Jasmine Nights

by Julia Gregson

  Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,

  Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes

  One hour was sunlit and the most high gods

  May not make boast of any better thing

  Than to have watched that hour as it passed.

  He’d copied it into his diary in hospital, certain he wouldn’t send that either. Poetry made people suspicious when they didn’t know you, and frankly, bollocks to the one-hour-being-lovely idea; he wanted to hear her sing again, nothing else.

  ‘Coffee, Dom darling?’ His mother’s voice wafting from the kitchen; she sounded more French when she was nervous.

  ‘I’m in the sitting room.’ He glanced discreetly at his watch. Blast! He’d hoped to finish the letter first. ‘Come and have it with me,’ he said, trying with every ounce of his being not to sound like a person raging with frustration.

  His mother was hovering. He’d felt her there all morning, trying to be unobtrusive. Thin as a wisp, elegant in her old tweed suit, in she bounded now with the tray, sat down on the edge of the piano stool and poured the coffee. ‘Thank you, Misou,’ he said, using his childhood name for her.

  He took her hand. ‘It’s all right,’ he wished she would stop looking so worried. ‘Nothing hurts now. Look, hold it properly.’ A surge of anger as he felt her tentative squeeze.

  She bobbed her head shyly, not sure what to say. She’d been so proud of him once. Now his injuries seemed to have brought with them a feeling of shared shame – there was too much to say and to conceal.

  During his months in hospital, he’d fantasised about being exactly where he was today, on this sofa, in this house in St Briavels, a tiny village on the borders of Wales and Gloucestershire. Sitting on the train that took him from Chepstow to Brockweir, he’d been determined to give his mother at least a few days of happiness to make up for the months of misery and worry she’d endured. No talk about flying again; no talk about friends, and maybe, in a couple of days’ time over a glass of wine, an upbeat account of Annabel’s departure.

  A taxi had met him at the station. As they crossed a River Wye sparkling in the spring sunshine, a line of swans, stately and proud, were queening it across the water, and on the far side of the river a herd of Welsh ponies grazed, one with a sparrow sitting on its rump.

  He asked the taxi driver to stop for a while. He said he wanted to look at the view, but in fact he was having difficulty breathing. The choking feeling, now familiar, came sudden as an animal leaping from the dark, and made his heart pound and the palms of his hands grow clammy. It would pass. He stubbed out his cigarette, and sat breathing as evenly as he could, trying to concentrate on only good things.

  ‘Lovely,’ he said at last when it was over. ‘Beautiful sight.’

  ‘Perfect morning to come home, sir,’ said the driver, his eyes firmly ahead. ‘Ready to move off?’

  ‘Yep. Ready.’

  As the car rose up the steep hill, he concentrated fiercely on the field of black Welsh cattle on his right, the scattered cottages bright with primroses and crocuses. He was going home.

  A long rutted track led to the farm; from it he saw the Severn estuary gleaming like a conch shell in the distance, and when Woodlees Farm came into view, his eyes filled with helpless tears. This was the charming whitewashed house his parents had moved to twenty-five years ago, when his father had first become a surgeon. Low-ceilinged, undistinguished, apart from large south-facing windows, it stood on its own in the middle of windswept fields. The small wood behind it was where he’d played cowboys and Indians with his sister Freya when he was a boy. They’d raced their ponies here too, dashing along muddy tracks and over makeshift jumps. He’d been born behind the third window to the right upstairs.

  The car crunched up the drive between the avenue of lime trees his mother, a passionate gardener, had planted in the days when she was a homesick girl missing her family in Provence. Sparkling with rain, glorious and green, unsullied by the dust of summer, they appeared like a vision. He’d grown to hate the severely clipped privet hedges surrounding the hospital lawns. Beyond the trees, new grass, new lambs in the field, a whole earth in its adolescence.

  His mother ran down the drive when she heard the taxi. She stood under the lime trees and took his face in both her hands. ‘My darling Dom,’ she said. ‘As good as new.’

  As they walked back to the house arm in arm, dogs swirled around their legs and an old pony in the field craned nosily over the gate. She’d said, ‘How was it at Rockfield?’ All she knew about it was that this was the place the burns boys were sent to, to shoehorn them back into ‘real life’.

