It was Hari who managed to calm him, sitting on the bed, holding both his hands and murmuring something, words that I didn’t understand but seemed to reach him. I watched in fascination as he spoke, looking into Lal Bahadur’s eyes, his voice soft and reassuring. He was gentle, his manner so different to the rather brusque way in which the British doctors treat the men. I felt a strange swelling in my chest, the sort of emotion one experiences at a moment of particular kindness, and I had to turn away.
After ten minutes, Lal Bahadur was soothed and lying quietly, but Colonel MacLeod has decided to send him to the Kitchener Hospital, up in the Old Workhouse, where there is a ward for the insane. I could not help wondering, after all the things that man has seen, whether the staring, the twitching and the howling are simply a reasonable reaction to the horror that he has lived through.
I hate to think of Robert being back at the Front, of being part of that, of leading his men through it all. I know that the Germans are the enemy, but in their hospitals there will be men going through the same horror as Lal Bahadur. I only hope they have the good fortune to be treated by someone like Hari.
Twenty-One
I don’t know how to say this, Suze.
I’m pregnant.
Twenty-Two
ELIZABETH WILLOUGHBY’S DIARY
19th February 1915
I am feeling rather bad about Robert. Despite my promise to write often, I have found myself taken up with events at the Pavilion, with scarcely a moment for anything else. A programme of entertainments for the troops has been devised: there are so many people from the town who want to do their bit. Yesterday it was a special matinée put on for the patients and public at the Palace Pier Theatre.
Mrs Hamilton, a rather imposing lady dressed in flowing robes and a golden turban, introduced me to one of the organizers, a Mr Das Gupta; in his own words the “life and soul” of the Indian Art and Dramatic Society. I told him all about Robert’s Indian past and how excited I am about going to live there once we are married. Mr Das Gupta clapped his hands, equally excited.
“Are you by any chance familiar with the works of Rabindranath Tagore?” he asked.
When I said that I wasn’t, he fumbled in a bag and brought out a little book. Mr Tagore, he said, had recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature and had actually lived in Brighton for a while, sent by his father to a public school on Ship Street.
“Keep it,” said Mr Das Gupta. “I think you will find it most interesting. Now I must excuse myself to prepare for the performance.”
A few minutes later, a hush fell over the theatre, and then Mr Das Gupta came onto the stage.
“Pandit Shyama Shankar will now perform some invocations to the divine triad: Brahma the creator, Vishnu the protector and Shiva the destroyer,” he said, and the curtain rose to reveal a man sitting cross-legged on the floor, dressed in robes of red and gold.
The man sat perfectly still for a moment, until there were no more rustlings or coughs or throats being cleared, and then began to chant. As he sang, some of the men closed their eyes, seeming quite transported by the sound. I did the same for a moment, feeling carried to the East by the music.
This opening prayer was followed by a British magician, much appreciated by the patients, then an exquisite musical performance on instruments the likes of which I had never seen before, and finally an Indian play adapted and translated into English by Mr Das Gupta himself. Although it was entertaining in its way, I found myself distracted, my eyes drifting away from the stage, seeking something out. Scanning dozens of dark heads in the audience, I found what I was looking for: Hari, sitting across the aisle, three rows in front of me, his face lifted to the stage.
As he shifted in his seat, the light fell on him and I saw that his cheeks were wet with tears. Once again I was struck by his focus, his ability to give all his attention to one thing, like when he persuaded Mohan Ram to have his operation or calmed Lal Bahadur out of his fit of nerves – and for a brief moment I wondered what it might be like to be the object of such attention. It would, I thought, make one feel rather special.
Later, at home, I looked at the book that Mr Das Gupta had given me. It was called Gitanjali, and was a collection of songs translated into prose from the original Bengali, with an introduction by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. A photograph was tucked into it of a man aged around fifty, his head turned to the side, his hair curling halfway down his neck, his beard long and mostly white, with a fine nose and intelligent eyes. He wore white robes folded over his shoulder and what I now know from our patients was a Brahminical thread.
At the bottom of the page was the publisher’s name and, under it, a list of cities.
Macmillan and Co., Limited
Calcutta • Bombay • Madras • London
I whispered the names to myself, thrilled at the thought of one day seeing those places for myself.
I did not find the poems terribly easy to read: there was a lot about nature – lotuses and rivers and monsoon rains, dust-stained travellers and so on. It was difficult to see what Mr Tagore meant by them. Once again, I thought of Hari. He would be able to explain them, I was sure.
“I’ve been reading the poems of Rabindranath Tagore,” I said the next day.
He looked at me in surprise, then nodded, with more enthusiasm than I have ever seen him express, and said that Tagore was one of India’s greatest writers, that his writing was extraordinary, “beautifully modern”. He had, he said, changed Bengali literature for ever.
I hesitated for a moment, then confessed that I had found the poems difficult to read, at which he looked rather pained, then said that perhaps it was because I had read them in translation, and that in the original they were extraordinary.
