The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  “This feels almost indecent, all this busy, busy life,” Charlotte said as we walked. “As though nothing has changed. I suppose Nature never changes, no matter what we do.”

  “Everything has changed,” I said, chewing a stem of grass as I used to do when I was a child. “We’ve shown we can and will visit total destruction on the world. What we’ve done can never be undone, it can never be unseen. Even if and when the grass eventually grows again in those Japanese cities, even if and when all those bones are cleared in Germany and Poland, what we did will stand unchanged. The permanence here, nature’s permanence, is a chimera. It will only last as long as we let it. I always thought nature would outlast us. I thought that was a given. It seems I was wrong.”

  We had reached our bench. It was at the top of a small hill, facing north towards Wheathampstead. Henry was already sitting on the right-hand side as he had done since I was a child. I took my place between my parents and we looked down at the fields and woods unfurling before us like a textured rug.

  “I never thought I would live in the countryside,” Henry said. “If I ever thought about it, I assumed I’d always be a Londoner. But I suppose I didn’t do that much thinking about the future before the war. The Great War, I mean.”

  “You’re to the manor born now,” I said, patting his knee. “Mr Allotment, with your vegetables and flowers. You must spend more time in Wellington boots than in shoes these days.”

  He smiled with his mouth.

  “I wonder why we make life so hard for ourselves,” he went on. “If you had told me then that I would see the things I’ve seen and that I would survive and build a life with this wonderful woman…” He reached across me to grasp Charlotte’s hand. “ … I wouldn’t have believed you. But then if you’d have said that there was more, that my daughter would have to live through the same and that we would all have to rebuild again, I think I wouldn’t have bothered going through it all in the first place.”

  I felt Charlotte squeeze his hand on my lap. I put both my hands around theirs. We sat in silence for a few moments, looking across the bleached fields as though we might decipher some answers in the patterns of the dried stalks, if only we looked hard enough.

  “I thought nothing could be worse than the Great War,” Henry said. “What we did to each other, what we let each other do, what we inflicted on ourselves and on the land, on the earth. It was unthinkable. And then it wasn’t.”

  I sneaked a look. His face was weary but his voice carried a note of surprise that was heartbreakingly fresh and young. He seemed somewhat perplexed to find himself speaking, bemused by his new need to give voice to thoughts long muted. It was as though the end of this second war had finally broken the spell that kept him silent all these years. After all, it had been proven definitively that not speaking of evil yielded no dividends.

  “After the Great War, we reshaped our sense of ourselves with what we’d learned and we were frightened of what we’d become but we thought that was it. We couldn’t be any worse, and in any case, it would never happen again. But now we see there was another level.”

  He turned to us and his face was raw. I fought the urge to turn away. I had seen the same flayed look on Robert’s face when he woke, screaming and panting, from his nightmares.

  “I’ve seen the reports from the camps in Germany and Poland; I’ve seen the pictures. Everyone has now. What really scares me is that we still ask, how this could happen? I remember thinking the same thing when I was running across no man’s land and watching men fall all around me, cut to bits, screaming, bleeding and dying in the most horrible ways. I thought, how could this happen? How could it happen to us? So I have to ask myself now, where does this all end? How much savagery can we bear? How much savagery can we commit? The lampshades made of human skin, the living skeletons, the teeth, the bloody horror of it all, the sheer enormity.”

  He stopped as though he was finding it hard to breathe. He pulled his cigarette pack from his breast pocket, lit up with trembling hands and then offered the pack to me. Charlotte disapproved and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her lips tighten but I lit one anyway. Surely, there could be no place for etiquette or niceties after what we had seen. Of course, horror is soon forgotten and these things always sneak back.

  Henry spoke again.

  “Everyone says ‘never again, never again’. But when something like this happens, and if the world doesn’t end, then it happens again. Because each time we chip away at our humanity and you can’t stick those pieces back. If we don’t say ‘stop’ at the time, we can’t say ‘never again’ because the next time it will be even harder to say ‘stop’.”

