Goodbye Piccadilly

by Goodbye Piccadilly (retail) (epub)

  George Moth was told in no uncertain terms that to give his son a chance of recovery he must stay away until the convalescent period. He had returned to London subdued and shaken. In the space of months he had seen two of his three children in a state close to death, and his son-in-law dead – all three youthful faces grown skeletal as a direct result of the war. On the train journey to visit his son he had sunk into himself, thinking how clean and simple, in comparison to the complex deaths caused by this war, was a passionate knife across the throat – the type of death that he used to investigate in the old days. One could do something about murder or rape; even if there was no satisfactory outcome, at least one was turning over stones. With a murder investigation he went out to look for the source of violence, but this national violence had come and sat upon his doorstep and he was helpless to do anything to turn it away.

  * * *

  Jack Moth knew that this stay in Lys House was only a brief respite, but for the present he was louse-free and not only slept in a bed, but in a bed with clean sheets. He knew that there was a gap in his memory. He could remember nothing of the late autumn of last year until the train journey to Le Havre.

  ‘It is not an unusual phenomenon, Jack,’ the doctor had said, ‘A shock to the nervous system. The present theory is that the mind blots out those events with which it can’t cope. It will all return when you are fighting fit. If not, then don’t worry, it can’t have been a pleasant experience having a bit of one’s lung chipped away. Think of your loss of memory as a newly-formed scab – it will protect but irritate. You will probably have an overwhelming desire to worry it, but if you do and it breaks before the wound beneath is healed, then it will bleed painfully, perhaps become infected. If that happens, then it will have to heal all over again and perhaps leave you with a scar.’ He had slapped Jack on the back. ‘Don’t pick it, old man, best not, the mind is a peculiar beast.’

  The familiarity of the use of Jack’s first name was because the MO had been at Cambridge with Jack and it was he who had thought that a Cambridge graduate and qualified lawyer would be happier convalescing among officers, even though his rank was only that of lance-corporal. And so, unbeknown to Jack, the Medical Officer had pulled strings so that Jack could be nursed in a convalescent home for army officers. It had not occurred to him that Jack preferred to serve in the ranks and had survived many months in the company of the lower orders.

  Jack was now resting at Lys House in the depths of rural Hampshire.

  Resting, but very jumpy. Every clang of a saucepan echoing up from the kitchens was a gas-attack warning being hammered on a shell case; farmers shooting raiding magpies and pigeons on nearby farms were surprise attacks by the Boche. Even the stillness could bring back to men like Jack, who were in a state of nervous exhaustion, the belief that they were still in the trenches and that the silence was the lull before the enemy stormed over the ridge. Often it was this latter state that caused Jack’s loss of memory to make him unnerved. He began to wonder whether it could be something other than a sniper’s bullet that had caused the blank weeks.

  This was his second week of convalescence and, although his temperature was still high, Jack was now considered to be in a state of recovery and allowed a visitor. As he waited for his visitor to arrive, he walked through the grounds of the crumbling old mansion that had been brought into use as a recovery home.

  It was the spring of 1917, and the contrast of this emerald green to that unending landscape of blackened tree-stumps, brown sucking mud and blood-tinged slime in which he had slithered and fought for the past months, was shocking. He wanted to weep with misery that he had only perhaps another few weeks of this peaceful place before he must return.

  Like others shocked from their experience of the trenches, he was, as he thought of it, always in two minds. In his daytime mind he read books, wrote letters, talked to other patients and joked with nurses; but the night-time mind was the place where one man’s nightmare scream would enter another man’s nightmare causing him too to cry out, thus compounding the terror and confusion of both men.