His skin was slightly flushed as he spoke, his eyes bright. I saw that I had discovered something that made Hari Mitra come alive.
He went on talking, saying that Rabindranath, as he called him, was not simply a poet: he was a thinker on the subject of the world and its workings, in particular on India and its future. Hari himself had been to an ashram owned by him, a place where people could stay and think and pray, just outside Calcutta, with an enormous prayer hall with a marble floor and beautiful gardens and an experimental school. Rabindranath, he said, disapproved of Western education, because he thought children should not be forced to learn facts.
“I’ll second that!” I said, remembering the great chunks of Tennyson I had to learn by rote at school.
Smiling, he said that although Rabindranath’s thoughts on Independence were inspiring, he was more swayed by the arguments of Mr Gandhi. Feeling rather ignorant, I asked if Mr Gandhi was another writer, a question that Hari seemed not to mind at all: he explained that he was another thinker, a lawyer who had just returned to India after many years in South Africa and who wanted Independence for India too, but only by nonviolent means. Mr Gandhi also believed that Indians should reject all forms of Western civilization and go back to something more traditional. Hari thought that this was going a little too far, but he did agree that India could not keep modelling itself on England.
“You don’t seem very—” I said without thinking.
“Grateful?” His voice was suddenly cold.
I stammered that even if England wasn’t exactly as he’d expected, there must be some things about it that were to his liking, and that he must have benefitted from being at Oxford at least.
He sighed. “There are some good parts to it, of course. But we need our independence. Look at our patients. They can’t go on like this, facing death for a country to whom in the end they mean so little.”
“They want to fight, though, don’t they?” I argued. “What about izzat?”
To my great surprise, he began to quote Shakespeare:
“Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No… Honour is a mere scutcheon.”
I remembered the play very well, as it happened. It was another of the things I had to lea
rn by heart.
“That’s Falstaff speaking. He may have saved his life in that particular battle, but by the end of the play he loses everything.”
There was a pause – and then Hari began to laugh, saying I was quite right: he had been using Shakespeare to make a point, but it was a weak attempt.
“It’s very Oxford thing to do,” he said. “I apologize.”
I smiled and told him that Robert has a terrible habit of speaking in Latin when he wants to put an end to a conversation, and that it was probably an Oxford thing as well.
“Perhaps we have more in common than I thought.”
The Pavilion reminded him of being there, he said. The architecture was similar, with its porticoes and domes, and the stone looked like very pale English limestone, although it wasn’t really: just stucco painted to look like it. There was also the sense of living in a place where everyone knew one’s business. Living in college had been like being at his father’s house, he said: the porters had been like the chowkidars, who knew everything that was going on. The scouts who cleaned rooms and made beds and brought coal for the fires knew as much from the contents of one’s waste-paper baskets as the sweepers at home.
“Although they were to be treated with more respect, as I soon found out,” he said.
Hari had thought he had left all that “surveillance”, as he called it, behind him the day he had packed his bags for England. He had believed that here one kept oneself to oneself, that one’s business was one’s own, but he had come to realize that it wasn’t really true.
“Surely that doesn’t matter if one has nothing to hide,” I said.
“That isn’t the point.”
I have never really thought about it. People have always known what I’m doing: Papa and Mamma, of course, when I was a girl, then the mistresses at school, Sister and Matron when I was learning to nurse, and now there is always someone keeping watch to make sure I don’t – Heaven forbid – get too friendly with the patients. Perhaps Hari is right: why should someone always know where I go and what I do, and with whom?
Once we are married, I suppose Robert will know everything about me: my hopes, my dreams, my fears. But that is different. We’ll be man and wife.
I must write to him now, must keep to my promise. But for the first time I am not sure what I should say. Would he be interested in the matinée? He is always slightly impatient at concerts. As for poetry, I know he doesn’t like that. My conversations with Hari always make me think about things in a different way, or bring up new things that I know nothing about. Our conversation about Shakespeare had not made me anxious, as I sometimes am when I discuss things with Robert, but instead excited, somehow alive. I know these conversations are not something I should put in my letters. Besides, there is something that makes me want to keep them for myself.
Twenty-Three
Shit, Suze, getting pregnant wasn’t meant to be part of the story. That was your thing, the thing you wanted more than anything, the thing that finally finished us, not the affairs or the arguments or the broken promises. A child was something I couldn’t get my head around, couldn’t even start to imagine.
I told you it wouldn’t fit with my career, that you’d be left to look after it each time I went away, but it wasn’t for any of those reasons, really, and you knew it. It was fear. When you began those conversations about children, a small knot appeared in my stomach, my mouth went dry – and I knew, although I would never have admitted it, that I was terrified.
Of what? Of losing you to a baby, of feeling guilty when I left for work and, I guess, underneath it all, of the things I’ve seen in the eyes of mothers – mothers pleading for food for their starving children, mothers gripping the bodies of their dead babies, mothers wailing as tiny coffins are lowered into the ground. Having children means the possibility of losing them, the worst vulnerability of all.
