Another mirror, this time belonging to Grandad, a looking-glass made of steel, a hole punched through one end with a length of khaki ribbon threaded through. It hung on a hook in the corner of the bathroom where he kept his shaving things. Whenever Nick asked, Geordie took it down and let him look into it, but the reflection that peered back at him was blurry, swollen, distorted by the irregularities in the metal, never the clear reflection you got in glass. Only it didn’t break. Grandad dropped it on the floor once, to show that it didn’t break.
The mirror had gone with him through France, but it couldn’t have been sentiment that bound him to it, for he avoided everything else to do with the war. Never spoke of it. Would walk a mile out of his way to avoid passing the war memorial. And yet every morning of his life he shaved using that mirror, the same he’d propped up against sandbags in France, had brought back across the Channel when he was wounded and taken out with him again. He would watch Nick looking at himself. ‘It’s funny, Grandad,’ Nick would say, pulling faces to distort his reflection still further. Geordie said nothing, just waited patiently, and then when Nick had finished hung the mirror back on the hook.
He said very little. With Nick’s father he was deferential in that curiously English way, though Nick sensed that beneath the surface respect there was a certain degree of contempt. ‘A man among boys, a boy among men.’ Whether Geordie knew the phrase or not, that had been his verdict. Though at the same time he was pleased that his Mollie, by marrying a schoolmaster, had taken several crucial steps up in the world. He was careful to mind his p’s and q’s whenever his son-in-law was around. Literally. He was uncomfortable with his own way of speaking, the local accent, the stammer, his inability to articulate. The stammer was bad in those years. There were times when he seemed to be hoiking up words like phlegm, raking them out of his gut.
But the silence went deeper than that. His body, stripped off in the garden – the wound in his side – suggested questions. Why? How? What happened? Nick would ask, but there were no answers. The past was hidden, veiled in silence, like his grandfather’s head behind its screen of cigarette smoke.
‘You know it’s cancer?’
‘Yes. Dr Morton told me.’
Neil Shepherd’s in his early fifties. His face is grey in the grey light falling through the tall windows to the right of his desk. The growling and gurgling from the pipes that run along the wall behind him suggest ominous possibilities, but not as ominous as the state of Geordie’s intestines.
‘I’m afraid it’s spread beyond the stomach. It wouldn’t be operable even in a much younger man. I’m sorry.’
‘Yes,’ Nick says. ‘That’s more or less what I expected.’
A pause. ‘How would you describe his state of mind?’
‘Seems fairly cheerful.’
‘Clear, mentally?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘He said something the other day that seemed to imply he thought the pain was coming from his bayonet wound.’
‘He’s said that to me too.’
‘But he must know it isn’t true.’
Nick hesitates. ‘When he came back from the war they had a memorial service for his brother, who was killed. And as they were leaving the church his mother, my great-grandmother, turned to him and said, “It should have been you.”’ He sees Shepherd wince. ‘I think he needs to believe it’s the bayonet wound that’s killing him. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I don’t think it’s just confusion or ignorance. He wants to believe it.’
‘Even after all this time?’
Nick pulls a face. ‘He seems to be getting closer to it, if anything. The nightmares are back.’
‘Yes, he’s very restless at night. Are you sure Mrs – I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten her name.’
‘Mrs Wilson. His daughter. My aunt.’
‘Do you think she can cope?’
‘Well, she won’t be coping on her own. I don’t think there’s any question of putting him in a home.’ He pauses. ‘How long do –’
Shepherd’s already shaking his head. ‘It really is impossible to say.’
‘Educated guess?’
Another shake of the head. ‘A few months, at most. Frankly, he could go any time.’
Well, yes, Nick thinks, going back to the ward, but at the age of 101 that’s true even without the cancer.
Auntie Frieda’s by the bed when he gets back, sitting in the plastic chair, nursing her handbag as if she suspects somebody of planning to steal it, and running her tongue round the front of her dentures as if she thinks they might have a crack at those as well. She looks disgruntled and virtuous and mildly critical, darting fierce little assessing glances round the ward.
Nick bends down and kisses her cheek, feeling how much more loosely the skin hangs from the bone than it did even a week ago. She should be resting, trying to get her strength back after the last two months of virtually round-the-clock care. Shepherd’s right. She can’t possibly cope on her own. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh, not so bad.’
