“I try to think as little as possible,” I said in the too-bright voice I had adopted for the new me. “Thinking doesn’t change anything. It’s not going to bring them back and you just end up going round and round in circles. To my mind, thinking is terribly overrated.”
He laughed and I realised I’d rarely heard him laugh during all the time I worked with him. It was a surprisingly robust sound.
“So if you are not thinking, what are you doing these days?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s not ideal but I haven’t found anything that suits yet. I have a high threshold, I guess.”
“You were always good at writing. Maybe you could come and work for us. I could put in a word.”
I looked at him over my teacup. I had despised this man and I had always thought the feeling was mutual. Apart from his fondness for my breasts, obviously.
“I thought you had a rather low opinion of working women?” I said.
He laughed again.
“I thought a lot of things before the war. I was wrong about almost as many. I thought the world would change when we won, that peace would be the answer. But look at us now. Our allies are our enemies. The world is more fractured than ever and our dead are still dead.”
I gawped. I had never heard him speak like this. He took a sip of tea.
“You know, we all kept ourselves to ourselves at the Ministry. Keep it under your hat and all that. But the real reason we stayed mum, I think now, was that no one wanted to spread pain. Everyone was hurting. Why add to what others were feeling with your own tragedy? My brother was killed in 1941. Twenty-six years old. Eight years younger than me and fit as a fiddle. He held that over me – the fact that his lungs were stronger than mine. I was always sick, always wheezing. He said I was a weakling. I said his healthy lungs just made him louder not smarter. I don’t know why they decided my lungs made me unfit for the military. After all, they’re not going to stop the bullets or bombs, strong lungs, are they? After Jim’s death, I hated everyone. Especially myself and everyone else who was huddled here when they were all over there, fighting our battles. I thought we were all cowards. I knew I was. Because my brother was right all along. He was smarter, faster and braver. When he died, I thought it should’ve been me. Who’d miss me? He was married, had a little boy, two years old. They killed the wrong brother.”
I didn’t say anything. By 1948, we had already used up all our words of sympathy.
“I’m not the same man now as I was at the Ministry, Lina. How’s that for a statement of the obvious. You could put it on a poster.”
He smiled.
“None of us are the same. So you needn’t worry that I’ll bellow at you like I used to if you come to the Gazette. At least, say you’ll think about it?”
I didn’t need to think about it. I knew I couldn’t go on partying forever. The oblivion was too ephemeral. I needed something stronger to take me out of myself. Work might be just the ticket. Apart from my facility with words, I also liked the idea of continuing in my grandfather’s footsteps along the route that Charlotte briefly trod during her war.
“I will. I have. I think it’s a great idea. I need a job and I do like writing, as you say,” I said, feeling a shiver of excitement despite myself.
“We could go to the office now if you like? Meet a few people?” Peterson said eagerly, waving to the waitress for the bill. “I can’t promise you anything but I’m sure you’ll charm the socks off them all.”
I held up my hand.
“Not looking like this, I won’t. I haven’t been home yet, I stink of alcohol and I must look a state. No. Give me your number and I’ll call you tomorrow. If I meet anyone now, they’ll have me cleaning toilets or making tea and I warn you, I have no interest in that kind of work.”
I started at the Gazette two weeks later. At first I covered London society, producing frothy pieces about parties and engagements, fashion and weddings. But as you can imagine, Diane, I swiftly tired of this and started pushing for more exciting beats. I began to court the foreign editor, Thomas McNeish, a razor-sharp, unflappable Scot with a sad look that made him seem older than his 35 years. I pestered him so much that eventually, whenever I sidled up to him, he would shake his head sadly and mouth ‘No’ before I could even get a word out. We soon had a well-rehearsed double-act where I would ask him to send me abroad and he would retort that I had to prove my worth first. Then he would suggest a mind-numbingly boring story about city council politics or repairs to the damaged and decrepit sewers that he felt should be covered. I would do whatever he suggested with my eye on the prize because deep down I knew that I could never be truly free while I stayed in England. I had to get out.
You probably think I was already much too free, having given you up and buggered off to London. It is true, to a point. But no matter how hard I worked, or how much I drank, or how many men I slept with, or what little thinking I did, I could not escape my memories, not in 1940s England where bombed-out buildings, broken pavements and piles of rubble were lurking like women with prams around every corner, in case we dared forget.
Try to put yourself in my shoes, darling. I had already done the hardest part. I had given you up. This agonising sacrifice would prove pointless if I did not take the next step and break free of my physical limits too. I worried that if I did not leave, I might eventually want you back. And even if I could get you back, how would I ever explain what I had done, to you or to anyone? What I had done could not be undone. It must not be undone.
One autumn day in 1949, I brought Thomas a cup of tea with my usual side of entreaties.
“Tea, Thomas? Any chance of a post abroad?”
I was already holding out the cup, anticipating his usual reply: “Just give me the tea, Lina.”
But he pulled off his glasses, cocked his head to one side and said: “What about Paris? Would you go to France for us, Lina?”
