He bandaged his hands himself, and never lost a moment’s duty. These were some of the ways the sergeant ensured that the war stood close to them all in the trench at all times, even on quiet days. He knew he would be doomed if normal life and normal judgments were allowed to settle for an instant.
MacIver was satisfied with Braddis: it was clear he would be nothing but trouble. The question was whether he could imagine anyone strong enough to hold his own against him. He tidied up a bit, and then thought about supper. Tonight he would be serving pasta, with broccoli and San Marzano tomatoes. Margaret, even out of such simplicity (but did he remember these ingredients with fresh scallops added?), would make a delicious seamless composition whose various parts all seemed to cohere and enhance each other. The house would fill with anticipatory smells and when he came to the table, he would find in a beautiful stoneware bowl an effortlessly harmonious dish, whose colors alone conjured up the Italian flag. Of course, her ingredients were fresh, though she did use those canned tomatoes, draining some of the juice so as not to produce too much slop, and then enhancing flavors and smells by cooking them with chopped shallots, a little olive oil. He didn’t have any shallots, but he didn’t see why he couldn’t achieve a near miss with a basic onion.
This time, instead of spooking him, his reenactment of these observed rituals induced a kind of wistful calm. The truth was, he was a little pleased with himself: you felt better if you did something—anything—and since he had been jolted by his fall into establishing a new rhythm to fill his remaining days, it seemed to have unlocked his frozen resentment against the end-that-would-not-come. He even felt warmer. He ate his dinner slowly and started working through his first bottle of Meursault, raising his glass to the end of time; it all tasted good. Then he cleaned up carefully and, to keep the mellow mood flowing, put on the slow movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, an old favorite.
With his glass refilled, he sat in his rocking chair and listened as the theme, at first slackly toned, headed off gently downhill, apparently going nowhere, a dog peeing in snow. But then a little development and a period of agitation, from which the theme emerged striding more confidently and briskly, cellos digging into the chords and bracing them. A climax built: the violins soared to a piercing sweetness, and then swooped once more buoyantly downhill with other strings rising to meet and cross them: it always reminded him of the best broken-field running. Poor bloody neurasthenic Mahler, with his migraines and his sad premonitory songs spelling death for his children—who would have thought he could be such an athlete in his mind?
Not for the first time, he allowed the music to revive some glory moments of his own. Scotland vs. England at Twickenham—a still grey January afternoon and sixty-five thousand noisy fans in the stands. Ten minutes to go with England leading 9–6. Scotland had had its chances and a good supply of the ball, but the fly-half Stewart had kept wasting it by keeping it himself and cutting straight back into the pursuit— a death wish for obliteration. MacIver had spoken to him firmly about it at halftime, but nothing had changed. Once or twice young Colin Cameron on the wing had picked up a loose ball and shown his pace with high-stepping runs, but he had been cut down each time. You had to hand it to this English side, baying like foxhounds to each other in their overbred voices, they were bloody quick.
It was time to make a move. Sure enough, the ball came out on the Scottish side once more, and Stewart, instead of passing, kept it and turned inside for the inevitable tackle. This time, MacIver, crossing to clear the loose ball, and with the fly-half still on the ground, landed with his studs and full fourteen stone on the back of his teammate’s knee. As he pushed off, gathered the ball, and kicked it out of play, he heard a satisfying yell of pain. In the age before substitutions were allowed, Stewart, badly hobbled, was sent out to the wing. In the press box, the radio announcer had described the incident as “one of those unfortunate accidents generated by the sheer pace of the game,” but the same man in the bar after the game had looked MacIver straight in the eye and said matter-of-factly: “Ruthless bugger, aren’t you? Good for you.”
