Hero (9 page)
He looks at me, blinks, shows less surprise than I imagined he would, less than I feel myself. Furrows appear upon his brow, and I think I've made a terrible blunder. But then the lines pass away. His mouth and eyes form a sad but crooked smile.
“Yes,” he replies. I watch the pale funnel of his breath. “Let's do that.”
I
t was inevitable. The unspeakable fact would either come to the surface, rending us forever in one merciless stroke, or it would remain hidden and we would marry. The only surprise was how quickly the decision was made. Had not the mockery of admiration rained down upon me like arrows at the tannery, things might have been different. But hour after hour the blows came:
“Excuse me, Mr. Simon, the agent from the army is here to congratulate you on your Distinguished Service Medal⦔
“Mr. Coombs has assembled the workers, sir, and would like to say a few words welcoming you home⦔
“May I say what an honour it is, Mr. Simon, to have you among us, a privilege if I may say so⦔
I was tied to a post. Some long-dormant part of my spirit smarted at each piercing blow. Deadened nerves were becoming sensitized once more. Prick by prick, I was awaking to a world of pain.
Only Sarah could soothe me; she at least understood the gravity of my turmoil, if not its specific cause. Where others saw only heroism, she perceived pain. She had opened her arms on that first night and I had fallen into them. From that moment, perhaps, there was only one course we would take. The justifications of the previous night came back to me as I stood in her garden watching the mists rise above us. My blade had pierced her brother, it was true. But he was one among the multitudes of the dead, and I was one among many with blood on my hands. If my bayonet had pierced another, if Charles had fallen to another's blow, it surely wouldn't have made the least difference, except to free me from the guilt that had held me so far from Sarah.
When death is this general and widespread, why think too hard about the details?
L
ucy has been tying and untying my laces beneath the desk for a while, but it's only when I feel her warm fingertips touch my shin that I feel a burst of irritation.
“Stop that, Lucy,” I snap, dropping my pen and wheeling back my chair. I squint at her. Even in the shadow of the desk, Lucy's eyes are so blue they evoke darting swallows and the canvas of billowing sails. I am aware that many fathers would feel a surge of wonder, not discomfort. I focus instead on the ugly, orange-haired rag doll she grips between her forearm and her chest. “Go and play by the window,” I mutter, colouring, ashamed that something as natural as the touch of my daughter's fingertips makes me recoil.
“I just wanted to see if your legs were real.”
She frowns at me from the dim light of her cave, the rag doll bent double as she wriggles backwards.
“What do you mean if my legs are real?”
I'm vexed with myself for engaging with her fancy, but the question is necessary. Several times recently I have believed Lucy to be teetering upon the edge of some nightmarish abyss only to find that it is merely my own imagination infusing some childish twitch of thought with dangerous unreason.
She continues to shuffle backwards in a sitting crawl, a sullen monkey in retreat. “I just wanted to see,” she whines. “The soldier in the park. His were made of wood.” A touch of indignation is in this statement and a sense of comparison too, unflattering to myself.
Lucy now skips, rag doll still collapsed under her arm, to the window. She gazes out into the bars of daylight visible through the blind.
“What soldier? What park?” I demand, aware of a burning at the roots of my scalp. It isn't just my soldiery being questioned that makes me smart. It seems that as soon as my back is turned in this family everything spirals out of control. Strangers intrude. Children roam free and graves threaten to yawn and spill their dead. Who is this veteran with wooden legs and how did my daughter come to encounter him? How did she come to peek into the tortuous methods through which half-men are cobbled back into the semblance of wholeness?
“Who were you with?” I ask, feeling my lips burn. “Mummy?”
Lucy flinches, half looks backâan adult reaction to a question if ever I saw one.
“No,” she says quickly. “I was with Elsa.” She pauses, lost between giving too much information and not enough. “It was in Christchurch Park.”
I pick up my pen once more but my fingers tremble with rage. Has Lucy seen my anger? She has witnessed at least one blistering argument between Sarah and me regarding Elsa. I fix my gaze towards the invoice on my desk and let the pen nib hover around the signature line while I pretend to read through the numbers again.
Elsa is the rapier point with which Sarah tortures me. She doesn't know it is torture, and it isn't done deliberately. But it hardly matters because the result is the same. Elsa is the governess Sarah hired behind my back six months ago. She has no special experience with children that I can tell, but that wasn't the point for Sarah when she brought the young woman into the house. Elsa isn't merely a governess. She is part of Sarah's grand design to heal us all, to undo the war and stitch us all back together afresh.
Before the war Elsa's people were in the Newfoundland fishery. Beaumont-Hamel ground her men-folkâhusband and two brothersâinto the earth like so many on that first day of the Somme. Though from different islands, Sarah and Elsa were part of that intricate web of sisterhood, robbed of persons they loved on the very same day. Somehow Elsa had ended up in London and through Mr. Eaves, a mutual acquaintance and distant cousin to the Baxters, Sarah heard about her. I can well imagine how the light must have come into Sarah's eyes when she saw the missionary possibilities. Here was an orphan of the same storm that had killed her own brother and wounded her own husband far more deeply than any scars might suggest. Sarah's whole life's work spun around those losses. Through the visor of her relentless kindness and her merciless search for meaning, she must have seen an opportunity for some kind of grand reunion of suffering. But she was cunning too. She was acutely aware of the offensiveness of her charityâ whether aimed at Elsa or myself, or bothâand had the guile to mask her intentions. She wanted Elsa, she told me, because in their Ipswich docks the Baxters had once built ships for Newfoundland whalers. Elsa's father had been a sea captain and her brothers would in time have followed suit.
It was this evasion that became the focus of our argument. The whalers the Baxters supplied were Basque and French, I told her. They had little or no relationship to Elsa's English and Irish ancestors.
