Alarmed, I looked at Jane. “Should we call a nurse?” I whispered.
She shook her head and moved nearer to the old man. “It’s all right, sir,” she said soothingly. “Don’t talk about anything you don’t want to. Only came to ask if you knew my friend, one of the men who survived.”
“Survived?” The old eyes looked vague. “One who survived? He didn’t die? But they all died, all—”
“No, Bill didn’t. Bill Fanshawe.”
“He died.” Mr. Tredgold’s voice was sharp again, though the tears still coursed down his cheeks. “I read about it. He died just yesterday. I’d given him everything, all those terrible things, for the museum. And he died. Perhaps they killed him.”
We accepted that and I took over our end of the conversation again. “Yes, but he died full of years,” I said, hoping the biblical turn of phrase would make him feel better. “A full fourscore years.”
“By reason of strength,” Mr. Tredgold said, nodding. “He was a strong man, a good man. Ah, here is our tea.”
When tea had been handed round and the maid had left, I took up the conversation again. “You did know him, then?”
“Know whom?”
“Bill Fanshawe,” I said, praying for patience.
“Of course I knew him! He ran the museum. It is only the past few weeks that I have been unable to get about. I visited him there.”
“But it was earlier that we wanted to know about. When he was a young man. During the—when you were at Luftwich.”
His face crumpled again. He put down his tea, and the prayer book slipped from his lap. “Luftwich! A terrible place! Death, and deceit, and treachery! War—I won’t talk about the war!”
It was hopeless. We were torturing the poor old man, and there was nothing to be gained. With a sigh, I took another sip or two of tea and then, picking up the prayer book from the floor, turned to the Order for Evening Prayer. “‘I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me,’” I said, choosing at random one of the several suggested opening sentences.
“‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.’” Mr. Tredgold responded with another and then proceeded right through the whole service, not missing a word.
He was calm, even serene, by the time we left. “So good of you to come,” he said gently. “I will sleep now, but I enjoyed having company in my prayers. Come again.”
We left quietly as he repeated to himself the words of the Nunc Dimittis: “‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word . .’”
“He’s forgotten that we ever asked about Bill,” I whispered.
“Likely,” said Jane, nodding. “A blessing, I suppose.”
“Why did he get so upset? Did something particularly terrible happen to him in the war? Is this lingering shell shock, or whatever they call the World War II equivalent?”
“Not unless spiritual disintegration is shell shock.” As we drove home, Jane proceeded to explain Mr. Tredgold to me. She’d had the story from the men who came back, the men she talked to in the months while she was waiting for Bill to come home. It was a sad and in many ways a familiar story.
Mr. Tredgold had joined the RAF almost as soon as the war began, full of high ideals about the purity of sacrificing oneself for one’s country. “Mixture of High Church and Arthurian legend,” was the way Jane put it. One gathered he pictured the men as latter-day knights, mounting their silver steeds to bring truth to the world and save it from Hitler’s godless ways. He would be their chaplain, the devoted priest to whom they could make their confessions before going into battle. He would pray with them, offer them the Sacraments, convert those who saw the error of their ways.
The brutal reality of war completely undid him. He found the men to be no nobler than most men. They gambled, they drank, they chased skirts, they quarreled with each other, they tried to avoid dangerous duty. They shocked him. Not all of them, of course, but even one would have been too many, given his rose-colored picture of the way things ought to be. He tried to reform them. They laughed at him and went on boozing and whoring.
And then they started to die, and to kill. He didn’t know which was worse. They killed, and gloried in it, or they failed to kill and came back maimed for life, or they didn’t come back at all. They caught diseases and died cursing the God who’d let them in for this.
Some few listened to him. Some were comforted. But not enough, never enough to make up for the horror.
He became a pacifist. He urged the men to lay down their arms, to cease the carnage. The men didn’t like his attitude, and the military authorities threatened him with court-martial. They probably wouldn’t have done anything—imagine court-martialing a chaplain!—but he was then shunned by everyone. In despair he volunteered to go with the men on a particularly dangerous mission, hoping he would be killed. The next-best thing happened. He was so severely wounded that he was invalided out. By the time he recovered from his wounds, the war was over and he was a civilian again.
He asked for and was given a slum parish in London, where he buried himself in unremitting toil and began to recover his sanity.