  ‘Surprisingly jolly,’ he said. He told her about the lovely house near Cheltenham, loaned by some county lady, about the barrels of beer, the pretty nurses, the non-stop parties, the complaints from the neighbours, who said they’d expected convalescents, not larrikins. Hearing his mother’s polite, anxious laugh, he’d fought the temptation to hang his head like a guilty boy; early that morning he’d been 10,000 feet above the Bristol Channel, zooming over the grazing sheep, the little patchwork fields, the schools, the church steeples, the whole sleeping world, and it had been bloody marvellous. Tiny Danielson, one of his last remaining friends from the squadron, had wangled a Tiger Moth kept in a hangar near Gloucester. Dom’s hands had shaken as he’d buckled on the leather flying helmet for the first time in months, his heart thumping as he carefully taxied down the runway with its scattering of Nissen huts on either side, and then, as he’d lifted off into the clear blue yonder, he’d heard himself shout with joy.

  Wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful! He was flying again! He was flying again! In hospital, the idea that he might have to go back to a desk job had made him sweat with terror. He’d worried that he’d be windy, that his hands wouldn’t be strong enough now, but he’d had no trouble with the controls, and the little aircraft felt as whippy as a sailing craft under his fingers. The air was stingingly cold, there was a bit of cumulus cloud to the left, and he felt suddenly as if a jumble of mismatched pieces inside him had come together again.

  Hearing his shout of pleasure, Tiny had echoed it, and a few minutes later clapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Down now, I think, old chap – we don’t want to get court-martialled.’

  A noisy breakfast followed – toast, baked beans, brick-coloured tea – shared with Tiny and a pilot wearing a uniform so new that it still had the creases in it. Nobody asked him any questions about the hospital; no one made a fuss – economy of emotion was the unspoken rule here. In the mess, there was even a ‘shooting a line’ book that fined you for any morbid or self-congratulatory talk. And that was good, too. Four of his closest friends were dead now, five missing presumed dead, one captured behind enemy lines. He was five months shy of his twenty-third birthday.

  ‘You’ll notice a few changes.’ His mother, light-footed and giddy with happiness, had almost danced up the drive. ‘We’ve been planting carrots and onions where the roses were. You know, “dig for victory” and all zat. Oh, there’s so much to show you.’

  She took him straight up the stairs so he could put his suitcase in his old room. The bed looked inviting with its fresh linen sheets and plumped pillows. A bunch of lavender lay on the bedside table. He gazed briefly at the schoolboy photographs of him that she’d framed. The scholarship boy at Winchester, flannelled and smirking in his first cricket XI; and there a muddied oaf, legs planted, squinting at the camera, Jacko sitting beside him beaming. Jacko, who he’d persuaded to join up, who he’d teased for being windy, who he’d last seen clawing at his mask in a cauldron of flame, screaming as the plane spiralled down like a pointless piece of paper and disappeared into the sea.

  He must go up to London and talk to Jilly, Jacko’s fiancée, about him soon. He dreaded it; he needed it.

  His mother touched his arm.

  ‘Come downstairs,’ she said quickly. ‘Plenty of time to unpack later.’

  A whiff of formaldehyde as they passed hi
s father’s study on the way down. On the leather desk, the same gruesome plastic model of a stomach and intestines that Dom had once terrified his sister with, by holding it up at her bedroom door, a green torch shining behind it; the same medical books arranged in alphabetical order.

  ‘He’ll be home after supper.’ His mother’s smile wavered for a second. ‘He’s been operating day and night.’

  ‘Things any better?’ slipped out. He’d meant to ask it casually over a drink later.

  ‘Not really,’ she said softly. ‘He’s never home – he works harder now if anything.’

  In the tiled hall, near the front door, he glanced at his face in the mirror. His dark hair had grown again; his face looked pretty much the same.

  Lucky bastard.

  Selfish bastard. He could at least have answered Jilly’s letter.

