All the Beauty of the Sun

by Marion Husband

  And soon he would be with him again in the Queen’s Hotel. There’d be two queens staying at the Queen’s. He tried to smile at this joke.

  The train slowed into Victoria Station. Patrick rubbed his hands across his face, he needed to shave; he was beginning to smell like them, the men pushing past him now to be the first off, his compatriots. Perhaps Paul and he would share a bath.

  The train stopped and doors were flung open; the platform was crowded because this was Victoria, London, not some backwater. No one would see him here; no one would take any notice of him. All the same he hesitated before he stepped down.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  PAUL HAD FALLEN ASLEEP on his bed and Edmund covered him with a quilt as carefully as he could; he couldn’t wake him, he was afraid that Paul might begin to cry again. He didn’t want to think less of him for this crying; he truly didn’t. He had asked him not to cry, but only as one might ask a child, knowing that it was just a way of saying something, a reassurance: Don’t cry, I’m here. In all truth he had wanted to say don’t cry because he was embarrassed; at least he was at first. But eventually he became used to this crying, he had stroked his head and kept silent, waiting for him to stop. He had no idea how long this would take because he had never seen a man cry before, not even his father when they received the telegram advising that Neville was missing in action.

  ‘They presume dead,’ his father had said, and his voice was as calm as it ever was, except for the inflection on that presume, as though the word was one he had never come across before, as though he didn’t know what they were talking about, sending out their incomprehensible nonsense. Edmund had been home from school for the weekend and he had wished desperately that he hadn’t come home, that he hadn’t witnessed the boy resting his bike against the railings outside their house, walking up the steps, adjusting his cap, his hesitation before pulling on the doorbell. All this was seen from his father’s study, over his father’s shoulder as his father had reprimanded him for his poor school report. He couldn’t take his eyes off this boy in his cap and uniform, this harbinger of bad news, only bad news, how could he do such a job? And his father had sighed, ‘Edmund. What are you staring at now?’ A moment later and the doorbell rang and Edmund had run out into the hall, racing the maid to the door.

  His sisters had cried for Neville; his mother went to her room and didn’t come out very much until the memorial service. He, his father and Rupert had not cried, at least not in front of anyone. For all he knew his father cried every night and as for Rupert, he only looked dazed when he came home on leave. ‘It should have been me, old son,’ he’d told him. ‘Neville was the good one.’

  So, no tears; dry your eyes, be strong, a man. Hold your head up, face the world, proudly, straight and direct. This is what he was taught at school; this is what his father taught him, when he wasn’t telling him not to go tilting at windmills. Who would have thought his father had read Don Quixote? Who would have imagined he would allow him to go after the giants who were not giants? Perhaps he wouldn’t have allowed it if Neville had lived; if Neville had lived his father might still have believed that everything was as it purported to be and that propriety truly mattered.

  He sat down on the chair; he couldn’t go on standing over Paul, couldn’t lie down next to him, couldn’t leave him, although he would like to go outside, to draw himself up straight, stretch and fill his lungs with air tainted only by traffic fumes and not the stink of cigarettes, of Paul’s hot, salty, snotty grief.

  When Paul had eventually stopped crying he hadn’t known what to do, how to hold him, what to say; Paul had frightened him, but what was there to be frightened of? Paul. A stranger; more strange than ever, now, with his little child and, therefore, presumably, a wife he had loved. He presumed he’d loved her, perhaps he still did, or perhaps he never had; perhaps he had never married, just fucked a girl, fucked off when things became messy. He didn’t know. He felt he could almost believe anything of a man who cried as Paul had cried this afternoon.

  It occurred to him to wish he had never met him, to wish that he had stayed in bed with Ann the other evening. The other evening! He closed his eyes, remembering that restaurant, the taste of garlic and spaghetti, the sound of Day and Andrew laughing at the other end of the table, the sight of Paul looking up at him, so handsome, wry, the question in his eyes, the smile in his voice as he asked, What conclusion have you reached? He remembered how Paul had made something in him rise to the surface, an urgent, needy feeling he hadn’t recognised until later.

