Coral Glynn

by Peter Cameron

  “Oh, but it is. You don’t know. I’m weak through and through, you see. The only brave thing I’ve ever done is coming to see you here tonight.”

  Clement said nothing.

  Robin sipped his beer. After a moment he said, “It’s funny, but I thought it was brave. I don’t mean tonight; it isn’t brave of me, I know. I mean what I did before—keeping the letters from you. I allowed myself to think it was brave to keep Coral’s letters from you—even loyal, perhaps—because I thought I was protecting you from something. The cruel, cruel misunderstanding world and all that. But I didn’t realise how I had it all wrong, how stupid I was. You don’t love me, and you don’t want my love. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to realise that; I know it’s very stupid of me, because you’ve made it plain enough, time and again, and so of course in a way I had realised it, but I hadn’t believed it. I couldn’t believe it. It’s hard not to believe in love. But I can now. It is all very clear to me now, and I’m sorry to have gone about something long after the fact of it—or maybe there was never even a fact of it; maybe it was always something I imagined. I don’t know, I’ll never know, but I’m sorry to have bothered you in all the ways I’ve bothered you. But it was only because—”

  “Be quiet,” said Clement. “Please stop.”

  “Yes: stop,” said Robin. “That is what you have always wanted, haven’t you, wanted me to stop. Well, I have. I am stopped now.”

  For a moment neither man spoke. Then Clement said, “Why do you make a melodrama of everything? There was no need for this.”

  “No need for what?”

  “Any of this. This drama you have created.”

  “It’s strange you use that word: ‘need.’ I wonder if you know anything about it. I don’t think I have ever known you to need anything, or anyone. Have you?”

  “Of course I have.”

  “What? Who?”

  “I need the things that any man needs.”

  “Does that include love?” asked Robin. “Does it include sexual fulfilment?”

  “I was thinking of more practical things. I have learned to do without a great deal.”

  “How?” asked Robin. “Will you teach me? Can you at least do that for me?”

  “You have Dolly,” said Clement.

  “You know I don’t have Dolly,” said Robin, “not in the way we are speaking of. Not in the way of love, or sexual fulfilment.”

  “I wish you would stop saying these things.”

  “Why? Do they frighten you?”

  “Of course they do not. It is simply neither the proper time or the place.”

  “And when and where would that be?” asked Robin.

  “Is that why you destroyed my letters from Coral?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because you do not love Dolly, and are not fulfilled with her—is that why you did not want me to have Coral? Did you think that I might love her, and be fulfilled with her?”

  “Oh, no. Quite on the contrary: because I know that you don’t, and can’t.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  “Because you have just told me: you do not need, or want, these things yourself, so how could you ever give them to someone else?”

  “Perhaps I could be taught. Perhaps I could learn. But now I shall not have the chance. You have seen to that.”

  “I don’t think it’s in your nature to love Coral,” said Robin.

  “You assume I am the same as you. At least in that respect.”

  “I know you are.”

  “And how can—do—you know this?”

  “Because I love—loved—you. And because you loved me. Will you deny that?”

  “No,” said Clement. “I wish never to deny that. It was a part of my youth—the best part of my youth. But it is over. The man—the boy—you loved, and who loved you, no longer exists.”

  “You exist. I exist. Here we are together in The Black Swan, existing.”

  “But we are changed. I am changed.”

  “You are not changed. You only pretend to be changed. Because you are weak. You are the weak one, after all. Perhaps I have done wrong—I know that I have—but now I understand what I did was not done out of cowardice. Foolishness, yes, and selfishness, too, but the cowardice and cruelty is yours, it is all yours. And I would rather have done wrong out of love than done nothing from cowardice. How lonely and bitter and miserable you will be all your life, Clement, and do not think for a moment that Coral would have spared you any of that loneliness or bitterness or misery, because she would not have. She would have increased it a ten—a thousand—fold. That is a hell I have saved you from, and I am glad of that. It is my last and final way of loving you.”

  Robin stood up and walked out of the room, leaving Clement alone in the little nook by the hearth that they would never again share.

  * * *

  The reason that Dolly had found Major Hart in such an uncharacteristic state of déshabillé was a result of problems he had been having with his health. His skin had recently begun to crack and suppurate, causing him great pain and discomfort. Frequent bathing seemed to hasten his skin’s disintegration, and the only clothes that felt comfortable were those of the loosest fit and softest material. Because he knew he was to blame for his worsening condition by refusing the skin grafts that had been suggested after the war, he put off seeing a doctor, and attempted to heal himself with assorted topical salves and unguents. And he tried to forget the stressful news that Dolly had brought him, but his efforts to forget only increased his strain, which in turn caused his condition to worsen, and become even more painful. When he could stand things no longer, he saw his doctor, who scoldingly reiterated his opinion that Clement should have had the skin grafts when they had been offered: he was not sure what treatment, if any, was now possible. The doctor sent him up to London to see an American doctor who specialised in burns. Dr Brown had invented a new instrument, the electrically powered dermatome, which harvested—for that was the term they used—skin for transplants.

