Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘you haven’t really told me anything about this research of yours. Just that it’s something to do with Dante.’
‘Blood,’ she said.
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘It’s about blood, how blood is used in
The Divine Comedy
. What it means.’
‘What it means?’
She nodded, but I wasn’t really listening to her reply, because two other thoughts had hurried into my mind.
The first was this: blood. Of course it would be blood.
And the second made clear something that had been nagging at me ever since Marian had sat down with me that evening. That she looked paler than the day I had met her. Much, much paler.
Chapter 11
Almost as soon as I boarded my flight home, a few bald thoughts hit me, the main one being this: what on earth was I doing?
I’d flown to Paris with dreams of a glittering career in medicine; I’d come home feeling decidedly jaded about academia, and having invited the friend of a man I suspected to be a murderer to visit me, but the trouble was that I wasn’t sure about anything. It was true that I had begun to doubt what I had seen in Saint-Germain, both on my present trip, and even in
1944
. If that sounds odd, believe only that I have often pondered the nature of memory; the way in which we can distort our memories over time, so that as the years pass something is exaggerated, added to, subtracted from, or otherwise twisted to the point where it no longer has much basis in reality. Sometimes, perhaps, these changes are not significant, but at other times a whole memory can be effectively destroyed, reduced to nothing – or created from nothing.
And as time passes, the mind can play various tricks. I once had a memory, for example, of something that I was sure had happened in my childhood: of falling from an apple tree and my father catching me. Years later, my mother told me it was a dream I’d reported having at the age of six; that it had never actually happened. Yet I still remember telling it to my friend Donald when we were undergrads as though it were the historical truth, because somehow in my mind it had become just that.
I wondered if I had done something like that with my encounter in the hole in the ground, but then there had been the blood, the blood on the ground when I went back for a second look. I could still smell it if I closed my eyes, and sense its warmth.
Still, it was too late by then. Marian had my phone number and we had arranged a tentative date for her arrival. To meet the
great
Hunter Wilson.
Hunter himself guffawed at that when I phoned him the evening I got back, but said he’d be delighted to help if he could, and at the very least he had a recipe for pork belly that he was keen to try out on me.
Though it had been cold and wet in Paris, Cambridge was, as so often, a couple of degrees colder than anywhere else, and I shivered as I climbed into bed, wondering when spring would come.
I dreamt.
In my dream, it was dark, or at least, I was not supposed to be seeing anything much, at first mostly just hearing something. I was in a small warm space, I knew that, and I was somehow hovering near, very near, the naked body of a woman.
I was excited. So was she, for she was softly moaning, her head tilted back, hanging over something, her lips apart as small cries of pleasure escaped; gentle, high cries of pleasure.
She seemed dreamy, unaware, as if drugged, high on some opiate, hallucinating perhaps, or maybe just her senses dulled.
The dream continued, and now sight began to play a bigger role. Her cries increased in volume and in frequency, she began to arch her back, her mouth opened wider, and her eyes scrunched up tight. Her long hair flowed wildly back from her head, as if blown by the wind. Her moans began to come in small, heaving gasps; I could feel her breath on my face, and I pulled away from her a little more.
And then I saw the truth.
The moans were not cries of pleasure.
She was in pain, in torment. There was a knife sticking out of her stomach, from which blood flowed and flowed. She was softly crying in terrible pain, from the knife, and from the man who was forcing himself into her, again and again.
I woke, screaming, and knew that I’d been dreaming of the girl in the bunker being tormented by that terrible figure, that man, that beast. And that I was the beast.
Chapter 12
Immediately upon waking, I knew what the dream meant. It meant that I felt guilty, that by doing nothing when the woman might still have had a chance, I had as good as killed her myself.
It took a long time for the horror of that dream to pass off, several days in fact, during which my mind was not really on my work and every night I feared I might have the same dream.
I went to see Hunter one evening, late.
I scurried from Caius over the cobbles of Green Street to Sidney, through the ever-present cold Cambridge wind, and, nodding at the night porter who knew me by sight if not by name, I wound my way up to Hunter’s rooms and knocked on the heavy door.
It swung open. He stood within, and as he often did roared a greeting at me as hearty as any prodigal son could ever have had.
‘Charles!’
‘The great Hunter Wilson, I presume?’
He pretended to shut the door in my face.
‘Not today, thank you. I gave a statement to the press yesterday . . .’
I barged my way in then and after some small chit-chat, we took chairs either side of his little fireplace, in which a small pile of coal was burning brightly.
‘That’s welcome. I haven’t been warm in months, it seems. I should be used to this place by now.’
Hunter poured some whisky and handed the glass to me.
‘I’ve been here a fair bit longer than you,’ he said, raising his glass, ‘and I’m still not used to it. You know they say the monks chose Cambridge for their new university because of the cold. They thought a warm climate was distracting to the concentration.’
‘Is that true?’
‘That’s the story. It’s still true, for want of a better word, isn’t it?’
I wondered what he meant for a moment, but was used to such things from Hunter. I knew what he was saying; that it didn’t really matter if the story was just a story, because it still had the truth in it.
It reminded me of what I’d come to talk about, and I must have suddenly looked serious, because Hunter sat deeper in his chair. He was a big man, not fat, just tall and broad, and his age had done nothing to change that. He had lots of hair still, all white now, though when I’d met him as a boy it had been a dark grey-brown. He fought regularly to try and stop it looking crazy, when what it actually needed was a trip to the barber in All Saints Passage.