  On this spring morning, Jack is easy in his daytime mind, letting thoughts drift as thistledown drifts on a warm breeze. Even though he had the parks of London and more recently the acres of Mere Meldrum, Jack Moth has never been much of a man for thinking about trees and greenery generally. Now, with the sunlight coming through, he notices for the first time that newly unfurled beech leaves have a furry surface; he notices how perfect is the arrangement of a primrose springing from its fan of leaves; he sees wood anemones, lousewort and spurge; hears chiff-chaffs and house-martins; smells violets, crushed ferns and the clover-like leaves of wood sorrel. Of all these he can only put names to the violet, the primrose and the house-martin.

  Though had there been poppies he could have named them. Papaver rhoeas. Except that I can’t say it like Taff with his soft up and down voice.

  Crouching in dug-outs and trenches, one discovered that the most unexpected of men had surprising funds of knowledge. Taff – as of course he would be – was a short-legged Welsh coal-miner and a botanist; or was he a botanist who dug coal? Taff and Lofty and… somebody? And Chalky and Nipper. And Farmer Giles – who had bowled for his county and could lob a stick bomb straight down the middle – and Leafy Green.

  They were a group who had shared tobacco and horror, shared vermin and danger, shared Sergeant Trigg, Sub-Lieutenant Tree and Captain Bush.

  There was somebody else, he was sure of it… who, who, who?

  The confusion was one of the worst parts of this malfunction of his mind. The not knowing reality from nightmare, survivors from the dead. It was so debilitating to have to sift through the great mass of sludge that filled his mind to achieve one sure and solid nugget of reality.

  He picked at the edge of the scab.

  And…? Nipper was a stockinger. I had never heard of a stockinger. How many Southerners know that making stockings is such skilled and well-paid work? Nipper was a geography fanatic: Flanders is reclaimed bog-land, drained by ditches. Did you know that farmers here can be fined for not keeping up the trenches? Did you know that, Loft? Looking out over the cratered and blasted landscape with its ditches gone, flooded again: that had caused some laughter.

  At first sight of the poppies. Somebody had said that they had never seen such bright poppies. Somebody else said it was all the blood. Blood was a good fertilizer if you could get hold of it. Somebody said: These farmers are going to get rich when we’ve gone. Free fertilizer. As far as the eye could see the cratered fields had been scarlet.

  He thinks of Mere for the first time in months, and wonders what he might sensibly do with the place. Poor Ess doesn’t appear to want to return there, and who can blame her? Who would want to rattle round in a great place like that? Quite apart from it being full of memories for her.

  He takes a beech leaf, rubs it between his hands, breathing the tangy smell into his lungs, imagining some healing power in the freshness.

  Poor Ess. He longs to see her, but the letter he received from his father had said that since Bindon’s death she had been under such a considerable strain that she had miscarried a child. Poor Ess, he couldn’t bear to think of all the misery that she had suffered. Perhaps he should ask his father to go ahead and sell Mere and offer Ess enough to buy herself a place of her own.

  He wonders how his father would react to that; it must suit him very well to have someone there to be mother to Kitt. And whatever was going to happen to Kitt now? His father loved the child well enough, especially as he looked so much like their mother, but Jack remembers how careless George Moth could be with his children.

  Out of sight, out of mind, it had been with himself and Ess. When he was immersed in a case that intrigued him, their father thought nothing of staying away from home for days, perhaps taking a few hours’ sleep in the cells, a wash and shave at a barber’s shop and out on the streets again, only returning home when his clothes smelt high, and carrying gifts f
or them all.

  But in his absence, their mother had always been there. Was little Kitt to be disposed of to some paid woman until it was time to pack him off to boarding-school? Jack determines to speak with his father and try to get him to see that he must not treat Kitt as he had treated his older children.

  Finding a weathered bench beneath a tree at the edge of the wood where it overlooks the rear terrace of the mansion, Jack Moth sits in the spring sunshine and thinks how wonderful it is to have only such sweetly domestic problems to think of.

  * * *

  From behind a net-curtained window, Otis Hewetson stands and looks out at the thin, close-cropped skeletal-faced man seated on a wooden bench, his face turned, like a scarlet pimpernel, directly to the sun. She knows that this is Jack, the doctor has said that it is, and she can see that the long legs stretched before him are long, as Jack’s are long.

