by Michael Pye
“They put Max to work,” Sarah said. “He had his surgical skills, so they set him to making mercury fuses for bombs. It was delicate work, and the risks didn’t matter because you can’t poison a dead man. Am I telling you more than you want to know?”
Helen only looked at her.
“Of course I am. I should get to the point, shouldn’t I? Is that what you think?”
Helen shook her head, but without vigor.
“To me,” Sarah said, “all this is the point. My life, not just my grievance.”
Helen said: “I understand.” But she was trying so hard to stay on her own high and well-defended moral ground, the perfect wrongness of her grandmother, perhaps the perfect wrongness of the Swiss in tolerating her, that it was hard to listen with the proper humility.
“Anyway,” Sarah said, “Max thought we’d been lucky, really. We’d lost money and jewels, of course. He said the Nazis seemed to think the only reason anyone would have a wedding ring was to smuggle gold out of Germany. As if, I said, we could ever leave Germany.
“Lucia stopped listening at that point. She looked distracted, then she concentrated, like a saleswoman concentrates on the house she’s selling, or the day cream. She said she did, as it happened, have some spare room in her apartment, if we needed to use it, and she could probably find a van somehow. The embassy would have one. She asked if we wanted to sell, but Max just said nobody would bother to pay us. They just had to wait and steal things.
“I didn’t want her to take anything. I wanted that table because it was like a little garden in the corner. It was my refuge, my place.”
Helen knew she had to go. She dressed, and she smiled.
“I remember what I said to her, after all these years, because I wanted to change the subject. I said: ‘You know, the stars. If you go out at night in the streetlamps, they don’t look yellow at all.’ ”
In the hotel lobby, Sarah found Peter Clarke fussing for stamps for a postcard and directions to the Chinese Garden. “I imagine you’ll be going back,” she said.
“I don’t have to go back.”
“But your family—” She wanted him to leave her. If he didn’t, he was different.
“I can go where I like. I can stay where I like, now.” He spoke as though he had only just discovered the fact. “I can’t leave you alone to deal with all this.”
“But it’s expensive to stay in Zurich.”
“I have money.”
“Of course you do. I meant—”
“I need to stay.”
She looked at him with enormous curiosity. He spoke with such feeling you might imagine he was a lover making his pitch. But although that would be flattering, startling even, it could not be the whole story.
“I need to stay. I have to stay and make sure that—I have to stay.”
She said: “You frighten me.”
“They take this away from us when we get older,” he said. “They won’t let us be responsible. They won’t let us care. I can’t live like that.”
She needed company. She was also nervous at a champion who seemed to need his role so absolutely.
“I don’t mean to frighten you. If you’d let me explain—”
Sarah said: “You don’t know my story.” She imagined a man in whose life there had never been enough incident, enough feeling: a diligent life, paced out day by day on the seed grounds, which now could acquire all the glamour of horror simply by staying put. He could be righteous; she had to carry the scars; and she was annoyed.
“I can’t just walk away,” Peter Clarke said, leaving out “not this time.”
He hated explanations. He decided to explain.
SIX
He was the youngest, so they let him ride up front where the bomb aimer usually rides: barred in with struts and spars and tubes in the breast of the plane, a gun in front of each eye. He was alone there, tense in place, the first into the air as the Lancaster climbed slowly off its huge truck wheels.
His bones shook. His ears stopped. He was fused to the lumbering machine that carried him. He couldn’t hear a word from behind him.
He was dancing in the hydraulic seat, turning left, turning right, shouting out. He was bloody going home.
Up, the sky was full of light and no enemy. The green stopped and the sea started at a white line of shore waves. Below, there was an impossible space of water, channel leading on to sea, sea to ocean, ocean to ocean beyond that. He’d been in rooms so long, rooms with guards, in an old brick factory on the German border with a sick sense of order, officers to obey, functions to fulfill. He’d kept clean, kept fed, kept hoping. And now there was all this world, the color of spilled school ink with a shine like gun metal, and he was glorying in it, and he was terrified.
One morning there were suddenly no guards at the brick factory. So he had walked west with the others, blankets in his arms, chocolate and cigarettes stowed away, with a cart he half bargained, half stole from a farm. Everyone was walking west to get away from the Russians, old prisoners, old soldiers, following their own shadows in the morning and the dazzle of a red sun in the evening.
They slept one night in a hall of poplar trees. He was the first to wake, heard an engine, and went down to the road. Out of the plains came Americans in a jeep. He flagged them down, shouted for the others, bowled off along the straight roads to a camp. They gorged on steak and pie, all on one plate, and half apologized for being a nuisance. Then he flew in the belly of some great transport plane, benches tied to the walls and buckets down the middle. He waited again, and he had practice in waiting, until he and his mates were put out on an airfield in gangs and the bombers came roaring in to take them home.
Now everything below was water, kind water. He remembered wading: cold water in the shorts, body smacked down on the sea, sliding under the thick glass of the waves and feeling ribbons of weed around his arms.
He was not a number on a metal disk anymore: prisoner of war. Very soon, he could give up his army number, too. He was a man of twenty, that’s all, which was all he had longed to be.