Her eyes are red-rimmed, from crying perhaps. She nods at the bed curtains. ‘I was just saying to your grandad, I don’t dislike that shade of beige.’
Nick turns aside to hide his amusement. Auntie Frieda’s enthusiasms are always couched in these negative terms: ‘I wouldn’t mind…’ ‘I don’t dislike…’ ‘I can’t say I object…’ He sometimes wonders whether her marriage remained childless because Uncle Wilf never felt sufficiently encouraged to persevere.
Grandad’s back on the bed, scaly red shins peeping from below the hem of the smock.
‘I’m dying for a fag,’ he says, unconsciously echoing the government’s latest anti-smoking campaign. ‘It’s bloody torture, this is.’ He sets up a great grumble about the hospital’s no-smoking policy, designed, Nick suspects, to deter him from too great frankness about whatever the doctor might have said. His clever grandson’s talked to the doctor and sorted things out and he doesn’t want to know about it, thank you very much – that seems to be the message.
‘You could go to the day room if you leant on me,’ Nick says.
He sees Geordie weighing the pain of the long journey against the delights of a cigarette when he gets there. ‘Aye, ho way.’
‘I don’t know,’ Auntie Frieda says. ‘You’re as bad as each other. You egg each other on.’
This is said in her ‘all men are children really’ tone. Nick can see Geordie being exasperated by it, but also, secretly, liking it – as he does himself.
‘I’m on if you are,’ Nick says.
The old man might have changed his mind after the pain of standing upright, but he grits his teeth and hangs on. Leaning heavily on Nick, shuffling along in his scuffed slippers, gasping for breath, he’s made it down the corridor, Frieda bringing up the rear with a blanket for him to sit on, and the longed-for cigarettes.
They sit at a little table with a heaped-up ash tray. A quiz show’s playing on television, blurred contestants against an improbably orange backdrop, but the day room’s empty except for a woman in a pink quilted dressing-gown with a shaved patch on her head, who sits at another table chain-smoking and staring blank-eyed at the screen.
‘Are you going to have one?’ Geordie asks Nick.
‘Yeah, I’ll join you,’ Nick says.
Geordie lights up, closing his eyes as he inhales. ‘Puts me back behind the bike shed, this does. Do you know I’ve gone a bit dizzy?’
A disgusted
tsk
from Frieda.
‘So what did he have to say, then?’ Grandad asks, fortified by his second drag.
‘Not a lot.’ Nick’s feeling his way.
‘Did he say when I can go home?’
‘No.’
Nick hears Auntie Frieda’s caught-in sigh of relief. She can’t cope, he thinks again. It’s asking too much. Grandad thinks of her as a young woman still. She’s his daughter, after all – how can she not be young? He doesn’t seem to see the reality of a woman in her seventies in failing health.
‘Did he mention the bayonet wound?’ Geordie asks.
‘He did, yes, well he mentioned it.’
‘I told him that’s what it was,’ he says, turning to Frieda, triumphant. ‘I said that’s what it was, didn’t I?’
What’s it all about, Nick wonders. The wound’s given him no trouble for
eighty
years, why on earth should he suppose it’s started playing up now? But it’s not just the wound that’s moved into the forefront of his mind. For years he’s been free of nightmares, flashbacks, hallucinations, all the dreadful baggage he brought back with him from France, yet in the last few months they’ve returned. His nights, recently, have been terrible to endure. Terrible to witness. Worse than that, he’s actually become quite dangerous. Auntie Frieda’s been mistaken for a German soldier more than once.
Geordie’s finding the hard seat and the upright posture more and more uncomfortable. He drags impatiently at his second cigarette, no longer enjoying it, just stocking up for the famine ahead.
‘That’s enough,’ Frieda says. ‘It’s time you were back in bed.’
He doesn’t argue, but stands up at once.
‘Are you coming back later?’ he asks Frieda, on their slow progress back to the ward.
‘Not tonight,’ Nick says, before she can answer. ‘I’ll look in again before I go.’
They get him back into bed and settled under the sheet. He eases himself right down, his sparse grey hair rucked up by the pillows, and lies flat at last. His hands flap like fish along the counterpane, unhappy with the hospital tightness of the sheets around him. He wants to pull the eiderdown up to his chin, and burrow down into the warmth the way he does at home. ‘Dress rehearsal for a bloody coffin,’ he complains.
‘Why don’t you try to sleep?’ Nick says, bending down to give him a hug.