Three months later, I was on the international sleeper train as it pulled out of Victoria station and rumbled its way through a London made soft and shapeless by thick mist. For one sentimental moment, I let myself wonder where you might be; I imagined a cheeky three-year-old with flushed cheeks being tucked into bed. You would sleep quickly because for you nothing was changing this night. You would not know your mother was leaving. You would not know that another chapter was closing. I let self-pity wash over me, knowing full well I had no right to this emotion but unable to stop the tears.
This then was the conclusion to our story. The story that Robert had promised would never end that day on the Felixstowe pier. As the train picked up speed, the houses flashed by and the smoke sped backwards and I felt all of my life falling away in a blur of bricks and fences, poky gardens, small hopes and smaller dreams. I was shedding my skin, but it is not as painless as one might hope, Diane.
CHAPTER 20
I fell over today on my way to post my latest letter to you, Diane. It was not a serious fall – grazed knees and gravel-pocked hands – but it shook me nonetheless. I’ve shrunk a little since I hit 70, or maybe it is just the curvature of my spine, the result of spending most of my life hunched over a typewriter. My new proximity to the ground has not, however, lessened my fear of falling. It’s never how far you fall but how hard.
I had taken my usual short-cut through the park when my feet seemed to stumble over each other and the next thing I knew, I was sprawled on the ground, peering bat-like at my glasses, which had fallen off and lay on the path a few inches from my face. I lay there for a few seconds, trying to catch my breath, that breath that seems more elusive and precious each day. I hauled myself up and then a neon-clad woman came bouncing past and stopped to ask if I was all right. I said yes, appalled by my quavering voice and the tears that were welling in my eyes. I felt horribly exposed, like an old lady with her slip showing beneath a frumpy A-line skirt. Everything about the flushed, vibrant woman in front of me, jogging on the spot even as she spoke, emphasised my frailty. I could no more imagin
e exercising to prolong my life than I could imagine saving for a rainy day. The rain is falling on me already. I tried to tell her I was on my way to the post office but I couldn’t remember the French for ‘to go’. She smiled sympathetically and said, in heavily accented English, “You are visiting? A tourist?”
I nodded mutely, still trying to dredge up the wayward verb from wherever it had gone. How ridiculous, I thought. I speak excellent French. Maybe the fall had shaken me more than I thought. But we can’t always believe our own lies and mine are becoming less convincing by the day.
The young lady helped me to a bench and then sped off, hair like a pendulum ticking down her life despite her efforts to outrun its heartless swing.
Generally, I relish my twice-weekly walks to the post office. I go early when the bronzed denizens of beach and bar are still safely snoozing in their borrowed beds. I am not jealous of their vitality, but some days I can’t see the beauty for its transience and I find that heartbreaking.
It is an established truth that you become invisible as you age, especially if you are a woman, but less well known is the fact that sometimes one craves that invisibility. We may seem grumpy, dotty and out-of-touch but we have not lost all our faculties. We recognise our irrelevance but it can still hurt to see the truth revealed so brutally in eyes that look right through our shrinking, shrivelling selves. Sometimes, it’s easier to just avoid those eyes.
I post my letters to you on Wednesdays and Fridays. That is why the Wednesday missives are heavier. I spend most of the weekend at the typewriter but if I’m honest, I waste a lot of that time staring into space. This epistolary effort has brought all my people to life again and sometimes they are too real to be confined to the page. What I write here is just the tip of the memory iceberg, Diane. There is so much more below the waterline and it demands my attention before I can focus on what I want you to see above the surface. I must relive it all before I can choose what to recreate. It is exhausting but this is what I have always done and there is a comfort in the familiarity of the task. Who knows how long these frozen monoliths of memory will survive?
I cannot lie, Diane; I enjoyed my years in Paris. I found I could reinvent myself wholly. Everything was different – the food, the landscape, the people and the language. I had learned French at school and I worked hard to improve it when I arrived, taking lessons from a slit-eyed, elderly lady who would hiss angrily whenever I failed to meet her exacting standards. I made friends and lied to them about my past. Or rather I told them nothing, maintaining an impenetrable air of mystery that was, I liked to believe, both bewildering and beguiling. I was appalled and delighted at how easy it was to create who I wanted to be using just words. It was another step along the road that eventually led me to fiction.
Paris in the early 50s was a city riven by poverty and angst: it thrilled and repulsed me. I wandered along the Seine for hours, marvelling at intact churches and monuments. My wide-eyed appreciation sat side-by-side with revulsion at the price the French had paid, although I could understand the drive to preserve such beauty. We had cheered news of the French Résistance from London and now I found the physical evidence of the flip side of that bravery – collaboration – hard to bear. And yet, the truth is, as always, more complex – apparently in 1944, Hitler gave the order to destroy Paris but General Von Choltitz had fallen in love with the city and could not comply. Paris was saved, in the end, not just because some French collaborated, but simply because it was too beautiful to destroy. I can only imagine how this tainted beauty made Parisians feel. Perhaps they didn’t notice, particularly those who had never walked, mouths agape, down London’s bombed-out streets. Maybe Parisians could not see the shadow of capitulation flitting across their city’s undamaged façades, but we Londoners could not ignore it.