But the clock was now edging towards injury time. MacIver put the other center at fly-half, and told him to open it up. It took them a couple of minutes to find a rhythm with this correction, but then the heroic forwards yet again fed them the ball from the line-out, about ten yards inside the Scottish half. A quick long serve from Gordon to Morrison, and the ball was MacIver’s. He took it at full stride and turned on the burners, straining for the outside. It might be that the English had grown too accustomed to Stewart’s inside break, or simply tired in the waning minutes. By the time the pursuit had adjusted, it had to look for an angle on him downfield. Reach for it, MacIver told himself, sear those lungs. He continued to strain for the outside, watching the English coverage stretching itself out. Then almost on a syncopated note, he planted his left foot, and cut back the other way. Boom!—BOOM! The body of the big English wing-forward Jarvis passed in front of his as he made his cut. Straightaway he was in the clear; the fullback David was over-committed to his right, and MacIver drove up the middle, all, it seemed, on one breath, to score under the posts. Before the movement began, he had been feeling sluggish, but the adrenaline pumped him up again, and the line came up to meet him almost too fast to relish the moment. He remembered the English crowd falling silent under the shock of this turn of events: 9–9, and the kick to follow. His friend John Wilson, the Scottish fullback and kicker, came up to make the conversion, businesslike as always, and said, “I don’t intend to waste anything that good.” The careful placement of the ball, the poised stance at the start of the approach, the smack of leather being squarely struck amid total silence, and then the sight of the ball soaring high straight between the posts. Scotland beats England 11–9 in the waning moments of the game.
The Sunday Express the next morning had a panoramic photograph of the field with MacIver making his cut, under the headline X MARKS THE SPOT!!! The amazing reflexes of the sports photographer had caught the instant at which, with every other player leaning leftwards, MacIver’s body alone slants right, and Jarvis’s body passing across his in the middle of the picture completes a perfect X. He still had the photograph somewhere. It had been a long time after that before anyone in Scotland would let him buy his own single malt. But the best thing of all was that the next match the selectors had dropped Stewart.
MacIver felt better about things. He put his wine glass in the sink and shuffled off to bed, thinking smugly to himself, “You used to be quite quick.”
CHAPTER 3
Characters
He had been a little too cocky there, and he’d paid for it during the night. Suddenly, his illness had woken up and decided to assert itself. It was as though it had been decreed, “Here is this absurd person fooling around with his imagination and his memory of this and that, and it’s certainly time to show him what a fact is.” He had been woken up by fierce stabs of pain in his left side, but well below the heart, he realized, and rising tides of nausea. Eventually he knew he would have to get to the bathroom in record time, if he was not to face a foul clean-up problem in the morning. He only just made it. Torrents of vomit erupted from him painfully in repeated waves into the basin, his eyes tearing and the sweat pouring off him with the effort. He could see enough to discern that there was blood and bile and some white matter in the mix. When it was all spent, and the taps had managed to wash all but splash traces of it down the sink, he washed his face and brushed his teeth to remove the horrible taste, and stripped naked to towel off the sweat. He had been bent over, and knew instinctively that he should stand up very carefully; he was in fact still trembling all over.
He left the light on in the bathroom in case there was to be a second performance, and went back to the bedroom for some clean clothes. Passing the wardrobe mirror, he now noticed that in addition to his small regular paunch (really just a trifle of sag in the gut, if you were being kind), he was now sporting a pronounced and
asymmetric swelling on the left side of his belly. He was beginning to get the picture: as was the case with the decadent Roman Empire, the point is reached when there is no organic unity of the whole; the provinces all start to go their own way, to break away and form their allegiances elsewhere, or sometimes to mass malignant forces at the frontier, and at the right moment erupt and begin an advance against the soft center. Not for nothing did the generals keep looking to drive against the soft underbelly. This was what was happening to him amidships.
He was back in bed now in a clean sweatshirt, underwear, and sweatpants, still feeling frail and slightly atremble, but without the nausea and with the fierce stabbing in his side reduced to a subdued, metronomic pricking. Few inner gratitudes run deeper than the one that greets release from violent pain. He lay quietly, considering whether he had done anything to induce this attack. No, he decided, he knew it had been down there biding its time. The question was whether he should now formally repudiate wine, to use the awful, medical phrase, just to be safe.
Hell, no, his naturally rebellious soul declared, slimily adding a little quote from Saint Paul to Timothy, “Take a little wine for your stomach’s sake.” Aha!