I’ve no idea how to be a mother. I’m frightened by neediness. You knew that, and you were clever, always managing to hide your own, putting on a front when I went away, absorbing yourself in your own life, knowing it was the only way to keep me. A child couldn’t do that, I know.
After what happened on the pier, I knew I had to see a doctor. I couldn’t face going back to my GP – our GP – in London, and so this morning I went to a surgery I’d noticed around the corner from the flat, with an old-fashioned brass plaque above the doorbell.
There was no receptionist, just a waiting room with a couple of battered armchairs. A handwritten sign propped up on the mantelpiece said: “Please wait here until GP is available”.
After a while, someone came into the room.
“Jo?”
I blinked. It was Florence, the girl I’d met in the bar.
“Oh,” I said. “Are you a doctor?”
“Yes, I’m covering for Dr Webster. Have you come to see her?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t got an appointment. My doctor’s in London. I’m here in Brighton for… a while, I don’t know how long. I wondered if I could be seen as a visitor. It’s quite urgent.”
“We’ll have to fill in some forms, but that’s fine. I haven’t got another patient for a bit. Come in.”
I followed her into what must have been the original parlour of the house, with a desk in the bay window, shaded by grubby net curtains. Every surface was piled with papers, books, a mass of travel mementoes, everything from Russian dolls to a fraying Mexican hat. I wondered if it was where Edith had come for her medical appointments – she would have liked all that.
“So how can I help you?” Florence asked.
At the bar, I’d been in too much of a state to notice anything other than her hair. She was striking, not exactly pretty – what’s that phrase the French use? Jolie laide – with eyes the colour of that cashmere scarf you once bought from Portobello Market one freezing December afternoon.
“It’s a nice grey,” I said when we went to the pub to warm up.
“Oyster,” you said, and we were off.
“Lead.”
“Pewter.”
“Platinum.”
“Taupe.”
“Taupe? That’s not grey, that’s brown. Hotel-room brown. Leather-trousers-in-Chelsea brown. Drink!”
“I think you’ll find I’m right. I’m the artist. I know about colour.”
“And I’m the photographer. I don’t just shoot in black and white.”
You raised your eyebrows. “Elephant’s breath.”
“Pinot Grigio.”
“Éminence grise.”
We went on and on, getting sillier and sillier until I said: “You win!”
We clinked glasses and I looked at you, your face pink from the whisky and the fire burning in the grate, and at that moment I truly thought that perhaps I could stay in London for good, and we could get married and have a child, and grow old together playing word games by the fireplace.
Sorry, I’m digressing, but I want to remember the good times, before it all went bad.
Florence’s eyes were grey – or pewter, or whatever – and they were focused on me. I wondered what I looked like to her, hunched in the chair, dressed in clothes I’d pulled on without looking.
“Are you all right?” she said.
I realized that my arms were clutched tight around myself, and that I was probably staring. I untangled myself and took a breath.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I am.”
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’m a war photographer. A photo journalist. Just back from Afghanistan. I think I might have picked something up there. I’ve been feeling pretty weird.”
“In what way?”
“Well, I feel sick a lot of the time.”
I saw a flicker in her eyes, and was embarrassed again. “That night, at the bar, that’s what was up. I was only on my first drink. I didn’t want you to think—”
She nodded. “I didn’t. Anything else?”
“Well, nightmares – but that’s normal
for me. Oh, and I’m bloated, even though I run most days. And I’m tired, really tired. I keep having to go to bed in the afternoons.”
She made a note on the pad in front of her.
“I came here because yesterday I fainted. I was in the arcade on the pier and there was this man playing a war game, and suddenly it all became too much, and then I woke up in the office with someone asking if I was OK.”
She frowned. “Has this happened before?”
“No.” Then I remembered the supermarket. “Well, once, a few weeks ago. I was shopping and suddenly I couldn’t stand it. I had to run out. I was almost sick then too.”
“Have you been experiencing anything else? Sweating? Shaking? Any pains in the chest? Are you feeling particularly anxious?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “A bit.”
“You’re a war photographer,” she said. “I guess you’ve seen a lot of dead bodies.”
“Of course. It’s part of the job.”
“Have you heard of PTSD? Post-traumatic stress disorder?”
I felt a prickle of annoyance. “Yes,” I said. “And I haven’t got it.”
“Do you know that? How can you be sure?”
I looked at her concerned face, her grey eyes, her glossy, well-conditioned, well-looked-after hair, and the remembrance poppy she’d pinned to her jacket. I thought of Elizabeth’s patients screaming with the pain of their battlefield memories, of heroin addicts lying almost dead in a Kabul drug den.
“It’s not me who’s got PTSD,” I said, suddenly furious. “It’s the ones who’ve lost their families, the people with no legs, the ones who were there when the suicide bombers hit.”
Tears welled in my eyes and started to roll down my cheeks.
She said nothing, but slid a box of tissues across the desk, then waited. When at last I had taken one of them and blown my nose, she said, “All right, let’s not talk about that for now. One more question. Is there any chance at all that you could be pregnant?”
The Repercussions Page 9
