uniform, wrapped up in tissues in the small suitcase, and she thought of her madonna and child, and the image of them in her memory no longer had any great reality.