And for the second time in his life, the knowledge of being loved overwhelmed him. The first time, when the kingfisher danced near the boathouse at Penge, the knowledge had washed over him like water, like the rain on the pond, cleansing him of his doubts and freeing him to trust Maurice and to stay in England to make their love real. This second time, in spite of the cottage’s dust and shadow, the knowledge came as light. The light revealed that he was loved to his core, also that he had done nothing to earn or merit such love, but that it was love’s nature to love.
37
“She’s with child,” Maurice told him in their room at Millthorpe.
Alec made no reply. He watched the rain on the greening hills through the window. Then he asked, “Is she well?”
“Healthy, you mean?”
“Yeah, comfortable?”
“Far as I can tell. She didn’t complain of any illness. Her face is quite serene, even radiant.”
“Ah…”
“But she’s troubled, very…”
“Of course.”
“There’s the marriage thing.”
“The father’s dead?”
“No, alive.”
“Oh? Then he’s got to—”
“He’s married.”
“Oh…” Alec shifted in the old overstuffed armchair. “Even so, there’s a duty on his part—”
“Alec, the man’s … not English.”
“Catholic, you mean, so he can’t divorce?”
“No. Oh Lord…”
“…?”
“He’s Indian.”
Alec’s eyes widened: “From India?”
“Yes, an Indian officer, with a wife and two kids in Madras—wounded in France. She was caring for him shortly before the armistice. He’s returned home and knows nothing about the child. She does not intend to tell him.”
Alec let out a long breath: “Indian…”
“That’s right.”
“So he’s—”
“Yes, colored. As the child will be—”
In his mind (in a flash), an imp drove Alec through a gauntlet, where other imps (with ugly little faces, some wearing monocles, others tiaras) cudgeled him not with clubs but with the English language’s array of hateful words about the pregnant woman and her paramour. He held his tongue till his mind escaped into his father’s arms, so to speak, into the embrace of the letter he was carrying in his jacket pocket near his heart. Finally he said, “We need to help her.”
“Yes. I’ve thought about going to Madras.”
“Whatever for?”
“To find him.”
“But why?”
“That man has insulted my sister—”
“Wait—no!—are you sayin’ he forced himself on her?”
“Oh no, nothing like that. She said she loved him.”
“Then what insult are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about my family’s honor.”
“And you’re going to fix that—how? A duel? Like The Three Musketeers? How the fuck would that help her?”
“Alec—”
“What, you kill the man? Brilliant! Then you’ve got a couple of Indian kids with no dad in addition to your sister’s. And you’re locked up in Madras till an Indian jury finds you guilty of murder and they hang you—” Maurice wanted to interrupt, but Alec barreled on: “Or, or, what if you lose this honor match of yours, eh? Could happen, ya know. What if he does away with you? Then your sister’s got no husband and no brother, plus your corpse to fetch home from thousands of miles away. Plus they hang him for killin’ you, so we’re back to three fatherless kids—”
“Alec—”
“And what about me?”
“You clearly do not understand.”
“Yeah, I understand, rude and menial that I am—”
“Aw jeezus, here we go—”
“I understand it’s the stupidest thing I hope to ever hear you say.”
Maurice stood to leave. “I don’t have to listen to this.”
Alec stopped him: “Tell her about us.”
Maurice opened his mouth to speak and shut up without a word. Then he said, “That’s—ridiculous! The absolute limit! And you call me stupid?”
In truth, the suggestion (blurted out with no forethought) had stunned Alec no less than Maurice. But now he stuck by his idea: “You let her know she’s not the only outcast, she’s not alone. That’s how we help her, to start.”
“You want me to tell my sister I’m a criminal?”
“Tell her that you love me, and that I love you.”
* * *
Nurse Hall, now that she had nothing to hide from her brother, readily agreed to meet again. She suggested a tea parlor in the Abbeydale section of Sheffield, near St. John’s Red Cross Hospital. Alec waited in a park around the corner, where raw drizzle was yielding to sunshine so warm that the hyacinths seemed to open while he looked at them.
Alec had prevailed in their dispute by reminding Maurice of his own courage, of the night when he’d taken leave of Clive Durham and told the squire frankly that he loved the gamekeeper. That was that. No second thoughts, no hesitating for fear of possible consequences. He’d simply spoken the truth.
“But family…,” Maurice protested, “complicates everything. Besides, much as you dislike him, Clive’s a gentleman and so I could trust him to be straight up in our quarrel and not try to knife me in the back later.”
“All right, then, let’s be gentlemanly ourselves.”
“How so?”
“Judgin’ from what you tell me, Miss Hall is likewise someone to be trusted—I mean that a lady like her should choose, choose, out of a sense of duty or kindliness or great-heartedness, to slop around in hospitals and tend the sick and wounded and dyin’. That’s fuckin’ noble, if you ask me, even heroic. And now she’s been truthful with her brother, though she might rather have done otherwise.”
“But—”
“Granted, she had little choice in the circumstances. But that accords you the chance to speak the truth in return, freely, by no force of necessity.”