  Before Paul had begun to cry he had talked until he was almost hoarse and Paul had listened, or seemed to listen, smoking, smoking, one pristine cigarette lit from the disgusting remnants of the last. When he told him about Neville he seemed hardly to have heard him at all and this was excruciating, because it had taken a lot to tell him, a lot of working himself up. He had wanted him to ask about Neville, even the kind of inane questions he imagined Paul, a veteran, would ask: regiment, rank, length of service, comparing these details with his own record, contrasting their fortunes, being secretly relieved that Neville was the dead one and not him: he had been in a luckier place further up or down the line. But Paul had kept silent, behaving as if Neville didn’t matter enough even for those questions in the scheme of things, and in the scheme of things he didn’t, he understood that, he understood that Paul had seen it all, everything; he understood.

  But understanding didn’t stop him thinking that Barnes was right: Paul was a self-centred bastard, and pathetic in his self-pitying silence. Edmund had gazed at him, hardly able to believe such a person was there on his bed. And then Paul had started to cry. He didn’t know if he’d felt repelled or not; still didn’t, there was just a worm of a feeling he couldn’t bear to examine too closely.

  He stood up, unable to sit still. Paul’s jacket had slipped from the end of the bed to the floor, and he picked it up. At once he was lifting it to his face, inhaling Paul’s scent, feeling the weight of his wallet in the pocket bump against his body. He remembered snatching the wallet up from the table in his hotel room, going after Paul, afraid for him, needing to take care of him. He remembered the intimacy of another man’s wallet in his hand as he ran down the hotel’s stairs, and yet at the time he had thought nothing of this intimacy: it was just Paul’s wallet and Paul was everything; nothing was too much a part of Paul that was not also a part of him.

  He hung up the jacket, smoothing out a sleeve; he closed the window, the evening had become windy, the curtains were billowing into the room; Paul would be cold. Sitting back down, he watched over him as he slept.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  GEORGE WENT TO PAUL’S room and knocked gently on the door. Room 212, the receptionist had said, that mannered, painstakingly polite man who nevertheless had raised his eyebrows so expressively when he’d told him that Francis Law was Paul’s alias. At that moment George had understood why Paul had chosen this hotel; even walking through its anonymous-looking door into its dim, neat lobby was like walking into an exclusive club; for Paul it must have felt like an oasis; the calm of acceptance, of no questions asked, must have been an enormous relief. He had felt the same kind of relief himself.

  George knocked again, a little more urgently this time, although he knew instinctively that Paul wasn’t in his room, that he wouldn’t have been able to settle after he brought Bobby back. He had looked as though he would run right out of the hotel and keep running, such was the energy that seemed to charge through him. Only Bobby’s presence helped a little to keep that energy in check. Paul had knelt down in front of his son so that their faces were level. Taking both his hands, he said, ‘I have to go now, Bob. Perhaps tomorrow –’ He had looked up at him, ‘You’ll be here tomorrow?’

  George had stepped towards him. He had an idea that he would catch hold of him when he got to his feet again; he would hold him and make him be still, keep on holding him until he was calm and still, as he used to hold him when he was a child and
had woken from bad dreams. But Iris had stepped forward; she had said, ‘We’ll be here.’

  Paul had turned to her. He had clambered to his feet with none of his usual grace, as though some inept puppeteer was controlling him; his face was ugly with hatred as he said, ‘Do I look like a dead man to you?’

  ‘Paul, please –’ George had taken another step towards him, but couldn’t bring himself even to touch his arm. This man was too unlike his son, too much like a man he would make an effort to avoid.

  Without looking at him, only stretching out his hand as if to stop him coming any closer, Paul said, ‘I’ll come back. I’ll come back to Thorp and take him when you least expect it and you’ll never see him again. Do you understand? I will take him. I will do this. Tell Margot, tell your husband. Don’t think any of you will have any peace from now on.’

  Iris had put her hand to her throat, her face so pale that George went to her; but he couldn’t touch her, either. He only stood uselessly, emasculated by the hate-filled power of this man.