The sea stopped. The din of the Lancaster no longer mattered because the air itself seemed warm, seemed silent around him, and below him the country flowed by, pits and monuments and suburbs and towers all liquid and luminous like quicksilver. The green started again: creeping in among sand dunes, overpowering in the meadows. He knew everyone back in the belly of the plane was talking out a future, but he was hungry just for the green.
The Lancaster started to lose height. Through the smeared plastic of the windscreens, the lovely generality of the land was coming into focus now. The plane went low over gardens like the ones he used to know, broad beans just over, runner beans up their poles, boxed houses, lanes buried in trees. He could see particular houses where particular people lived. He had to imagine a life he could make: twenty, one of a great many young, official heroes, with no special appetite for a suit or a job, and no woman waiting, either. The war was over, but the war was what had shaped his world since he was a schoolboy of fourteen, his whole lifetime as a man.
He’d seen so many colors: blood, uniforms, unfamiliar woods and corridors and towns. Now, as the Lancaster lowered itself as slow as a cloth coming down to the ground, the colors were simple again, and glorious. There was the shine of grass, gold seed, bright growth, all stippled with dandelions. There was the deep white of hawthorn flowers, frothing in a case of green ground and blue sky, that filled the bombsights and the gun sights as the Lancaster bounced to the ground.
He hung on the glass for a moment. He had come home.
Everyone scrambled from the planes, the aircrew complacent as parents at a holiday. There were women with tea and sandwiches and English comfort, and order and patience enough to make the men into queues for rail warrants, cash, the coupons for six months of double rations. The trains were assigned. The men jostled to pack them out. This one was going to be a teacher, this one was going to make a million, this one was for Oxford, and this on
e was going to get into the sweet civilian civil service if it killed him, and build a new Jerusalem, rule by rule.
But the kid said nothing.
Working crowds parted for them. They understood that the men wanted to take off the prickling uniforms, undo the blanco and webbing and polish, and get started. They could not imagine there were some who were held together by uniforms, blanco, webbing, polish, rank, and orders; that this was all they had known.
On the train out of London, he looked out through dusty windows and he saw bits of London broken and torn down and boarded up, leaving gaps in the brick and endless fountains of buddleia and tall grass bristling on dead homes and factories. He remembered going to London for treats, seeing these same streets with their windows and gardens and the hints at the lives they contained, a whole maze of possibilities. But as the train jolted east, the tarmac of the streets was like a memorial to that old order. He saw a church tower marked with fire.
The smell of steam in the train, of old and half-clean clothes and worn seats, was comfortable: like the camp smells. He hadn’t smelt the truly clean or open air for two long years. He stared at the pictures hanging above the seats opposite, a sepia countryside with a great church, a set of cliffs with people walking.
He looked out for the brick seed warehouses that came just before the village station, and the seed fields, assorted marigolds, godetias rampant, flocks of campanulas, a white tide of alyssum, but all marked out neatly into rectangles of brilliant color. His eyes came alive.
He opened the compartment door and stepped down on the platform. A fresh salt breeze shocked him. He straightened his back, and picked up his bag.
He walked by tiny brick houses opposite a slow river. He remembered seeing nets in the river, all full of cut parsley keeping fresh for the London train. Nothing now. People waved. A couple shook his hand, one after the other, eyes irritated with tears. The grocer’s shop had the same dusty cans in the window, as though nobody needed them, not even in wartime. In the baker’s window was a pinkish red, palish blue, sugar-white cake with a great “V” for “Victory” and a hand-lettered sign that said “Welcome Home Our Boys.”
Everyone recognized him. “Peter Clarke, good to see you.” “Peter, welcome home!” But he was not quite sure he was Peter Clarke anymore, not the same boy who used to defend the boundaries of the village at night with a .303 rifle, who knew to duck when the flying bombs stopped their whining note overhead and went silent.
He followed the river, which was full of bending weeds, past a Roman site where he once found a coin still deeply incised, and the mill with its rooms strung out across the water. The American planes dropped fuel tanks; you could make them into canoes; he remembered that. He came to a wood he helped his father plant: dark and tall now, but he still had in mind the small brushes of firs they set out at exact intervals, just before the war.
He slowed down. He noticed the verges, how they were full of thick green docks and plantains. He felt the lack of someone to come home to, a particular name and body and address which could be his future.
Now he was at the gate of his father’s house. The rosemary bush by the door had grown huge in a couple of years, and it was stuck about with odd, papery flowers. He studied it. He held off knocking on his father’s door.
He knocked, and his father opened the door immediately, as though he’d spent the morning standing ready.
The two men held each other.
“I’ll show you,” his father said. He went to the table, and pulled a wad of papers from the drawer and gave them to Peter, then went off to the kitchen and rattled drawers, slammed cupboard doors, and shouted back: “Just a minute.”
Peter was left to stand and read. There was army form B 104-83: Peter Clarke “posted as missing,” which “does not necessarily mean” he is dead. If his father heard anything, he was to send the postcard or the letter to the Record Office in Warwick. A little pamphlet explained that official lists of prisoners took time to compile—rooms of clerks laboring slowly—but “capture cards,” filled in by prisoners after capture and sent to relatives, were “often the first news received in this country that a man is a prisoner of war.”
