by Pat Barker
She was restless under his scrutiny. ‘Perhaps we’d better be going,’ she said.
As he helped her on with her coat, his mouth was only inches away from the nape of her neck, that secret groove she never saw. Careful. They said goodnight to the owner, who managed to raise his drooping eyelids long enough to acknowledge their departure. Paul opened the door and the bell chimed as they stepped out into the night.
The cold air restored a certain formality, though after a few yards of walking along the uneven pavements in virtually total darkness Catherine’s hand came up and nestled in the crook of his arm. He liked that. It was a good feeling to be strolling along beside her, adjusting his stride to hers.
‘Do you mind if we walk for a bit?’ she asked.
‘No, I’d love to.’
It was getting late. The houses in the moonlight seemed insubstantial. Only the moon was real, pouring white acid on to the streets, dissolving cabs, trams, motor cars, offices and shops in its cold stream. Its light seemed to form a brittle crust over the city, like the clear fluid that oozes from a wound. He suggested they should go for a walk on the Heath and she nodded without speaking. Once they’d left the shelter of the buildings behind, the moon emerged in its full murderous magnificence. They stood with their heads back and their mouths slightly open, drinking it in.
‘Makes you wonder about the blackout, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean, if you were up there now in a Zeppelin you’d be able to see absolutely everything.’
Something in her voice made him shiver. He wondered if her father’s death and the prolonged isolation of her life had made her change sides: she’d said she no longer felt British. So perhaps he was walking with the enemy? Oh, what nonsense. Catherine, whom he’d known since she was, what – seventeen, eighteen? The enemy?
They stopped on top of the hill. He’d often visited this spot before the war, looking down on a city laid out before him in all its brilliance. He’d been so full of hope then, of vague, cloudy ambitions: the life he was going to lead, the pictures he was going to paint. He didn’t despise that boy. Of course, he should’ve been at the Slade, hard at work, exposing himself, day by day, to the brutal gap that opens up between aspiration and reality the moment you put brush on canvas; but the dreams are necessary too.
Catherine was silent. She’d taken her hand from his arm and left a small, lonely space there. Trying to pull her back, he said, ‘You know, I used to love coming here, before the war. You could see all the little villages lit up like fireflies.’
Somewhere in the distance whistles began to blow.
‘I hate that noise,’ she said.
‘Me too.’ In the trenches, whistles blowing signalled the start of an attack. ‘Do you remember when the raids first started, there used to be boy scouts with trumpets cycling round the streets?’
‘God, yes, they were funny.’
But her smile faded quickly. Looking up, he saw that a second moon had appeared. So beautiful, so ethereal, it seemed that awful drumming sound must be coming from somewhere else. A second later came the flash and roar of guns. The ground shook. He’d have liked to play the battle-hardened veteran, but couldn’t stop himself flinching. Quickly bringing himself under control, he put an arm round her shoulder. ‘It’s all right,’ he kept saying. ‘It’s all right.’
Her eyes were fixed on the sky. When he tried to draw her into the shelter of the trees, she followed reluctantly, stumbling a little as her feet moved from tarmac to grass. At first, when he tried to hold her, she struggled, but then suddenly relaxed against him. With his back against a tree and Catherine in his arms, Paul looked up at the floating silver oval and prayed: Don’t burn. Don’t burn.
The guns boomed again. She was very strange to him, standing there in the circle of his arms. He remembered the night of the fancy-dress party, the almost serpentine suppleness of her body as they danced, the anonymous, masked face lifted to his.
‘Do you still think that? That they might be your cousins?’
‘Every time.’
‘You must feel … I don’t know, alienated.’
‘But that’s exactly what I am. An alien.’ She flared her eyes at him. ‘The enemy.’
‘But they don’t do much to women, do they?’
‘I can’t go home. Our house is right on the sea front – at least, it used to be – I expect some patriotic citizen’s burnt it down by now. I suppose they think we’d be flashing lights out to sea or something.’