  ‘He is not fully recovered, but don’t worry, old Jack is a survivor.’

  Otis frowned sceptically at him.

  ‘Believe me, Miss Hewetson, they come down here looking like corpses, and in weeks they are fit and ready for action once more.’

  ‘And mentally healthy?’

  He raises his eyebrows, using the doctor-without-an-answer ploy, and sucks his tongue against his top teeth before he replies, ‘I would say that few men who have been in the trenches are entirely…’ He taps his forehead. ‘I think in Jack’s case it is nothing too serious. Nature’s way of allowing the mind to recover.’

  Otis’s look penetrates, but he makes no comment.

  ‘Well then?’ The doctor rubs his hands together. ‘Shall I have an orderly fetch Jack, or shall you go out?’

  The few minutes facing into the sun with his eyes closed caused tears to form when he opened them, so that, for a moment, he had the impression of Otis as a shimmering mirage, then the tears overflowed, he saw that she was reality. He got up and went towards her, dragged down on one side by his healing wound.

  ‘Otis. It really is you. I thought I must be day-dreaming.’

  Covering her shock at his appearance, she smiled, genuinely pleased to see him, and stretched to kiss him on the cheek. Apart from that day in childhood when they had all floundered in the sea, she could not recall any time when they had touched one another. The slight rasp of his badly-shaven skin seemed to stay upon her lips. When he raised his hand to the place where she had kissed him, she wondered whether he realized that this was a new experience, or whether she had left that irritating cold moistness that some kisses seem to leave.

  ‘Hullo, Jack. I’m sorry that I am not Esther, but the journey might be a bit much for her.’

  He indicated that she might like to sit on the bench. His movements were frail and fussy, so unlike Jack Moth. He took her hands in his, the contrasting plumpness of hers making her feel almost embarrassed.

  ‘Poor Ess. I keep thinking of her, is she really down?’

  ‘I have seen really very little of her… my job, you know, we get so little free time. This is a mid-term break. Your father says that she is on the mend now. He told you that Nancy Dickenson is there?’

  ‘He did, he did. I think that is wonderful. I hope they realize how fortunate they are. I once heard her speak at a public meeting, you know.’

  They smiled at one another, but it was to cover awkwardness. Jack knew how he looked and imagined how she must feel seeing him thus. The ice must be broken: he had written to tell her that he loved her; he remembered that, but not whether she had replied, or even whether it had been sent.

  Holding out his hands and turning them this way and that, then smoothing the hollows of his cheeks, he said, ‘I shan’t be like this for long.’

  Earnestly, ‘Of course you won’t! The doctor says that you are making a remarkable recovery.’

  ‘He told you about my…?’ He tapped his head.

  ‘That you had a blank in your memory? He doesn’t attach much importance to it.’

  ‘I know. It’s just that…’ He searched around for the right words. ‘It is that there must have been something if what he says is true. It is the not-knowing what it is. I am supposed not to try to recall it at present, but good Lord, Otis, how can I avoid trying to get back a missing piece of my mind – even though I know that I may have to look into the pit to find it?’

  ‘Perhaps if you think of it as nature’s way. It’s said that women cope with the distress of giving birth by dismissing the memory of it at once. It does seem to be a very sensible thing to do, don’t you think?’

  ‘Perhaps so. Enough of me. Tell me about yourself.’

  ‘Oh, very little to tell. Though I say so myself, I believe that I shall make a very good teacher. I even have five little children saying a few French phrases.’

  ‘Really? French in infants’ schools, that is forward looking.’

  ‘It’s a start at least. I sometimes wonder if I am right. A thing like that in a tightly-knit community can set a family apart.’

  ‘You should keep on.’