  Henry was right, of course. Look what we have done since 1945, Diane. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, just to name a few. War is like a bushfire. You stamp it out again and again but when your back is turned, it flares into life. Maybe, as a species, we are destined to be at war. Maybe peace is the anomaly. I wish I could dream up a better theory but my poor imagination can only do so much. There is only so much evidence one can deny.

  A few weeks later, I was walking down St Peter’s Street, heading into town to buy some flour and eggs for Charlotte, who wanted to make a cake. It was raining heavily but I stopped at the war memorial as I usually did to read a few more of the 600-plus names of those who died in the Great War. It had become something of a ritual, a way to acknowledge those who had to die so that we could live. I usually sat on one of the benches in the memorial garden, but, because it was wet, I stood under my umbrella, gazing up at the Portland stone cross. I was not keen on the religious symbol – I found it distasteful in its evocation of more cruelty – but I had made my peace with it, deciding to focus on its decorative qualities, the eternal circle linking the four branches.

  I had reached the Gs. Garment, Gates, Gathard, Gazeley. I mouthed the names silently. It was the closest I ever came to praying. I wondered where they would carve the names of the new dead. Could the architect have imagined more space would be needed? The plinth was full but there was more stone around the base. So maybe he had come to the same conclusion as Henry.

  I got to the end of the Gs and as I turned to leave, I saw a man walking stoop-shouldered up the path on the other side of the road. He was wearing an ill-fitting brown suit, a Fedora sat low on his brow and he carried a large duffel bag. It was his strange halting gait that caught my attention. He walked fast and then slow, as though he was in two minds about where he was going. He passed by and it was only when I saw him from behind that I realised it was Robert. It was the stretch of his back and the length of his legs and the swell of desire and delight and despair that sent me dashing across the street, shouting his name. He stopped and turned just in time for me to throw myself into his chest, holding onto his shoulders as my discarded umbrella twirled like a child’s spinning top on the rain-slicked path.

  “Are you here? Is it you?” I sobbed.

  I had waited so long for this moment that would mark the end and the beginning and all I felt as I clung onto him was the most incredible sorrow. I could not stop crying. I held his face in my cold hands and stared at eyes that seemed darker, cheeks that were hollow, the new lines around his mouth, the undamaged whole that was the same and yet so different. He kissed me hard, pulled my hands away and buried his face in my neck.

  “It’s over,” he said, breathing heavily. “It is really, finally over, my darling.”

  I think we both knew even then that he was lying.

  CHAPTER 16

  We got married in December at the town hall in St Albans. It was a blustery day and I wore the same dress Charlotte had worn to marry Henry. It was a drop-waist, shift-style affair made of silk and lace. I dyed it turquoise. Robert always liked me in blue. He said it made me look like a mermaid. Charlotte and I joked that the dress was our ‘war’s-over-let’s-wed’ gown. There were few flowers to be had but Henry went to Nomansland at the crack of dawn and came back with a spiky bouquet of holly, ferns, rose hip branches
and two hardy dog roses. Robert wore the same brown suit he had come home in with a sprig of holly in his buttonhole.

  We tried so hard to wring every last drop of joy out of the day. That we succeeded at all was down to Evelyn, with her smutty jokes and indecent laugh, and our other witness, a soldier friend of Robert’s whose wide-cheeked, ruddy face and stocky body led me to assume that he was a man of the soil, a farmhand who mucked out stables and rubbed down horses, perhaps. Age had made me no better at judging the book by its cover. I got Douglas Bennington as wrong as I had Robert the first time we met. He was landed gentry and had travelled from the family’s estate near Bedford for our wedding. Robert had told me very little about him, beyond insisting that I would love him, so I did not know what to expect when he strode up to us as we huddled awkwardly on the steps in front of the town hall.

  “Douglas Bennington,” he said, shaking my hand firmly. “So you’re the one that got Robert through the war. On behalf of all of us, thank you. You got him through and he got us through. We knew he was untouchable for a reason. And it certainly wasn’t on his own merit.”

  He gave Robert a hug, thumping him vigorously on the back.

