‘How are you, Grandad?’ Nick smells the sourness of sweat on his skin as he bends to give him a hug.
A nurse follows him into the room. ‘He was in the sluice room last night at two o’clock,’ she says. ‘Weren’t you, love?’
Geordie doesn’t answer her.
‘What were you doing in there?’ Nick asks after she’s withdrawn and left them alone.
‘God knows.’
‘Dreaming?’
‘Something like that.’
Nick thinks: I can’t bear this, and a second later is appalled by the selfishness of his response. If Grandad can bear it, he can.
‘It’s the pills,’ Geordie says. ‘I’ve never been one for pills.’
It’s not the pills, and they both know it, but somehow the hospital prescribes the kind of conversation they can have with each other. Nick just wants to see Geordie back in his own home, in his own bed, as fast as possible. ‘I forgot to mention it this afternoon,’ he says. ‘Helen wants to know when she can come and see you?’ When there’s no reply he adds, ‘You remember Helen?’
‘Of course I remember Helen, I’m not daft.’
‘What shall I tell her?’
‘I don’t want her seeing me like this.’
He always made a fuss when Helen was coming. Got bathed, shaved, wore a suit and a tie. Frieda used to say, ‘Look at him, all done up like a shilling dinner. His girlfriend must be coming,’ and bizarrely, behind the teasing, there was real jealousy.
‘Give it a few days,’ he says now, reluctantly, and then, abruptly, brings up the real problem. ‘I want these bloody bars down. I’m like a ruddy great baby sat up in a cot. I can’t have anybody seeing me like this.’
‘They’ll put them down in the morning.’
‘They’d better. If they don’t I’m out of here.’
Nick grips his wrist through the bars. ‘I should be going now. I’ll see you at the weekend.’
‘Aye. Perhaps.’
‘Now what’s that supposed to mean?’
No answer.
‘Auntie Frieda’ll be in tomorrow.’
Nick hovers, knowing that in his grandfather’s position he would find this lingering impossibly irritating. He bends down and holds the thin shoulders whose bones seem to become a little more prominent every day. Old soldiers never die – they only fade away. Though the man who shouts and rages and cries out for Harry in the kitchen or the sluice room isn’t fading away, whatever else he’s doing. ‘I’ll ring and see how you’re getting on,’ he says inadequately, and then walks out down the grey shining corridor, past the WRVS stall with its flowers and balloons and fruit, and out into the car-park, where the stars burn pale against the sodium orange of the lights.
SEVEN
At the exit from the motorway Nick hesitates, then, to the immense irritation of the driver behind him, flicks his indicator from right to left and drives to a row of terraced houses not far from the University library. Four-storey substantial Victorian houses, divided into elegant, expensive flats. Helen has the top floor of one of them. A beech tree, its leaves a virulent green in the light from the street lamp, reaches to her windows.
Nick knocks, hears the television news switched off and then Helen appears, barefoot, in jeans and T-shirt, short dark hair spiked around her ears. ‘Nick,’ she says. ‘How are you?’
‘Not so bad.’
‘Come in.’
This is what he needs, he realizes, following her through into the living room, though it’s probably not what he ought to need.
‘Coffee?’
‘Please.’
‘Or beer?’
‘Beer would be better.’
The fridge door bangs shut. She comes back into the room hugging cans with a cold sweat on them to her chest, and hands one over. ‘Here you are.’
Sweeping piles of books off the sofa on to the floor, she peels open her own can and applies her mouth to the white foam that bubbles out, laughing and flicking beer from her hands as she sits back. ‘So how are you really?’
‘All right.’
She waits. Don’t pull that one, he thinks. I do the silences.
‘Geordie’s dying.’
‘Oh, Nick, I am sorry.’
‘You’re the only one.’ This comes out so much more bitter than he intended that he reins himself back. ‘Well, you know, I get a bit fed up with people saying, Perhaps it’s for the best, he’s had a good innings…’
‘You’ll miss him.’
‘Yes.’
‘So will I.’ She attempts a smile. ‘Won’t have anybody to flirt with now.’
‘Oh, you’ll find somebody, I expect.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Cancer. They’ve done an exploratory operation. Secondaries all over the place.’
‘Is he having radiotherapy?’
‘There’s no point. It’d just mess him about, and it wouldn’t give him that much longer anyway.’
‘Can I see him?’
‘Give it a few days,’ Nick says awkwardly. ‘The thing is they’ve put the sides of the bed up and he’s so upset about that he can’t think about anything else.’ He hesitates, because telling anybody this, even Helen, seems like a betrayal. ‘He’s taken to wandering about in the middle of the night.’
‘But he’s not confused. Not when I saw him.’
‘No, but you can see why they think he is. He’s back there. Poor old Frieda gets mistaken for the German army. I mean, I don’t think it’s confusion because I think he’d be showing signs of it the rest of the time. It sounds like flashbacks, but why should he suddenly start doing that again?’