  ‘I shall. I believe that we shall all be the better for reading the literature of other countries untranslated, speaking one another’s languages freely. Quite apart from my theory that all knowledge is valuable to the development of the human character.’

  She turned to see that he was gazing inwardly, pulling his brows together, concentrating.

  ‘Socks,’ he said. ‘I had some soft woollen socks. It’s something about some socks.’ He clenched her hand tightly with the effort of trying to remember.

  ‘I sent you some.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes, perhaps it is those…?’

  ‘Fine, soft wool. Best quality army officers’ socks.’

  ‘I did send you some like that. I was told that all soldiers need good socks in the trenches.’

  ‘Why did that suddenly come to me? Oh God! I wish that I could remember.’

  ‘Don’t try, Jack dear. I believe that when you are ready, everything will be put right.’

  Healthy, confident and whole, his legs and large feet working like engines, the doctor, carrying a spectator’s folding chair strode across the ancient, springy lawn.

  Heartily, ‘Jack, old son, you are already looking better for your visitor. If you go on like this, then we shall release you to complete your recovery at home.’

  ‘At home?’

  ‘I have a letter from your father suggesting it, but we shall see.’

  With the arrival of the doctor upon the scene, Otis felt the delicate aura which had surrounded her and Jack fade in the intensity of his hand-rubbing heartiness. Perhaps she was not too sorry, for if she had been unsure of the wisdom of coming here, she was not reassured now that she was here. She felt that by seeing him so weakened and almost unmanly she was as vulnerable as he. If he had forgotten the socks and chocolates, then he had probably forgotten that he had declared his love for her. If, in their state of mutual vulnerability, he asked her, she would not find it easy to refuse to marry him. Not for love, but in an attempt at a recompense for being a young man who had been tricked by the contemptible war-mongers.

  For half an hour they walked in the grounds of the old mansion until a nurse came looking for Jack to say that it was time to have his dressing changed and to spend an hour or two resting on the bed.

  ‘You will come again soon, Otis?’

  ‘Let us hope that you will be sent home.’

  ‘A bit of a burden on the household, I should think.’

  ‘They have Nancy Dickenson.’

  ‘I thought that was a temporary arrangement.’

  ‘That’s the general idea, though I can’t see Esther wanting to lose her now.’

  ‘I should think not. I remember Nancy Dickenson, and she’s not your average domestic, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you see Victoria, Otis?’

  ‘She is working harder than ever. The Peace League is to petition the Prime Minister.’

  ‘And Victoria is
in the midst of it all.’

  ‘It is important.’

  ‘I wish her luck of it.’

  ‘It won’t succeed.’

  ‘I know. Honour must be satisfied.’

  ‘Whose?’

  Wearily lowering his eyes in a negative reply, he said, ‘I think I would settle for peace at any price. It is the brass hats and the red tabs whose honour is at stake, they have the scent of Boche in their nostrils and they won’t stop until they can wave his brush at the world.’

  ‘Poor Jack.’

  ‘Too many of our casualties… too many. Too many inept leaders who value men only when they are scarce – if we were in unlimited supply they would willingly spend ten thousand of us to gain a few yards of bog-land. In fact they have done so.’

  ‘Déjà vu. Max said something very like that on the leave before he died.’

  ‘Max Hewetson was killed? I never knew. Poor Otis, you were very fond of him. Who is going to be left?’

  He had red spots on his cheeks.

  ‘I think you should go back. Shall I walk with you?’

  He nodded absently.

  In the large, wooden-floored hall of Lys House, Otis took both his hands to make her goodbyes, but he pulled her towards him and pressed her close and kissed her with as much force and passion as his weakened strength and bound ribs could manage.

  A year ago and she would have wanted to respond – but now she was not certain.

  ‘I will come and see you soon. Perhaps next weekend if you are not at home. Goodbye, Jack. I must go or I shall miss my train.’

  On Petersfield Station she bought a book in which she could bury her head until they reached Waterloo.