Banishing Verona Page 11

  Both the church and the vicarage had been built by the parishioners. To compensate for the pitiful salary, they had chosen a beautiful situation on top of a small hill with a view thirty miles down the valley; to the north the bare hills rose toward the Scottish border. During my childhood I explored most of this wild countryside, as far as I could walk in a day, often in the company of one of my father’s private pupils. The most memorable of these was a Tibetan prince whom we called Tiger. How Tiger made his way from a palace in Lhasa to the Lake District, I never understood. He had skin the colour of our local honey and eyelashes so long that my mother claimed to envy them; he wore scarlet robes. I taught him to swim, to tie knots, and to recognise birds. In exchange he taught me the courtesies of his language, how to start a fire without matches, how to walk through a flock of sheep so quietly they didn’t pause in their grazing. He lived with us for nearly two years. A year after he returned to Tibet a letter brought the news that his throat had been cut in a palace uprising.

  I had never seen my mother so upset. “I don’t understand,” she kept saying. “A boy who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Why would anyone want to kill him?”

  The part about the flies was literal. I shared a room with Tiger, and all summer long he ushered the bluebottles out of the open window rather than letting me swat them. As for my mother’s question, we were all about to start asking variations of that.

  I attended the local grammar school and in 1916 did what most boys my age were doing: enlisted. That was my real education, the war and the men in my company. Many of them could barely read or write, and I became their scribe. You can imagine these soldiers in their twenties, a few in their thirties, writing to their wives and sweethearts and mothers, courtesy of an eighteen-year-old brat. There was one corporal, Ralph, whose letters were so dull I couldn’t stand it. Dear Eliza, he would dictate. How are you? I hope your cold is better. I am still all right. Thank you for the socks. Love, Ralph.

  After the first few, I gave him the advice I’d given my father. He squirmed and said he was rotten at that kind of thing but if I had suggestions, go ahead. So I cut loose, wrote about the countryside, the food, the Romanesque churches. We weren’t allowed to comment on the war. The next letter from Eliza had a postscript. Forgive me for remarking, but the last letter didn’t sound like Ralph. Keep up the good work. It was signed JS.

  Of course, Eliza too was using an intermediary. From then on, JS and I continued to embellish the letters and to include postscripts to each other. After a couple of months I asked if I could write to her separately. The reply contained an extra page: Dear Jigger, I’d be glad to correspond. I live down the street from Eliza and I’m going to be eighteen this summer, so if the war keeps up, I’ll be joining you in France soon.

  I was too embarrassed to admit that I’d been seeking female company. Odd what the imagination can do. I’d turned JS into a lovely young woman who shared my interests in nature and books. All those things were true, except the gender. When I asked Ralph if I could check something in one of the letters (he kept them under his pillow) and reread them, I realised that there had never been a hint of femininity. I had invented everything, out of loneliness.

  But embarrassment had its rewards. Next time I was home on leave, JS took the train from Streatham into Charing Cross and we met at a tearoom. I have no feelings that way, but he was one of the most beautiful boys I’ve ever laid eyes on, slender, upright with a bright, open face. In the street, both women and men turned to look at him. At first our conversation was awkward and stilted. He asked about my journey; I mentioned a concert I’d attended; he said something about a novel. Then he asked about France. “I can’t imagine”—his voice fell to a whisper—“killing a man. Maybe in the dark, maybe with my eyes closed, but if I can see a man’s face—”

  I drank my tea and thought of the scenes I’d witnessed, and of some I’d taken part in. I couldn’t imagine them either. After the first month in France I had decided not to keep count of anything. “You could become a conscientious objector,” I told him.

  His face reddened as if I’d slapped him. “I don’t have the guts,” he said. “When you see how they’re treated … . And my parents, they dread me going, I’m an only child, but my staying would shame them past bearing. Everyone on our street has gone.”

