by Pat Barker
‘Paul,’ Catherine said.
He turned to face them. They were sitting on the sofa, their arms and legs so entwined it was difficult to see which limb belonged to which girl. There was something accusing in their joint stare. His fantasy was rapidly turning into a nightmare.
‘She’s going to see him, Paul. Whatever you say. Wouldn’t it be better if you went with her?’
‘Why don’t you go?’
‘Because he wouldn’t want to see me. I’m the last person … But he might want to see you. You’re a soldier – he knows you won’t be shocked. I just think it’d be easier, that’s all. Easier for him.’
This was defeat, and he knew it. Turning to Elinor he said, ‘When do you want to go?’
‘Now.’
‘Don’t be silly, it’s far too late.’
‘Tomorrow, then. First thing.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll see you at Charing Cross Station at ten o’clock. I don’t know what time the trains go, but they’re quite frequent, so I don’t suppose we’ll have long to wait.’
He didn’t want to stay after that. They both came to the front door to see him off. He walked away from them, conscious of his limp, feeling them all the time behind him, watching, though when, eventually, he turned round, they’d gone inside and the door was shut.
Next morning, the train journey to Sidcup passed in almost total silence. Elinor gazed out of the window; Paul pretended to read. It seemed they were no longer even friends.
On Sidcup Station, a pretty young girl came up to Paul, holding her hand out, begging for cigarettes. When he gave her a packet of Woodbines, she said, ‘Gawd bless yer, guv,’ and bobbed a curtsy, before running back to her mother, a tall, angular woman with an imposing bosom, floor-length skirts and a wide-brimmed hat. She was one of three smartly dressed society ladies standing behind a trestle table collecting for the wounded soldiers at Queen’s Hospital. The young girl was managing to dart flirtatious glances at Paul behind her mother’s back.
Elinor looked exasperated. ‘If you’ve finished …’
‘Shall we get the tram?’ Paul said. ‘The porter said there’s one goes straight past the gates.’
‘No, let’s walk.’
He didn’t think she was up to it, but he was too tired to argue. At Charing Cross he’d exhausted his patience in a last-minute attempt to persuade her not to come at all. This unannounced visit to Neville was, at best, ill-judged; at worst, unfeeling, even cruel, but Paul was committed to seeing it through. So let her walk, if she wanted to. He didn’t care.
The road took them through the village and out into open country. Blue-painted benches were set at regular intervals along the grass verges. Hospital blue. Evidently the colour was intended as a warning: Don’t look this way, if you don’t want to see horrors. On one of these benches a soldier was sitting, wearing the red necktie and blue uniform of patients in military hospitals. Twenty yards or so ahead of Paul and Elinor, a dumpy little woman with a shopping bag was dragging a small child along by the hand. As soon as she saw the soldier the woman crossed, very obviously, to the other side of the road, but not all her care could prevent the child staring at the strange man on the bench. He smiled; the child screamed. Her mother bent down to smack the backs of her legs, and then yanked her – crying inconsolably – away. The soldier got stiffly to his feet and strode off down the road, back to the hospital grounds where he knew he would be safe.
The whole ugly little incident had taken no more than a minute, but it confirmed Paul in his view that they should not be here.
The hospital was approached by a long avenue of beech trees. Their dead leaves lay on the grass, reddish-brown, smelling pungently of decay. As a boy, he’d have been down on his knees scuffling through handfuls of mulch in search of stag beetles. Now, he limped soberly along, escorting a young lady, though they kept straggling apart, and not merely because of the uneven ground.
After a few minutes, the house came into view: a huge, mid-Victorian building with Italianate towers and turrets and a covering of ivy leaves that stirred as a breeze blew across the lawn. The front garden was set with beds of roses, many of the bushes still with lolling, loose-lipped blooms clinging to the stems. A solitary bee toppled from flower to flower.
