1917, I raised my glass to the sky (I was alone in Cranleigh, Gertrude and Mother asleep) and declared valiantly that I had given up on Thayer. It was a new year, and I would move on.
Two weeks later the letter came, and when it did, the almost giddy joy I felt upon seeing his handwriting nearly brought me to my knees. It wasn't even a real letter, just one of those forms which, before the fracas, I had become accustomed to receiving from him whenever he was anticipating a leave. I have the form still. At the top there is the usual warning:
NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. Sentences not required may be erased. If anything else is added the postcard will be destroyed.
And then, below, the various lines to be checked off:
I am quite well.
I have been admitted into hospital
{ sick } and am going on well.
wounded and hope to be discharged soon.
I am being sent down to base.
I have received your
{ letter dated ______
telegram “ ______
parcel ” ______
Letters follow at first opportunity.
I have received no letter from you
{ lately
for a long time.
Signature }
only
Date ______
Before, Thayer had always ticked only the line that read “Letters follow at first opportunity.” This time, however, he had also ticked “wounded.” He did not tick “and hope to be discharged soon.”
The real letter arrived the next day. It gave only the name of a military hospital, this one outside Oxford.
I took the first train I could catch, and arrived early in the afternoon. As the hospital was smaller than the one at Cambridge, and was housed, in fact, in an actual building, a girl's school requisitioned for the duration, finding him took almost no time at all.
He was lying quietly in his bed, much as he had been lying quietly in his bed the first time I had spoken with him. His face was intact. Much to my relief, he smiled when he saw me.
“So you got my note,” he said.
“I did,” I said. “This morning. I came as soon as I could.”
I sat down, made a fist and landed it, softly, in the flesh of his shoulder. He did not laugh.
“So what's happened to you?”
“They got the other leg this time. See?” He pulled back the sheet, exposing the leg in its dressings, bandages to just above the knee. “So—two legs down, one arm down, one arm to go.”
“What happened to your arm?”
“Oh, that was weeks ago. A bullet. It didn't do much damage—just enough so that I'll never be able to raise it all the way again.”
“And this time?”
“A big hunk of shrapnel. But I won't lose the leg. They told me that. And there's pain. Lord, is there pain. That's a good sign.”
“Will you be discharged?”
“Doubtful. I don't seem to be lucky enough to get shot up enough for that. I'd probably have to lose the leg to get a discharge, and frankly—” He lowered his voice. “But the truth is I don't want to come back. You know, to England. Not until it's all over. It's hard to explain. Out there in the trenches—you're wretched but you're alive. And then you come back, and everything's going along like it's a normal world. And you sort of—you feel dead. And everyone else seems dead. And you look forward to getting back because you don't like being around all those dead people.” He frowned. “You know what I mean?”
“Yes, I do.”
“I don't know. I don't know anything anymore.”
A few beats of silence passed, and then I said, “I'm glad you wrote to me.”
“Yes, I meant to before, only the last few leaves—you see, my sister's going to have a baby, and so I've been up in Birmingham quite a bit. I was in Birmingham with the arm. I never did make it down to London.”
Was he going to mention what had happened in Pimlico? Or did he expect me to bring it up? Or had he decided to pretend it had never happened?
“So how long will you be in hospital?”
“A week or so more. Then I'm free for a while.” He looked up shyly. “Is that lady, that friend of your sister's, still in your flat?”
“Only during the week. Not on the weekends.” I took in my breath. “We get along better now. She leaves me sandwiches. I suppose you wouldn't be free some Saturday, would you?”
He smiled. “To come to tea?”
“Exactly.”
“I think I could manage that,” he said.
And he did. Two Saturdays later. He managed it as well the next time he had leave. This time they had got the other arm. “Two arms, two legs,” he said. “What's next?”
“I hope not this,” I said, grabbing him in a crude way, which was what he wanted.