  I wanted to protest—they’d rather see you dead or maimed than have the neighbours gossip?—but my parents would have failed the same test. Winter after winter my mother cautioned me to dress warmly and not to venture onto the frozen lakes; in summer similar rules applied to swimming and the farmer’s old mare. But when I came home to announce that I’d enlisted, she flourished a pair of needles and said she was already knitting me a scarf to take to France. “What about driving an ambulance?” I suggested.

  JS’s face brightened and he said he’d investigate. Then he reached into his satchel and shyly handed me a brown paper parcel: Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. On the flyleaf he had written: For Jigger, with admiration and affection. In the hope of many years of friendship.

  “I hope you like it,” he said, smiling earnestly.

  For an odd moment I felt like crying.

  Now here’s the funny part of the story. JS did join an ambulance team and came to France. Our paths crossed several times, and each time he was more altered. No one could have survived over there the way he was, quivering like a blade of grass with every passing word, but JS changed out of all recognition. My recommendation had been meant to spare him; I had had no idea of the terrible choices he would face. Once when we met, he’d just lost a dozen wounded men because the pipe they’d led from the exhaust through the van to heat it had leaked. “But if we hadn’t done that,” he said, “ninety percent of them would have died of cold and shock. Hobson’s choice.”

  I told him about Albert, a man in my company who had shot himself in the foot. “Cleaning my gun, sir,” he had said, when I asked how it happened. His eyes were blue as the sky above Lake Windermere. “Bad luck,” I said. The official line on self-inflicted injuries, Blighty wounds as they were called, was severe. Unofficially I couldn’t help admire a man who would hurt himself in order to get sent home. Several hours later, I watched the stretcher bearers carry Albert away down the trench, the first stage of his long journey.

  “And then last week,” I said to JS, “a letter came from his widow.” The foot had turned septic and he had died in the local hospital. She was beside herself. He had been determined to go home not out of cowardice but because he’d got it into his head that she was carrying on with a local blacksmith. I never looked at another man, she wrote, but nothing I said made a difference. Something or someone had poisoned his thoughts about me.

  A year earlier, even six months, JS would have cried out against the waste, the irony. Now he drummed his fingers on the table. “At least she can get cracking with the blacksmith,” he said.

  “Why do you stay?” I asked.

  “Because (a) I’m not about to shoot myself in the foot and (b) what would I do at home? Read the obituaries in The Times? Dig for victory?” Then he looked me full in the face, which was something he hadn’t done in months. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he said.

  “Tell you what?” I said, though I’d been waiting for the question ever since he came over.

  “What it was like here. What we were like here.”

  Our combined ages—he was eighteen, I was nearly twenty—were less than half my present age. We were talking by candlelight in my dugout while the rain fell outside, and our talk was treason, or close to it. The rather good merlot in our glasses had been given to JS by a farmer in exchange for splinting his son’s wrist. I started to stammer out an apology, and he laughed.

  “Don’t,” he said. “You couldn’t have told me, even if you’d tried. You know it’s two years, almost to the day, since Edith Cavell was shot. One of the men in my corps worked in her hospital in Brussels.”

  He raised his glass. “To Edith, who didn’t change.” He t
ipped his head back and drank until the glass was empty. “Did I mention the farmer’s daughter,” he said, “as sweet a piece of crumpet as ever I squeezed? She made such a racket, I had to put my hand over her mouth.” He winked, and I turned away.

  Two years later I was in my room at Clare College, Cambridge, struggling with a translation of Pliny, when the porter brought a rather grubby envelope to my door. Ralph, bless his heart, had found someone to write to me. Three days earlier, JS’s body had washed up at low tide in the Thames. “His dad says he slipped, but down the pub the word is he jumped from the Battersea Bridge. His pockets were full of stones.”

  After the war the two of us had grown even farther apart. I was living the snug life of an undergraduate—one of my father’s parishioners, who had lost a son at Ypres, was paying for my studies—and JS was drifting round London, trying his hand at journalism. Our occasional meetings, usually in a drab pub near his current digs, were a disappointment, I think, to both of us. Eventually, as he moved from one rented room to another, we fell out of touch.