Elinor was walking more slowly now. He suspected she was beginning to realize they might simply be turned away. He hoped they would. There was no sound except for their footsteps crunching over the beech mast in the drive. The silence was almost uncanny: it didn’t seem like a hospital at all. Only when they had opened the front door and stepped inside did they hear the sounds of a busy office: typewriters clattering, telephones ringing, the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on black-and-white tiles. A bowl of roses stood on a table by the door, much as it would have done when this was a private house, but the smell of boiled cabbage would not have been tolerated in any well-run home. It smelled like a boys’ school.
A secretary wearing a mannish tweed suit and rimless spectacles strode up to them. Paul explained their business.
‘Visiting’s Mondays at seven in the evening and Thursdays at two in the afternoon.’
‘We’ve come a long way,’ Elinor said.
The woman looked at her. ‘I’ll have to ask.’
She was gone some time, returning eventually with a nurse who rustled and crackled and asked about their relationship to Mr Neville, and when Paul admitted they were merely friends – close friends, Elinor put in – seemed equally unsure.
‘I’ll ask him if he wants to see you,’ she said. ‘Meanwhile you’d better wait in here.’
She opened a door into what might well have been a dentist’s waiting room. A round table covered with copies of Punch occupied the centre of the room. Elinor retreated to an armchair in the far corner; Paul went across to the window and looked out over the rear of the house. Once, all this land must have been set to lawns; now it was covered in row after row of huts. Some had narrow flower beds planted round them, but nothing could soften the brutal reality of raw, hastily erected wooden buildings crammed together in a waste of mud and trampled grass.
At the centre of the grid stood a black-and-white timbered building with a curious octagonal roof, designed, he supposed, to let in the maximum amount of light. As he watched, the doors of this building opened and a trolley emerged, pushed by a porter, with a nurse walking alongside, trying to steady some kind of apparatus that covered the patient’s nose and mouth. The trolley was wheeled rapidly along the covered path and through the doors of the next hut along. The journey had taken less than a minute.
Paul heard the creak of the door opening behind him. When he turned round, he saw that a man, not immediately recognizable as Neville, had come into the room.
‘Tarrant. This is a surprise.’
Something wrong about the voice; something terribly wrong. Pulling himself together, Paul went across and shook hands. ‘Sorry to hear about the …’ He was thinking: Don’t look away. Don’t stare.
‘Oh, there’s a lot worse than this. And let’s face it, Tarrant, I was always an ugly bugger. Your profile – now that would be a loss to mankind.’
His speech was very difficult to follow.
‘Sorry, I know I sound a bit odd. Like farting in soapy water, I’m afraid.’
Paul realized Neville didn’t know Elinor was there. She’d got to her feet and was standing motionless, arms hanging limp by her sides. Neville followed the direction of Paul’s gaze and took an involuntary step back.
Elinor came towards him. ‘Hello, Kit.’
She stretched out her hand. Neville took it as one might grasp a dead and decomposing fish. Then he retreated to an armchair as far away from her as possible and, even then, turned it a little to one side so the wing would cast a shadow over his face.
They sat down, their chairs forming an approximate triangle, and tried to think of things to say. Paul, who knew he had to take the lead, asked about Neville’s treatment.
‘They seem fairly optimistic. Gillies says a
lot of damage was done by the surgery I had before I got here. You’re meant to come straight here but I ended up in the wrong hospital and they just stitched the edges together – so, apparently, the first thing is to undo all that. Gillies says it might look a bit worse, initially.’
Neville said this almost apologetically, as if well aware of their incredulity. Could anything be worse?
‘Odd chap, looks a bit like a bloodhound. New Zealander. He calls the patients “honey” and “my dear” and sits on the beds. God knows what the army make of him, but he’s supposed to be the best there is.’
Paul forced himself to ask about the food.
‘Not bad, actually, not bad at all. The hospital’s got its own farm so we get fresh milk, eggs … A lot of the chaps can’t eat solid food, so it’s eggnog, soup … Well, that’s it really. Food’s not as good for the men as it is for officers, of course.’ The red ruin turned in Paul’s direction. ‘Apparently, their delicate systems require more nourishment than ours.’
‘Is that a dig at me?’
‘My dear chap. Wouldn’t dream of it. You’re a temporary gentleman, I’m a temporary non-gentleman. That’s just the way it goes.’
