The long weekend of Margaret’s visit to Edinburgh coincided with the first anniversary of David’s death. The actual anniversary was a Friday, but they had talked about it, and both of them wanted to spend the day together, so she had come on Thursday morning. For the Friday, MacIver had rented a car for the day, and they drove out to the north of the city—to Kinross on Loch Leven, where Mary Queen of Scots had been kept prisoner, but escaped. Then they had gone on through Falkland to Perth, where as a boy he had ridden horses on the hills above the Tay estuary. They looked quietly at what there was to see on that golden October day, and they talked.
“I know it’s irrational, but I’m like a child who believes he was given a treasure, and feels guilty for losing it,” he said.
Margaret kept urging him past this mis-feeling, rather than misreading, of the situation. “I felt some of that, too,” she said, “but I have convinced myself that it’s just a symptom of real loss; there is an ‘ought’ in the situation—he really ought to be here, but the fact that he’s not is not our fault: it was never in our hands. But one sure thing is that David would want us to enjoy these weekends, and not mope over him. So starting tomorrow you must show me your new Edinburgh.” As always, she kept trying to lead him back to better spirits. They parked the car and walked and kept talking, though there were comfortable silences too. And now when he looked at her, he began to see what loss had done.
On the last hill of the day, as they looked down at the pale ribbon of the Tay below them dissolving itself into the Indian summer haze over the North Sea, he studied her face and with a little shock finally realized that she was lonely. He put his arm around her shoulder and turned her to face him, and said: “He was more you than me, more yours than mine, and for all his life I never resented it for a moment, but gloried in it—it was as though there was more of both of you to love. But the instant he died, something vile in me started grabbing to get all of him. And I lost myself and you. It’s the worst thing I’ve done, and I’ve never said I’m sorry for doing it. But I’m saying it now.” She hugged him and wept.
That night they made love again very gently, and Margaret touched his rough face with wondering fingers, moving lightly over all his features as though trying to make what had become strange feel familiar again. When she drifted off to sleep curled against him, he suddenly recalled a visit he had made to her studio in the house about a month after David had died. She never minded his watching her paint, but he knew better than to start a conversation while she was engaged. On the easel was a new painting: a ruined Celtic chapel on a headland—it could almost have been above the Tay that afternoon—with an overgrown garden or cemetery, a high wall in partial collapse, and what was left grappled with a tumble of weed and ivy. On the seaward side there was a derelict doorway with its lintel still intact, and over it was an inscription from Isaiah, still legible in the weathered stone: “Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. When thou passest through the waters, I shall be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee. . . .” Lovely words, but the view through the doorway down to the sea was chillingly bleak. The color chosen for the water was the darkest grey, one halftone from black. MacIver knew she had never before done anything so desolate. But it wasn’t finished.
In the foreground, almost at the observer’s feet, was a new grave, with an engraved stone but without a name or dates. The soil around it had been recently cleared, an inscription freshly limned on the clean granite, no lichen or meandering cracks. But when he read the inscription he recognized at once that the words were taken from one of David’s letters. This was his grave.
Soon after he had started his helicopter duty, carrying the wounded from battlefield to field hospital, he had written a long letter, first describing the novel sensation of being in the machine, but then moving his focus to the impact on the landscape and the people who work it. “. . . A helicopter in the middle distance is just a nondescript mosquito with a drone, but as it approaches, different levels of noise start asserting themselves; the woofer of the rotary kicks in (BA-BA-BA-BA) and becomes ever louder, and when you fly low (which we usually do, because it is harder for anyone on the ground to draw a bead on us at that pace), you are inscribing an earsplitting incision of noise on the fields you are rushing over, often only twenty-five feet below. They have been harvesting the rice from the swampy paddies over the last couple of weeks, lines of figures bent to the work, a curve of mostly white clothes under the fine yellow conical hats, held in a permanent stoop over the individual plants. They don’t look up anymore when we pass; my pilot says when he started out here they would sometimes stand up, and occasionally even wave, but not now. I’ve noticed a few children down there, but they don’t look up either. They are working their land, doing what their grandparents did, and it is their place. With our constant rush and constant noise pressing down on them, I cannot avoid the invasiveness of what we do. Everyone needs a place, and this is not ours. I have been wondering where mine is. Not New York, not Wellfleet. You, I now know, are mine. . . .”