  “Congratulations, old boy. You deserve this. Once more into battle, eh?”

  When he had been introduced to my somewhat over-whelmed parents, Douglas clapped his hands briskly and said: “Well, we’re not getting any younger out here. What say we go in and do what clearly has to be done?”

  After the short ceremony, and before heading off to celebrate in a squat pub hunkered in a corner of Verulamium Park, the photographer made us pose in front of the Cathedral’s giant West Door despite our protestations.

  “We’re not believers,” I said hotly.

  “Not believers in what?” he said, rushing over to me and gently edging me closer to Robert. “Beauty? Because that’s what this is. A beautiful wooden door. Nothing more and nothing less. Now smile, darling!”

  I’ve enclosed that photo with this letter, Diane. I would like you to have it so please don’t reject it. We made a good-looking couple, didn’t we? I like the photo even though it is a little blurry because we are smiling at each other. There is a natural quality to it, unlike most wedding snaps. The fact that it is ever so slightly out of focus reflects the way I felt that day. It was all so unreal. A whimsy as flimsy as my blue dress. My affair with Penrose still hung over me like cloud. I could not believe I deserved this happiness. Even with Robert back in St Albans, in my arms, I was still terrified there would be a price to pay. Not to say I feared anything as crass as a tearful confession or rage-filled discovery. Penrose was dead and whatever we had together had died with him. No, I dreaded some kind of oblique retribution, a punishment that would creep up on me, on us, when I least expected it. I wish I had been wrong.

  Everyone cheered when we entered the pub and the landlord gave us our first drinks on the house. I got delightfully drunk, not just on the ale but on the sheer relief of having got through the day. Douglas regaled us with war stories – the acceptable kind: all joking Tommies, stubborn and foolish commanders and lucky escapes. Robert smiled and drank and nodded happily and even sang a ribald soldier’s song that had the pub cheering and Charlotte blushing. He held my hand as we sat together and it would have been as perfect as one could expect in 1945 were it not for how hard he squeezed my fingers. It was a desperate grip and so I tightened my own hand on his, placing my thumb on the throbbing pulse in his wrist. Every beat rang like an explosion.

  “Are you alright?” I whispered.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” he said. “It feels like a dream. I think I’m afraid I’ll wake up and you’ll all be gone and I’ll be back there.”

  He bent to kiss my hand. I pinched his arm.

  “See, it’s definitely not a dream. We are here. This is happening,” I said firmly, as much for myself as for Robert. “We just need to hold on to each other. Then there will be no danger of waking up somewhere else, alone.”

  Later, I went to sit by Evelyn, who was sipping her vodka-and-orange and smoking with the languor of a femme fatale.

  “You look happy,” I said.

  “I am happy. Or at least not sad. That’s it, today I am not sad and that’s as good as being happy,” she said, smiling broadly and then shaking her head.

  “Bugger, sorry. It’s your wedding day. You’re marrying the love of your life. I’m ecstatic, of course. So sorry, my darling. I’ve been a little down recently.”

  “Do you miss it?” I asked.

  “The ATS? No. A little. Oh Lord, maybe a lot. I just don’t know what to do with myself now. I went to London the other day and I walked from the Strand to the East End, down to the Thames and back again to the Mall. It broke my heart, Lina. Everything torn up and smashed. Puddles and ripped cables and blasted homes. I hadn’t realised how bad it was. When I was in the battery, I didn’t see the damage much. It was all about getting the plane in our sights and calculating the numbers. We cheered when we got one but deep down we must have known it was just one. We must have known the others got through but we tried not to think about it. You know I went into Hull once, in 1943. It made me so sad I didn’t go again. I couldn’t bear it. To see what happened when we missed. If you thought about it, you’d never hit another plane. You’d be too paralysed with nerves.”

  She sighed and dragged on her cigarette. Her big green eyes were moist but she blinked ferociously until they were clear again.

  “I suppose I’ll have to try to find work as a secretary now. They’ll still want women to type up their letters. The men won’t do that no matter how much unemployment there is. It just feels like such a comedown. I miss the excitement and I miss feeling useful. It’s a terrible thing to say when so many died, but that’s the truth. What about you? What will you do, Lina?”

