A Love Like Blood

by Marcus Sedgwick

  My second match went out, and I lit a third, turning around.

  I saw I was in a corridor, with the mouths to at least three other passages leading away to total blackness, into which I gazed for a moment or two, my heart beating hard.

  Then my nerve left me, and I turned and ran up into the sunshine again, slowing to a walk when I saw the Major, climbing into the jeep beside him, sitting in silence as the private drove us slowly back into town.

  I don’t remember anything else about my time in Paris, nothing in detail. I suppose it was around then that the men began to whisper about me, nudging each other and winking when they thought I wasn’t looking. The private had obviously been talking.

  But I didn’t care about that. I had few friends amongst the men; I’d never found it easy to be one of them, as some of the other officers did. I’d always been set apart, and this gossip made little difference to me.

  We left the city in the early evening and returned to station. Amid the noise and activity of the unit, it was easier to hide my silence. A torpor and introspection settled in me, and that night I lay half awake, replaying the scene I’d witnessed, again, and again, and again.

  Of course, I hadn’t even dreamed yet of the full horror of the situation. That this moment would cling to the rest of my life, weighing it down, crippling it, pulling it in a direction I would never have wished it to go.

  No, then all I could think about was the woman on the ground, the man squatting over her.

  In my mind she became more beautiful every time I replayed the scene, though thinking back now I’d seen her in less than half-light, for a few seconds, in a moment of great shock. Maybe she had been very beautiful, maybe very ugly, I don’t know, but there had been an elegant curve to her jaw, finely shaped eyebrows, waves of thick dark hair, and I’d seen her as attractive.

  I berated myself. Would it be any less terrible if she’d been hideous? Of course not.

  And the man. Him.

  I’d seen his face most clearly in profile, and then, as he turned slowly to look at me, in full. His nose strong but not big, his dark brows, his eyes, mocking me.

  I could not understand everything about the way he had looked at me; that would come later. For the whole of that first wretched night, I was consumed by other, more immediate questions.

  Who was he? Who was she? Was she someone he knew, or some poor girl he had lured into the hole in the manner the private thought I had been trying to?

  Had he killed her? That seemed likely, but maybe not. Maybe he’d just found her, and . . .

  What?

  Cut her body and drunk her blood?

  I questioned again if that’s what I had really seen. It was ludicrous; it was, as I’ve said, something I should not have seen, something wrong. Not just violence, not just murder, but something even more depraved than those acts.

  My mind turned over and began to sink beneath these awful thoughts, but still sleep did not come till the very early hours, as daylight returned. And yet, even in sleep, and as I forced myself awake again, and as we struck camp that morning, and even as we began to roll further east chasing our men chasing the German forces, one question rose to dominate all my other thoughts.

  It was the question that drove me to where I am today, that ate away at my sense of self for year after year, and it was this.

  I said that the young woman’s body was lifeless, but even on the way back to the city in the jeep, I had begun to realise that that was an assumption I’d made. It was dark. It only lasted a few seconds. I saw a terrible and shocking thing.

  I’d assumed she was dead.

  But what if she wasn’t, what if she’d still been alive when I’d found her? What then?

  Chapter 4

  In March 1951, I went back to Paris.

  After the war, I’d returned to London briefly, but then took a specialism, telling myself that it would offer a better career, though in truth it was more something that happened than something I chose.

  The chance to move back to Cambridge was all I thought about, and when a position arose in the small Department of Haematology, I took it.

  I had further studies to do, and I did them diligently. I worked hard, but I also enjoyed being back in the place I felt was home, with some old friends around me; people like Hunter, an English professor who was a lifelong family friend, almost an uncle to me, and Donald, who’d become a clinical psych-ologist, because, as he told me, it would mean he wouldn’t have to see blood any more.

  I, on the other hand, both in the department and in Addenbrooke’s Hospital, saw lots of it, though mostly it was unrecognisable as such, mere smears of stained erythrocytes between two glass slides, under a microscope.

  I became a consultant by the age of thirty-one, and was immediately disliked by my older colleagues at the hospital for making them feel stupid, though to a man they were all distinguished doctors. I made some efforts to break down their hostility but whatever I tried failed and so I withdrew into my work. There at least I made good progress; so much so that in the early part of 1951 I was invited to speak at a conference on leukaemia in Paris.

  I was sitting in my office in Trumpington Street when I opened the letter of invitation. As I looked at it, I stood up, slowly, and then looked out at the cold Cambridge morning.

  Students on bicycles hurried by, striped college scarves wound tightly around their necks; the bare spikes of trees stuck their fingers into the sky; the steps of the Fitzwilliam were still damp with melting snow. My mind was far away, on the edge of a piece of parkland by the chateau of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

  I tried to work out how I felt, and then realised that that in itself meant I felt nothing. But it was a strange kind of nothing.

  I sat down and wrote a letter to the organising committee, telling them I would be delighted to accept, querying what expenses would be covered, and outlining what I would like to speak about.