Another crash and recoil of guns. The Zeppelin vanished into a cloud.
‘I think I should get you home.’
He walked her back to her lodgings. She cut through a side street and, a few minutes later, they were standing outside a tall, narrow house, while she scrabbled inside her handbag for the keys. He was a little surprised when she invited him in, but told himself she’d be sharing the flat with another girl. The three of them would soon, no doubt, be drinking cocoa together, the girls giggling and chattering while he fretted and burned. What a strange evening it had been. He’d known her for years and yet, in any meaningful way, they’d only met for the first time tonight. And where was Elinor in all this? He didn’t want to think about that.
‘The other tenants go downstairs when there’s a raid,’ she said, throwing her hat on to a chair. ‘I don’t bother.’
‘I tend not to either.’
He thought of telling her about his landlady, who kept suggesting he should take refuge with her in the understairs cupboard, but decided against it. Catherine had put the kettle on and was taking two cups from a shelf above the sink. The evening had taken an unexpected turn, but the cocoa, at least, was arriving on time.
She handed him a cup, and sat on the other side of the fireplace, slim ankles crossed, skirt pulled well down. Their situation might be unconventional, but her behaviour certainly wasn’t: she might have been entertaining the vicar to tea. A dreadful thought occurred to him: that she was simply indifferent to men. But no, that couldn’t be true. What about Kit Neville? They mightn’t have been lovers, but they’d certainly been very close. At one stage they’d been seen everywhere together. And Neville had head-butted the man who’d insulted her. He could remind her of that, surely?
He was rewarded with one of her slow, curved smiles.
‘That’s Kit for you.’
‘Do you suppose he’s ever heard of the Queensberry Rules?’
‘Oh, I think he might’ve heard of them.’ She shook her head. ‘He’s a strange man.’
That was one way of putting it.
‘Do you know, he always liked me to speak German when –’
Abruptly, she stopped, and blushed. To cover her confusion, he said, quickly, ‘He speaks it himself, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes, quite fluently. That’s one of the reasons he ended up nursing the German wounded – and he was very good at it too, by all accounts, but you can’t get him to talk about it.’
‘No, well, it doesn’t fit with the image of the great war artist, does it?’
God, that was sour. He wasn’t surprised when she didn’t reply.
‘Do you think he does know something about Toby Brooke’s death?’ he asked, after a short silence. ‘And he’s not telling Elinor because he doesn’t want to … I don’t know. Make things worse for her than they already are?’
‘I don’t think I know him well enough to say. He’s changed a lot in the last few years. We all have.’
He put his cup down. ‘I think I’d better be going, I’ve got an early start in the morning.’
She followed him to the door. As he opened it, he turned to face her. ‘Do you think we might go out again sometime? A concert or something. I don’t much like the music hall these days.’
‘No, nor me. A concert would be nice.’
‘Right.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
He couldn’t bring himself to go back to his lodgings, not yet. After dark, his restlessness increased; he didn’t so much walk the streets as
prowl, his senses alert for any sign of life. Even during a raid, there were always some people about. Across the road, in a shop doorway, there were two girls standing close together, huddled up against the cold. Rather bedraggled they looked, in their tawdry finery, and as skinny as a brace of ninepenny rabbits. He imagined what it would be like: their slim fingers swarming all over him, bringing his clay-cold body back to life …
No, definitely not. Though something about the idea of two girls together had always excited him. It was surprising how many of his memories of Elinor involved Catherine as well. He saw them walking round the quad with their arms around each other’s waists, or dancing together on the night of the fancy-dress party. And then there were the letters from Elinor in the first few weeks of the war, describing how she and Catherine, wearing only their nightdresses, had turned cartwheels round and round the lawn. They’d been cartwheeling around his imagination ever since, their white nightdresses falling in bell shapes over their heads, as they continually wheeled and turned. Now there was an image to come between a man and his sleep.
