Though it had been cold and wet in Paris, Cambridge was, as so often, a couple of degrees colder than anywhere else, and I shivered as I climbed into bed, wondering when spring would come.
I dreamt.
In my dream, it was dark, or at least, I was not supposed to be seeing anything much, at first mostly just hearing something. I was in a small warm space, I knew that, and I was somehow hovering near, very near, the naked body of a woman.
I was excited. So was she, for she was softly moaning, her head tilted back, hanging over something, her lips apart as small cries of pleasure escaped; gentle, high cries of pleasure.
She seemed dreamy, unaware, as if drugged, high on some opiate, hallucinating perhaps, or maybe just her senses dulled.
The dream continued, and now sight began to play a bigger role. Her cries increased in volume and in frequency, she began to arch her back, her mouth opened wider, and her eyes scrunched up tight. Her long hair flowed wildly back from her head, as if blown by the wind. Her moans began to come in small, heaving gasps; I could feel her breath on my face, and I pulled away from her a little more.
And then I saw the truth.
The moans were not cries of pleasure.
She was in pain, in torment. There was a knife sticking out of her stomach, from which blood flowed and flowed. She was softly crying in terrible pain, from the knife, and from the man who was forcing himself into her, again and again.
I woke, screaming, and knew that I’d been dreaming of the girl in the bunker being tormented by that terrible figure, that man, that beast. And that I was the beast.
Chapter 12
Immediately upon waking, I knew what the dream meant. It meant that I felt guilty, that by doing nothing when the woman might still have had a chance, I had as good as killed her myself.
It took a long time for the horror of that dream to pass off, several days in fact, during which my mind was not really on my work and every night I feared I might have the same dream.
I went to see Hunter one evening, late.
I scurried from Caius over the cobbles of Green Street to Sidney, through the ever-present cold Cambridge wind, and, nodding at the night porter who knew me by sight if not by name, I wound my way up to Hunter’s rooms and knocked on the heavy door.
It swung open. He stood within, and as he often did roared a greeting at me as hearty as any prodigal son could ever have had.
‘Charles!’
‘The great Hunter Wilson, I presume?’
He pretended to shut the door in my face.
‘Not today, thank you. I gave a statement to the press yesterday . . .’
I barged my way in then and after some small chit-chat, we took chairs either side of his little fireplace, in which a small pile of coal was burning brightly.
‘That’s welcome. I haven’t been warm in months, it seems. I should be used to this place by now.’
Hunter poured some whisky and handed the glass to me.
‘I’ve been here a fair bit longer than you,’ he said, raising his glass, ‘and I’m still not used to it. You know they say the monks chose Cambridge for their new university because of the cold. They thought a warm climate was distracting to the concentration.’
‘Is that true?’
‘That’s the story. It’s still true, for want of a better word, isn’t it?’
I wondered what he meant for a moment, but was used to such things from Hunter. I knew what he was saying; that it didn’t really matter if the story was just a story, because it still had the truth in it.
It reminded me of what I’d come to talk about, and I must have suddenly looked serious, because Hunter sat deeper in his chair. He was a big man, not fat, just tall and broad, and his age had done nothing to change that. He had lots of hair still, all white now, though when I’d met him as a boy it had been a dark grey-brown. He fought regularly to try and stop it looking crazy, when what it actually needed was a trip to the barber in All Saints Passage.
He considered me for a while, judging my mood.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah! Go on then, tell me.’
I swilled the whisky round in my glass.
‘There’s something I never told you,’ I began.
‘I knew it!’ he cried. ‘You’re queer! No? A communist? No? Wait, I have it, you’re actually a woman! Yes?’
‘Hunter, stop it,’ I said, though I smiled. I never knew how someone his age had managed to stay so boyish. It was what I liked best about him, but I wanted him to listen to me seriously.
Bless him, he did.
‘In the war . . .’ I tried again to focus my thoughts. ‘I didn’t tell you much about the war, but not because I was trying to hide anything from you, or anyone. It just seemed better when it was over to move forward and get on with other things.’
He nodded.
‘But there is one thing I was hiding. Not just from you, but from everyone. Something I saw in Paris.’
Hunter, though he frequently played the fool, was the smartest man I had ever known. He was already making connections.
‘You never told me you were in Paris in the war. I thought the French and the Yanks liberated it . . .’
‘They did. Our CO took us for some leave, just after the liberation.’
I could see he was amazed by this. He raised a finger.
‘And you have just returned from Paris and now your mood is bad and you’ve come here to drink whisky late at night. What happened?’
That was what I’d come for, the Hunter who cared, who made it easy to talk, to discuss things.
‘I saw something. Someone, rather. It was . . . a coincidence, I suppose. That’s all. I was in a restaurant in Saint-Germain—’
‘Lovely. I know it well.’
‘No, not Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Saint-Germain-en-Laye. To the west of Paris itself. It’s a suburb on a bluff that looks over the city. I went there one day. I’d had a really bad morning at the conference. I wanted to clear my head, I wanted . . .’
‘You wanted to go back somewhere, I think.’