  But it was too late, Dr Brown told him: his dead skin would reject any transplant. It should have been done immediately, when the wounds were fresh. However, a colleague of his was experimenting with a pharmaceutically produced silk gauze that had proved successful in stabilizing critically burnt skin; apparently the gauze was so fine that it actually adhered to the dead skin and protected it from any further disintegration or infection. He was in Harley Street, and Dr Brown could arrange a consultation with him for the next day. If he wanted to go the National Health route, there was a dermatological clinic at St Mary’s Hospital that might be able to offer some palliative help.

  Clement left Dr Brown’s office with an appointment to see Dr Tompkins the following afternoon, and walked out into the baked London streets. It was July, and very dry and hot: a fine dust hung in the sunlit air. Clement felt defeated; he had not expected to feel otherwise, although he had hoped, wildly, for a miracle. He always felt defeated by London: it was unknowable, and there was so much that could go, and be done, wrong. He decided he would stay at Durrants that night, because that was where his mother had always stayed when she went up to London, and see Dr Tompkins tomorrow—although, really, what was the use? Didn’t one know when one had had enough?

  Clement walked into Regent’s Park, because although the lawns were mostly burnt, it did look slightly cooler and fresher in the park than on the busy street. He needed to sit in the shade for a while, just sit, and close his eyes, and separate himself from the world.

  He saw Coral immediately upon entering the park, for she was sitting on a shaded bench beneath a towering catalpa tree just inside the entrance, wearing a nurse’s costume. Whenever Clement saw a nurse, he thought of Coral, although he did not think of her as a nurse any longer—in an effort to dismiss her from his world, he had geographically and professionally exiled her, imagining that she must be a governess in France or a secretary in Philadelphia—and so to find her sitting there, in fron
t of him, was shocking. It had not occurred to him that by coming to London he might encounter her, for he was not a man given to conjecture or speculation; for him life had happened and was only now being endured. He could not imagine the future as being anything except a continuation, or diminishment, of the present. He turned away and left the park.

  * * *

  When Coral returned to St Mary’s Hospital that evening, the Sister told her that a man had come looking for her that afternoon. A gentleman, she said. He did not leave his name, and as the Sister who related the message was not the Sister who had spoke with him, he could not be described. But he had said that he would be at the hospital the following morning so he might see Coral before she began her rounds.

  Of course it was Inspector Hoke; there was no one else it could be. More than a year had passed since Coral had left Harrington, and although she sometimes still dreamt of Hoke reappearing in her life, chasing after her through the rooms of a house or down the streets of some strange city, her conscious fear of him had abated, for she knew that if he had wanted to find her, he would have found her long ago. There must be new evidence, she thought, but what could it be?

  The reappearance of Hoke aroused in her a fear that was irrational and wild, and caused her to forget that she had not been responsible for the death of the girl in the Sap Green Forest.

  That night she did not sleep but sat in her room, feeling the world close down around her, the buildings of London collapsing like boxes, the trees in the squares retracting their branches and pulling themselves back into the earth, everything leaving, shutting down, abandoning her.

  In the morning she bathed and dressed and left the house as if going to the hospital, but sat on a bench in the square, watching the door of 16 Grantley Terrace. She knew that when she did not appear at the hospital, Sister Castle would give Inspector Hoke her address, and so it would not be long before he arrived. Coral did not want to be arrested, or be questioned—or suffer any consequence of Hoke’s reappearance—in Madame Paszkowska’s house, for she had always been respected there, and treated well, and the thought of Miss Lingle abandoning Pansy and her chair so that she could step into the hallway and listen over the banister was too mortifying to contemplate.

  She sat there all morning, watching, but no one approached number 16. About eleven o’clock she saw Madame Paszkowska close the windows in the drawing room and close the drapes, for it was getting very hot and the house stayed cooler when it was shut away from the heat of the day. A few moments later Madame Paszkowska reappeared in the bedroom windows on the second floor and repeated the ritual, and again on the third and fourth floors, until all the windows of the house were shut and shrouded, as if the house, like everything else, were leaving her, excluding her.

  She fell asleep on the bench soon after that and awoke abruptly only moments later. A man was standing on the sidewalk outside of number 16. She looked at her watch, which was pinned upon her bodice and hung upside down, facing up, so that its time was private and revealed only to her. It was a thing she treasured, for it had been given to her by her parents when she had started nursing school. She was shocked to see that it was noon: she had slept for more than a few moments.

  She stood and as if by instinct walked towards the iron fence that surrounded the square, stepping across the green forbidden lawn and pushing her way into the rhododendrons that grew inside the fence. Perhaps I am in a dream? she wondered. The heat beat down and everything shimmered, the bonnets of the cars parked along the street angrily throwing the sunlight back up into the sky, and through the crazed glare she watched the man climb the steps, grabbing hold of the rail and hoisting one leg up after the other, and it was by this strange gait that she realised it was Clement.