The overture to Elsa's arrival had been the slamming of doors and the crashing of glasses. I remember how, through the rising smoke of discord, I turned from my wife a final time and caught, through the partially shielding leaves of the large aspidistra in the corner of the room, Lucy's wide-eyed stare. She had witnessed the whole battle.
How disquieting to ruminate on the thoughts that lay behind those clear blue eyes. I have since sensed the unnatural silence of a spy within our walls. Now, as my five-and-a-half-year-old daughter pretends to stare through the window, I have some idea of the creeping vines that entangle her young thoughts. She can sense my anger as a cat senses rain, and she is trying to weigh each influenceâthe stranger, Elsa, my mother, the parkâfor its potential to either calm or enrage. Her infant understanding is in a constant grapple with her precocious experience of life's slipperiest recesses.
“Where was Elsa when you were talking to the stranger?” Though my voice is quiet, the faintest crackle lurks beneath my words like that of a still-glowing ember.
I watch her shoulders twitch, and she resists the impulse to turn towards me. “Getting an ice cream for me,” she declares with the strained joyfulness of a bad stage actress.
I stare at her for a moment longer. A gust strikes the window, and the blind rattles back and forth against the sill. Even though her face is side-on, I can see her eyes narrow, not like those of a child, but rather like I used to see in the trenches when men burdened by cold, exhaustion, or fear became suddenly aware of a hopeful change in the wind, mindful of a world outside their present existence. The fire is gone from me. I long to be with my daughter, who stands upon the other side of the world; it must be a delusionâa trick with mirrors perhapsâthat she appears to be standing by the window in my office. The small, neat figure with the rag doll is surely my own projection. She is merely a wounded man's misconception, a living embodiment of his inability to conceive innocence. I float away from my shoulder to where Lucy stands, turn back to myself, and watch the seedy, hunched figure sitting at the desk, holding the trembling nib of his pen like some cruel parody of impotence. I seem a thing of twists and buckles, a body of crushed tin cans from which jealousy oozes like rancid juice. How dare this creature soil the innocence of youth! How dare he infect his own daughter with his terror!
A tentative knock sounds on the door while my mouth struggles to give form to this conciliatory impulse.
“Come in,” I say very softly, a small kindness meant for my daughter, but as usual, undelivered.
The door opens. Coombs, the foreman, enters on his incongruously delicate stepsâlarge feet in constant motion with the carpet as though it burned his solesâand nods in deference before starting.
“About the horses' hides from the Jacob farm, Mr. Simon,” he begins.
I nod, and lay down my pen. My fingers ache as I do so, and I realize I must have been gripping it unnaturally tight.
“Too old, sir. Infested with maggots.”
“All of them?
“Most. Gone right through to the other side.”
“What about the bullocks' skins?”
“Oh they're fine, Mr. Simon. Came straight from the slaughterhouse. The team is scraping them now.”
“Thanks, Coombsâanything else?”
“A gentleman came to see you while you were out, sir.” His feet shuffle on the carpet again. “Wouldn't give a name, sir, but says you and he are old comrades from the war.”
A silence thickens around us, and a high note sings in my right ear. I never considered during my convalescence in France, even during my first months back in Suffolk, how omnipresent the war would remain. Had I known, I might have found a way not to return.
Coombs's eyes are alive with a timid admiration as he watches for my response, but all I feel is a weight around my shoulders, my albatross returning for perhaps the third time this week. The war is a calling card and is in liberal use. The gentleman in question might possibly be from the same battalion, but he is most likely using the term “comrade” loosely, a general kinship claimed by salesmen, would-be employees, someone in town looking for a quick contact.
“Thank you, Coombs. If it's important, he'll return.”
“I hope so, Mr. Simon. The poor gentleman had some trouble climbing the stairs to your office. Badly injured in the legs, I believe. I would have told him you weren't in if I had seen him first.”
“Yes,” I conclude testily. “Thank you, Coombs. I'll deal with the Jacob farm.”
Coombs nods again and shuffles out, closing the door quietly as though it were the gate to a sacred tabernacle. A new gloom sweeps through me at the thought of this “comrade's” infirmities and his painful attempt to negotiate the open staircase that leads to the upper floor. The nature of his injuries robs any future meeting of the “Hail fellow, well met” bravado I am usually able to muster for these brief encounters. Empty sleeves and crutches transport me to the battlefield, to the smell of burning soil, and fill me with panic.
The grandfather clock, which is placed halfway along the empty wall opposite my desk, ticks through the silence. Both hands reach towards the ceiling as though yearning for escape. I look towards Lucy, whose sulk is now turned in my direction. I attempt a smile.
“It's nearly twelve o'clock, Lucy,” I say as kindly as I can manage. “Why don't you and I take a drive into the centre and see if we can find mummy at the Beehive Tea Shop?”
Lucy must have been half-watching the time. She's already making her way to the door while I speak. As she passes by the desk, she gives me the kind of glance with which I imagine a wild animal might greet a fork of lightning. She opens the office door and scampers away. Before I have reached the uppermost of the steep wooden stairs, her feet have pattered down to the workshop floor. The apron-draped scrapersânine in all today, although with our planned expansion this room and the others will find personnel swelling to one-and-a-half the present numberâdon't look up from the tables as they work diligently with dull knives. Coombs chooses them carefully, favouring a deference of manner and serious turn of mind, and he trains them well. Even so, how could they not notice how my daughter strains from my presence like a reluctant moon choosing the widest possible arc with which to orbit its parent planet? I have seen daughters hug and cling to their fathers, but on the rare occasions Lucy is with me at work, she always skitters ahead or else lags behind.