A World of Other People

by Steven Carroll

  He says nothing but his very presence tells her time is up. She picks up the photograph of herself and the rose.

  ‘Where did you say he was found?’

  Her voice is weak, as if she has just woken up.

  ‘I didn’t. It was one of those tiny places that no one’s ever heard of. Odd name, Little …’ And he looks down at the floor, trying to remember the rest.

  ‘… Gidding?’ she says.

  He looks up, puzzled.

  ‘Yes. You know it?’

  ‘I know of it.’

  He stares at her, wondering, she imagines, if the place might have some private meaning, but discreetly choosing not to ask.

  ‘May I have these? The photograph of me won’t mean anything to his parents, and the rose is personal.’

  He shrugs.

  ‘Yes. Of course. But we must go.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, looking once more around the room, knowing full well that within a few hours it will be cleaned and become somebody else’s. So, this is where he came to and from. And with that thought she steps out into the fading light and hears the door close behind her.

  It is late in the afternoon now and the winter sun is low. But the sky is clear and she can see the crews standing about or lounging on the grass, smoking and talking or just staring around. They are, she assumes, waiting to be taken to their planes. Just as Jim would have waited once. One crew is standing in front of a hedge. They are quiet, legs shuffling about. Cigarette smoke rising from them into the cold air. And again she is astounded at how young they are. And at the same time she is looking at the hedge and thinking I know that hedge. And then she sees the sign, the arrow pointing to the Officers’ Mess, and realises that it is the hedge in front of which Jim and his crew stood. They stood there. On that precise spot. And she can picture him as he was in that snap. Absurdly young. And, stopping where she is for a moment, she imagines him on the afternoon before his last flight. Looking out over the airfield. Lighting a cigarette. His last evening as a free man. Before becoming a haunted one. There’s a kind of innocence about the Jim she conjures up. And a confidence. To have known him then. Just to have known him then. But of course, he was neither innocent nor confident. That was just the face he wore, like all the other faces out there now. All the same, there’s something untouched about the Jim she imagines. Untouched and untouchable and somehow whole. Still there, lighting up a ciggie and looking out over the airfield on his last night as a free man.

  At the gate she thanks the captain for allowing her to see his room and his things and then adds, because the thought has puzzled her since she saw the photographs, ‘So his plane crash-landed near here, then?’

  ‘So I believe.’

  She shakes her head. ‘It couldn’t have.’

  It is his turn to look puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I saw his plane that night. I saw it. The dove. You couldn’t miss it. I was fire-watching in London and it passed over us, close enough to touch. One engine was in flames. It was so low, it could never have got to the country. Not this far. It couldn’t have.’

  When she finishes, and she’s vaguely aware of her voice being louder than she intended, she looks directly at him, and his eyes … they’ve hardened. As if to say is this what I get? But there’s also a recognition in his stare, a suggestion that he just may have let trouble onto the base. That he won’t be doing this again. And looking her in the eyes in such a way as to leave her in no doubt that the conversation is about to finish, he says, slowly and distinctly as if speaking to a child or the remarkably ignorant, ‘You’d be surprised what a good pilot and a good plane can do.’

  And with that he turns on his heel and is gone. And she is suddenly outside the gate. The barrier down. Without looking back, she leaves the road that leads to the front gate and walks towards the track that crosses the common. In her pocket is the rose. Too fragile to touch. But with the lighter, the only thing she’s got. The only things of his she has. Her only mementoes. She looks up to the sky, a small, lone figure on the common. A bird, a kestrel of some sort, wheels over her as the wind picks up. The fields stir, a rusted tractor sinks into the soil, a skulking fox in the distance pauses briefly in mid-stride, brazenly staring back at the intruder. The brows of the trees’ branches lift and sigh on a current of air.