I nodded.
‘Yes. I wanted to go back, I don’t really know why, to the place where I saw something in 1944.’
‘Which was?’
So I told him the whole story, of the Major and his Venus, of M Dronne, of the bunker and what I’d seen there. And then I told him about my recent trip, and about the margrave and about Marian. When I’d finished, I was very tired and it was very late. I’d drunk too much whisky and I felt on the verge of tears, but I didn’t want to cry, and especially not in front of Hunter.
He listened without comment as I spoke, and nodded slowly when I’d finished. It was a relief just that he seemed to take me seriously, that he believed what I was saying, because I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.
For once, he didn’t have much to say.
‘I was lucky not to have to fight,’ he said, quietly. ‘And you, you tried to help people, but you still saw more than anyone’s fair share of suffering, I suppose. Don’t punish yourself for that.’
I didn’t answer, but smiled to show I was grateful to him.
‘You know, Charles, I’ve known you since you were a boy. A very bright boy, but a dreaming boy too. And now you are on the verge of being a brilliant doctor. But I wonder whether you are still too much of a fantasist to be a very good scientist.’
‘Maybe the best scientists are the biggest dreamers,’ I argued. ‘The ones able to think of something no one else has thought of before.’
He inclined his head and I knew I’d won that point, but it was his subtext that bothered me more. It meant that perhaps he didn’t believe me after all.
He stood and put a hand on my shoulder.
I stood too. It was time to go.
‘And Marian?’
‘Marian sounds delightful from everything you’ve said, and I suspect that even if this man were to turn out to be some kind of criminal, she is nothing to do with it at all.’
‘What
do you mean? “If”? You don’t believe me?’
He held up his hand, shaking his head, and was clearly searching for the right words.
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying. All I’m saying is try not to worry. Get some sleep. Go home now.’
I did. And I did feel better, because an hour with Hunter was like a confessional in some ways, and a holiday in others; you always came away feeling better, about both yourself and the world.
And I did feel better, because for the rest of that night, and half the following day, I was able to believe the lie I’d told Hunter and so wanted to believe myself: that the girl was dead when I found her.
Chapter 13
What is blood?
Around the time of my visit to Paris, and Marian’s trip to England, there were many excellent men and women trying to answer that question, trying to understand its composition and its nature in order to better fight the diseases and disorders of the blood. For a while I was one of them, and yet I had an unspoken question at the back of my mind all that time, one that even now I can only formulate like this: why is blood?
Why is it like it is, and what does it mean to us?
In our modern world, I knew, bright colours are not so rare, but that is because we have synthetic dyes and pigments. Long ago, in those caves in France where the Venus of Bastennes and other figures like her were carved, bright colours must have seemed magical; most of the world was soft browns and greens. The strongest colours would have been the autumn leaves, the blue of the sky on a summer’s day, and even these would seem to have no permanence, for the leaf that is golden one day is on the ground the next, the sky that is blue one day can be grey the day after. There would be some brightly coloured berries and fruit, I suppose, too, but the one splash of colour that could always be relied on to amaze, to impress, to shock, maybe even to delight, would be blood. In every culture I knew of, red symbolised danger, presumably because of the link with blood; we are programmed to react to it, because that might save our life.
And though more blood was perhaps spilled in those distant days, it must still have been a rare moment, and when blood was seen it would have been such a contrast to the everyday world, such an extraordinary, magical, mysterious thing. And as someone bled to death and their life bled away with that blood, it must have been obvious that blood is the source of life, that without it we are nothing; its colour must have seemed chosen by the gods, as if to say, ‘Look! This! This is important, for this is what you are!’
I learned at medical school how the colour of blood changes with its state of oxygenation, from dark, almost purplish, through to the brightest lurid red, but whatever its precise colour, our earlier selves must have formed a deep relationship with it. Relationship, that’s the only word I can use, and still, after all my time thinking about it, I cannot find an answer to the question of blood.
Chapter 14
At some point after my return from Paris and before Marian’s arrival, I was called in to see the Head of Department, Dr Downey. My boss.
Although he didn’t refer to it once, it was obvious that I had not impressed in Paris. Somehow word had reached him of my performance at the rostrum, and I wondered if he also knew I’d skipped a couple of sessions. All this sat unspoken on his desk between us, and I was unable to defend myself, for the accusations were not said aloud, and they were all the more damaging because of that.
Downey was a forbidding figure, old school, of uncertain age, probably in his late sixties, though I speculated idly about whether he’d been a classmate of Darwin, he was so antediluvian. He spoke to me in the kind of way that made you think he added Listen here, young man to everything he said to you, though it was done just with his eyebrows and his forefinger.
He sat before me in the gloom of his office and after some ambling around, saying nothing really, he got to the point.