Margaret had edited the ending, and blocked out space on her granite stone, and penciled lettering for it to read:
EVERYONE NEEDS A PLACE, AND THIS IS NOT OURS.
I WONDER WHERE IS MINE? NOWHERE I CAN NAME.
YOU, I NOW KNOW, ARE MINE.
But she could not paint the words. She was staring in misery at this bottom corner of her painting, and MacIver could see David’s letter, much creased from being read, reread, memorized, on the table beside her. “It won’t work,” she said. “He never wrote the words for a stone or a painting. . . . The new won’t fit with the old here. . . . It will always be apart.” And now she was weeping, and MacIver held her and felt her shuddering sobs into his body, as he had that awful morning at the hospital. “How could you have ignored all this?” he asked himself, and turned now to hold her in her sleep.
If MacIver’s world started to open up again with a view into his wife’s grief, the next day it expanded further by seeing deeper into her buoyancy. Before the weekend he had sent her in Paris a list of Edinburgh’s coming events, so they could plan their activities—there was an exhibition of late-nineteenth-century Scottish painting at the National Gallery of Scotland, which included three women painters she was interested in, and there was a good concert at Usher Hall. “There’s just one fly in the ointment,” he had written. “Saturday afternoon is Heriot’s big match against its hated rival. As coach for half the team, I reckon I should put in an appearance, but only for half the game. It will take me an hour and ten minutes going and coming, to rejoin you at whatever you choose to be doing.” But on the Saturday morning she said she wanted to come with him to the game, “if that’s all right. I never saw you play, so I’d like to see the boys you coach.”
So on the Saturday afternoon, he had taken her down to the second half. They stood on the sideline in the big, noisy throng, and MacIver stationed her in front of him, with his hands on her shoulders, or in a relaxed moment enfolding her: he was swiftly into the game, roaring over her head “Up on him, Colin!” when the enemy had the ball, or muttering “Oh for God’s sake” when Heriot’s dropped it. She could feel herself catching his excitement through the tension in his body. They had arrived with the score tied 6–6, but then with time short Duncan’s forwards had started grinding with precision down the field against a tired and outweighed pack, with the fly-half Gary gaining yards with some elegant kicking for touch. Margaret was by now shouting with the crowd. Heriot’s finally forced a five-yard scrum near the enemy line, and MacIver’s pupil Kevin got the ball, feinted his usual pass to Gary, but instead did a lovely reverse pass to the blind side, where their speedy winger, like a fair-haired, diving dart, took the ball in full stride and shot over for the try. Total bedlam—maybe better than beating England. Margaret turned, looked up at him beaming, and said, “You taught them well!” The final whistle blew and MacIver took her hand, and they trotte
d out onto the field to join the team celebrating around their coach. In his exuberance, Duncan, who had never met Margaret before, picked her up by her elbows, raised her to his full six-eight, and kissed her resoundingly on both cheeks, before setting her gently down again. She was still breathless at supper that night: “That coach is a giant,” she said, looking at MacIver across the table, her eyes round with wonder.
It was in the evenings, of course, that he missed her most and felt small prickings of jealousy against her admirer Ferenyi, who saw so much more of her than he did. The thought occurred to him: why should he not also commission some works of art from her? So sitting at his borrowed desk one night, after sorting through the notes he had taken in his interviews that day, he decided to embark on a children’s story, and sketched out its title page:
The Cat Who Knew His Mind
STUDIES OF OPINIONATED ANIMALS, VOL. I
by
Robert D. MacIver, B.A., M.A. Oxon,
Ph.D. Columbia, D.Litt. Edinburgh, etc.