‘Fear of death? Pretty powerful trigger.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How’s he going to manage?’
‘Frieda’ll look after him during the day – he’s all right then – I’ll do the nights.’
‘And what does Fran think about that?’
‘She doesn’t know yet.’
‘Sure you wouldn’t rather have a whisky?’
He smiles. ‘I think I’ll take you up on that. But only a small one, I’m driving.’
‘You could walk from here.’
‘If I turned up sozzled I would be in trouble.’
‘Small one, I promise.’
While she’s out of the room, Nick passes the time looking along her bookshelves and, for the second time that evening, identifies the red cover of
Soldier, from the Wars Returning
. This time he opens it and Geordie’s voice leaps off the page.
GEORDIE:
Like Rip Van bloody Winkle, I suppose. You don’t hear that story much now, do you? We got told it at school. Friday afternoons, we used to have a story, last lesson before the bell, and that one sort of stuck in me mind. I remember walking home from school – four miles, it was, there and back twice a day – they’d think it was child abuse these days – and thinking all the time about this man going to sleep on the hillside, and waking up years later, and nobody knowing who he was. It haunted me. I used to think it was awful.
HELEN: What in particular?
GEORDIE: The loneliness.
Helen’s focus in the book was on the interaction between the individual veteran’s memories of his combat experience, and the changing public perception of the war. Geordie, from the moment she met him, intrigued her, not merely because he was old enough to remember the trenches, and remembered them clearly, but because he had, at different stages of his life, coped with his memories in radically different ways.
As a young man just back from France, Geordie refused to talk about the war, and avoided all reminders of it. Every November he wore a poppy, but he took no part in Armistice Day commemorations. Instead he went for a long walk in the country, returning well after dark, exhausted and silent as ever. Refused all questions. When obliged to speak stammered so badly he could barely make himself understood. This was the man Nick remembered.
Then, in the sixties, Geordie began to talk about the war. Over the next three decades his willingness to share his memories increased and, as other veterans died around him, his own rarity value grew. In the nineties he was one of a tiny group of survivors who gathered for the anniversaries of the first day of the Somme, and most of the others were in wheelchairs. There were rewards in this for him. He was sought after, listened to, he had friends, interests, a purpose in life at an age when old people are too often sitting alone in chilly rooms waiting for their relatives to phone. But the sense of mission was genuine. His message was simple:
It happened once, therefore it can happen again. Take care
.
And the stammer? The stammer vanished or, at least, was reduced to a slight hesitation that had the effect of concentrating his listeners’ attention on the next word.
Helen was interested in the reasons for these changes, in the social forces that had obliged the young Geordie to repress his memories of fear, pain, bitterness, degradation, because what he had thought and felt at that time was not acceptable. A later generation, fresh from a visit to
Oh! What a Lovely War
, the
Dies Irae
of Britten’s
War Requiem
pounding in its ears, couldn’t get enough of fear, pain, etc. The horror, the horror. Give us more. Suddenly a large part of Geordie’s experience was ‘acceptable’, though still not all.
Towards the end of the published interview, Helen attempted to get Geordie to see that he still hadn’t been asked to talk about class, the different experiences of officers and men, profiteering, the whole idea of the war as a business in which some people suffered and died to make others rich, though this bitterness, as much as the anguish of grief for lost comrades, had shaped and framed his experience of the post-war years. He was still, Helen believed, remaking his memories to fit in with public perceptions of the war, only now he was working to a different template.
She tried to get Geordie to frame his war experience in terms of late-twentieth-century preoccupations. Gender. Definitions of masculinity. Homoeroticism. Homo-
what?
asked Geordie. Helen, with her Oxford First. Geordie, with his board-school education, shovelled into one dead-end job at the age of fourteen and then, aged eighteen, into another. It was an unequal contest. Geordie won.
‘Penny for them?’ Helen says.
Nick feels cold glass against his fingers and takes the whisky. ‘Oh, I was just thinking about this.’ He shows her the book. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve still got the transcripts, have you?’
‘Yes, somewhere. In the department, I think.’
‘May I borrow them? I mean, I’d get them photocopied and let you have them back.’
‘No problem. I’ll look them out.’ She curls up on the sofa, and chinks the ice in her glass. ‘You know, I went with him to the Imperial War Museum and he was in the trench talking to these kids and they were saying, “Was it like this?” And he was saying, “Well, this is pretty good, but in the real trenches there were rats and dead bodies and horrible smells, and bombs falling and it was cold and it was wet and it was noisy and you were fed up and you were frightened and you wanted to go home.” And of course the kids lapped it up. There were two little boys racing up and down the trench making machine-gun noises. You know?’ She rakes the room with an imaginary machine-gun. ‘And I said to Geordie, “Are you sure this is doing any good?”’
‘And he said?’
‘ “Yes.”’ She laughs. ‘He never doubted it.’
Silence. Nick takes a gulp of whisky and waits for the question he knows is coming.