The pale blue eyes fasten on his face. He’s disconcerted by their sharpness, their awareness of the unintended irony of his suggestion.
‘I’ll sleep soon enough.’
When they reach the end of the ward and turn to look back, he lifts his hand in a gesture that’s almost more a salute than a wave.
SIX
‘Trouble is, he thinks I should be there all the time,’ Frieda says, as they walk back to the car. ‘I don’t think he realizes what an awkward journey it is. I have to change buses twice.’
She’s enjoying her grumble, but Nick knows he mustn’t make the mistake of agreeing with her, because that will put her back into defensive mode. The wheel’s turned full circle. Grandad’s her baby now.
He unlocks the car door on her side, and sees her seat belt fastened before he turns the key in the ignition. There’s a smell of wood smoke in the air. Autumn with its pre-packaged nostalgia is just around the corner. He feels a passionate desire to cling on to the last of the summer. He won’t spend tomorrow covering up the wall painting, he decides; he’ll take Fran and the kids out somewhere instead, and then finds himself yawning. He feels too tired to concentrate on anything.
‘Perhaps if you told him what time to expect you? Then he’ll know how long he’s got to wait.’
‘Hm,’ Frieda says, unconvinced. She doesn’t want to be rescued. But she can relax in the car, doesn’t have to wait at that draughty bus shelter they’re just passing, full of women like herself with pinched faces, belts knotted tightly round non-existent waists, clutching plastic bags full of dirty nightdresses and pyjamas, looking up the road for a bus that doesn’t come.
‘You look tired,’ Nick says.
‘I haven’t been sleeping. Can’t sleep. When I was up and down to him all the time I used to think, Oh, if only I could have a good night’s sleep, but you see, I’m still listening for him. I was convinced last night I heard him get up and go out.’
Grandad’s taken to wandering. Or going out on patrol. One or the other.
The car heater’s making Nick drowsy. He opens the window on his side and a few spots of cold rain blow on to his face.
‘You know that thing they’ve got him in?’
‘What thing?’
‘You know, the white thing.’
‘The smock?’
‘Yes. Do they put you in that if they know you’re not going to get better?’
‘No, I don’t think so. It just makes bathing them easier. They don’t have to pull them about so much.’
‘Only I thought it might be easier for them to lay you out.’
She knows it’s cancer, but she belongs to a generation that can hardly bring itself to say the word. ‘The big C’ was as far as he’d ever heard her go to naming it, and that was explaining the death of a woman at the bottom of the street, a woman she hardly knew. How many of the reassuring things she says to Grandad does she believe herself, and does he believe them? Is anybody saying what they think? When he next looks at her she’s fallen asleep, hanging from the seat belt like a toddler from its harness. He concentrates on braking smoothly, and manages in this way to safeguard her sleep until they bump once, twice, over the sleeping policemen in the street outside her house. She blinks like an old tortoise, sits up straight, clasps her handbag with both hands, runs her tongue round her front teeth, pretends she has never not been awake.
‘Do the sleeping policemen work?’ he asks, as she fumbles her front-door key in the lock.
‘Do they heck as like. You’d think it was the dodgems round here.’
Inside, it’s a matter of moments only to light the gas fire and put the kettle on. She comes back, unwrapping her scarf, to find him sitting in one of the armchairs staring at the regular blue buds of flame. ‘I thought we’d just have a sandwich,’ she says. ‘If that’s all right?’
‘Fine.’
While she’s making them, he looks round the room at the photographs. Nick’s mother and Auntie Frieda as children, himself in his graduation gown, Miranda at various stages of development from newborn baby onwards. The photographs of Miranda stop abruptly at the time of the divorce. He must bring her some more up-to-date ones, he thinks, but then he’s hurt because several of the early photographs are of Barbara and Miranda together, but there are none of Fran and Jasper. When he first asked if he could bring Fran to see her, Frieda had said, ‘Leave it a bit, Nick. You know I’m mebbe a bit old-fashioned.’ It had spread to include even Jasper. She always asks after him, but it’s never ‘How’s my bairn?’ as it used to be with Miranda.
‘Is there anything you need doing while I’m here?’ he says, hovering in the kitchen door while she slaps butter on to bread.
‘You could change the bulb on the landing if you wouldn’t mind.’
Of course he doesn’t mind. He’s relieved to be doing something that only he can do. He gets the stepladder, says, as Grandad always said at such moments, in his younger days, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. He puts the stepladder back in the bedroom and goes down to eat.