On page 2, the story began:
“We are all very lucky to live in a well-ordered household,” said Bluto, the bloodhound, to the other three dogs and the cat. He considered himself their leader, not only because of his size, but because of his unique social skill of absorbing three (3) tennis balls into his soft, leathery jowls at once, rotating them there for a while, and then disgorging them on the rug with their yellow covers all pulpy and disgusting strands of saliva draped over them.
“Bullshit,” said Lord Stripington, reclining in his usual place on the bookshelf in front of the works of Hobbes. “In a well-ordered house, dogs who roll in manure outside would not be allowed inside. . . .”
The story drifted on to its moralistic conclusion, and the triumph of Lord Stripington and the border collie Kipper, who becomes his buddy. MacIver had singled out the passages he required for illustration:
“For a fellow who lies around in his striped pyjamas all day, he’s really an efficient little killer,” said the border collie admiringly.
“Just shin up the tree, Stripy old boy, and tell us if you see anyone coming,” said Kipper to his friend.
MacIver phoned Margaret and said some important materials were on their way, and within a week received the two illustrations back, much better than their text deserved, and a third, with a truly adorable, small, clearly feminine cat saying to Lord Stripington, looking as supercilious as the New York Public Library lions: “Lord Stripington, do you think a worldly, knowledgeable fellow like you would soon get bored with a diffident girl like me?” It was the first time they had played together, MacIver calculated, since David had come home from Yale.
MacIver went skipping over to Paris as soon as the term was over in early December, and they celebrated their twenty-fourth wedding anniversary in style on Christmas Eve. After a walk along the cliff’s thin edge, they were back together again.
CHAPTER 11
No Glorious End for Warriors
Sergeant Braddis was not ready for the horror that greeted him when he returned to the line carrying Dodds’s body, the limp figure’s uniform crimsoned from neck to knee, the face pale as wax under the soft brown hair, the whole head lolling back and to the right, as though it had had its throat cut, Braddis himself breathing heavily and sweating, fatigues almost as dyed with the young man’s blood as his victim. Hands were raised to take the body and lay him out on a groundsheet spread along the fire-step. No one was looking at the sergeant, who stood a little off to the side, telling what happened.
“I’m just making it back to my section, and ready for the last lap home, and suddenly there’s a shot behind me, and I go running back. I’d been worried all the way during our withdrawal; I’d seen a skulker between mounds, just a shoulder disappearing as I turned sort of thing, and fired off a couple of rounds at him, hoping to chase him off. But he clearly wasn’t going home till he’d had a clean shot, and taken someone out. Maybe he just wanted the officer, knowing that he would be covering the rear of the platoon. Anyway, I get there just as Mr. Dodds is crumpling, so I half-catch him and am holding him and he’s got blood pouring from the chest, but it’s an exit wound, I could tell, so he was shot in the back; and he’s got more blood coming out of his mouth, but he looks up and says ‘Thank you, Sergeant’ rather faint, and then he can’t talk anymore, and he’s gone. Always a gentleman, Mr. Dodds.”
They were hearing him, not looking at him, as though they were ashamed for him. He felt like smacking them to attention, with a firm “Do you understand what I’m telling you?” dressing them down like a sergeant, but the thought occurred to him that he was in charge of the platoon now, and should try playing it in a quieter way, like an officer. Who knows, he might even get a commission out of this: the beautiful thing about war was that officers often have their hand forced to do things that would never occur to them in peace. Other NCOs had got their Sam Browne belt and the King’s letter in these situations, and, after all, Braddis knew he was the best man they had. The one diffidence at his core was that he would never know how many of the men believed him.