  As she enters the village high street she can see the bus that brought her from Huntingdon waiting. What luck! And she picks up her pace, noting as she does that the mere sight of the bus and her good luck in returning at just the right time have somehow given her a small moment of happiness on a day that has passed in a blur and on which she expected no such thing, however small or incidental. Then, like a sudden patch of sun in a cloudy sky, that flash of happiness is gone and the end of the day settles over the village and the pale fields around it like the end of the world itself, and she’s sitting on the bus contemplating the poster that is once again asking her if her journey is really necessary, and answering what business is it of yours?

  PART SIX

  January 1943

  9.

  SOMEBODY PANICKED

  ‘Somebody panicked.’

  The man speaking to Iris has, she’s always thought, a vague resemblance to the old Prince of Wales. He’s got that upper-class English look, probably got a title tucked away somewhere. Even the occasional stammer fits. They know each other from university, the Communist Party club of all things, and he’s in Intelligence. Then again, they let her into the Treasury. It’s the war doing that, she smiles faintly.

  Everybody’s got a contact and he’s hers. She gave him two pieces of information last week: ‘F’ for Freddie, and a date, 11th May, 1941. Now he’s telling her what he found.

  ‘Somebody panicked?’

  ‘Probably. We’re all human.’ He gazes thoughtfully over the small Westminster square they’re sitting in, green in the brief January sun, while she shoots him a look suggesting she’s not too sure about that. ‘The night before, you may remember,’ he continues, ‘was the biggest raid of the war. Over three thousand dead, God knows how many suddenly without a home, half the city blown to smithereens. In one night. The general feeling around here was another night like that and we’re done for. Everybody was jumpy. Jittery. We’d read about it in books, comrade.’ There is only the barest hint of irony in his use of the party greeting and she wonders if he’s still in contact with the old crowd. ‘You know, polite society falls apart, the stiff upper lip turns to jelly, the streets teem with anarchy and all those good little shopkeepers are afraid to open their doors. Don’t imagine it could never happen here. Like the man said, civilisation looks good and solid — until the last ten minutes. Maybe our friend Mr Arnold was right, comrade. Anarchy, it’s never far away. Of course, there wasn’t another night like that. That was it. Blitz over. But we didn’t know that then. Everybody was jumpy. Quietly jumpy, but jumpy. Mannered hysteria. One more night like that …’

  He pauses, lights a cigarette and offers one to Iris, who shakes her head. He leans back on the bench, breathing out, and it’s hard to tell what’s smoke and what’s condensation in the chilled air.

  ‘And into all this comes your man. Just drops out of the sky the next night while everyone’s still jittery and half dead from the night before. And doesn’t have the good form to drop onto a country field where nobody can see him.’

  ‘Where? Where did he land?’

  He draws on his cigarette again and half smiles as he gently shakes his head. ‘Regent’s bloody Park.

  ‘Of course.’

  And now she recalls the distant explosion that night which everybody chose to conclude was a delayed-action bomb.

  ‘A burned-out Wellington in Regent’s Park full of charred British airmen. Not the sort of thing you want people to see on their way to work. Not exactly the sort of thing that picks up everybody’s spirits and puts a song in their bulldog hearts. Somebody panicked. Personally, I think we always underestimate the people, comrade.’ And, once a
gain, part of her is contemplating the fleeting hint of irony, or whether there is any there at all this time, and she is seriously wondering if he is still in touch with the old crowd. ‘I mean, they threw everything they had at us and we didn’t crumple. We could take it,’ and here he smiles openly, ‘just like the signs said. Jolly us. But perhaps we can say we didn’t know that then either. One more night like that and we just might …’

  His face turns grim as he tosses the cigarette away.

  ‘“F” for Freddie was hosed down and carted away before morning. There was no raid that night, so there were fire trucks and transports everywhere. Come first light there was nothing left apart from the tracks and the scorching where it had been. Nothing for people to see. Nothing for the newspapers. It never happened. Your man—’

  ‘Stop saying “your man”. He’s dead. He’s nobody’s man.’

  He eyes her, as if pondering how to go on. ‘We know …’ and he pauses, suggesting without saying as much that we know a lot more besides, ‘… that he wasn’t expected to live either. He was out to it for weeks. And when he came round it was easier, for everyone, for it to be understood that he crash-landed in a country field just outside his base. Besides, his memory wasn’t all back. There was a bit missing.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s common. They call it,’ and here he winces at the clinical nature of the term, ‘amnesic syndrome in war.’

