I have to go now, Lottie. Do you know what really scares me, more than anything else? The thought that even if I make it through, if it ever ends, there won’t be anything left of the man you loved. How could there possibly be?
I love you. I don’t know what else to say. The sound of those crows exploding from that tree rings in my head, their wings beating the light out of everything.
Yours forever,
Henry
CHAPTER 6
That was the sound at the heart of your grandfather’s silence, Diane. It was his secret, or at least one of them. Who knows what else he carried with him from his war? We all have secrets and the best place for most of them is the grave. Why should we share the many tiny treacheries and deceptions that make up a life? Who would benefit apart from the teller, who might gain some solace from sharing? You’re right, of course. I have caught myself again like a fly in a sticky web of words. Isn’t that what I am doing, after all? Sharing my terrible secrets to make myself feel better?
In this case, I promise you I am not sharing Henry’s secret to make it easier for me to bear. It is too late for that. It was already too late when I found that letter. I just want you to understand how the man who was my father and your grandfather was reshaped by war. Do I secretly hope this will help you understand me? Hand on heart, that is not my aim. Or at least not for this part of the story. What I do want is for you to understand the world as it was then. I believe that is fundamentally important.
As I watch my contemporaries pass on – I cannot in all honesty say friends, not since my dearest Evelyn died last year – I feel like a hoarse-throated oracle with one foot in the grave and still too much to tell. I have a duty to bear witness even though we all swear blindly, blithely, uselessly, falsely, that these things will never happen again. Never again. The most over-used, trite phrase in the English language. We blasted that phrase into oblivion in 1939. If there is another world war, I will not be here but you, my darling, might be and your children, Millie and Jacob, might be. I feel it is my duty to pass on what I know about what happens when we let the dogs of war slip their chains. I worry that the only real deterrent is memory and those of us who bear that crippling burden are dying off. We have a duty, before we go, to tell our tales to those who will carry on, to show the true cost on the human spirit.
I have never been able to write about the Great War or the Second World War in my novels. These conflicts are too personal, too bleak and too incomprehensible to fictionalise. Writing about them would endow them with a kind of reason and logic and I will not, I cannot, do that.
And yet that is the role of the writer, Diane. We sculpt figures from sand. We take human lives in all their fragmentation and we turn them into narratives. We give our transitory flit across this earth structure and, through structure, a false meaning. We turn wars into epics, soldiers into heroes, disasters into destinies. That is the real reason why reading fiction is escapism. It is not that it allows us to break free from the actuality of life – not if you eschew science fiction and fantasy, those tawdry baubles that have never interested me. Fiction allows us to escape the pointlessness, the arbitrary and the random. Writers are the real gods because we are the only ones who can confer sense on the senseless and order on chaos. We are the sole purveyors of immortality but like all the stories we spin, it is a fiction.
When I was a child, Charlotte told me that Sally’s brother had disappeared in the war, whispering the story to me one night. War stories were often whispered. It was as though the whole world had become a church full of traumatised worshippers, fearful of speaking of evil out loud in case that very deed would bring it to life again.
She said the Betts family never discovered Daniel’s Fate. (You see, Diane, I did it there. I described his paltry, degrading death as Fate. I’ve turned it into a destiny. I’ve told a lie, a fiction). They were told he was killed in action, the body never found. He just disappeared.
Sally never married. Like many women at that time, she didn’t find her Prince Charming before the war and afterwards, both men and motivation were lacking. Of course, she had a crush on Henry at first but when she saw how smitten he was with Charlotte, she graciously backed away and I truly believe she never felt jealous. In reality, she fancied the notion of Henry more than the man himself – she was in love with the idea of the brave and bold soldier with the pretty face. Such a slight caprice was not enough to damage her most enduring friendship. And then when Henry came back from the war, he was not the same man. The myth of the hero-soldier had been obliterated, leaving Sally with no one to worship. I have read that marriage rates were already decreasing before the war and that after 1918 the change wasn’t that great. But I am sure those statistics did nothing to comfort Sally.
When I was a child, Sally visited our house regularly. She would turn up around 4pm, before Henry returned from work and sit with Charlotte, drinking tea and eating biscuits. I say drinking tea but there was often a bottle of Gordon’s gin on the table as well. Despite her still-young face, Sally always seemed sad and somehow aged to me. She was alone in the world by then. Her parents had survived the war and their son’s vanishing only to die of Spanish flu in that kick-in-the-teeth year of 1919.
“They got up, had breakfast, said they felt shivery, their skin turned purple and they were dead by supper time,” she told me once, her eyes wide with the unfathomability of it all. I was only six and I shivered at the exquisite horror of it, imagining purple faces and hands. Charlotte’s own parents were also gone by then. Her father died of a heart attack in 1922 and her mother followed just nine months later, ostensibly of pneumonia but Charlotte said it was because she could find nothing good to do in the world once the man she doted on and cared for like a pampered son was gone.
One April day, when I was about 10 years old, I stood at the kitchen door and watched Sally sobbing loudly at the table, her head in her hands, shoulders shaking as though waves were rippling along her spine. Charlotte stretched her hand across the pink-and-white cotton tablecloth to rub Sally’s arm.