  “I have no plans,” I said, realising with a jolt that this was the brutal truth. I had not thought beyond getting Robert back. It might seem ridiculous today when we school our children to imagine their future careers from the earliest age, but we hadn’t even discussed jobs or how we would earn a living. I suppose we thought we had earned our living already. We were still staying with my parents, still struggling to repair the rips the war had torn in our lives. That was enough for the time being.

  “I suppose we’ll look for our own house,” I said. “Robert has money from his mother. She left him her home but he doesn’t want us to live there. He’s happy to stay around here where at least we have some family. I imagine he could get work in a law firm. Maybe he could even finish his studies somehow. I don’t know, Evelyn. It makes me tired just thinking about it. It seems too much to ask us to start again.”

  Evelyn had a funny look on her face. Amused, almost indulgent. Somewhere in my fuzzy head, I realised how insensitive I was being, moaning about my future life with the man I loved. What casual cruelty. In our post-war world, you had to be careful not to be too happy, too cheerful or too hopeful. But you also had to avoid being too sad, too ungrateful or too surly. There was always a worse story. There was so much pain and anguish in the air; it was as though we had to learn how to breathe again, in and out, very carefully.

  “What about you, Evelyn? Will you be settling down? Surely, some of those men in the mixed batteries must have fancied you?”

  “Oh my darling girl, you are so delightfully naïve,” Evelyn said and her indecent laugh made heads turn in our direction. “Of course, I did have admirers but… how can I put this without shocking you? I am not exclusively interested in men and to be honest, I lost my heart to a woman when I was up there.”

  I took a deep slug of my beer.

  “Don’t look so horrified, Lina. I’m bisexual, not a Nazi. It’s perfectly acceptable now, or if it’s not it jolly well should be. As if our sexuality could matter after everything that’s happened.”

  She shook her head but I knew her too well. Her ostentatious defiance was as much to silence her own doubts and her own fears.


  “I don’t know what to say,” I said, slurring a little. “Is it congratulations?”

  Evelyn guffawed.

  “Maybe, just maybe it bloody well is,” she said. “And before you ask, Robert has nothing to fear. You’re like a sister to me, Lina. If the war aphrodisia didn’t send us rushing into bed together, then trust me nothing will. No, I fell for a girl, a tough, bird-like Mancunian called Sandra. I think I wrote to you about her, about how I pulled her bed into the yard one time? Well, she got me back for that, with bells on. She only stole my bra and hoisted it onto a flagpole in the yard. God knows how she got it up there because I had to get a whole team of airmen to get it down. She thought she was the bee’s knees after that. We worked as a pair for months, operating the height-and-range finder. So many nights shivering, trying to stay warm as we waited for the sirens. Then one night she was asked to work the searchlights because the girl who usually did it was sick. Bloody food poisoning and no wonder given the gloop they served us in the NAAFI. Sandra said yes, even though everyone knew that the searchlight teams were the most vulnerable. The whole job was designed to give away their position. Anyway, I saw the plane come in. It was a Messerschmitt and it was escorting the bombers. I knew it would fire on Sandra’s lights but there was nothing I could do. I tried to get a reading for it so the girl beside me could calculate the range and then we could pass it on to the gunners but there wasn’t enough time. The plane strafed Sandra’s little trench and the light went out. A sprinkling of sparks and gone. Just like snuffing out a candle. I actually saw the pilot; he came so low. He didn’t look like much. Just a black helmet, buggy goggles and a mouth that was fixed and hard and, I thought, cruel. I suppose all pilots, whichever side they are on, look cruel if you’re looking up at them from the ground. Sandra was killed by a piece of metal that sheared off the lamp. It cut her throat, clean from side to side. I don’t think she would’ve felt much pain. But who knows. She died alone. I was the first to reach her and she’d already gone. She didn’t look anguished or anything, thank God. Just a little surprised. As if she’d been caught out by a prank that she knew was going to get her into trouble.”