Paul could feel Elinor itching to ask about Toby’s death, but she waited until there was a natural pause in the conversation and then handled it really rather well. No reproach for Neville’s not having written, no suspicion, just a dignified expression of her desire for more information.
‘I think it would help my parents to know a bit more,’ she said. ‘I know it would help me.’
Neville’s expression was unreadable, but then all his expressions were unreadable.
‘Nothing to tell, I’m afraid. Direct hit. His death was instantaneous, completely painless. He was a brave man, a wonderful doctor, everybody who came into contact with him admired and respected him.’ He might have been reading from a script. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’
‘Did you see him die?’
A fractional hesitation? ‘No.’
Elinor quite clearly didn’t believe him – and, rather to his surprise, neither did Paul. He couldn’t think of anything further to say. After a few minutes of strained silence, Elinor stood up. ‘Do you know, I think I might have a walk round the garden.’
‘Are you all right?’ Paul said.
‘Fine, I just need a bit of fresh air. Anyway. I’m sure you two have lots to catch up on.’ She shook hands again with Neville, not looking at him, and turned to Paul. ‘I’ll be outside when you’re ready.’
After she’d gone, Paul said, ‘Sorry about this, we shouldn’t have come.’
‘So why did you?’
‘Because I couldn’t stop her coming, and I thought it would be worse if I wasn’t here.’
Neville shrugged. ‘Well, it’s done now. I suppose I have Tonks to thank?’
‘Not really, no, he told me you were here, but he made it perfectly clear you didn’t want visitors. It’s my fault, I should’ve stood up to her.’
‘You were never good at that.’
Paul was still inclined to hope that Neville might speak more freely – and more honestly – now Elinor was gone. If there was anything more to say about Toby’s death, Neville would tell a man rather than a woman, a serving soldier rather than a civilian – a relative least of all. But instead, he began to talk about old times, before the war, before the trauma. He talked about the years immediately after he left the Slade, his discovery of Futurism, the excitement of scraping away the dead layers of the past. And he talked about girls, the models at the Slade whom he’d painted because he had to, and slept with because he wanted to. He had an old man’s hunger for the past. Paul joined in easily enough, though he knew he’d have to raise the subject of Toby’s death again before he left. He owed Elinor that, at least.
At last, Neville’s stream of reminiscences seemed to be trickling to an end. Paul sat gazing into the fire, waiting for the right moment. He was tired; he hadn’t slept very well last night. Once or twice he caught Neville looking sideways at him; he was expecting the question. All right …
‘Is there anything else to say about Brooke?’
‘Nothing it would do her the slightest good to know.’
‘You could tell me.’
‘No, I couldn’t, you’ll tell her. Oh, I know you’ll say you won’t, but you would, you couldn’t help yourself. She’d have it out of you in no time.’
‘So there is something?’
‘You know the rules as well as I do. What happens out there stays out there.’ He stood up. ‘Along with my fucking nose.’
Clearly, the conversation was over. Paul had no choice but to get to his feet and accompany Neville to the door.
With his hand on the knob, Neville turned. ‘Will you come again?’
‘If you want me to.’
‘It’s up to you. No, I’d like to see you.’
He actually managed to make the admission sound hostile. The old Neville was still there, very much intact behind the shattered face, biting every hand that presumed to feed him.
‘I’ll come next week,’ Paul said. ‘Meanwhile, if there’s anything you want, just let me know.’
Neville nodded, tapped him briskly on the shoulder, and was gone.
Fifteen
When the door clicked shut behind Elinor, she stood for a moment listening, but no sound reached her from the room beyond. The door was solid oak. This house had belonged – perhaps still belonged – to a wealthy man. It would have been commandeered ‘for the duration’ – or perhaps he’d volunteered to move out. Either way, he was going to get it back in very poor condition. Scratch marks, made by hundreds of heavy boots, had ruined the parquet floors.
Elinor’s thoughts were skittering about like bugs on the surface of a pond while her real feelings lurked in the depths somewhere, out of reach. She looked around: she’d lost all sense of where the main entrance was.