“He would have been 30 today, Lottie. Same age as the century. He’s been gone so long but he would only have been 30. Can you believe it? He’d so much living to do. So much growing up. I didn’t even get to see what kind of man he would be,” Sally said, raising her head.
Her brown curls were flattened across her forehead, her eyes were red and her nose was running. I remember I felt a little disgusted by her streaming, snotty face. That is how we are. We are always disgusted by the wrong things.
“He would’ve made a fine man, don’t you think?”
Charlotte nodded, picked up the bottle of gin and poured a generous amount into two glasses.
“We’ll drink to him,” she said. They clinked and raised their glasses “to Daniel”. Charlotte took a genteel sip while Sally gulped the gin but then this wasn’t Charlotte’s first drink of the day. Eyes locked on each other, they didn’t notice me standing near the door. I have always been good at becoming invisible when it suits me. A trick of the trade.
“He’s been dead almost half my life,” Sally said and her voice was a bitter wind through the bare branches of a winter tree. “All day I’ve been thinking, what have I done in that time? I’ve done nothing except bury my parents. I can’t even find a husband. Daniel was so bright, so alive. He would have done something with his life. He would have travelled and made things and seen things. I don’t know but it would’ve amounted to something special. He would have laughed so much and made so many people happy. It’s so unfair.”
Charlotte had both hands wrapped around her glass, holding it tightly just below her lips so that her knuckles gleamed white.
“Don’t think like that, Sally. It doesn’t work that way. You don’t have to justify your life just because you didn’t die. You don’t have to prove your right to exist. That’s what I keep telling Henry. We mustn’t make more of life or death than they merit. All we can do is try to go on happily. We owe the oth
ers that.”
She smiled as she spoke and I could see Sally’s shoulders drop an inch or two as Charlotte’s low voice filled the kitchen with a comfort blanket of sound. Charlotte rarely seemed overwhelmed by anything. As a child, I thought it was because she was my mother and mothers were always calm and measured. I learned the hard way that this is not the case. I now believe her equanimity was a curious by-product of the trauma of that age. She had pushed through pain and fear to the other side and she would never again, and could never again, feel the same degree of terror as she had when Henry was fighting in France. That was why our home was a place of utmost reserve. During the war, the guns roared so loudly that the individual’s voice could barely be heard. When they fell silent, Charlotte and Henry and all the others found their voices again but they used them so very carefully, imbued with new reverence for the delicate fragility of individual speech. But all the words she didn’t say, all the screams she didn’t scream, could be seen in Charlotte’s white knuckles.
“Do you remember, Sally?” Charlotte said now, her eyes illuminated by the sunlight pouring in the window so that she looked like a seer. “Those romances we used to read before the war? The ones where the handsome man always got the pretty girl at the end?”
Sally nodded as she reached into her purse for a clean handkerchief.
“I can’t believe we ever liked them.” Charlotte shook her head. “I feel so stupid now. As though we didn’t understand anything. We were worse than the stupidest girls around. And the thing is we weren’t dunces, we were both smart. But we believed in fairy tales. We should have seen all this coming. Or at least not have thought it was impossible. Why was it so unforeseeable for us? We never believed seriously in the monsters and we took the fairy tales at face value.”
“I don’t think it was just us,” said Sally, sniffing and shaking her head. “No one could have imagined what was going to happen. Look at poor Daniel. He thought the war would be a lark, an adventure. That’s why he was in such a hurry to sign up. He was scared it would be over before he got a chance to fight. He wouldn’t believe the stories coming from France. We all knew it wasn’t going well. You’d have to have been blind and stupid not to, but Daniel wasn’t stupid. He was just… just too young to see beyond the posters. He could have been safe, Charlotte. He slipped out that day in April, signed up and that was it. He didn’t even come home to say goodbye. If he’d waited until he was 18, it would have been over. I sometimes think that’s what really killed my mother. Knowing he could have missed it all. She just didn’t want to live in a world where such an absurdity was possible.”
She took another sip of gin and for a moment, the only sound in the kitchen was the ticking of the Bakelite clock that looked like an old lady with a brown hood round her white face.
“We were fooled by those stupid romances, Lottie, and Daniel was hoodwinked by tall tales of derring-do. He used to read those scouting books and all those stories of adventure in foreign places. He loved Rider Haggard’s novels. There was one in particular, I can’t remember the name, I think it was set in Africa, something about mines. For a while, he used to carry that book around with him, stuffing it in the inside pocket of his jacket. Oh, he did make me laugh but I also thought he was special because not many boys liked to read. Now I wish he’d never learned his letters. He might be here now if he hadn’t believed all that tosh. Pretty words made fools of us all.”
Charlotte sipped her tea and sighed.
“We’re all smarter now, Sally. Fat lot of good it seems to be doing though, knowing what we know and watching what’s happening over there.”
She tilted her head towards the window, towards London and the Channel and the continent where a despot was already hatching plans that would derail our lives again.