  But those wretched evenings in some smoky room, those weren’t what I thought of when I read Ralph’s letter. Instead, I recalled the tender openhearted boy who had bought me a book of poetry and begged me to save him. And then I remembered his remark about the farmer’s daughter. Perhaps, unbeknown to himself, JS had left behind a son or daughter with the same bright, curious gaze.

  The week after Armistice I met a man who changed my life. The regiment had a couple of days’ leave in Paris while they organised transport. The weather was seasonal, cold and damp, and there wasn’t much to do except go to cafés and try to keep warm. One drizzly afternoon a friend and I found ourselves sitting at a table with two men from another regiment. My pal and the older of the two discovered a liking for dominoes; I fell into conversation with the other. “Charles Howatson,” he said. He proffered a bottle of Calvados and began to talk about how he’d been trying to find someone to rent him a bicycle so he could visit Versailles. “It seems daft to be this close and not see the Hall of Mirrors.”

  A few minutes earlier, when I first laid eyes on Charles’s pudgy red face, I had thought, now here’s a dim bulb. For years afterward, I was to have the pleasure of watching other people make the same mistake. Sometimes Charles encouraged them; he was canny about the advantage his unprepossessing looks gave him. He kept talking about how the war had changed everything, how people wouldn’t be content any longer to work and die in their own little villages. “They know the world is larger,” he claimed. “They want to see it.”

  “Not me,” I said. “I’ve had enough travel to last a lifetime.”

  “That’ll pass,” he told me, and we wrangled, amicably, back and forth. Shortly before dark he said, “Come on. There’s something you have to see.”

  Outside, dusk was falling and streetlights were sparse, but Charles led the way confidently from one square to the next until we reached an imposing set of stairs. At the top he pushed open a huge door. In the vast gloom I gradually distinguished the trains lined up at the platforms, like slumbering behemoths. Charles had brought me to the Gare de Lyon. On the far side a single engine let out a sonorous whistle; a burst of steam floated up to the vaulted ceiling. He led us over to the engine and called up, asking permission to climb aboard. I can still remember stepping into that cabin. For years I had been living with mud and cold, smells I couldn’t or wouldn’t identify. Suddenly I was warm and dry and the air smelled of nothing more sinister than the stoker’s coffee and engine oil. My French was still absurdly bad but Charles was fluent. As a boy, he’d spent holidays in Brittany. While he pelted the men with questions, the driver kindly gave me his seat. I rested my hands on the wheel, pretending to drive.

  The next thing I knew, someone was tugging my sleeve. Monsieur, monsieur. Il faut partir.

  Still half asleep, I stood on the platform watching the engine pull out of the station. Even in my dazed state I could feel Charles beside me, observing every detail of the train’s departure. These iron maidens were the love of his life. On the steps of the station, looking out into the misty streets, he rocked back on his heels and said, “What are you going to do when you get home?”

  “I’m going to Cambridge to study mathematics.” I had a piercing vision of a future in which I would sit in lectures, carry a clean handkerchief, wear a gown at dinner. My biggest fear would be missing the curfew.

  Charles didn’t seem to hear my answer. “You know what I think we should do? Take over my pater’s railway.”

  “I have forty-one pounds in my bank account,” I said, exaggerating only slightly.

  But Charles, it turned out, had a little more, or his father did, and he absolutely meant that offhand remark uttered at dusk on the steps of the Gare de Lyon. I won’t go into the financial details, but after we’d graduated from university we ended up owning a hundred and fifty miles of track and half a dozen stations. We survived the general strike, the stock market crash, and the Second World War, and lost everything when railways were nationalised by the Labour Government, for which we both voted, in 1945.