  At the back of my mind, of course, the memory of Saint-Germain lingered, but it did not bother me seriously. By the time the war had ended I had seen my share of horror, more than my share perhaps, as the fighting grew more intense as we made it further east into Germany. I saw worse things than I’d seen in that hole, if one can possibly compare one horror to another, and I’d seen enough to make me realise that what I’d seen was not unique; that war makes men do monstrous things, and that those things were not my fault.

  Anyway, I was excited. I had achieved the rank of consultant almost embarrassingly early; I’d been invited to an international conference; and Paris was, I reminded myself, a beautiful place. I had never flown; even that excited me.

  If anything, I saw the trip as a chance to make things better. I know now that I believed that if I could go back to Paris and feel normal, it would lessen the meaning of what I’d witnessed in 1944. Just one more awful thing among the many that had happened during the war.

  Chapter 5

  Paris was more or less as I’d remembered it, but cold and wet. It was a miserable March morning when my plane touched down at Le Bourget.

  A car had been sent for me, with a driver and an aide, a young Frenchman. Lucien was polite, had excellent English and explained that he was a medical student and had volunteered to look after me during my five-day trip. He was quiet, spoke only when spoken to, but answered my many questions about the city graciously.

  I was asking him about how things had changed since the war, but there was a look in his eye that made me think he would perhaps rather not speak about it.

  I could see for myself that there was more life in the streets, a few more cars on the road. Clothes were a little more colourful, food was better, and in short, Paris was Paris. But over the course of my first couple of days there, I began to sense in my conversations a certain malaise in the people.

  I knew immediately what it was, because it was the same back home, especially in London. It’s hard to imagine now, now that war is far behind us, but back then, on a trip to town, something had
become clear to me.

  I’d been to the theatre in London to see a rather bad play at the Criterion, and stopped over for the night in an even worse little hotel in Half Moon Street.

  Walking down Piccadilly, watching the people rushing past, noses to the pavement, shoulders about their ears, I suddenly knew what was wrong, wrong with them, with me.

  How ill we were! How sick our lives were, how empty, how grey. Without the war to tell us that life was precious, what were we? Threaten to take something from us and we grasp on to it with desperate desire; give it back to us, and how soon we grow tired of it! So we are left with our flat, ruined lives; humiliated, humiliated by many things. That we are alive when our friends are not, that we struggled through the dramas of the war only to end up in a dull, broken and impoverished world, that we had felt noble in the face of the dangers of life, and now we sat in a pile of ugly rubble, knowing we had turned German cities to rubble too.

  It was confirmed to me the following day as I sat in a café in Shepherd Market. I sat by myself in a corner, feeling less alone here than I had at the theatre the night before. Even at such an early hour, shattered and deteriorated tarts loitered in doorways, cigarettes hanging from their mouths, their faces floating white bags. Behind me I heard a man reading a paper remark to the waitress, ‘The headlines are so dull, aren’t they?’

  I could almost hear him think to himself, if only one could hear the buzz of a robot bomb.

  And it was the same in Paris, and maybe it was doubly so for them, for they had had the enemy in their midst, had served them meals, made their beds, cleaned their clothes. Some of them had presumably slept with them, and all had wrestled daily with notions surrounding dignity and fear and survival.

  For them, there was no antidote to the ennui, and although Lucien was kind enough to accompany me out to Montmartre on my first, free, evening, and although there were people dancing, and the large clubs had reopened, I found myself longing for Major Greaves to pour me a glass of house wine and tell me to call him Edward.

  The next day I gave my paper.

  I was as nervous as hell, and it was a disaster. This was my first experience of the world of medical academia in conference, and after I finished speaking I was assailed by dozens of questions. We quickly became bogged down in a fruitless argument about methodologies and I grew flustered and began to sweat, despite the chill of the big salon in which the presentations were taking place. It wasn’t so much the questions themselves that bothered me; it was something underneath them, something in their delivery. I sensed resentment in everyone, as if they were jealously trying to find fault with me. Not with my paper, but with me.

  I left the auditorium, Lucien at my side, and when we stood on the steps of the hotel, I could see something had changed about Lucien too. He asked me if I wanted him to take me anywhere for lunch, or what else I wanted to do, but he couldn’t look me in the eyes, and I knew that, in his estimation, I had been humbled.

  When I’d arrived, I had been a shining example of what he perhaps hoped to be; now he wasn’t so sure.

  I mumbled something about taking the afternoon off. There was nothing I had to do, and I couldn’t face the glare of my colleagues, not yet.

  Lucien offered to arrange a car for me to look round the city. I began to refuse and then something slipped into my mind, and I accepted the offer.

  Half an hour later, I sat in the back of a comfortable Citroën, heading for Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

  My driver spoke no English, so we fell into silence.

  As we pulled up the hill into the town, I had a sudden urge to be alone, not be tailed all day.

  ‘Il y a une gare ici?’ I asked the driver.

  He said something fast that I took to mean there was at least one station, and so I had him drop me off, and sent him back into town, presumably to take the afternoon off too.

  Did I know what I was doing?