The front door clicked. Sally jumped from her chair, pulling her hat onto her head and her purse to her breast, as though my father was the kind of man who would come marching stoutly into the kitchen. I could’ve told her she had time. Henry always stopped to hang his coat in the hall. I’d caught him a few times, immobile beside the coat stand, staring into the mirror as though wondering who was looking back at him. He saw me hovering at the kitchen door and I ran to hug him. Every hug from Henry was what I secretly called a goodbye embrace – tight and desperate, his fingers fluttering like butterflies on my shoulder blades. He never took anything for granted. As we stood there, Sally rushed past me, eyes down, edging past my father and out the door. I remember thinking she could have at least said hello.
At that time, I thought Sally hated my father. It’s a strong word, I know, but that’s how 10-year-olds see the world. I guess it’s how 16-year-olds, like Daniel, do too. Love and hate, black and white, good and evil, war and freedom, death and life. Old men and their complex, grey grudges spark conflicts but the fighting is done by idealistic teenagers. I assumed Sally had grown to hate my father because he survived and Daniel didn’t. I was angry with her for it but even a 10-year-old could understand her pain.
After my parents died and I found Henry’s letter, I had to re-evaluate all my memories. Did I impute feelings to Sally when really it was my father who could not bear to see her? I started to question everything. Did it all really happen as I recalled so unshakably for years? Maybe Sally didn’t rush out of the house that day. Maybe she did say hello. Maybe she even smiled.
I sifted through my memories of other occasions when Henry and Sally were forced to be together – Charlotte’s birthdays, or my birthdays, or the street party we had for the King’s Silver Jubilee. I realised I had rarely seen them speak directly to each other but this distance wasn’t just Sally’s doing. Forcing myself to dig deeper, I remembered seeing my father moving away from Sally at a church fete, inch by deliberate inch so that he ended up on the opposite side of the draughty hall where he stayed, facing the bare stone wall, pretending to read a newspaper. I remembered him turning away from Sally during a dinner at home and deliberately placing himself at the opposite end of tables over the years. Unearthing these memories was like discovering a new dimension that warped the space-time continuum.
One time, we were in our garden, there was bunting and a table of cakes and sweets and it was my 13th birthday. It was one of those soft English summer days, not warm enough for short sleeves but pleasant. What a perfect moniker for this country: a green and pleasant land. I used to think Blake’s faint praise was belittling. I realise the value of pleasant now, having spent most of my life chasing the extreme. I can see how such banality might come to seem like paradise.
It was 1933 and we were drawing close to the end of what we called the post-war era because we had not yet allowed ourselves to accept what was coming. In six years, I would meet Robert and fall in love and war would start again. If the summer of 1914 was my parents’ last hurrah, then the summer of 1933 was mine. I found out later that 1933 was also the year Dachau opened. Even as I sat in our garden, an unspeakable horror was being birthed on the ground of a munitions factory outside a medieval town none of us had yet heard of.
I was sitting on an upturned crate, one of several that Charlotte had covered with pink-and-white fabric left over from when she made our curtains. I was picking at the fibres and thinking how much I hated pink when I looked up and caught my father staring at Sally, who was standing at the food table with my mother. They were ooh-ing and aah-ing over the birthday cake, a three-layer sponge made by a lady down the road. I was behind the table and so I could see my father clearly, though the ladies could not, and he could not see me. The pain and regret in his face hit me like a physical blow. It was so raw, so unfiltered. Suddenly, he lurched forward, just a few steps but with such energy that it seemed as though he was about to rush over to them. I held my breath: at last, I thought, we would know everything that had been going on behind those dark eyes. He was about to break his silence and it would be as satisfying and definitive as the crash of cymbals at the end of an orchestral piece. But suddenly he froze, swaying with the fo
rce of repressed motion, his arms falling to his sides. From behind the table, where Charlotte and Sally were still laughing, I saw the shades come down over Henry’s eyes, like net curtains being tugged shut on nosy neighbours. His face gradually returned to normal and he turned on his heel and headed into the house, shaking his arms out to the sides as though they alone had held him back and were now exhausted and trembling.
What gobsmacks me, Diane, is that for well over a decade I remembered that event, and several others, completely differently. When I used to recall that party, conjuring up the image of Charlotte and Sally laughing at the table, I thought the two friends were somehow excluding my father. In my mind, he hovered on the edge of their laughter, like a dog tied to a stake, unable to move closer. I felt sorry for him and I viewed Sally as an interloper, depriving my father of Charlotte’s attention. It angered me because I knew Henry needed Charlotte’s eyes on him at all times. Her gaze tethered him to the world. But after I read Henry’s letter, when it was too late to forgive those involved, I thought back to that day and I saw my father’s face again and this time my brain gave up its secret. What I had thought was isolation or loneliness or even jealousy was really the most crushing pity and guilt, the kind of despair that should turn a beholder to stone. Maybe that is what happened to my heart, Diane.
And so I conclude that we see what we want to see even when we don’t consciously know what that is. Is there such a thing as a pure memory? I doubt it. And what does that mean for our understanding of history? Is there even such a thing as pure history or is that another illusion that we have created to make sense of the senseless?
The Reckoning Page 6