He was up before dawn as usual, and sipped two or three glasses of water first: he seemed to have lost gallons of liquid in the night. Then he made himself hot tea with honey and lemon, swallowed a passel of vitamins, and was able to eat half an English muffin and marmalade on top of that. Then he went back to work. MacIver had fashioned a bad person to lead off his story, and should imagine a good one now to balance him. He found him in a gamekeeper on a Norfolk estate.
Charles Alston
GAMEKEEPER
Charles Alston sat blocky in his greatcoat, face painted solid red by the firelight, both hands around his tea mug. He was telling them about animal behavior on the estate at Blickling. It was pleasant for him to tell the stories, pulling him back to the exact site of each encounter; and it was good of them, he thought, to listen to him so quietly, and let him get away from all this. He supposed they each had somewhere to go in their minds, but now they were letting him go to his place instead. “Now the badger,” he was saying, staring into the fire, “is a very quiet, clean, and decent animal, who keeps pretty much to himself. He digs his burrow in the ground (you call it a sett, you know, for badgers) and has several rooms or chambers in it. He keeps it all immaculate. The straw and soft leaves he takes down for bedding he won’t just leave there. He will replace it regular to keep it fresh. And he wouldn’t dream of going to the toilet in his bed-chamber. But the fox on the other hand is a handsome cocky fellow all right, and he’s got a good head on him, but he’s lazy and very dirty, too. He smells awful rank. The fox often can’t be bothered to dig himself a hole, he’s got too much going on, or he never gets around to it, so sometimes he’ll just move into the badger’s den. He just up and moves right in, without so much as a knock on the door. Now the interesting thing is that the badger could take the fox on, if he had a mind to, and really punish him. He’s brave as a lion, and he’s very low-slung and powerful with an underthrust, and he’s got teeth that will clamp like a steel trap and never release. But once the fox has set foot in his place, the badger will always just walk away from it. Can’t stand the smell of it anymore, you see, that awful fox smell. If he knew how to fumigate it, he probably would, but as it is he would much rather start over, nice and clean again, than have to breathe in that fox-stench. It’s strange, but that’s the way it is. It’s a wonder that the fox doesn’t take advantage of that all the time, but he probably doesn’t realize how bad he smells. He’s got used to it himself and rather likes it.”
MacIver saw no need to push this any further on the day. Tomorrow he would try to introduce young Simon Dodds, the subaltern in command of the platoon. In the meantime, he wanted to think some more. He had met quite a few solid, decent Alstons, the best of East Anglia, when he was developing his oral history archive on the war; he wanted his sample of four or five from a platoon on the front to be close to what he knew. Admittedly, he had met only two possible Braddises who had survived the war: it was fortunate they were rare, but he needed one of them for his story. But the whole exercise of finding these people was bringing him back to the long series of encounters he had had when he was trying to bring the war close to himself for the purposes of history.
In the meantime, there was supper to attend to, and he thought with relief that this aspect of the Rules would now prove easier than he had feared; surely on last night’s performance he qualified for invalid rations, which, without weaseldom, meant he could go back to eating less rather than more. For supper tonight he had two slices of bacon, a slice of seven-grain toast with strawberry jam, and two glasses of warm water, with which everything seemed to go down a little easier. After supper he listened to Mozart, Marriage of Figaro, Acts Three and Four, beginning with the duet Che soave zefiretto, the two women sending in turn the lovely ripples of their voices gently chasing across the limpid pool. Whatever Mozart’s follies, he knew women and he never left them out.