When she comes in with the sandwiches on a tray they talk about Geordie and his illness, Frieda reproaching herself for not having spotted the signs sooner. She seems to think if only she’d got him to the doctor more quickly he might have lived for ever. Once or twice Nick notices slips of the tongue: she talks about ‘your dad’ when she means
her
dad. Tiredness – she must be absolutely knackered. ‘Grandad,’ he corrects, gently, but then thinks, Why bother? She’s only unconsciously recognizing a truth.
When his father died, Nick stood by the grave, eyes stinging, not from grief, but from a kind of despair at his failure to feel anything. His deepest reaction had been one of relief: that he wouldn’t have to try to talk to him any more. Cars and cricket, cricket and cars. They’d sit on either side of the fire during Nick’s disgracefully rare visits, like a couple of bookends with no book worth reading in the middle.
Once the sandwiches have been eaten and the tray taken away, he asks, ‘How bad are the nights?’
He sees her hesitate, the struggle between loyalty and desperation painful to witness. ‘Bad,’ she says at last.
‘Nightmares?’
‘Worse than that. He wakes up and it’s still happening. I can remember him being like this when I was a little girl. I used to stand at the kitchen door and watch your gran try and get him back into the house. But he’d got over it, that’s what I can’t understand. He hasn’t had turns like that for years. And now it seems like it’s all coming back. You know, he thinks he sees Harry being killed. But the thing is, it’s not like he’s remembering it, it’s like he’s actually seeing it. He’s shouting “Harry” and waving his arms about and when you get hold of him he doesn’t see you, he’s in a world of his own. To be honest I’ve been frightened of him once or twice and it’s an awful thing because he never once lifted a finger to any of us when I was little. He was never a violent man.’
‘Look, when he comes out, I’ll do the nights.’
‘You can’t,’ she says immediately. ‘When’s the baby due?’
‘Not till October. I can manage the first few weeks.’ To himself he’s thinking (hoping?) that a few weeks may be all that’s needed. Shepherd said he could go any time. ‘You need your rest,’ he says. ‘You can’t do nights and days.’
She blinks doubtfully. ‘Well, if you’re sure. I can’t say it wouldn’t be a help, ’cos it would.’
On his way back to the hospital, Nick calls at Geordie’s house to check that everything’s all right. It’s typical of Geordie that he won’t surrender his independence and go to live with his daughter, though there’s never a week goes past that Frieda doesn’t try to persuade him. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m all right as I am.’
And until recently he was. He lives in a terrace of two-up, two-down houses, in what used to be a poor district, though now it’s rising rapidly as young professional people move in. It’s an attractive area, only a short drive from the city centre, yet the houses back on to woods and fields.
The house smells cold, musty and unlived in, though Geordie’s only been in hospital a week. Nick checks the windows and the back door, but everything’s secure. He goes upstairs, switches on the light in Grandad’s bedroom, not knowing what he’s doing here. Wanting some contact perhaps, some feeling of closeness that he doesn’t get from that semi-stranger in the hospital bed.
Two books on the bedside table. One’s called
Soldier, from the Wars Returning
and includes an interview with Geordie, though that’s not why it’s there. It’s there because of the inscription on the title page,
To Geordie, with love and admiration, Helen
.
The other’s a scrapbook for cuttings of his public appearances. Not many recent cuttings, only one in the last three months, but before that they come thick and fast. Grandad at the Imperial War Museum, talking to children in schools and colleges, on a televised trip to the battlefields, framed by the arches of Thiepval. The record of an ordinary man who, by living long, had become extraordinary.
On the table beside the wardrobe there’s a photograph of two young men in uniform, not obviously brothers, though they were brothers. Tinted sepia, drained of life and colour, as if the mud’s already reaching out to claim them. Born to die, that’s the impression, though only one of them did. Harry’s the one who copped it, dead in 1916, just before the Somme. Yet in the photograph the shadow of what’s to come seems to lie over them both. Eighteen years old, a self-conscious moustache framing his upper lip, Grandad looks closer to death than he did this afternoon, 101 years old, riddled with cancer, lying in a hospital bed.
Beside it there’s another photograph, a glossy Polaroid taken by Nick on a visit they’d made, earlier this year, to the battlefields. The last week of February, snow on the ground. No time for a man of Geordie’s age to be travelling, but they both knew this would be his last time, and that if they didn’t seize the chance to go together then, they would never go at all.