It was having quite a marked effect on him even now. He could hardly believe he was taking Catherine to a concert; she’d agreed to come out with him. Possibly he should have felt slightly awkward about this, but he didn’t. The last night he’d spent with Elinor had been so disastrous that, in a way, it had seemed to free both of them, to mark, not the resumption of their relationship, but its end. Of course, he couldn’t be absolutely certain she felt the same, but he strongly suspected she did.
All the way back to his lodgings, he thought about Catherine. Her alienation attracted him; it seemed to echo his own difficulty in fitting in. There’d been times, recently, when he’d hated London: the hysteria over the Zeppelin raids, the spurious sense of excitement and even glamour that seemed to cling to it all. Catherine’s nationality set her apart from all that, and her isolation drew him to her.
He let himself into the house just as the whistles were blowing the all-clear. His landlady, bright-eyed and sour-faced, emerged from the understairs cupboard where she’d been left to face the might of German air power alone. If this went on, she said, she’d have to think seriously about shutting up the house and going to live with her married sister in Worthing, and then some people, mentioning no names, but some people would have to find themselves somewhere else to live.
Paul disengaged himself as quickly as he could and climbed the stairs to his rooms where he undressed and lay on the bed, exhausted, in pain from the cramping of his leg, and, for the first time since his return to England, full of hope.
Fourteen
By mid-afternoon Paul was too tired to go on working and went outside for a cigarette. The shadows of trees and buildings were already encroaching on the quad; soon it would be time for the men in wheelchairs to be pushed away. They felt the cold badly – in spite of the blankets wrapped round their waists many of them looked grey – but somebody, somewhere, had decreed that fresh air was essential. Perhaps there was a theory that it made amputated limbs sprout? As Paul watched, a group of nurses arrived, greeted their patients with professional good cheer and, laughing and chattering, pushed the wheelchairs through the iron gates into Gower Street, for all the world like nursery maids pushing perambulators round the park.
Tonks had come out of the door and was standing immediately behind Paul. Together they watched the last wheelchair as it moved out of sight.
‘I’m always rather glad when they go,’ Tonks said. ‘At least inside they’ll be warm.’
Paul expected him to say a few brisk words and walk on, as he generally did, but today he lingered.
‘Kit Neville’s back.’
Paul struggled to take it in. ‘Wounded?’
‘Shrapnel injuries to the face.’
How did he know? There’d been nothing in the newspapers. ‘Is he in Queen’s Hospital?’
‘Yes, he was admitted a few days ago. I only found out yesterday.’
‘Is he well enough for visitors?’
‘He doesn’t want to see anybody; well, except his parents, of course. He’ll come round to the idea, but he shouldn’t be rushed. A lot of them don’t want to see people at first.’
‘Well, give him my regards, won’t you? If you do see him.’
Tonks nodded and walked off. No sooner had he turned the corner than Paul thought of half a dozen questions he should have asked, but the news had shaken him: he couldn’t think clearly. Elinor must be told; that was the first thing. And Catherine. He probably ought to tell Catherine the news in person. This wasn’t a difficult decision to reach: he was longing to see her.
The Friday before last they’d gone to the Aeolian Hall to hear a Schubert Octet, almost miraculously beautiful it had seemed with Catherine sitting beside him, and then afterwards they’d gone to Spikings for tea and walked round Piccadilly arm in arm, looking in shop windows and listening to raindrops peppering his umbrella. Its black silk canopy created a world within a world. He had felt totally at peace.
Now there was a crater in the pavement where they’d walked. Low-lying mist had made the Zeppelins miss their targets and they’d unloaded bombs at random. One of them had landed just opposite Swan & Edgar’s, blowing out the windows. Next morning queues of people had been crunching over broken glass, trying to peer into the hole. Why? God knows.