  Lucky first of all to have been wearing the protective gloves all of them were supposed to put on when they flew, and he so often hadn’t, preferring the feel of the joystick in his fingers. Lucky to have been picked up quickly by an ambulance crew and not burned to a crisp strapped into his cockpit. Luckiest of all to have been treated by Kilverton. Kilverton, who looked, with his stumpy hands and squat body, like a butcher, was a plastic surgeon of genius.

  He owed his life to this man. He’d gone to him with his face and hands black and smelling of cooked meat – what they now called airman’s burns, because they were so common. The determined and unsentimental Kilverton, a visiting surgeon, had placed him in a saline bath and later taken him into theatre, where he’d meticulously jigsawed tiny strips of skin taken from Dom’s buttock to the burns on the side of his face. All you could see now was a row of pinpricks about an inch long and two inches above his left ear. His thick black hair had already covered them.

  Last week Kilverton had called Dom into his chaotic consulting room and boasted freely about him to two awestruck young doctors.

  ‘Look at this young man.’ He turned on the Anglepoise lamp on his desk so they could all get a better look at him. Dom felt the gentleness of those fat fingers, the confidence they gave you. One of the other chaps in the ward had said it was like getting ‘a pep pill up your arse’.

  ‘I defy you to even know he’s been burned – no keloid scars, the skin tone around the eyes is good.’

  ‘So why was he so lucky?’ one of the doctors asked, his own young skin green with fatigue under the lamp. They’d had five new serious cases in the day before, a bomber crew who’d bought it off the French coast.

  ‘A combination of factors.’ Kilverton’s eyes swam over his half-glasses. ‘A Mediterranean skin helps – all that olive oil. His mother’s French, his father’s English.’

  Dom had smiled. ‘A perfect mongrel.’

  ‘The rest,’ Kilverton continued, ‘is pure chance. Some men just burn better than others.’

  Dom had gone cold at this.

  Thompson had died in East Grinstead, after being treated with tannic acid, a form of treatment Kilverton had said was barbaric and had fought to ban. Collins, poor bastard, burned alive in his cockpit on his first training run. He was nineteen years old.

  The same flames, the surgeon had continued in his flat, almost expressionless voice, the same exposure to skin-and tissue-destroying heat, and yet some men became monsters, although he did not use that word; he’d said ‘severely disabled’ or some other slightly more tactful thing. Having the right skin was, he said, a freak of nature, like being double-jointed or having a cast-iron stomach.

  To illustrate his point, he’d lifted a pot of dusty geraniums from the windowsill.

  ‘It’s like taking cuttings from this: some thrive, some die, and the bugger of it is we don’t yet know exactly why. As for you . . .’ he looked directly at Dom again, ‘you can go home now. I’ll see you in six weeks’ time.’

  Dom had pretended to be both interested and grateful, and of course he was, but sometimes at night he sweated at the thought of this luckiness. Why had he lived and others died? Privately, it obsessed him.

  ‘Can I fly again?’ It was all he wanted now. ‘Can you sign me off?’

  ‘I’ll see you in six weeks.’ Kilverton switched off his light. He was shrugging on his ancient mackintosh, standing near the door waiting to leap into another emergency.

  ‘I want to fly again.’ The obsession had grown and grown during the period of his convalescence.

  ‘Look, lad.’ Kilverton had glared at him from the door. ‘Your father’s a surgeon, isn’t he? Why not give him and your poor bloody mother a break and let somebody else do the flying for a while? I’ll see you in six weeks’ time.’

  ‘My hands are strong. I’m fit. Four weeks.’

  ‘Bloody steamroller.’ Kilverton hadn’t bothered to look up. ‘It’ll be six months if you don’t shut up.’

  His mother always did three things at once: right now she was in the kitchen up the flagstone hallway, making bread to go with a special lunch she’d prepared for him. Its warm, yeasty smell filled the room. She was roasting lamb in the Aga. She’d darted into the room to ask if he’d like a whisky and soda before lunch, and now she was standing beside the gramophone wearing what he thought of as her musical face, as she lowered the needle.

  Tender and evanescent as bubbles, the notes of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 floated out and his throat contracted. Home again: music, roast lamb, the faint tang of mint from the kitchen, his mother humming and clattering pans. The cedar parquet floors smelling faintly of lavender where he and Freya had been occasionally allowed to ride their tricycles. The rug in front of the fireplace where they sat to dry their hair on Sunday nights.