  ‘I know that too. I looked it up.’

  ‘Hundreds of those poor bastards who came back from Dunkirk had it. Marching through the French countryside one minute, back in Dover the next. No idea how they got there.’

  He stops, checks his watch, then looks back at Iris levelly.

  ‘So, there you are. In the big scheme of things a footnote, really. But what we don’t get is how he found out. And we’re assuming he did. Correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How? What was his source?’

  And here Iris smiles at the sheer improbability of the answer, savouring the moment before she speaks.

  ‘A poem .’

  He nods slowly, with a slight creasing of the brow.

  ‘Nothing like a good poem.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course,’ he says, rising from the bench, ‘we never met up. And this conversation never happened.’

  ‘Just like “F” for Freddie.’

  ‘What?’ he calls, walking away with a broad smile. ‘What was that?’

  She stays on the bench, watching the square and the sun coming and going. At least she knows that much. But the thing she accepts she’ll never know is just what it was he saw when the world stopped going black. When his memory came back. For she is certain it did. When he heard the poem and that missing page floated back into his mind. What was so terrible that it had to be passed over in silence? So terrible that it took him away? What was that terrible thing? That’s the bit she could have known, and that’s the bit that he could have known all along, and which he might eventually have told her, or somebody at least, if only he hadn’t been fed a pack of lies. And maybe, just maybe, he could have been walked through it. And the terrible thing might have gone away. With the right people to talk to, and time enough to do it.

  He’d still be here, then. Beside her. Now. On the bench. Instead of winding up under a tree, in a field in the snow, and nobody in the world to talk to.

  She’s not sure how long she’s been sitting there. Or if she’s moved at all in that time. A statue in the park? Lunch hour must be over. She rises, watching a slowly passing barge on the river, squinting into the pale January sun. Maybe. They’ll never know. Life is filled with if onlys … and there’s only ever one story in the end. Is that the ultimate mystery of love? That it’s on you before you know, and gone before you realise? She drifts out onto the street and floats away. Back to work. People passing like phantoms.

  At the traffic lights a young woman is clinging in the cold to an American soldier, for the Americans are everywhere now, and they’re kissing, these two. In public. Brazenly happy. And beside Iris a small group of men and women are silently tut-tutting, disapproval in their eyes. This is them, the army of the miserable. Look at them, no wild emotions to carry them away. No runaway horses in their hearts. No forbidden words to quietly mouth in the privacy of their rooms as if having personally discovered them. Look at them, and she smiles faintly to herself as she crosses with the lights and pronounces farewell judgement: look at them — cuntless, cockless and fuckless, the whole miserable bunch.

  And she remembers the faint smile on her face as she answered, ‘A poem.’ And drifting, floating back along the wide street, vaguely aware of the sandbags and the soldiers on guard at the occasional public building, it’s the power of words that she’s dwelling on: to bring pleasure, to bring pain, to bring comfort, or to bring the terror of hard truth. Like many of those around her, she’s beginning to believe that the war will end, after all. And when it does there’ll be no old life to go back to because it won’t be there any more. And she could never go back to it in any case. She’s already decided. To pursue words. Whatever the cost. To make them go BOOM. And to live. Here and now. To be brazenly happy again, if she’s ever lucky enough. To chase the runaway horse of life and love, and never stop chasing it. Anything else, anything else at all, would be a betrayal of all they’ve been through.