‘What do you think?’
‘I’m not a historian.’
‘No, but you must have an opinion.’
‘Well, you see the first thing is I don’t believe in public memory. A memory’s a biochemical change in an individual brain, and that’s all there is. There’s quite a lot of evidence that traumatic memories are stored in a different part of the brain from normal memories, and that’s what makes them so incredibly persistent. And so… almost hallucinatory. They’re not accessible to language in the same way. It’s like watching a film, or… or even worse it’s like acting in a film.’ He spreads his hands. ‘As for warnings and messages… I don’t know.’ A spurt of anger. ‘Anyway what
is
the message? You look back over the whole horrible blood-sodden mess. Isn’t the real message:
You can get away with it
.?’
“And yet you went to the battlefields with him.’
‘Somebody had to. He couldn’t have managed on his own.’ Nick wants to tell her about Thiepval, but there’s no time, he ought to be going. And anyway he hasn’t succeeded in telling himself about Thiepval yet. ‘Thanks.’ He puts down the empty glass. ‘I needed that.’
‘I’ll look out the transcripts,’ she says, opening the door. ‘And you’ll let me know when he’s ready for a visit?’
The August night’s cool, rather than cold, yet he shivers, an automatic reaction to the glitter of moonlight on cobbles and the stars pricking sharply through the telegraph wires that score the sky. The car smells musty, a mess of cardboard cartons left from the family’s last outing litters the back seats. Curried chips, his nose tells him. Gareth’s favourite. He wonders as he fumbles with the ignition key if he’s fit to drive. He’s well under the limit for alcohol, but he seems to be getting more tired by the minute, as if all the energy he’d expended over the last few weeks, moving and decorating, had been borrowed and the loan’s just been called in. His hands hurt where the wallpaper scraper rubbed off the skin. He yawns and yawns again, as the car at last sputters into life. He’ll go the back way, he decides. It’s a bit longer, but, at this time of night, there’ll be next to no traffic.
It’s been raining. There are crescents of silver light trapped inside the drops that speckle the glass. It seems a pity to press the button and sweep them away. Almost as soon as he starts the engine the rain comes on heavier. Smears of orange light on greasy cobbles, the wipers’ swish and whine, make it hard to stay alert. He’s hunched over the wheel peering at the edges of the road for guidance, driving as if in a thick fog, though there’s no more than a slight mist.
What he wanted to say to Helen, but couldn’t find a tactful way of phrasing it, was that she’d got Geordie all wrong. That she was so much in love with her thesis that she distorted his experience to make it fit. Geordie’s memories aren’t malleable: they don’t change to fit other people’s perceptions of the war. On the contrary. Geordie’s tragedy is that his memories are carved in granite. The nightmares of Harry’s death that had Geordie screaming back in 1919 are the same ones that wake him, sweating and terrified, in the sluice room now. And secretly, what he wants to say is that raking about in the detritus of other people’s memories is a waste of time and energy. The only true or useful thing that can be said about the past is that it’s over. It no longer exists.
All the houses are in darkness. Lob’s Hill, when he gets back, will be in darkness. Fran will have given up and gone to bed by now, and she won’t be too pleased either. He’d said he was going out ‘for a few hours’. His headlights pick out the silver trunks of trees, moths flickering like beads of light, big, pale stars of bindweed, and then, in the rear mirror, darkness swallows them. His lights seem to create the road he drives along, and then consign it to oblivion.
He lets himself gain speed, sits back, starts to relax. Too much, he’s getting drowsy. Probably he should pull over and walk up and down a bit, but that would make him even later than he is and anyway he’s nearly home. Another few minutes and then, providing Jasper’s asleep, he can slide into bed and lose consciousness. Louder music, that’s the thing.
He’s tapping on the wheel when a girl emerges from a gap between the trees and runs out into the road. A pale face turned towards him, staring through the windscreen. Not terrified, not anything, blank. The features shadowless, whited out by the glare. There’s a second when Nick knows it’s too late, knows it coldly and clearly and, despite the bulging of his heart, calmly. Nothing he can do, neither braking nor swerving, will be in time. The girl slips silently under his wheels.
A few yards further on the car skids to a halt. Automatically he puts the handbrake on and reaches for the door, dreading screams or, worse, silence. Already he’s out of the car and running, searching for the hump, the dark shape, in the road, his eyes blinded by the headlights. He can make nothing of the confused mêlée of moonlight and shadows. Except that the road’s empty. Thrown into the hedge? He searches on either side, groping through grass and stinging nettles. His grass-snarled feet send up a cloud of small pale moths, but his eyes, his hands, find nothing. He runs back to the car, gropes underneath. Warm tar under his fingertips, greasy from the recent shower, still squishy from the long hours of sun. He prods round the wheels. Nothing. Crawls out again, runs his hands along the bumper. The headlights are burning his retinas, he can’t see a bloody thing, relies on his fingers to tell him the cool curve of metal is intact.