He considered me for a while, judging my mood.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Ah! Go on then, tell me.’
I swilled the whisky round in my glass.
‘There’s something I never told you,’ I began.
‘I knew it!’ he cried. ‘You’re queer! No? A communist? No? Wait, I have it, you’re actually a woman! Yes?’
‘Hunter, stop it,’ I said, though I smiled. I never knew how someone his age had managed to stay so boyish. It was what I liked best about him, but I wanted him to listen to me seriously.
Bless him, he did.
‘In the war . . .’ I tried again to focus my thoughts. ‘I didn’t tell you much about the war, but not because I was trying to hide anything from you, or anyone. It just seemed better when it was over to move forward and get on with other things.’
He nodded.
‘But there is one thing I was hiding. Not just from you, but from everyone. Something I saw in Paris.’
Hunter, though he frequently played the fool, was the smartest man I had ever known. He was already making connections.
‘You never told me you were in Paris in the war. I thought the French and the Yanks liberated it . . .’
‘They did. Our CO took us for some leave, just after the liberation.’
I could see he was amazed by this. He raised a finger.
‘And you have just returned from Paris and now your mood is bad and you’ve come here to drink whisky late at night. What happened?’
That was what I’d come for, the Hunter who cared, who made it easy to talk, to discuss things.
‘I saw something. Someone, rather. It was . . . a coincidence, I suppose. That’s all. I was in a restaurant in Saint-Germain—’
‘Lovely. I know it well.’
‘No, not Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Saint-Germain-en-Laye. To the west of Paris itself. It’s a suburb on a bluff that looks over the city. I went there one day. I’d had a really bad morning at the conference. I wanted to clear my head, I wanted . . .’
‘You wanted to go back somewhere, I think.’
I nodded.
‘Yes. I wanted to go back, I don’t really know why, to the place where I saw something in
1944
.’
‘Which was?’
So I told him the whole story, of the Major and his Venus, of M Dronne, of the bunker and what I’d seen there. And then I told him about my recent trip, and about the margrave and about Marian. When I’d finished, I was very tired and it was very late. I’d drunk too much whisky and I felt on the verge of tears, but I didn’t want to cry, and especially not in front of Hunter.
He listened without comment as I spoke, and nodded slowly when I’d finished. It was a relief just that he seemed to take me seriously, that he believed what I was saying, because I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.
For once, he didn’t have much to say.
‘I was lucky not to have to fight,’ he said, quietly. ‘And you, you tried to help people, but you still saw more than anyone’s fair share of suffering, I suppose. Don’t punish yourself for that.’
I didn’t answer, but smiled to show I was grateful to him.
‘You know, Charles, I’ve known you since you were a boy. A very bright boy, but a dreaming boy too. And now you are on the verge of being a brilliant doctor. But I wonder whether you are still too much of a fantasist to be a very good scientist.’
‘Maybe the best scientists are the biggest dreamers,’ I argued. ‘The ones able to think of something no one else has thought of before.’
He inclined his head and I knew I’d won that point, but it was his subtext that bothered me more. It meant that perhaps he didn’t believe me after all.
He stood and put a hand on my shoulder.
I stood too. It was time to go.
‘And Marian?’
‘Marian sounds delightful from everything you’ve said, and I suspect that even if this man were to turn out to be some kind of criminal, she is nothing to do with it at all.’
‘What do you mean? “
If
”? You don’t believe me?’
He held up his hand, shaking his head, and was clearly searching for the right words.
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying. All I’m saying is try not to worry. Get some sleep. Go home now.’
I did. And I did feel better, because an hour with Hunter was like a confessional in some ways, and a holiday in others; you always came away feeling better, about both yourself and the world.
And I did feel better, because for the rest of that night, and half the following day, I was able to believe the lie I’d told Hunter and so wanted to believe myself: that the girl was dead when I found her.
Chapter 13
What is blood?
Around the time of my visit to Paris, and Marian’s trip to England, there were many excellent men and women trying to answer that question, trying to understand its composition and its nature in order to better fight the diseases and disorders of the blood. For a while I was one of them, and yet I had an unspoken question at the back of my mind all that time, one that even now I can only formulate like this: why is blood?
Why
is it like it is, and what does it mean to us?
In our modern world, I knew, bright colours are not so rare, but that is because we have synthetic dyes and pigments. Long ago, in those caves in France where the Venus of Bastennes and other figures like her were carved, bright colours must have seemed magical; most of the world was soft browns and greens. The strongest colours would have been the autumn leaves, the blue of the sky on a summer’s day, and even these would seem to have no permanence, for the leaf that is golden one day is on the ground the next, the sky that is blue one day can be grey the day after. There would be some brightly coloured berries and fruit, I suppose, too, but the one splash of colour that could always be relied on to amaze, to impress, to shock, maybe even to delight, would be blood. In every culture I knew of, red symbolised danger, presumably because of the link with blood; we are programmed to react to it, because that might save our life.
And though more blood was perhaps spilled in those distant days, it must still have been a rare moment, and when blood was seen it would have been such a contrast to the everyday world, such an extraordinary, magical, mysterious thing. And as someone bled to death and their life bled away with that blood, it must have been obvious that blood is the source of life, that without it we are nothing; its colour must have seemed chosen by the gods, as if to say, ‘Look! This! This is important, for this is what you are!’