So they were here today in Sheffield, Alec in the park while the two Halls drank tea. The brother, it was planned, would break the news to the sister and then bring her to meet his beloved. But as the afternoon lengthened, anxiety started to prey on Alec, dragging his thoughts from calamity (i.e., what if she becomes enraged and threatens to expose them?) to catastrophe (i.e., what if they should consequently be ripped apart and imprisoned?), thence to bleak rumination about the war: though it had not killed him outright, it had so crushed him that he would have died in France but for the charity of others …
“Alec,” Maurice called from some yards away.
As they approached, Alec thought the sister looked familiar. Her hair was as dark as her brother’s, and she had lovely eyes, greenish, magnified by her glasses.
“Kitty,” Maurice said to her, “I’d like you to meet my friend, Alec Scudder.”
Then Alec said, “You’re the VAD nurse.”
“Beg pardon?” she said.
“At Slough. Sorry. Did you volunteer at Slough?”
“Yes, I worked there…”
“I was your patient.”
“No.”
“Truly.”
She laughed out loud. “No! When?”
“Summer of 1916. First battle of the Somme. Collapsed right lung.”
At a loss for words, she said, “I’m sorry, but so many … Collapsed lung, you say?”
“That’s correct. Welsh Fusiliers, Private Scudder.”
She looked from Alec to her brother and then back at Alec and said, “And you—? And Maurice—?”
* * *
In her rooms, Alec listened quietly to the sister and brother talk. Her place was as shabby as the building was run-down, but she did not apologize for it. Alec liked her for that.
“I’ve put off thinking about what to do next,” she said, “keeping busy with work. But that’s changing. St.
John’s is closing. Earlier today, before I joined you, I was saying goodbye to friends and patients. Next they’ll close the military wing of the Ecclesall Infirmary … Of course, there’s still Wharncliffe—they’ve treated forty-seven thousand over the last three years.”
“But surely, Kitty,” Maurice said, “you can’t keep working.”
“You’re right, I can’t. I’m ‘showing,’ as we say, and I’ve long since felt life … Oh, Maurice, I was so very angry with you when you came up on me with no warning. But now I’m relieved. The family must know sometime. And it’s best you’re the first. We’re more alike now than we ever were grow-ing up.”
“How’s that?”
“Because you were there, and saw it, and lived through it, as I have, and your friend. And that makes us different from all those people who were not. It’s like I’m watching them from another world. What do you say? We can’t describe it, and they can’t fathom. I couldn’t face Mother that day she came to the door, I still don’t want to.”
“I understand.”
“Please don’t think I’m brave. Don’t think for a minute I haven’t wished I might lie, invent a secret wartime marriage to an officer who died in combat and then play the respectable young widow. But that lie won’t work for me. My child’s color, they’ll call that a worse crime than illegitimacy. Listen to me! Illegitimate, as if a child’s birth needs the approval of a magistrate! My child’s color, that will be my mortal sin, unforgivable in the eyes of the Hall family and jolly old England. Thou Shalt Not. Ever.
“I’ve thought, should I go to India, where the baby might fit in? Would we, though, among our colonial sahibs? ‘Touched by the tar-brush,’ don’t they say? As for me, I’m sure they’d fling their arms wide open to the fallen Englishwoman gone native before she even arrived. Besides, I know nothing of India. Why should I pass my years like a criminal in exile in a place where my fellow countrymen will despise me? Does my life count for nothing? Truly, I cannot see a way forward.”
* * *
As they walked to the train from Kitty’s rooms, Maurice told Alec about their talk in the tea parlor. “She said she’s amazed to learn of you and me, but by no means upset, much less scandalized. ‘Why are you amazed?’ I asked her. ‘Because you always seemed such a conformist,’ she said.”
Alec chuckled: “Not since I climbed in your window.”
“She makes a good case that tending the wounded is like being wounded yourself, maybe worse, time and again, with no chance for healing, always another casualty. Good God, she’s witnessed so much misery! And suffered plenty of her own. Anyway, she says she welcomes love any way it manifests. ‘It’s the enemy of war,’ she says. So she’s glad for us.”
“Now, that is amazing.”
“Yes. When I hear her talk like that, I can understand how the baby came about.”
On the train, Maurice and Alec each kept to his own thoughts. Alec reluctantly acknowledged to himself that he’d been afraid to meet Maurice’s sister, of how she might look down on him. But in the face of her hardship, he now renounced such emotion as unmanly, selfish, silly. Maurice stared out the window, elbow on the armrest, chin on fist.
Alec spoke up when they were approaching Millthorpe: “Can you see a way forward?”
Maurice shook his head. “I was just thinking about breaking this news to Mother and Ada and my aunt…” He shuddered.
38
Teddy opened the door and said quietly, “Morgan’s reading to us.” They paused in the parlor archway to listen:
When one of them used to pass by the market-place
of Seleucia, about the time of nightfall,
a tall young man of perfect beauty,
with the joy of immortality in his eyes
and perfumed black hair,
the people used to watch him
and ask one another whether they knew him,
whether he was a Syrian Greek or a stranger. But some
who looked with greater attention
understood and made way;
and while he disappeared under the archways
among the evening lights and the shadows
on his way to the place that lives only at night
with orgies and drunkenness
and every kind of lust and debauchery,
they wondered which of Them it was
and for what unavowed pleasure
he had come down to the streets of Seleucia
from the Sacred and Hallowed Dwellings.