Despite all of this, it was uplifting and invigorating to live in a city that bore so few scars. Especially for one who was trying to erase all traces of her own wounds. I threw myself into my work, determined to excel. What had started as a means to get through endless days grew into a fervent ambition to succeed. Survivor’s guilt? Perhaps I felt my life had been spared from the cataclysm of war because I was destined to ‘do something great’. I doubt if I formulated the thought as concretely or as cheesily as that but I cannot be sure such feelings were not spurring me on. Going deeper, this idea might have been all the stronger because my survival was such a calculated act: I felt duty-bound to make my life count. I could not simply wait for my destiny to be revealed. If I had played God once, then I must continue in the role I had chosen.
It was an exciting time to be a journalist and exhilarating to be a woman in this field. We were still relatively few in number and during my first months in Paris, I stuck mostly to relatively anodyne social and cultural stories – the Gazette’s editor still struggled to believe that women could understand, much less write about, politics or economics. But our voices were growing in authority and soon I submitted my first articles on France’s efforts to spur greater European economic integration, the fledgling nationalist movement in Algeria and Communist protests. I must have done something right because nobody ever questioned my gradually expanding remit despite the fact that I never shied from proclaiming my opinions in my articles. I have never had much time for what Martha Gellhorn called ‘that objectivity shit’. I could not separate my feelings from my journalism and so I quickly established a reputation as a so-called passionate reporter. It was not entirely positive as a description but it was better than hysterical or, heaven forfend, emotional.
For years, women’s emotions were used as yet another reason not to employ us as journalists but by the 1950s, passion and enthusiasm were no longer seen exclusively as negative qualities. Journalism was changing. I was, for once, in the right place at the right time.
In June 1950, war broke out on the Korean peninsula and by July, the US was involved and Britain was sending troops as part of a UN force. I badgered Thomas McNeish to let me go. He was, at first, agog at my temerity, if such a calm man could ever be described as ‘agog’. His tone certainly tightened a notch or two, the equivalent of a raging tantrum in a lesser man.
“I sent you to Paris, Lina. I’ve put your stories on the news pages. I’ve let you write about pretty much whatever pleases you. And you’re still not happy?”
“I don’t think that’s the right question,” I hollered down the crackling phone line. “Am I good? If not, you’re doing me a rotten favour by letting me work for the Gazette and you should be ashamed of yourself. If I am, send me to Korea.”
“It’s an ugly conflict, Lina. No place for a woman,” he said.
“Thomas, are you really saying that to me? I lived through the Blitz, you silly man. I think I can cope with an ugly conflict, don’t you? Or do you think we women were somewhere else during the war? Kept safe in pretty gilded boxes tucked away in rose-covered bowers, were we?”
“Now you are being ridiculous, Lina. That was utterly different. You were not on the frontline. You were not reporting. You’d be deliberately looking for trouble if you went to Korea. And anyway, reporting on a war is different from living a war. I’m just not sure you’d be able for it,” he said.
“You’re too late with that logic, Thomas. Women have been reporting from frontlines since the last century. Don’t make me list them. You won’t be able to pay the phone bill if I do!”
In fact, I had to make several phone calls and even travel to London to stalk poor McNeish in person and speak directly to the newspaper’s owners – a pair of whiskered men in their 60s who allowed me into the meeting but were only prepared to hear McNeish speak. My efforts paid off. In August 1950, I arrived in Korea to bear my witness to what was in effect the first hot salvo of the Cold War.
Incredibly, the Korean conflict has almost been forgotten today. It became a mere footnote to the televised, mythologised war in Vietnam. It was as though a line had been drawn through time and Korea was placed indisputably in the past, while Vietn
am became the symbol of a more complex, morally dubious modern warfare. But for those of us who were there, the Korean War looked like a stepping-stone to another global conflict, a direct link between the horrors of the recent past and a potentially devastating future conflagration. Coming just five years after the end of the Second World War, we genuinely feared that this could be the next one. It was hard not to see a direct line when they were even using the same comedians, people like Bob Hope, to entertain the US troops as they had done during the Second World War. And our old preacher-politician Churchill was back, rhetoric unleashed, to warn again that the stakes were high. “Once again,” he intoned, “America and Britain find themselves associated in a noble cause. When bad men combine, good must associate.” You can see why we were nervous, Diane.
As more and more countries were drawn in – albeit under the banner of the UN – we prayed that reason would prevail and the war would stay on that little spit of land far from our still-traumatised homes. We knew that for many leaders this was the red line across which Communism could not pass. They saw the war as a battle for the souls of the future, for a way of life. That absolutism, that existential angst reminded me of the 1930s and that is partly why I had to go. I could not bear to sit in Europe, waiting and worrying. I needed to see with my own eyes whether the end to the last war would really start the next global conflict. We had made that mistake with the vengeful Treaty of Versailles. We made it again with the division of Korea. We even risked repeating our greatest mistake – there were whispers from very early on that the US might be driven to use an atomic bomb in Korea. Some say Clement Atlee talked Truman down. In any case, it created a feverish atmosphere for those of us for whom the past was still all too present. Truman was one of us, for sure.
The Reckoning Page 21