  When Paul had gone, George had slumped onto the bed, unable to look at Iris, who had gone to Bobby, who was taking off his coat, speaking to him too quickly, with too much bright reassurance.

  George stepped back from the door to Paul’s room. About to turn away, to go back upstairs to Iris and Bobby, he reached for the handle. The door was unlocked, and he stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

  ‘Paul?’ He went to the bathroom, cautiously pushing the door that stood ajar. On the threshold of these two rooms, he turned to face Paul’s bed.

  The bed was made, neat and tidy like the room itself. Nervously, George went to the wardrobe and opened its doors; there were Paul’s shirts, the suit he had worn when they’d had lunch together, his silk ties coiled carefully on the wardrobe’s shelf, beautiful ties in jewel colours. There was a leather box and he opened it: cuff links, tie pins, a gold signet ring. He picked up the ring and saw the two Ps engraved, entwined. George gazed at it, turning it around and around; he slipped it on his own finger, the third finger of his left hand; it fitted, slipping easily over his knuckle. He wondered why Paul didn’t wear it, why he left it in a box. He thought of Patrick, who had told him how much he loved his son, of Paul saying, I can’t live without him, Dad, as though this was not just a romantic figure of speech but the literal truth: he would die without the man who had met him at the prison gates, who had taken him in a taxi to Durham Station, who had turned to him as he followed Paul on to the train and said, ‘I’ll take care of him. I promise, Dr Harris, I’ll take care of him.’

  George took off the ring, replacing it in the box, putting the box back on the shelf and closing the wardrobe door softly. The air inside the wardrobe had smelled of Paul – no, of Francis Law – Paul had only ever smelled of soap, carbolic or sometimes Pears or Lifebuoy, whatever soap he’d bought for the bathroom at Parkwood, neither of them caring. But Francis Law, he was quite a man about town, urbane, wearing his experience lightly. And such experience! Such knowledge of the world: a man who had lived in countries George had never even dreamt of visiting, had barely known existed; a man who knew exactly how to dress, how to carry himself, how to behave in whatever hotel he found himself in – how to find the appropriate hotel in the first place. Francis Law, the artist who could sell out an exhibition of his work to other men who behaved with the same urbane air as him, men who were the opposite of George himself. Although he had lived and worked in London he’d only ever wanted to go home to Thorp, to Grace, the girl along the road, whose parents knew his parents, who was so shy and sweet that even his father was careful of her.

  His father. Even on his death bed that man had been laughing at him; his father, a man with experience, who could have become Francis Law just as easily as Paul could – more easily perhaps, not having Paul’s more unique experiences to bring him down to earth.

  George sat down on the bed and stared out of the window. Paul would come back to this room, he had to, there was the ring in the box, and he wouldn’t leave such a thing behind, not when he had deliberately brought it with him. Paul would come back, to this hotel where eyebrows were only raised ironically, and he would be here, waiting for him, alone, because Iris would not stay now, would not keep Bobby here close by a man who could transform into the very devil, a vengeful, pitiless sprite, cursing those who had crossed him, who had killed him if only in their heads and hearts.

  He went to the window and looked down on to the empty, shadowed street. Paul would come back, or Francis; he didn’t much care which, he knew both, he was caught between them, could reach out to either of them.

  Iris stepped inside Paul’s room; she was shaking, a pulse throbbing in her head, a fearful, metallic tingling on her tongue; she had never been as scared as this. But there was only George there, sitting on the bed, his back to her, staring out of the window at the prison-like building across the road.

  Cautiously, she said, ‘Did you speak to him?’

  He stood up, seemed to make an effort to stand up straight, to make a show of not minding that she was still here in this hotel. ‘No, Iris. He wasn’t here. I hardly expected him to be here.’

  ‘Where might he have gone?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve really no idea.’

  She turned to go. ‘I’ve left Bobby alone. I should go to him in case Paul comes back.’

  ‘Iris –’ He exhaled sharply. ‘I’m sorry. What Paul said – you know he wouldn’t have meant it – he’s just so angry … He loves Bobby.’

  ‘Yes, George, I know he loves him. And now I know just how much he hates us too.’