Indeed, the fatal flaw in Braddis was that he never cared, and therefore never knew, what other people were thinking. It had never occurred to him that Lieutenant Dodds was well liked and respected by the platoon. The animal schooled for predation on instinct had scant room for moral judgment. For him, general rules of right or wrong stopped pretty much with parade-ground etiquette. Beyond those geometrically ordered bounds, especially out on the battlefield, he made his own rules, and they had been quite successful for him. The quieter shadings of good into decent were nonexistent for him. The thought that other people might have feelings on such things, and strong feelings, and even act on them, and that indeed society was sometimes organized to pay deference to such feelings, was wasted on him. His neglect of such niceties was what had caused his demotion to sergeant for raiding the quartermaster stores at Caterham, and what he had done in no-man’s-land this afternoon would be ruinous for him, as it should be. But before another twenty-four hours were out he would have curiously compounded his predicament because of exactly the same neglect.
Simon Dodds had written a memo to the company adjutant, Captain Alan Leslie, about Braddis. His batman, a small, shy, punctilious man who revered his officer, had delivered it to company HQ that morning, and as Dodds had omitted any dramatic note on the envelope, such as “Open in the event of death,” Leslie had read it straightaway. It’s not clear whether Dodds was simply passing on the worrying question of Braddis’s looting to a more seasoned and experienced officer (Leslie was in his forties, a good Yorkshireman with an established practice as a solicitor in Whitby), or whether Dodds had some premonition that Braddis might resort to violence to stop just such a memo as this letter. Leslie knew all about Braddis, and the letter disturbed him when he read it. He regarded young Dodds as a friend—the two of them had had some happy escapist conversations in the officers’ mess about their mutual passion for sailing. When the news came of his death, brought very quickly by Private Alston, and not dispatched by Braddis, Leslie promptly took charge.
He went straight to the Norfolks’ trench, designated two men as stretcher bearers, and had the body taken to HQ first; he found Dodds’s batman trying to fight back tears near the body, and told him gently to go straightaway to his officer’s quarters, collect all his possessions in a suitcase—a subaltern would not have many—and deliver them all to the adjutant’s office. Then he took Braddis aside; this was not the time to insinuate anything, but to restore some sense of routine order. “You’re in charge of the platoon for the next few days, Sergeant, until we see what sort of reshufflings we need to do. The men have had a terrible shock: Lieutenant Dodds was well liked. What they all need now is a little quiet, to let things settle down, and show them that things do keep going on, as they have to, and it’s not the end of the world, though they may think it is. But they’re not to be harried by any of us. We’ll try to send them something a little
better with their rations. So just keep the regular watches, but they won’t be doing patrols or fatigues or drills for the next twenty-four hours. Keep yourself ready to talk to the major; he may be sending for you before the afternoon’s out, or later this evening to get you together with the other platoon commanders; so just make sure you’re on the alert through this difficult transition. There’ll certainly be church parade for the company for a service to honor Lieutenant Dodds and all the others lost today across the board, so I’ll tell the chaplain to be in touch with you, if he needs details about any of the men lost. One of our worst days. . . .”
The adjutant went back to his office and arranged to have a medical officer examine Dodds’s body, to find out what was to be learnt about the nature of his wound, and what sort of weapon had caused it. It was, Leslie admitted to himself, a kind of luxury in this war to entertain and examine suspicions about mere individuals, when what is permanently in your face is the question of how to thread your fragile way between the impersonal thundering howitzers and forty miles of seven or eight different types of flesh-maiming and -mangling barbed wire. But Leslie, who had some Yorkshire bloody-mindedness, was not going to drop his hunch lightly. He could not undo the lawyer in him; if the world was upside down, and killing had its own stamped license, it seemed to him a minimal stand for a civilized authority, if there still was such a thing, to insist that people point their guns the right way. Call it what you like—the case of Dodds would be his own little protest that even in war there is some business worth conducting as normal. He knew he would have to work carefully on this without any help from the company commander, Major Reginald Erskine, who he happened to know from previous comments thought highly of Braddis—the prejudice of one regular soldier for another, for a man who knew the business of war, and did not have to be trained under actual combat conditions how to fight, and perhaps even for a man who shared the same comedy-butt’s first name.
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 15