A man with one eye came up to her. ‘Can I help you?’
The other eye was a moist slit with a few sparse eyelashes clinging feebly to the lid.
‘No, thanks, I’m fine.’
She pretended she had somewhere to get to and walked off, head down, away from him. She could feel him watching her with his one eye, and started to walk faster. A turning led into a dark passage; she was afraid she might have blundered into the kitchen area, but no, the passage opened out again on to a wider corridor. She knew she had to give Paul plenty of time to make Kit talk, so she would just go wherever this corridor took her. God, she’d have liked to shake the truth out of Kit, but it wouldn’t have worked. If she’d tried to put pressure on him he’d only have clammed up more. He wasn’t going to tell her anything.
She was walking head down when a near-collision with somebody in a blue uniform forced her to look up. The corridor, almost empty when she set off, had become crowded with people all moving in the same direction: some nurses, but mainly patients. Faces loomed up in front of her, all kinds of faces; the bodies in their garish uniforms hardly registered. Men with no eyes were being led along by men with no mouths; there was even one man with no jaw, his whole face shelving steeply away into his neck. Men, like Kit, with no noses and horribly twisted faces. And others – the ones she couldn’t understand at all – with pink tubes sprouting out of their wounds and terrible cringing eyes looking out over the top of it all. Brueghel; and worse than Brueghel, because they were real.
She had to get away. She scaled along the wall, quickening her pace as the crowd began to thin. By the time the last of them had gone by she was almost running, and not looking where she was going until her nose came into violent contact with a man’s chest. Slowly, she raised her eyes, braced for God knows what horrors, and found herself looking at Henry Tonks.
‘Miss Brooke. Good heavens.’
Her mouth opened but no sound came out.
‘You don’t look at all well. Come along, let’s see if we can find you a cup of tea.’
Still unable
to speak, she fell into step beside him.
‘You must be visiting Mr Neville,’ Tonks said, pleasantly, as he unlocked a door.
‘Yes, that’s right. Paul Tarrant’s still with him. I fancied a breath of fresh air.’
Even that little lie made her feel uncomfortable. This was a place for truth.
Tonks ushered her into a large room that contained a desk, two chairs and a filing cabinet. There was a screened-off recess to her right. The part of the room she could see resembled a doctor’s surgery, except that at the far end, underneath the tall windows, there was an easel and a table covered with drawing pads, pens and ink and pastels. Directly underneath the window was a stool, presumably for the patient since it had been placed where the full, shadowless glare of northern light would fall directly on the face.
‘I’ll see about the tea. Have a seat.’
He went out; she could hear his voice in the room across the corridor requesting a pot of tea and two slices of that rather nice fruit cake, do you think we could manage that? A woman’s voice replied; and then a man’s voice – not Tonks – and, finally, a rumble of conversation. Clearly, Tonks had got embroiled in hospital business.
Elinor went across to the table and looked at a pen-and-ink drawing of a patient with a gaping hole in his cheek. Presumably, Tonks’s medical drawings would be done in pen and ink – ironic, really, since he’d never made any secret of how much he hated that medium. In fact, he’d described it to her once as the least forgiving medium an artist could work in, calculated to expose every flaw in draughtsmanship. Yet she’d have recognized this as Tonks’s work from the purity of the line alone.
She wondered what lay behind the screen; probably a washbasin, something like that. But when she looked behind it she saw, instead, a whole wall full of portraits of men with hideously disfigured faces. One of them, the man with no jaw, she recognized from the corridor. Individually, each portrait would have been remarkable; displayed together like this, row upon row, they were overwhelming. She took her time, pausing in front of first one portrait, then another. Were they portraits, or were they medical illustrations? Portraits celebrate the identity of the sitter. Everything – the clothes they’ve chosen to wear, the background, the objects on a table by the chair – leads the eye back to the face. And the face is the person. Here, in these portraits, the wound was central. She found her gaze shifting continuously between torn flesh and splintered bone and the eyes of the man who had to suffer it. There was no point of rest; no pleasure in the exploration of a unique individual. Instead you were left with a question: How can any human being endure this?