  The weeks pass in a blur: work, the pubs, Pip, friends, even her journal entries, in which she records that the weeks pass in a blur. And near the end of this procession of days and weeks she sits at her desk, mechanically working through files one morning, when the telephone rings. And whereas once her pulse may have quickened in anticipation, now it doesn’t. All the same, it is not a work voice at the other end. And for a moment she can’t place where she knows this voice from. The voice is shaky with emotion — the speaker, a woman, may even be crying. And then she informs Iris that Frank is no longer missing. That he is, after all this time, alive and well. And will even be home on leave soon. Isn’t this wonderful? his mother is saying. And Iris is remembering their last conversation, remembering the control, the nothing else for it but to get on with things tone in the woman’s voice, and noting how that control has now collapsed. And for the first time in weeks, her heart goes out to someone other than herself. It’s the relief doing that, she thinks. Her heart goes out to this woman who has been shaken by happiness and whose son is coming home soon. But at the same time she is puzzling over the name ‘Frank’, as if trying to remember someone she met a long time ago at a party somewhere. For a moment she has trouble picturing him. And, even as she tries, she knows full well that the Frank she pictures will not be the same Frank who is no longer missing and who will be home soon.

  And as she puts the telephone down, after telling Frank’s mother that yes, it is wonderful news, she is thinking of that ring still in her drawer and contemplating the Iris who put it there. For she is a distant woman, this Iris who accepted the ring because she couldn’t bear to let the young man down and who, in accepting it, took on the weight of his fate and pledged herself to its care in a small church in Maiden Lane all that time ago. She stares out the window, a January grey that seems to have been there for weeks filling the sky. My, how we’ve all grown.

  10.

  THE SOLID FACE OF EARTH

  The face is the same, but older. And not just physically older. Older in the same way as everybody is. The hair, its wavy floppiness, hasn’t changed. Nor the mannerisms, the sweeping hand gestures and the self-conscious laugh that she imagined would have been blown away by now, but hasn’t been. So familiar, yet changed. And there’s an occasional vacancy in the eyes that wasn’t there before.

  All the same, here is the solid face of earth that waited for her after work all that time ago, when she was the her and he was the him that they aren’t any more. What does he see? A different Iris, of course. But how?

  They’ve been sitting in a pub off St James’s Park for an hour now, and the conversa
tion stops and starts as she knew it would. He can’t say where he’s been and he can’t say what he’s been doing. And there’s something in the way he says it that confirms that he’s not been doing the usual things, and that his work is probably dangerous. And if she were to press him for more he’d just answer with that self-conscious laugh and she wouldn’t get any further. But the laugh would be a give-away; it always was. And, with that, she realises that she’s concerned for him. No, worried about him. That she is the girl back home whom he can write to and who is thinking of him. But it’s the worry, the concern, she realises, that you feel for a close friend.

  She asks about his parents and how long he’s got (five days), and all the time she’s fingering the ring in her pocket. He tells her that he’s seen his old history professor. By chance, in the street. Small world. Or, at least, odd to be back in such a small world. He’s been promised a place in the department. This doesn’t surprise Iris; he was always their star. And, he says, he just might take up the offer when everything’s over. He’s been planning a book. A big one. A history on the making of the English working class, he quietly announces. It’s never been done. Not really. Extraordinary to think that. Suddenly he’s animated. Excited, even. The way ideas have always excited him. The way plans have always excited him, for he is one of those who are always making plans. And she always loved that. And she’s no doubt that he’ll do it, and that it will be a great success. But, all the time, she’s judging the right moment to bring up the ring.

  While she’s waiting and judging her moment, glimmers of the Frank she first met in that faraway summer of ’39 come and go. Frank then, and Frank now. Same clear eyes that both were trusting and expected trust in return (and which may well have been the reason she felt she couldn’t let him down when he offered the ring), same hands that she held, same lips she kissed. The same, but not quite — and never again. Here they are, there they were. Now back, now ghosts of themselves. He’s still talking about his book, this grand project of his, and she’s still smiling while part of her — her heart, even — is suddenly pierced by the thought that he may not live to write it. But it is a passing pain, for as she stares into those clear eyes she is convinced that they are not the eyes of someone destined for death. She’s heard people talk like this of others, that some have that air about them — that you just know they won’t buy it. And Frank is one. She’s sure of that now. And she knows, once again, that she never held his fate in her hands. His fate is, and always was, his to hold. There is no god of fate, she muses, to make our pledges to. No, there’s just us.