  He stepped towards her. ‘Iris … I have never been rash, never in my life, until these last few days. I don’t know what I’m doing, what to say –’

  He was disclaiming their relationship. She felt as though he had slapped her across the face. Yet she heard herself say stiffly, ‘It’s all right, George. We’ve both been rash. Now, I must get back to my grandson.’

  ‘He isn’t at any risk, Iris, wasn’t at any risk. He was with Paul – he wouldn’t hurt him.’

  ‘No. But he might have taken him. Might still, I think.’

  As she turned to go he said, ‘I’ll stay in this room tonight. If Paul comes back then I’ll ask if they have another room.’

  She nodded. ‘I think that’s for the best.’

  For the best not to make love to him again, ever again; for the best to be alone as Daniel’s wife for the rest of her life, no more intimacy that wasn’t the intimacy of her marriage.

  Half way up the stairs to her room on the next floor, Iris stopped. She thought of her bed at home in the vicarage, how in the darkness Daniel’s hand would go to her breast and how she would turn to him so that they were face to face in the darkness, her nose brushing his as he stroked back her hair. There would be such an intense look in his eyes, so serious, as though desire couldn’t be taken lightly, as though it was too deep inside him even for words. At most he would murmur her name, a whispered word lost in a kiss, his hand moving down her body, slowly and patiently so it seemed that he thought she would stop him, never expecting her to want him as much as he wanted her. Afterwards he would roll away and reach across the bed for her hand, squeezing her fingers lightly, goodnight, he would say. No darling words, there was never any need for words; in a moment he would be asleep, his hand becoming limp in hers, and she would move away from the heat of his body, sleepy too but thinking of the next day, its busyness whirling away before her. Daniel would begin to snore; she would touch his back lightly and he would stop and the bed would creak beneath his weight as he turned over, goodnight repeated as though he was dreaming it, his voice thick with sleep.

  On the hotel stairs, she gripped the banister rail. She closed her eyes and saw Daniel’s face, and it was as though her infidelity had torn a hole inside her, damaging her beyond repair. She gripped the banister and bowed to the pain of it, gasping with shame so that she didn’t hear him, only felt George’s arm around h
er waist, helping her upstairs.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  PAUL FELT HIMSELF BEING shaken awake: they had come for him: he would be taken to the showers where the blood could be washed away more easily, Prison Officer Barker’s hand clamped against his mouth, frog-marching him along, quick with anticipation – perhaps Barker loved him, wanted him urgently, because he could hear a voice close to him saying, ‘Quiet, quiet,’ a loving voice, full of alarm. The voice became calmer, softer, ‘Quiet now. Everything’s all right. Hush … hush, that’s it, that’s it.’ There was a hand on his chest, another on his face; they had come for him: he fought back.

  ‘Paul! Stop now, stop … It’s all right. It’s me, Edmund …’

  Edmund. He stared at him, disorientated; Edmund. He closed his eyes and fell back onto the pillows that were too warm, too creased and sweaty from his dreams. He covered his face with his hands. Edmund; he had witnessed this, too, then: the shouting out, the fighting with apparitions, the bloody idiotic drama of it all. Edmund, who was too young, much too young, his only fault was that he was too young, born too late, lucky boy. Too young to be kneeling over him now, frightened and appalled by his histrionics; too young; what had he been thinking of? Himself, of course.

  ‘Paul?’

  He lowered his hands; covering your face was nothing, if not drama. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why?’ Edmund laughed a little, making Paul ache for him. ‘It’s not something you can help, is it?’

  Paul made to get up but Edmund pushed him down again. ‘Give yourself a moment.’

  Edmund’s hand was on his chest and Paul lifted it away. Despite himself, he held on to his wrist, not wanting to relinquish him yet; he could feel his pulse, strong and steady, perhaps a little too fast. He had held other men’s wrists like this, counting as a life pulsed away despite his frantic reassurances, his hasty tourniquets. Could he not have been calmer and less scared; not a speeded-up, charged-up version of an officer, but considered, careful, calm? And then he could have saved them. He could have, he could have.