  He stretched his legs out and put his arms behind his head, and looked at the pictures his mother had hung above the fireplace. There was a reproduction of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, a Gwen John self-portrait.

  He stood up and stared at them, as if by examining the pictures he could see her more clearly. How cleverly she’d arranged them – not too rigidly formal, but with a plan that pleased the eye.

  She did everything well: cooking, dressing, gardening, entertaining and stitching. The sofa he sat on was covered, too covered for real comfort, in her tapestry cushions. He picked one up now, marvelling at the thousands and thousands of tiny, painstaking stitches that had measured out her afternoons, pinning unicorns and stilled butterflies to her canvas.

  While the Mozart swept majestically on, he heard the faint pinpricks of a spring shower against the window. His mother had once dreamed of being a professional musician; as a child, Dom had loved lying in his bed with Liszt’s Polonaises drifting up to his room like smoke, or the brisk rat-tat-tat of her little hands swashbuckling through her own rendition of the Ninth. But now her piano sat like some grand but disregarded relative in the corner of the room, almost entirely covered by family photographs. The gorgeous Steinway that had once been her life, that had almost bankrupted her father.

  Dom’s own father had put an end to it. Not intentionally, maybe. Two months after he’d married his clever young bride, he’d developed tinnitus and couldn’t stand, so he said, any extra noises in his head. And then the children – Freya first, and two years later Dom – her husband’s determined move up the career ladder, and lastly, in the cold winter of 1929, she’d developed chilblains and stopped for good. No more Saint-Saëns, or Scott Joplin to make guests laugh; no more duets even, for she had taught Dom as a little boy, and told him he would be very good if he stuck at it. What had once been a source of delight became a source of shame, a character flaw. Even as a child he was aware how it clouded her eyes when people turned to her and said: ‘Didn’t you once play the piano rather well?’

  Dom examined silver-framed Freya, on the front of the piano. Freya – of the laughing eyes and the same thick black hair – was in the WAAF now, in London, working at Fighter Command, loving her life ‘whizzing things around on maps’, as she put it.

  There he was, a ghost from another life, striking a jokey pose in a swim
suit on the beach at Salcombe. His cousins Jack and Peter, both in the army now, had their arms around him. They’d swum that night, and cooked sausages on the beach, and stayed out until the moon was a toenail in the sky. The beach was now littered with old bits of scrap metal, barbed wire and sandbags, the rusted hulks of guns. In another photo, his mother’s favourite, he sat on the wing of the little Tiger Moth he’d learned to fly in, self-conscious in his first pilot’s uniform, almost too young to shave.

  The year he and Jacko had started to fly had been full of thousands of excitements: first set of flying clothes; Threadnall, their first instructor, roaring abuse: ‘Don’t pull back the control column like a barmaid pulling a pint, lad’; first solo flight; even the drama of writing your first will out when you were twenty-one years old. There was nothing the earth could offer him as exciting as this.

  That first flight was when he’d cut the apron strings, and all the other ropes of convention and duty that bound him here, and thought to himself, Free at last, shockingly and shamefully free as he soared above the earth, terrified and elated, over churches and towns, schools and fields. Free at last!

  As the music dropped slowly like beads of light in the room, bringing him to the edge of tears, he thought about Saba Tarcan again: her daft little hat, the curve of her belly in the red satin dress, her husky voice.

  He did not believe in love at first sight. Not ever, not now. At Cambridge, where he’d broken more than his fair share of hearts and where, even at this distance, he now thought of himself as being a tiresome little shit, he’d had a whole spiel that he could produce about what a ridiculous concept it was. His reaction to Saba Tarcan felt more complex – he’d admired the way she’d carried herself in that noisy ward, neither apologising, nor simpering, nor asking for their approval. He remembered every detail: the fighter boys lying in a row, stripped of their toys and their dignity, some tricked up like elephants with their skin grafts, and the girl with only her songs, taking them beyond the world where you could define or set limits on things, or be in simple human terms a winner or a loser. What power that was.