‘You’re going to have to make up your mind what you want in life,’ he said. I sat up a bit straighter. This sounded like plain speaking – something I had rarely heard from Downey. ‘Do you want to be a consultant for the rest of your life, or do you want to try something different? God knows you’ve got there at a frighteningly young age; that’s going to mean a long career in the hospital, practising your art. The board has approved the plans to move to a new site. In about ten years from now there’ll be a grand new hospital to work in on the edge of town. We intend it to be the finest in the country. So you can work there, putting into practice everything you’ve learned, or you could do something else: you could be the one to move on our sum of learning, the one who discovers the laws that others will learn.’
He was, of course, selling me only one choice, and I knew what he expected.
‘Is there an area that interests you? Something you’d like to look into? Think about it. I’ll give you a small team of researchers. Just bring me something we can be proud of.’
I stumbled out of Downey’s office feeling as though I’d been told to invent gravity, but by that evening, over drinks with Donald, I realised it wasn’t so bad. Off the top of my head there were at least four interesting areas in haematology at the time, and I just needed to pick one that would interest me, and that I had a chance of cracking.
I think it was that evening Donald told me he was moving to London, to set up in private practice. He had got married earlier that year, and although I liked his wife, she certainly had expensive tastes.
‘She wants children,’ he said, matter-of-factly, ‘and I need more money.’
I was sad that Donald was leaving, but just then it didn’t bother me too much, because I had something I was anticipating, greatly.
Marian.
When she arrived I went to meet her at the station. She’d wired her arrival time, and the train was punctual.
When I saw her step down from the carriage, it felt like a small physical blow, as if something had knocked into me from behind. I think I actually caught a breath, then told myself to act as coolly as I could and went to meet her, my arms frozen to my sides, though I wanted to put them around her. And by the time we walked into town, me carrying her bag, and we got to St Andrew’s Street, I knew I was in love with her, and I felt sick, because I didn’t get the slightest impression that she was in love with me in return.
I felt swept along, out of my depth in waters I knew little about. My experience of women was limited; I had been to a boys’ school, so my first encounters with any girls of my own age apart from my sister had to wait until I came up to Cambridge. In the war, in France, there were those times when the men queued underneath a red lamp on some filthy street corner, but I chose not to accompany them. One more thing that set me apart from them. I pretended it was because I was wary of disease.
So the mere presence of Marian was almost too powerful for me. The click of her heels on the cobbles, the smell of her hair as it brushed near me, the warmth of her hand on my arm.
Marian talked away happily, and I found it was all I could do to answer her. She was fascinated by Cambridge, and had a hundred questions for me about this building and that church, and I quickly remembered what a remarkable place it rightly was to any visitor, let alone a young American on her first trip to England.
‘I found you a guest room at Caius,’ I told her. ‘It’s not far.’
‘That’s your college?’ she asked.
‘Yes, but I don’t live in the Old Courts any more, I have a flat now, by the cricket ground. Here we are. Look, just wait here while I get your key.’
We ducked into the gates of Gonville Court, and I set Marian with her case just inside while I went into the porter’s lodge. My heart sank. The porter was one I knew well, a curmudgeon from my own time as an undergraduate.
‘I’ve booked a room for a visiting academic from Paris,’ I said. ‘Fisher.’
I waited while the porter made the slowest job possible of looking up something in a large book, all without saying a word to me. He glanced up again, and was just about to turn and start
a presumably equally laborious hunt for a key when he saw something over my shoulder.
Marian had drifted into view, her case in her hand.
‘Monsieur Fisher is a lady?’ the porter asked, sarcastically.
I groaned.
It took half an hour of wrangling before they agreed to let Marian use a guest room in the all-male college, even just for one night, until other arrangements could be made.
‘I’m so sorry about that,’ I said, as I found our way to the third floor and unlocked the room.
Marian didn’t seem to mind; on the contrary, she found it amusing.
‘What century is this, anyway?’ she laughed.
‘You’d be surprised. I’ll have a word with the Master. He likes me because I was a good student. Did them proud, you know?’
‘Were you a good student, Charles?’ asked Marian, her eyes twinkling, teasing me.
She walked round the large but simple room overlooking the courtyard. It was quiet, most students were down for Easter, and as dusk fell over the rooftops, it suddenly seemed rather spooky.
‘Will you be all right here?’ I asked, quite seriously.
‘As long as you keep that dinosaur off my back,’ she said, laughing again. ‘Well? Were you a good student?’
‘One of the best,’ I said, quietly. ‘Or so they said. And this is a college with strong links to medicine. That goes all the way back to John Caius himself, though he would admit no student who was blind, dumb, deformed, maimed, or otherwise diseased. Or Welsh.’
Marian looked at me sharply.
‘Is that English humour?’
‘Sadly not, it’s true. Or so they say.’
‘So they say. So they say. I can see I still have a lot to learn about Englishmen.’
Suddenly I was powerfully aware that we were alone in her room. The door stood open still, her bag just inside, and yet there was a strong sense of seclusion, of intimacy. She stood by the large window, almost in silhouette; beyond her, the roofs of the college were cut out against a light grey sky. Everything was quiet. I noticed her waist, so slim, and the curve of her hipbone through her dress, and for a fraction of a second, I pictured myself on my knees before her, kissing her stomach.
A Love Like Blood Page 6