“Thought himself a failure. Hoped to work himself to death, I suppose,” Jane concluded. “Didn’t manage it.”
“It’s amazing that he never lost his faith. Men have lost it over far less.”
“Slums saved him, he used to say. Real work, real needs to be met. Saw some real courage and compassion amongst the parishioners. Spent the rest of his working life there, then retired to Canterbury House. Been there for thirty years, more or less.”
“Waiting to die, I suppose.” I shuddered. “He must wonder why the Lord’s taking so long to release him.”
Jane looked at me a little oddly, then shook her head. “Kept himself busy for years. Took his turn at the chapel altar, helped the feebler residents, wrote devotional tracts. Even took services at the Cathedral now and again, when the canons were indisposed or away. He’s from these parts and knows everyone, and quite clearheaded, even now, except for the one little quirk.”
I nodded. “King Charles’s head.”
Jane took her eyes off the road and gave me a sharp look. “Know your Dickens, do you?”
“I’m pretty good at
David Copperfield.
It’s always been one of my favorites. And
Great Expectations
and
A Tale of Two Cities.”
And we quoted Dickens to each other the rest of the way into town, but the back of my mind was thinking about the great sorrow this world could dole out to its idealists.
“MAKING ANY PROGRESS?” ASKED ALAN CHEERFULLY WHEN I RETURNED home. I set a plate of gingerbread on the kitchen table. Jane had managed yet another batch before we’d taken off for the afternoon, and had, typically, refused any thanks for it.
Alan was in his study, trying to work on his memoirs. I say “trying” because one cat was lying on the desk on top of a stack of papers he needed for reference, and the other was in his lap, meowing crossly whenever his typing happened to disturb her slumber.
I looked over his shoulder at the screen. “I’d say I’ve made just about as much progress as you have. Emmy isn’t much help, is she?”
He grinned. “I typed nearly a page before I looked up to check my work and discovered my right hand had been one key over. It looked like comic-book swearing, with quotation marks and semicolons all over the place. So you didn’t learn very much from the good padre?”
I dropped into Alan’s comfortable, squashy old chair and sighed. “He’s a sweet old man, but he can’t talk about the war years without breaking down.” I related our conversation, such as it was. “And he wouldn’t say a word about Bill, or Luftwich, or any of the people there. He nearly went into hysterics. I had to stop asking, out of pity.”
“Poor chap.”
“Yes, there must be some terrible memories buried in his mind.” I fell silent.
“This business is depressing you, isn’t it?”
“Well, it is, a little. Oh, a lot, actually. Jane and I have been talking to so many old people. And, Alan, I call them old, but some of them aren’t all that much older than we are. Ten, fifteen years. I keep wondering what’s going to happen to us.”
Alan got up from his desk and came to sit on the arm of my chair. “It’s something to think about, isn’t it?”
“Do you think we’ll age gracefully? Or will our minds turn to mush and our bodies to a collection of painful, nonfunctional parts? Because if that’s what lies ahead, I don’t think I want to live much longer.”
He took my hand. “Well, it isn’t our decision to make, is it? And of course we don’t know what lies ahead. We can make some guesses, though. For example, I have no Alzheimer’s disease in my family. Do you?”
“Two of my cousins, but they inherited it, I think, through their mother who was my aunt by marriage, not by birth. My own parents lived into their nineties, and though their minds failed at the end, they were fairly sharp until the last few months. My grandparents all died rather young, though, so I don’t know what would have happened to them.”
“What did they die of, your grandparents?”
“One was killed in an automobile accident before I was born. The others followed the typical pattern: a fall, a broken hip, pneumonia, and that was it. A couple of weeks of distress and then it was over.”
“That was how my mother died. My father was drowned in a boating accident off the coast of Newlyn. He was eighty-seven and still going out fishing every day. I suspect he’d have lived to a hundred if a storm hadn’t come up. So we both come from good, sturdy stock. I’d say there was every chance of our keeping fit for a good many years yet.”
“But if we don’t?” I couldn’t rid myself of the nightmare visions.
“If we don’t,” said Alan, pressing my hand again, “we’ll cope with whatever comes, when it comes. We have enough money, if we’re reasonably prudent, to see us through. We have our house, and we can afford to hire help if we begin not to be able to do all the work ourselves. National Health will see to our physical problems, after a fashion.”