  Seven years after I came down from Cambridge, I married a fair-haired Welshwoman called Irene Talbott. Mutual friends introduced us at a matinee of The Importance of Being Earnest. At dinner afterward she did a very passable imitation of Lady Bracknell, and later, when the bill came, she attempted to pay her share. Her parents were both dead, she told me; she lived in lodgings and worked in a dress shop. I was intrigued by her wit and her independence. Eight months after the matinee, I proposed, and four months after that we got married. For reasons that made perfect sense at the time, I did not take her to meet my parents until the eve of the wedding, when we caught the train to Kendal. A taxi dropped us off at the vicarage shortly before dinner. I hadn’t been home since Christmas, and the roses by the door were in bloom.

  “What a lovely spot,” said Irene.

  Inside was roast duck and trifle and my mother in top form. She stood at the head of the table, pretending to teach Sunday school. “Now, children, who can tell me why the servant with the single talent was punished? That’s right, Tabitha. Darned if I know.”

  Over the port she sang the music hall song that, before she met my father, she had planned to use at auditions. “I gave up everything for him,” she said, producing a handkerchief and dabbing at her eyes. “I never could resist a man in a dog collar.”

  “Nor I a woman of the stage,” said my father. The three of us laughed beneath Irene’s watchful gaze.

  We retired shortly afterward with remarks about the big day ahead, but upstairs in my old room I felt too restless for sleep. I sat by the window, having a last cigarette, and thought about the afternoon Tiger and I had climbed the hill curiously known as the High Street. We were almost at the summit when he beckoned me over. A few yards away, balanced on a ledge, was an untidy bundle of sticks containing three good-sized chicks. As we crouched behind a rock watching them, a whirring came from overhead. A peregrine falcon was hovering so close that its wing-beats lifted our hair. We froze, not knowing if the chicks were progeny or prey. The answer came a second later when the bird swooped down and bent to feed them.

  As we crept away, I saw that Tiger’s cheeks were wet with tears. I knew better than to ask the cause. He led us up the final pitch, an almost sheer rock face, at breakneck speed. I had noticed before that, when he forgot my limitations, Tiger climbed as if he weren’t subject to gravity.

  Left to my own devices, I would probably have begun next to think about JS. All my ghosts were out that night, crying stop, wait, don’t do it. But just as I was finishing my cigarette there was a knock at my door. I went to open it, expecting Irene. “Edmund,” said my mother, slipping past me, “I have to talk to you.” She had not used my baptismal name in over a decade.

  Standing there in her white nightdress, her hands clasped before her, she made her speech. “You think Irene’s like me, all jokes and silliness. The thing is, Jig, I’m not reall
y like that. I knew that marrying me would ruin Henry’s career and that we’d have to scramble to make ends meet. There hasn’t been an hour since I walked down the aisle when making him happy and running a pleasant household hasn’t been my main preoccupation. But Irene is different. Underneath the giggling, she’s shell-shocked. There’s some bad history there: maybe a dead fiancé or two. She’ll be fine for a while. Then she’ll go to pieces, mark my words.”

  Her earlier joking gone, she was utterly serious. As for me, I would have given almost anything not to be getting married. But such is the contrariness of human nature that, as soon as my mother began to speak, I knew I couldn’t back out. “Mother,” I whispered—we were both aware of Irene in the next room—“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. You’ve barely met Irene. Of course you make her nervous. There’s no way I’m going to jilt her at the altar, just because you have a bee in your bonnet.”

  I turned back to the window. I could argue with my mother until the cows came home, but I could not contradict her. A couple of months ago I had begun to notice how reticent Irene was about her past. I’d been talking about the Christmas before I met her, when I’d gone skiing with Charles and his wife. “What did you do?” I asked.

  “Oh, I can’t remember,” she said. “Did you get us a reservation at Cox’s?”

  We must, during our courtship, have had hundreds of similar exchanges, but for some reason this one irked me. “It’s only a year and a half ago,” I said. “Surely you know what you were doing.”