MacIver sat on, after the lovely hymnlike Ah! Tutti contenti and the merry scramble to the finish, now in a relaxed and quietly somber frame of mind, and let his thoughts run over his personal register of fallen heroes. They kept coming back to linger, for no particular reason, on one of his gas victims, Ben Winterbourne, whose interview he could put his hand on in seconds, thanks to Margaret’s quiet insistence. Years ago, at a critical stage, she had bought him a fine old oak filing cabinet, after coming upon his innumerable folders crammed into shelves in apparently random order, yellowing and drooping with neglect. The section on gas interviews was now in the top drawer, and had been put into alphabetical order, at first by Margaret, hoping to shame him into some activity. She had succeeded eventually, when, sitting beside her as she worked, he started thumbing through some of them, and finally realized that they were full of vivid details, that the men’s sufferings made his insignificant, and that his record of them constituted a memorial to them that ought to be decently preserved. He thanked her, apologized gravely, and took over the work of filing from the letter D. Now on an impulse, he went to the cabinet. The drawer slid out on its smooth runners, and there, properly under W, was Ben, Research Case 113, Watling Nursing Home, Chatham, Kent. He ran through the details—born April 26, 1898, Herne Bay, Kent. Signed on East Kent Regiment (the Buffs) July 2, 1916. Still a private at time of injury, Messines, Ypres salient, May 14, 1917. Then a complicated series of shuttles from field hospitals, and through England. Interviewed April 10 and May 3, 1932. He put the file back and returned to his chair.
MacIver remembered the interviews perfectly. Nondescript Victorian nursing home outside Chatham. Big, bare, sightless windows set in grey stucco, overlooking a neglected garden, rank hydrangeas beneath ground-floor windows, plantain weeds and dock leaves winning out over grass on the lawn; a monkey puzzle tree on one side of the path, and quite a respectable cedar on the other. A house that had grown used to being unvisited. It reinforced MacIver’s notion that the medical people made a point of parking these gas victims in backwaters where they would be out of sight. BW’s room on first floor overlooking the front. The blind was torn, and an old army blanket had been tacked on top of it to give him some extra shade. His eyes still very weak. Two black oxygen cylinders on the floor, and on the metal bedside table a black rubber mask with the hose attached, an enamel bowl with a cloth over it for him to spit into, and a couple of well-thumbed sports magazines. Sometimes with these people his rugby had been a help.
Ben in bed when he arrived, small figure, you would have thought a young teenager, humped facing the window. When he sat up, sickness and premature aging quite evident. Thin mousy hair receding, and much scrofula on scalp, pink-rimmed eyes with exaggerated dark pouches underneath, pink-rimmed nostrils also on narrow nose pointing upwards, as though under pressure from buckteeth below. Halfway, you might say, on his way to being a sick albino rat. Under the green surgi
cal gown, pitifully thin arms without muscle, and concave, permanently wheezy chest.
“Hello, Ben.”
“You again. I thought I’d sent you packing.”
“Fuck off were the words you used. The Sister was mortified.”
“Yeah”—with a chuckle. “That wasn’t nice.”
“So feeling better, are you?”
“Depends what for.”
“I want to talk to you.”
“About the fuckin’ war?”
“Yes, about the fucking war, and before the war and after the war.”
Last time, to his fury, MacIver had lost the small ferrety man by letting him run on about his boyhood. Before he knew it, the hard edge of bitterness had been softened by the act of reminiscing. BW started to remember the tough little tyke he had been, full of merriment and mischief—you never knew what he’d get up to next. As he told the old stories, they brought him home to the forbidden ground of what he had lost and how he had changed. Now his anger had poisoned all relationships, no one could be put in the two empty beds in the room, and not even his long-suffering sister could abide him in her house. He had hardened himself in the corrosive toxins, and needed the bitterness to keep going; but here, talking himself back into the world of lost possibilities, he could feel himself being undone. Much more of this and he might cry in front of this persistently probing stranger, who was making him go slower to get down to the details. That could not be endured.
In his anxiety, he had started yelling at MacIver, and brought on a coughing fit. Clouds of purple rose to his face, eyes bulging with the strain of the spasms, and then a sudden lurch to the covered bowl to retch into it. MacIver wanted to hold him, but was sure that if he added one more jot to his rage, he would finish him off. Fortunately, a nurse arrived to investigate the noise. But Ben had not finished with him. “Do you want to see, MacIver?” he had shouted between gasps, clutching the bowl with both hands, robe wrenched off his knobby shoulders, sweat and tears streaming down the flushed face. “Do you want to see how the yellow gets mixed with the red?” Holding the bowl up to him.
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 4