“Oh, Alan, I know all that, and when I’m rational I know you’re right. But it could all go sour, somehow. We don’t know what will happen. You said it yourself. I can just see us, our minds slipping away …”
“Love, if your mind slips away, after a while you won’t care. You won’t know.”
“And what if mine doesn’t, but yours does? And I have to watch you deteriorate?”
He stood and pulled me to my feet. “My dear woman, anything could happen. We could both be struck by a lorry tomorrow, crossing the High Street. Right now we’re well and happy, and there’s no point in letting what might or might not happen tomorrow poison today. I promise we’ll deal with whatever comes along.” He enfolded me in one of his bear hugs.
“I’m not sure I’m convinced,” I said when I could speak again, “but I’m glad you’re willing to talk about it. I hate it when people say things like ‘Don’t worry’ or ‘It’ll be all right.’ Because it might not be.”
“It might not,” he agreed. “But it is not a bridge that needs to be crossed this instant. In fact, what you need to do this instant is decide what your plans are for supper. Because Elizabeth has invited us over to see their Christmas tree and spend the evening. I said I’d ring her back, but it’s my opinion you need the company of the young for a bit.”
“You’re right about that. If all the people I’ve talked to lately were laid end to end—”
“ … they’d lead to the
Guinness Book of World Records.
Or something. Elizabeth said about six, if that’ll do.”
“Wonderful. It’ll give me a chance to put my feet up.”
Most days I can nap without difficulty. Today, when I’d risen so early, I expected to be snoring two minutes after my head hit the pillow. But there was too much on my mind. I lay trying not to fret about advancing age, but the more I tried not to think about it, of course the more I thought about it. Have you ever tried strenuously
not
to think about a large pink rhinoceros?
The only solution, since my mind refused to relax, was to occupy it with other thoughts, and the ones that immediately popped up all had to do with Bill.
I’d talked with four people now who had known him well during the war. What, if anything, had I learned?
From Stanley Rutherford and John Merrifield I’d had slightly different accounts of the accident that had cost Bill his freedom and most of the crew their lives. Stanley was sure it was Merrifield’s fault, but then Stanley didn’t care for officers. Stanley had wanted to brag about his own war. I wondered if I should have let him. I might have learned more from meanderings. Maybe I’d have to go back.
Merrifield had given me a bit of a picture of what life at the airfield was like. So had the WAAF—what was her name—oh, yes, Price. Barbara Price. She hated Merrifield even more than Stanley did, but that was, I supposed, understandable. Her fiancé had perished in the plane crash, and of course she blamed the pilot. She’d presented the most vivid picture of life at Luftwich, the cold, the segregation by rank, the temptation to talk more than one ought about military secrets. I probably ought to visit her again and just let her ramble.
And then there was poor old Mr. Tredgold. What a dear he was, but how utterly useless as a source of information. Yes, I’d go and visit him again sometime. I’d take some knitting or a piece of needlepoint and sit and talk about theology, or his work in London, or whatever subject seemed neutral and safe. I wouldn’t ask him about Bill or Luftwich or, in fact, anything at all that happened between 1939 and 1945.
I may be a busybody, but I do draw the line at torturing harmless old priests.
Then there was the last contact that Jane had mentioned. Somebody’s widow, whose husband had been a friend of Bill’s and stationed at Luftwich. She didn’t sound very likely, but she might be able to tell me something about Bill. I resolved, this time, to be collecting anecdotes for a book about the war. That way I didn’t have to ask direct questions. If I simply let her tell what she remembered, there might be some wheat among the chaff
There might be. More likely there wouldn’t be. More likely I was chasing wild geese. I began to watch them as they flew overhead in formation, one in front, then two by two, hard to count because they kept changing position …
“It’s after five, love. Did you want to change clothes before we go?”
I’d slept a little, after all.
The evening was pleasant. We admired the tree Elizabeth and her family had decorated, had a little light supper, and when the teenagers had retired to the den to watch television, we sat and talked about nothing in particular.
“I suppose you’re mixed up in this business in the Town Hall, Dad,” Elizabeth said eventually.
“And why do you suppose your poor old dad would be getting himself involved in crime at my age, poppet?”
“First, because you always were intrigued by anything the least bit out of the ordinary, and second, because you married someone exactly like you!” She smiled broadly across the room at me, and I felt a sudden stab of gratitude for my adopted family. Elizabeth didn’t treat me like her stepmother; she treated me like a trusted friend. Idiotically, my eyes were wet. I faked a sneeze to give me an excuse to blow my nose.