Grandad’s last, Nick’s first, visit. He’d resisted this for years, but now couldn’t refuse. At intervals, as once when Grandad stood on the lip of a crater, looking down, it strikes Nick with the force of revelation, though he’s known it all his life:
he was there
.
Nothing Nick had heard, nothing he had read, prepared him for the cemeteries. He wandered round, taking surreptitious photographs of Geordie, neither of them speaking much, content to leave each other alone. They visited the cemeteries promiscuously, in no particular order. One of Nick’s clearest memories is of Geordie standing in a German cemetery, the thin dark crosses casting blue shadows on the snow, like the footprints of birds.
Just as nothing had prepared him for the cemeteries, so the cemeteries, with their neatly tended plots and individual inscriptions, failed to prepare him for the annihilating abstractions of Thiepval. Geordie walked in a straight line towards the monument, dwarfed by its immensity, his figure shadowy in the faint mist that lingered on the grass. Nick retreated to a curved stone bench, ignoring the damp seeping through the seat of his jeans, and stared at the inscription:
TO THE MISSING OF THE SOMME
.
He was repelled by it. The monument towered over the landscape, but it didn’t soar as a cathedral does. The arches found the sky empty and returned to earth; they opened on to emptiness. It reminded Nick, appropriately enough, of a warrior’s helmet with no head inside. No, worse than that: Golgotha, the place of a skull. If, as Nick believed, you should go to the past, looking not for messages or warnings, but simply to be humbled by the weight of human experience that has preceded the brief flicker of your own few days, then Thiepval succeeded brilliantly.
Following in Geordie’s footsteps, he walked across the grass and up the steps to the stone of sacrifice, feeling the weight of that experience heavy on the back of his neck. Above him, on the vast flat surfaces the complex structure was designed to provide, were columns of names, stretching up precisely as far as the eye could see. Through the arch was yet another cemetery. ‘Inconnu’ on the French crosses, ‘Known Unto God’ on the British stones. Out there were the graves of men whose bodies had become separated from their names; inside the monument thousands of names that had become separated from anything at all. A scrap of blue or khaki cloth. A splinter of charred bone. Nothing else remained. Echoing footsteps, lists of names, arches opening on to emptiness. It seemed to Nick that this place represented not a triumph
over
death, but the triumph
of
death.
Geordie stood for a full ten minutes looking up at Harry’s name, and his lips moved, causing Nick to wonder what could be left to say after so many years. Then he went to lay his wreath on the steps of the altar, standing bare-headed, while outside it began to snow again, small stinging flakes whirling about on a bitter wind. Nick stood beside him. Up to that moment he’d always disliked the easy sentiment of poppy symbolism, but then he became grateful for it, for into that abstract space, with its columns of names and its ungraspable figures, the poppies brought the colour of blood.
Geordie was attempting to graft his memories on to Nick – that’s what the visit was about – and perhaps, in spite of Nick’s resistance, he’d come close to succeeding. Something important happened to Nick at Thiepval and he’d never come to terms with it. There’d never been time. As soon as they got back Geordie started to feel ill, as if the accomplishment of that final visit had given his body permission to let go. At first tiredness, then changes in bowel function, then a constant sensation of heaviness. Nick knew before the results of the tests came through, and he suspected Geordie knew as well. But all Geordie ever said was: ‘It’s the bayonet wound playing me up.’
If Nick hadn’t gone to France he might have regarded Geordie’s theory as merely ignorant, but he’d stood beside him in the empty arches of Thiepval, looking up at Harry’s name on the wall, and from that perspective Geordie’s belief in the power of old wounds to leak into the present was not so easily dismissed.
In the hospital Nick stares blankly at the empty bed. He isn’t prepared for this. How can they not have been told? Why didn’t they ring? But perhaps they did. Perhaps they rang Frieda, but she couldn’t contact him. A nurse squeaks up on rubber-soled shoes. ‘Are you looking for Mr Lucas?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s in a side ward.’
Nick goes back along the ward, where men anonymous in pyjamas turn to stare at him as he walks past. He stares through the portholes in the doors of the side wards, and spots him at last. He pushes the door open. The sides of the bed have been raised. It looks as if he’s lying in a cot. Eyes tightly closed, humiliation visible in every muscle of his clenched jaw.