Too restless to wait for the bus, he set off to walk, head down, watching his feet devour the pavement, thinking about Neville. Shrapnel in the face. My God, he’d seen injuries like that. He shrank from trying to imagine Neville’s despair and yet, even now, the old, stupid rivalry surfaced and he caught himself thinking: hmm, he won’t be doing much painting for a while. Immediately, he cringed with self-contempt.
He arrived at Catherine’s lodgings out of breath and doubting whether he should have come at all. He knocked, waited, knocked again, and was just beginning to think she must be out when the door opened and there she was, looking rather flushed and dishevelled, with her hair down and the top three buttons of her blouse undone.
‘Paul.’ She seemed so taken aback that for a moment he thought she wasn’t going to ask him in, but then she stood aside. ‘Come in. Sorry, I was just getting changed …’
‘My fault, I should have …’
‘Is anything wrong?’
‘No, well, yes. Kit Neville’s been wounded. Tonks just told me.’
She took a step back. ‘Is it bad?’
‘Quite bad. He’s in Queen’s Hospital.’
‘Queen’s … That’s facial injuries, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, my God.’ She pushed her hair off her face. ‘You’d better come up.’
He followed her upstairs and into the living room. Two cups lay side by side on the draining board. He sat on the sofa. Catherine stood with her back to the fire, twisting her fingers together, almost wringing her hands. He hadn’t known people actually did that.
‘Has Tonks seen him?’
A door clicked open and Paul turned to see Elinor in her grey silk dressing gown. So she’d come to London and not told him …
Catherine was looking over his head. ‘Kit’s –’
‘I know, I heard. How long’s he been back?’
‘A few days.’
‘So, this wound – it’s not the reason he didn’t write?’
‘No, they ship you back pretty fast if it’s a bad wound. Especially facial injuries because they just don’t have the facilities out there. Everybody goes to Queen’s.’
Belatedly, she came across and kissed him. He felt warm flesh through the thin silk – she must be naked underneath – and her hair smelled of rosemary. It felt awkward, embracing her like that in front of Catherine; he was relieved when she pulled away.
‘I’ve got to see him,’ she said.
‘Tonks says he doesn’t want visitors.’
‘Too bad, I’m going.’
‘Elinor, for God’s sake, he’s got a shrapnel wound in his face.’
‘I don’t give a damn what he’s got, I’m going.’
‘No. You can’t –’
‘Oh, I think you’ll find I can.’
She was pacing up and down the small room as she spoke. At one point she leaned against the sink, only to push herself off it again immediately. She went to the bedroom door; he thought she might be going to shut herself away, but then she turned and came back into the room. At last she came to a halt, standing by the fireplace, chafing her arms under the loose sleeves of her gown.
‘Grief’s bad enough at the best of times,’ she said. ‘But when you don’t know …’ Her voice hardened. ‘I’ve got a right to know.’
‘And Neville’s got a right to privacy. Look, why don’t you leave it a couple of weeks, let him settle in, and then we’ll go together.’
‘No. Now. I owe it to Toby.’
The mere mention of his name produced a paroxysm of grief. Paul could do nothing but hold her close and wait for it to pass. He saw Catherine, who’d been reduced to a bystander in all this, watching them, and sensed her confusion. She was visibly withdrawing from him, as she realized how deeply involved he still was with her friend. He could have howled.
Instead, he went on holding Elinor, rocking her, until at last her sobs subsided into hiccups. Finally, in despair, he caught her face between his two hands and kissed her, lightly, on the forehead. ‘There, there. Come on, now, it’s all right.’
Elinor freed herself. ‘It’s not all right, nothing’s all right. I want to see him.’
Exasperated beyond bearing, Paul went and looked out of the window, leaving the two women to whisper together. A young soldier came staggering along the street, weaving from side to side as if the pavement were the deck of a ship labouring through heavy seas. As he passed the house, he almost overbalanced, clutched at a lamp post and clung to it, his fair, foolish face dazed with drink and shame. Shame, because he’d never intended his precious leave to be anything like this.