He imagined he’d gone from the order of a regiment to the order of a prison camp, just changing numbers on the way. It was disconcerting to find he’d gone missing from the record: on the first of July 1943.
Army form B 104-83A , dated the twenty-first of September 1943. The army number, his rank, then his name were there, with the news that he was a prisoner of war “at a camp not yet stated, Prisoner of War number not yet reported, details to be notified later.”
Then the capture card must have come, and his father must have sent it to the Record Office. They thanked him, anchored Peter Clarke to a new number, and sent back the card. He was officially reconstituted: a case filed and sorted.
All this time, he had been in an old brick factory, in an office, at a wide desk with a German officer, some French and some British prisoners, all sorting and filing. He’d been an obvious choice for listing and organizing, because he was bright and he wrote neatly. He had worked in an office, then found himself fighting for a while, then he was back in an office.
He didn’t think he had killed anyone. He’d fired bullets, but that was all.
His father should have been at work. He was always at work, except sometimes on Saturday afternoons. He nursed hothouse roses for a daily buttonhole, sat on steps for hours thinning grapes, pollinated nectarines with a lamb’s tail on a stick, stoked the boilers, drove the cars, rode his bicycle down to the bank to cash the staff’s wages, and came back to load guns on shooting days, or chase down swarms of bees and bottle their honey. He filled hothouses with bougainvillea. He put caps on flowers to make them meet a timetable for shows. He won prizes, too, but they came in the name of the owner of the house which he managed, decorated, fed, and even animated. He did all this with patience, and with kindness, maybe love.
He had brought back a bottle of whisky. “You’re old enough now,” he said. He handed out one glass, and sipped at the other. “It’s good to see you,” he said. He watched his son with the glass. “It’s for drinking,” he said. “Drink it.”
“I’m not used to it.”
“Enjoy it,” he said. “It’s time you enjoyed things.”
“Nothing doing at the house?”
“Nothing to do,” he said.
Peter considered what his father just said, and he could not make any sense of it.
“I made up your old room,” his father said at last. “In the attic. You can stay as long as you want.”
The cottage, after Peter’s mother died, had come to seem low and small: whited walls under old thatch, a garden crowded thick with tomatoes and Michaelmas daisies and roses and bees and sage. It stood beside a one-track railway line, and at the side of the flint church. Somehow, it was never called a “house,” let alone “the House”; the word didn’t fit. A “house” was something like the great brick range you could glimpse down the road, the other side of a dark English shrubbery, with iron gates, a gravel drive, dells, and pauses in the wall of rhododendrons on the way to the front door. The house always seemed to shine, even on a drab day, after the sunless-ness of the driveway.
“I thought I’d go for a walk,” Peter said.
The sweat under his arms stained his khaki shirt, which did not seem proper for going up to the house. But a couple of kids came out from behind a hedge and cheered. An older woman smiled much too much, as though she was nervous of all the men coming home. He pulled himself through the dusty heat.
The gates were off their hinges. He saw that at once. The hinges had rusted, too. The driveway was rutted from heavy vehicles and the orderly shade of the shrubbery had become wilderness. It wasn’t reasonable to be shocked, not in a countryside full of barbed wire and sentry boxes and tank traps and firing ranges, among people who wanted returning soldiers to see they, too, had been at war.
But he was sti
ll shocked: that his father thought he had nothing to do.
The lawns were torn, clods of black clay. The topiary by the kitchen garden, yew obelisks and privet globes, had new stems all defiantly waving out of order. There was glass missing from one of the drawing-room windows, and alongside it the wall was stained in the shape of a great dark funnel. One of the downpipes was clogged, obviously, and just as obviously nobody cared.
The main door, which was always ready to be opened, stood open already.
The house had been requisitioned for war use; all large houses were requisitioned for foreign troops or domestic training or intelligence. He knew that. But still he did not feel entirely comfortable swaggering in through the front door as thought it was now his communal, national property. It was not a question of deference, because that was all past now; he had become a registered hero, and probably the banker owner of the house had not. He only thought he might offend his father.
He walked to the back of the house, to the greenhouses where he remembered spikes of strelitzia, to the asparagus beds which his father said had to be salted once a month, to all the wonders and the order of his childhood. It might as well never have been.
War didn’t change him. Peace did. He always knew the moment: when he stood behind that great house, saw a window open, and pushed through into the rooms as though he was thieving. There wasn’t any more order to the world, or anything sure, and he might as well roam about room to room.
In the drawing room someone had written in red on the walls: a regimental tag, a Kilroy peering over a wall.
In the next small room, he remembered the paper on the wall: a zoo of gilded birds, peacocks and flamingos. The walls had been boarded over for safety. He pulled at one of the planks, just to bring back something of what he remembered: a room a child glimpsed once and then turned into a land for dreaming. The plank came away a little too easily, as though the nails had gone into soft plaster, or been disturbed already. He saw a narrow slice of wall, with peacocks on it.