And the amazing thing was that they never let him go. They would break him, and send him home for repair, and break him again. In much the same way, I realized later, we broke Ramanujan, and patched him together again, and broke him again, until we had squeezed all the use we could out of him. Until he could manage no more.
Only then did we let him go home.
PART SEVEN
The Infinite Train
1
GERTRUDE WAITS, while the fire gutters, for her brother to come. Pitch dark at five in the afternoon, and she's reading something Alice gave her, a novel set in Italy. “What a ridiculous country this is!” the heroine tells her lover. “Nearly midnight, and so warm I don't need my wrap!” Words don't melt frost, though, unless you throw them into the fire, and Gertrude is too much of a worshipper of books—even bad books—to burn them. So she puts the novel down and summons her fox terrier, Daisy, from where she sleeps by the hearth. Daisy has improbably good taste: she chewed up Ouida but left D. H. Lawrence alone. Now Gertrude holds the book out—One Tuscan Summer—and Daisy sniffs it; licks the spine; turns away and returns to her nest. Indifference. Gertrude laughs. Church bells sound, waking her mother in the next room.
“Margaret?”
“It's all right, Mother,” she calls.
“Isaac?”
“Everything's fine. It was just the church bells.”
Sophia Hardy (her real name, Euphemia, she has never used) moans and turns in her bed. Lately she converses more with the dead than with the living. She seems to be journeying, as she has countless times before, to the edge of an unknown world. The question is, this time will she cross over? Gertrude hopes she will cross over. The doctor thinks she will cross over. According to him, the situation is dire enough to necessitate Harold being summoned from Cambridge. For he'll want to say goodbye to his mother, won't he? But Harold, she knows, is skeptical. He has made the same journey, for the same motive, one too many times.
Another moan—this time deeper—and Gertrude, with a heave of boredom, gets up again and walks to the drawing room, her mother's bedroom for the duration. Despite her Italian name, Mrs. Hardy is even more a northern creature than her daughter, so pale you can see the fine tracery of veins on her face, frail as a nymph, but a nymph of winter, of icy forests of silver birch. And thin. Gertrude remembers her boasting, on her seventieth birthday, that she could still get into her wedding dress. Then she tried it on and waltzed into the dining room, immemorial, a latter-day Miss Havisham. They thought she was losing it that time. But she came back. She has always come back.
Old age, Gertrude often thinks, can look like second childhood. Certainly it's easy to lapse into the habit of treating the elderly as children, the way the sisters treat her retired colleagues at the Home for Distressed Gentlewomen, leading them in orgies of tatting and sewing and painting watercolors, these women who twenty years before taught chemistry, mathematics, Shakespeare … At the Home for Distressed Gentlewomen the year is marked off by holidays, mistletoe through the New Year, hearts until St. Valentine's Day, green for St. Patrick's Day, lambs and eggs until Easter. “It's so they don't forget time,�
�� the matron explained when Gertrude visited the first time; when she was still thinking her mother might live there, and she herself might change her work, and move full-time to London. But it wasn't to be.
“Mother, are you all right?” Gertrude fluffs her pillows.
“Would you rub my legs?” Mrs. Hardy asks.
“Very well.” Sitting down, Gertrude untucks the blankets from the foot of the bed and lifts them back; reaches inside her mother's nightdress and begins the steady, rhythmic rubbing, thigh to stockinged ankle, from which, for reasons Gertrude can't quite fathom, Mrs. Hardy seems to derive such comfort. Back and forth; skin and bone. There's so little left of her! No flesh, no heft. Whatever's wrong, she recognizes, is something very bad. The doctor doesn't say and Gertrude doesn't ask. She only knows that twice now the pain has got so severe as to require morphine. For the moment, though, Mrs. Hardy is tranquil. She lies back, emitting little hisses of air. “Margaret, bring the flowers into the kitchen,” she says. And: “Shell the peas.” And: “Do you have your eye in?”