The listeners murmured. When Morgan looked up from the page and saw Alec framed by the arch, he beamed. “Here he is! My dear, old, young friend—”
They crossed to each other to shake hands; Alec drew him closer and kissed him on both cheeks. Morgan reddened. “I have agonized over your safety these last months,” he said. He turned to the others. “But doesn’t he look well, Risley? Fully a man now—”
“Well indeed,” Risley answered.
* * *
At supper the talk got around to the verses Morgan had been reading, the work of a Greek man he met in Alexandria when serving with the Red Cross at the military hospital there. “I do love that city,” he said. “Sights, smells, attitudes—thoroughly cosmopolitan, with expatriates from all over the world. Greeks have been living there since Ptolemy.”
“That last poem you read us,” George said, “about the stunner on his way to orgies—what’s it called?”
“‘One of Their Gods.’”
“Aha!” Risley said. “The pronominal key in the title! Their gods—that is, the Hellenists, the ‘pagans’ in Alexandria. Unlike the speaker of the verses, no doubt a timid Byzantine Christian, terrified of his own urges.”
“Oh, I think otherwise,” Morgan said. “It seemed to me the only ‘timid’ people in Alexandria, scared of their ‘own urges,’ were we English. For instance, when we took charge, we right away shut down the brothels, though they’d been flourishing for centuries. And it goes without saying they tried to close the men’s bathhouses,” Morgan said.
George thwacked the table and protested, “No!” They all turned to him. “I mean, where else could a man bathe?”
“Don’t fret, Georgie, with the bathhouses they had no luck,” Morgan said. “And on the streets, boys and men were flirting openly with one another.”
“Good for them!” George said.
“Tsk, tsk, it’s the climate, no doubt,” Teddy said. “Excessive sunshine causes hypersexuality.”
“One must visit,” Risley said.
“But about the poem,” Morgan said. “I take the speaker for a Hellenist, one who recognizes that the dark young man is divine, maybe even the god Eros, a visitor from Olympus. On the other hand, in the title the poet himself is speaking, giving the verses a curatorial touch, don’t you see, as if we’re admiring an antique text. Voilà! Timeless artifact! Spanking-new museum piece! At once ancient and au courant, and therefore perfectly Alexandrian and equally at home in Bloomsbury.”
* * *
After the others had gone to bed, student and mentor sat together in the parlor with a little brandy.
“I didn’t know how much I’d missed you till I saw you,” Alec said to Morgan.
“Thank you. You’ve been my consolation in all this—and my hope.”
“In the war, you mean?”
“Yes, and after. You and Maurice together. Hope for all of us.” Morgan sipped his brandy. “You were quiet at dinner.”
“I was happy to listen. Lots of wisdom at that table tonight, from books and from life.”
“Maurice was quiet too. Are you all right?”
Alec stared at his glass. “Well enough, I guess.” He sipped, looked up at his friend: “Truth be told, Morgan, I’m a fuckin’ wreck. Maurice too. He wakes up wailin’ in the night, like a child, enough to break your heart.” His voice began to quaver. “It’s all changed now, everything, i’n’t it? We were goin’ to live in the greenwoods—remember? But there’s no woods left. And even i
f there was such a place anymore, or had been ever, how could we go there, the two of us, changed like we are?”
They were quiet together. Morgan wanted to comfort his friend. He said, “You’ve changed, eh?”
Alec nodded.
“Would you rather you hadn’t?
“How’s that—?”
“Would you rather be as you were?”
“Before the war?” Alec asked.
“Before the war.”
“Not much use sayin’ yes, is there? Or no…”
“Perfect answer. There’s no un-changing, is there?” Morgan paused, then went on: “The war has forced memories on me, as it has on you and Maurice, of things I wish I’d never seen, things I wish I’d never even heard about. Shattered my beliefs. What I’d been taught to call civilization and barbarism, the war turned those ideas upside down—along with my notions of being English, or being a man.” He finished his brandy. “It hurt like hell and still does.” He poured a bit more. “‘Respectability.’ That’s what I once called my way of life. In truth it was cowardice.”
“I’ve always thought of you as brave,” Alec said. “In the trenches, when I’d think of you, I’d say to myself, ‘I’m lucky to know such a man.’”
“How kind you are. Before the war, I’d no experience—with sex, or intimacy. That’s changed now.”
“I’m glad for you.”
“Sex was easy, once I’d made up my mind. So many of us lonely men, patients and medics, at the hospital where I worked. Right on the beach at Alexandria. What a scene: scores of convalescing soldiers playing in the sea all day long, as naked as if they’d never worn clothes, and lying on the sand side by side well into the evenings. To no one’s surprise, there was a trysting place…”
Alec grinned: “And so…?”
“And so.”
“Wonderful!”
“Yes, entirely delightful. But why had it taken a war to set me free? I’d pinioned myself, trapped myself—or aided those who’d sought to do so. I look back and shake my head at my own cowardice.
Alec Page 25