  Perhaps I did. I’m not sure, in all honesty, what took me there, but it was one of those times when you feel impelled to do something, to act your way through a scene or two of your life that has already been written for you. You find yourself walking somewhere almost without thinking, as if unseen forces have a hold of you. Or maybe you do know what you’re doing, deep down, but it’s so buried in your unconscious that it feels automatic.

  Within minutes, I was in the park beside the chateau. The building itself hadn’t changed, but outside there were small signs to show it had returned to its former role as the Musée des Antiquités.

  Briefly, I remembered the Major, and his passion for the ivory Venus. I remembered old Monsieur Dronne and wondered if he was happily taking care of ‘his museum’ once more, but my mind was on something else, and I found myself heading for the edge of the park overlooking the valley, the river, towards the city.

  I had to look at myself, at my arms, to see the black wool of my suit in order to remind myself that I was not in uniform, that the war was over, and that this was 1951, for the park looked just the same, or so I thought at first.

  But, though I looked and looked, I could not see the bunkers in the park. They appeared to have been removed. Seven years had passed, my memory might have distorted things, but . . . no, I knew I was in the right place, at the side of the chateau and before the first avenue of trees.

  The only thing different, as far as I could see, was a new little bandstand. I wandered towards it, trying to remember, and then I understood that what I was looking for was the bandstand; it had been built on top of the bunker, the entrance to which was now a small wooden door, firmly padlocked. A small window had been punched in the front side, right underneath where a bandleader would stand, and I crouched down on my hands and knees, trying to see inside.

  I couldn’t. It was too dark, and the glass was grimy and mud-splashed, being so low to the ground.

  A couple passed by me on bicycles, looking at me strangely, and I tried to give the air that this was something one did every day, but I stood nonetheless, and walked back towards the town.

  I found a large and noisy brasserie and was pleased to get a table to one side, where I could observe both the cold square outside, and the diners in the restaurant.

  And there it was that I saw him.

  Chapter 6

  Him.

  I knew at once it was the man from the hole. He was turned in profile to me, sitting across a small table from a young woman, in her early twenties I guessed.

  I remember that for a moment I questioned myself, told myself I was being fanciful, wanted to dream up this powerful coincidence in an attempt to destroy the ennui that pervaded me just as much as everyone else, but it was, unquestionably, him.

  My first impulse was to run, but the waiter appeared in front of me. I looked up.

  ‘Je peux manger quelque chose? C’est trop tard, peut-être . . . ?’

  ‘Pas du tout,’ he said, and began setting out cutlery for me, placing a large card menu on the table. Adding in English, ‘In Paris, you can eat at any time.’

  I looked across at the man again, and realised he had not seen me, and probably would not see me. I was fractionally behind him, and I could watch both him and the girl easily without drawing attention to myself. While I was glad I was not too close to them, I soon regretted not being able to hear what they were saying, although I could hear enough to know they were speaking in French, and fluently. I would most likely not have understood them even had I sat at their table.

  The girl was striking. Not beautiful, but there was something about her. She had a slightly pointed nose, but it was fine and gave her an air of nobility. Her mouth was noticeably wide, but the most striking thing about her was her hair; long auburn ringlets hung beyond her shoulders, quite unlike the short French fashions.

  Though I couldn’t hear what she was saying, she spoke in an animated way, using her hands a lot, something that again made her very different from the few women I knew in Cambridge. Her gestures were quick and vivacious; I could see sh
e was at ease, thinking quickly, moving ahead with her thoughts. She wore a black blouse and a bright red skirt, and low black heels.

  I looked from the girl back to her companion. He bent down to one side, brushing something off the hem of his trouser leg, and as he straightened again I was given the same view of his face I’d seen seven years before, three hundred yards away, in a hole in the ground.

  It was him.

  Those eyes, that dark brow, and yes, his hair was a little different, and he had grown a thin moustache, but it was him.

  Who was he? What was he doing here, so close, as I put it in my head, to the scene of his crime?

  He was dressed well, very well in fact, better than any other man in the place. He wore a dark grey wool suit with a waistcoat. Silver cufflinks gleamed when he reached to pour the girl another glass of wine. His shoes were expensive, spotlessly clean despite the weather.

  I tried to judge his age, studied the small lines around his eyes, possibly a grey hair or two in the temples of his slick black hair, and guessed he might be ten years older than me, maybe less. His hands were somehow both elegant and strong; he appeared to be tall.

  He was very different from the girl; where she was all movement, he was very still, and when he moved, he moved slowly and with great deliberation. He spoke deliberately too, with the occasional firm gesture of his hand, or just the flick of a fingertip, as if he did everything with great precision.

  Then, without warning, he stood and walked right towards me. As before, I froze as he met my gaze, but then he looked right through me and walked on to the Gents, somewhere behind me.

  I breathed again, realising he didn’t know who I was, which was confirmed to me when he returned from the lavatory without so much as a backward glance.

  He rejoined the girl and they renewed their conversation. Their waiter served them coffee and I noticed the extra deference he paid to the man, and the girl by extension, going so far as to give a slight bow as he left them.