Gertrude flinches. Mrs. Hardy gives out a little cry.
“I'm sorry.”
“Even if no one sees,” Mrs. Hardy says, “someone is watching. Remember that.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“You need to marry. But she's a homely girl.”
“Who?”
“Margaret.”
“Who is Margaret?”
“She taught with me. At the training college.”
“And she was homely?”
“Oh no. Pretty as a picture.”
“Then who was homely?” But she knows the answer, and keeps rubbing. It doesn't bother her particularly. No niceties in this house anymore, not now that the daughter, with a brisk efficiency that surprises even her, washes twice weekly those parts of her mother from which, decades before, she herself sprang. “Loins.” What a word! She washes her mother's loins, her mother's pudendum (another word she loves), more or less bald now. Like an old man's head.
There is a rattling at the door. No one but Gertrude to answer. Maisie, who cleans for them, has gone home.
“I'm coming!” she calls, and removes her hands, gently, from under Mrs. Hardy's nightdress; rolls back the blankets.
“I'm just going now, Mother, to get the door. It's Harold.”
“Harold's here?”
“Yes, he's come to see you.”
“But I look a fright!”
Gertrude rises. Daisy has beaten her to the door; she leaps and barks at the handle. “Get down,” Gertrude says halfheartedly, for she knows her brother doesn't like dogs. It was the principal reason she acquired Daisy.
She opens the door, and Hardy steps inside, shaking his umbrella. “What weather!” he says, and kisses her on the cheek.
“How was your journey?”
“Tiring. It takes hours to get anywhere these days. Oh, yes—” Daisy is leaping at his hands. “Yes, I know you're glad to see me. Yes. Now please get down.”
“Sorry,” Gertrude says, picking Daisy up.
Hardy hangs his coat on the peg. “So how is she? Is it bad?”
“Come and see for yourself.”
“I'd rather not quite yet. I'd like to settle in first.”
“Harold, is that you?”
“Yes, it's me, Mother.”
“Come and say hello.”
He glowers at Gertrude, as if their mother's insistent tone is her fault. Then he smoothes back his hair, and they go in together. Mrs. Hardy smiles. Suddenly she is lucid, garrulous. She wants to be propped up. She wants a hot water bottle. “A game of Vint, perhaps?” she asks. “How long will you stay?”
“I'm not sure. I have to be in London on Monday. I've got some business with the Mathematical Society.”
“Good, you can go in for the day and come back.”
“We'll see.”
But she won't take no for an answer. She wants to chat, she wants to play Vint, she wants Harold to promise he will stay. She is like a child who refuses to go to bed, who has to be talked into recognizing her own fatigue.
Finally, after much cosseting and bargaining (“Go to sleep now, Mother, and we'll have a game of Vint in the morning”), much protesting (“But I'm not in the least sleepy!”), at last, without warning, Mrs. Hardy falls asleep. Now Gertrude and Hardy can retire, as is their wont, to the kitchen. Gertrude makes eggs, laid by the hens she keeps. They drink tea.
“Well, that was easier than usual,” Gertrude says.
“Easier!”
“She knows what time it is. Yesterday she woke me at two in the morning wanting her lunch. But at least she read the clock right.” Gertrude stabs her egg, so that the yolk runs. “Well, even if you do have to go to London on Monday, I'm glad you'll be staying the weekend. I need to go into town tomorrow and do some shopping.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“Someone has to watch her.”
“What about Maisie?”
“Maisie's sixteen. She can hardly be trusted. Anyway, it's not difficult, Harold, all you have to do is bring her meals and make sure she's comfortable.”
“But what if she needs the toilet?”
“Maisie will deal with that.”
“But I'm supposed to meet a friend for tea tomorrow—in town.”
“What friend?”
“No one you know.”
“Can't you change it?”
Hardy puts down his cup. “You've got me down here under false pretenses,” he says. “You told me she was dying—”
“The doctor said she was dying—”
”—you told me she was dying when the truth is you just want to go shopping.”