  She wanted to call out, but something stopped her. Perhaps it was a feeling of disbelief, but it was incapacitating, as if the sense of folding up and shutting down she had experienced the night before had finally progressed to her interior, and that she herself was being hollowed out, the bright noonday sun reaching in and scooping her clean of everything. She could not move or speak, and in this dreamlike trance she watched Clement ring the bell and straighten and collect himself, fixing his cuffs and shrugging his linen jacket close about his shoulders, and waiting, waiting, until Madame Paszkowska opened the door. Something prevented Coral from hearing what they said to one another; it was not the distance, for she was just on the other side of the road, and it was quiet on Grantley Terrace at midday. It was a great roaring that Coral heard, a sound that started far away and grew louder and brighter as it approached, roaring at her from all directions, as strong and surrounding as the sun, beating down upon her and yet, at the same time, lifting her up.

  * * *

  The ceiling in Madame Paszkowska’s drawing room was high and had, at one time, been elaborately plastered with dadoes, but much of this decoration had plummeted during the Blitz. Coral stared up at what was left, trying to make sense of it, but there were too many gaps, too many missing pieces, and so it was impossible to imagine the original design.

  “Here,” said Madame Paszkowska, leaning forwards with a glass of water. “Drink this, my dear.”

  Coral continued to gaze at the ceiling, for she had the feeling that she might, at any moment, see through it, if only she did not look away—that it might open and reveal the sky, or another world. But Madame Paszkowska was gathering her up and arranging her so that she sat back upon the cushions of the sofa and the puzzling ceiling disappeared.

  “Drink this cool water,” Madame Paszkowska said, and held the glass up to Coral’s lips. Coral drank a bit, and Madame Paszkowska lay a cool washcloth upon her brow.

  And then, quite suddenly, it all returned to her, everything that had been disappearing, and she took the glass from Madame Paszkowska, and drank thirstily from it.

  “She is better now, I think,” said Madame Paszkowska, and Coral realised there was someone else in the room, and looked around to see Clement sitting in a chair in the shadows by the corner, looking as if he, too, had fainted. She knew the room was not very large, but nevertheless he appeared to be very far away, in another country, perhaps, a distant misty place.

  “Clement,” she said.

  “Coral.” He stood up. He was holding his hat in front of him with both of his hands, turning it around and around by its brim, as if he were trying to hypnotise her with it.

  “Stop,” she said.

  He looked puzzled.

  “Your hat,” she said. “Stop spinning it.”

  “Oh,” he said. He looked at his hat as if surprised to find it in his hands and then put it down upon the chair he had been sitting in. Then he showed Coral his empty hands, blank palms forward, to prove they were empty.

  “I will go and make you some tea,” said Madame Paszkowska. “This will be good for you both.” She turned and left the room, pulling closed the doors behind her.

  It was very quiet now, almost silent, just the ticking of the porcelain clock on the mantel atop which stood two silent Dresden shepherdesses.

  After a moment Clement said, “Coral. It’s a long time since I have seen you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “A year—”

  “Longer than that,” he corrected. “It was April when you left.”

  “It was the beginning of the spring,” Coral said. “I remember that.”

  “May I sit beside you?” he asked, after a moment.

  Coral looked along the length of the sofa, which was strewn with little silk pillows. Even in the dim submarine light the wooden floor glowed like the surface of a pond, so ferociously had its surface been waxed and buffed. The large gilt mirror on the mantel, inside of which the two shepherdesses faced away into another reality, as if turning their backs on this world, reflected a single shard of light that fell through a chink in the drapes back into the room. Coral moved two of the pillows nearer to her, opening a space on the sofa apparently intended for Clement. This was as close as she could come to inviting
him to sit beside her.

  He sat, and they both faced forwards, staring across the room at the drapes that hung in shadowed folds against the large front windows, and then Clement stood up and walked over and adjusted the drapes so that the wand of light that had entered the room was exiled. Then he sat back down, this time turning a bit towards Coral, and crossed his legs. Finally, he turned a bit more and looked at her. “So, you are still a nurse?” he asked.

  As she was dressed in her nurse’s uniform, there could be little doubt as to her occupation, unless she had become theatrically inclined, but she let this idiocy of his pass and said, “Yes, I am.”

  “Of course you are,” he said. “You must forgive me, I’m feeling a bit addled. Are you all right? You fainted dead away—”

  “I am feeling fine now,” said Coral. “It was only the heat.”

  “Would you like me to go away?”

  “No,” said Coral. “Madame Paszkowska is bringing tea,” she added, as if this were the reason why he should stay.

  “She is very kind,” said Clement.

  “Yes,” said Coral. “I am very lucky here. Very lucky indeed.”

  “How are you Coral? How is your life?”

  “Oh,” said Coral. “I am very well. Everything is fine.”

  “Do you still work as a private nurse?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m a visiting nurse, with the NHS.”

  “So you still visit people in their homes?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Mostly diabetics, but only briefly.” She paused for a moment and then said, “I prefer it that way.”

  “I am sorry if I shocked you, coming here like this. I should have written to you here first, but I only learned your address this morning.”

  “Oh, no…” said Coral. “It wasn’t you who shocked me. I thought you were Hoke.”

  “Hoke?”

  “Inspector Hoke. I thought he had come to arrest me, or to ask me questions.”

  “Arrest you for what?”

  “The girl that was hanged in the woods,” said Coral.