If my worst fears were realized, it might not be so terrible to have to live with Elizabeth and her family.
Sunday morning dawned foggy and chilly, as predicted. Even the sound of the church bells nearly overhead was muffled. I had no desire whatsoever to get out of bed, but I felt I needed the consolation that church might provide. So I pulled myself out from under the covers, showered and dressed, and had time for a quick cup of coffee.
Alan, who had been up early, had waited for me, and together we rushed across the Close, too late for the early Eucharist, but almost on time for Matins.
I brooded through the service. The beauty of the words usually drew me in, but this time I muttered the General Confession without really paying attention to what I was saying. The lessons weren’t inspiring, I hated the ultra-modern choral setting for the Te Deum, and I didn’t even hear the sermon.
I made an effort to pull myself together after the service. Our young friends Nigel and Inga Evans were there, with their new baby, a tiny mite not even a month old who had slept peacefully through prayers, music, and all. After we had exchanged comments about Jane’s wonderful gingerbread, I duly praised young Nigel Peter to his adoring parents and grandparents, though really I don’t think babies are very interesting until they get a bit older and start to turn into people. Maybe it’s just as well I never had any.
Margaret Allenby, the dean’s wife, caught up with Alan and me as we were about to leave the Cathedral.
“Morning, you two. Looking a bit gloomy today, Dorothy. Has poor Walter taken a turn for the worse?”
Margaret always knows everything, including most of what upsets me. I’ve come to accept and welcome her insight, but today she was missing the point. “No, I believe he’s doing quite well. I hope to be able to visit him in a day or two. It’s the rest of the problem that’s getting me down.”
“Not getting anywhere?”
“Not an inch. I think I must be taking the wrong tack. I was so sure that Bill’s war experiences were somehow at the bottom of all that’s happened, but I’ve talked with several people who knew him back then, and nobody seems to think there was anything out of the ordinary going on with him. Of course, I don’t know what happened in Colditz, and I probably never will. I suspect that information died with Bill, and just as well, maybe.”
“I suppose you’ve talked to poor Mr. Tredgold.” Margaret smiled sadly.
“Tried to. Of course I didn’t make any headway at all. How long has he been that way, Margaret?”
“Oh, for as long as I’ve known him. He talks quite rationally about everything except the war, but that subject is absolutely forbidden.”
“It’s such a shame. He seems like a sweet old man. And then there’s John Merrifield, his mind sound, but his body deteriorating. And Stanley Rutherford—he’s a Nonconformist, I expect, do you know him?”
“Oh, yes, indeed. A stalwart Baptist, but he comes to jumble sales and that sort of thing here from time to time, especially when they’re in aid of war veterans or their families. It doesn’t seem to matter which war, so long as he has a chance to buttonhole people and tell them about his war.” She laughed gently.
I chuckled, too, but then I remembered how miserable Stanley seemed to be, living with his granddaughter. It wasn’t really very funny, was it? “He’s lonely. So is Miss Price. So are they all, lonely and weary and unhappy. It’s pathetic. I tell you, Margaret, I’m terrified of getting old. Really old, I mean, outliving my usefulness and all my contemporaries and having to live in some sort of ghastly home. I get really angry at God, just thinking about it. Why doesn’t he let people die when they’re ready, instead of making them hang on and on until they’re fed up with life, and everybody else is fed up with them?”
Alan put his arm around my shoulders and started to say something, but Margaret forestalled him. “I rather think that’s a question for my husband—and here he is. Kenneth, my dear, Dorothy wants to know why God permits the ravages of old age.”
Some clergymen might have dodged the awkward question, but the dean was no coward. “Do you know, I’ve often thought about that very point, particularly as my own age advances and my aches and pains multiply. One can never know for certain why God does anything, of course, but I wonder if perhaps he allows aging as a way of easing us from this world? We don’t belong here, you know, not permanently. He’s made us for his world, for Paradise, but we become attached to our lives here and loath to give them up. I will never believe that God
causes
any distress of any kind, but he obviously
permits
a great deal of suffering. I’ve toyed with the idea that he uses it, as he can use any evil in the cause of good, to make us a little less sorry to leave our earthly home.”