“I've got to have underwear, don't I?”
He winces at the mention of the underwear.
“I'm a busy man, I can't just pack up and leave every time—”
“All right,” Gertrude says. “You go. Go to London, meet your friend, and I'll stay here, just like I do every Saturday, watching and waiting. And when she calls, I'll go to her. And the same on Sunday. And then Monday, teaching. And then in the evening sitting with her, again.”
“I know it must be difficult.”
“Do you? Do you have any idea?”
“Of course I do. Look, I'm not spending all my time throwing tea parties these days. I don't go to London for my health, you know, I've got two secretaryships, then there's the Mathematical Society, the Royal Society. And at Cambridge my lectures, and this Russell business—”
“But at least you get to leave. You're not in Cranleigh week in, week out.”
“No, I'm in Cambridge week in, week out.”
“Have you any idea how long it's been since I've had a chance to escape this place? To just do a few normal things, have lunch in a restaurant, go to some shops?”
Hardy says nothing. He puts his fingers to the bridge of his nose.
“You get irritated with me because I summon you down and she looks like she's all right. But the doctor said she was dying. What am I supposed to do, tell you not to bother? And then if she does die—”
“Yes, I understand.”
“And if I've got to buy underwear … I'm sorry, but a woman needs …”
“Yes, I know. All right, I'll stay tomorrow—or part of tomorrow. Perhaps if you were back by three—”
“You never asked me why I told Alice Neville she could let my room in the flat, did you? It was because I never bloody have the chance to go anymore—”
“Yes, Gertrude.”
“Well, I don't.” She blows her nose. “I'm sorry, I'm a bit short-tempered these days.”
“No need to apologize. I am too. Things are very bad at Trinity. And now I've had to enter the fray again, because a Newnham girl— this shit called Ridgway won't let her into his lecture because she's a member of the U.D.C. He took advantage of the fact that women aren't officially enrolled, therefore he can throw them out of the lectures without cause. He couldn't do that with a male student.”
“You're turning into quite a feminist, aren't you?” Gertrude says— but he misses the irony in her voice.
“It isn't really about that. Ridgway says that if he could, he'd keep male students out too, if they were in the U.D.C. It's all a tactic. The truth is, he's punishing the girl because she said something in the Newnham Hall that was construed to be pro-Russell. I'm working on a piece about it. Possibly a flysheet. We haven't given up on getting Russell reinstated, you know—after the war.”
“It's really quite admirable, the lengths to which you'll go to help other people.”
“I do what I can.”
“Of course you do.”
He coughs; gets up. “Well, I'm a bit tired,” he says. “I think I'll go to bed early if you don't mind.”
“Why would I mind?”
“And you? Are you going to bed?”
“Hardly, considering it's only half past six.”
“Yes, well, as I said, the journey …” He leans toward her, palms on the table. “Gertrude, about tomorrow… This appointment I have really is rather important, so if you don't mind, perhaps you could go into town early, and I'll plan to leave around two. That way Mother will be alone with Maisie, what, two hours?”
She doesn't say, “But I do mind.” It's not her way. It's her way to concentrate her bitterness, to let it spin in the centrifuge of her spirit, until only its essence remains, unspoken and ineradicable.
“As you wish, Harold.”
“And if anything goes wrong, if … You can telephone me and I'll be on the first train.”
“As you wish.”
He turns away. She does not get up. Through the kitchen door, she hears Daisy jumping, Daisy sniffing … “Yes, fine, goodnight, dog,” he says, which brings a faint smile to her lips. In a minute, she knows, she will have to rise from her chair, pile the dishes on the counter for Maisie to wash in the morning: something else her brother would never think to do. But that can wait. These days, moments of solitude are so rare for her she has learned to treasure them. For now she simply sits, listening to the silence, looking at the dark.
The Indian Clerk Page 36
