by Pat Barker
She was speaking to Alex, who grimaced and put down his glass. Elinor smiled, tried to look encouraging. She wondered what it was like to be Alex, to have seen so many men his own age and even younger killed, and then to come back into this other world, where an old woman dying in her own bed, surrounded by people who loved her, was treated as a tragedy. They never really come back, she thought, looking at Alex, thinking of Toby. Wondering if the same might not be true of Paul.
“You too, Elinor.”
She didn’t want to go; she thought Alex would want time alone with his grandmother—they’d been so close—but evidently Rachel thought otherwise. For whatever reason, she’d decided the whole family should all be there together.
Alex was sitting with his back to the door when she entered the room, his left hand resting on his grandmother’s wrinkled arm, her dead-white skin and his brown hand shockingly contrasted against the pale blue coverlet. It imprinted itself on her mind, that image; she knew she would always remember it. Mother was smiling, though she could only smile with one side of her face; the other was twisted into a permanent droop or sneer. And she was struggling to speak.
“It’s all right, Gran.” Alex obviously meant don’t bother, don’t try to speak, but the old woman’s mouth worked and worked at the words that wouldn’t come. Then: “Toby,” she said. “I knew you’d come.”
Elinor saw Alex flinch. Rachel, who was standing on the other side of the bed, leaned forward as if to protect her son. Too late for that, Elinor thought. You should have been doing that years ago.
Shortly afterwards, Mother drifted off to sleep again. She seemed contented; happy, even. They listened to her breathing, waiting, and perhaps—some of them—longing, for a change in the rhythm, but, though the gaps between one breath and the next seemed sometimes impossibly long, her chest still rose and fell with the same remorseless regularity. This might go on for days.
I can’t bear it, Elinor thought. And then: Don’t be stupid, of course you can.
In the end the prolonged silence became too revealing. “I’ll get Nurse Wiggins,” Elinor said. She didn’t know what Nurse Wiggins could do, but she felt the family atmosphere needed diluting. She ran quickly upstairs and tapped on the door at the end of the corridor. Nurse Wiggins appeared, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, all that fresh, jolly hardness gone. “Yes, of course I’ll come.” She stifled a yawn, then yawned again. Moist, pink, catlike interior; huge tonsils.
Beginning to relax slightly, Elinor went first to her own room to splash her face with tepid water—no water was really cold this summer—was tempted to lie down for half an hour, but decided she ought to go downstairs. When she reached the bottom step she saw Alex and Rachel standing under Toby’s portrait in the hall. Something about their attitude suggested the talk was private, so she retreated a few steps and settled down to wait.
Rachel was saying in a low, urgent voice, “You will stay, won’t you?”
“Tonight? Yes.”
“Only one night? I hoped you…”
“Yes?”
“Well, I hoped you’d stay till the end.”
“Don’t you think I’ve done enough?”
“You’ve only been here a couple of hours.”
“I don’t mean now.”
“Look, it’ll only be a day or two. If that.”
“I’ve got things to do in town.”
“Can’t they wait?”
“I’ve got a life.”
“She loved you more than anybody.”
“Me?”
He jerked his head at the portrait, then walked out into the garden, the front door banging shut behind him. Rachel stood for a moment, looking after him, and then, head down, crossed the hall into the drawing room.
Elinor lingered on the stairs for a minute, then went to stand where they’d been standing. Killed in action, she read, looking at the plaque, and even that wasn’t true. She was remembering an incident when Alex had been five or six years old. He’d come running in from the garden, had stopped under the portrait, and pulled his sweater over his head. “Christ, it’s hot!” She remembered him saying it, she’d thought it so funny at the time, his chubby red face struggling out of the neck hole, first one ear, then the other, almost as if the sweater were giving birth to him. Then, suddenly, he stopped, one arm still in the sleeve, and stared at the portrait. “It wasn’t my fault!” Yelling, right at the top of his voice. Then, freeing his arm, he threw the sweater at the painting. There’d been something disturbing about the little boy shouting at the painted face of a man he couldn’t remember. She’d wanted to…intervene, protect him somehow—but from what? It wasn’t my fault. She hadn’t known what it meant, then, and she wasn’t sure she knew now. Of course, it might have been a reference to some childish game he was in the middle of, perhaps he’d been accused of breaking the rules, something like that, but no, it had been very definitely directed at the portrait. At Toby. So what was it? A repudiation of the grief that hung over the house like a pall of black smoke and wouldn’t go away? A refusal to feel guilt—and how guilty they all felt, then and now. Especially now, when another generation of young men was dying. We dropped the catch, she thought. Our generation. Wondering why she’d suddenly strayed into cricket: the memory of Alex’s white sweater, perhaps. And Alex’s generation is paying the price.
She looked across the hall and saw him still standing there, the angry little boy. And then he turned and ran out into the garden, where the dazzling light swallowed him, like the skin on a sunlit sea.
Crossing the hall, she was about to follow that flitting shadow into the garden, when she stopped, for there, pacing up and down the lawn, smoking furiously, was the adult Alex. As she watched, he turned towards the house and stared straight at her. She raised a hand to wave, then realized that he couldn’t see her. From where he stood, the hall would be in darkness.
She couldn’t imagine what he felt, now the old woman who’d loved him and used him as a substitute for her dead son was herself dying. Loss? Relief? Or did he perhaps no longer care much either way? His face really had aged; she’d noticed it earlier, but it struck her again, now, with renewed force. When he was talking, the play of expression on his face softened the lines around his eyes and mouth, but now, in repose, they looked as if they’d been scored in with a knife. She remembered the identical transformation in Toby; how, suddenly, from being two years older, he was five, ten, fifteen years older. Out of reach.
As Alex was. He was his own man now. The war that had taken so much away from him, had given him that, at least.
FIVE
Elinor woke early from confused dreams of Paul. She’d telephoned twice the previous night, had listened to the phone ring in their empty house, walked in memory through the familiar rooms, seeing the dented cushions, hearing the affronted silence. What on earth could he be doing? He couldn’t be on duty every night, but he certainly wasn’t at home. Working late in his studio, she guessed, perhaps even sleeping there—he did that sometimes when she was away from home—but there was no telephone in the studio so she had no way of contacting him.
Throwing back the bedclothes, she went to the window and looked out, feeling the morning air cool on her sleep-swollen face. Five or six jackdaws were strutting across the lawn—little storm troopers—rapacious beaks jab-jabbing at the soil in search of worms. Drops of dew glinted in the grass. It was still only half light.
Something had woken her. She listened. Footsteps on the landing? No, no, it was much too early for anybody to be about. But then, the front door opened and Alex came out, carrying a suitcase, followed by Tim. She looked down at the tops of their heads, Alex’s thick blond hair, Tim’s pink scalp showing through carefully combed mouse-brown. They got into the car, moving heavily, not speaking, gray shapes in the gray light. Doors clunked, the engine coughed and choked before settling down to a steady hum, spinning wheels scattered gravel and away they went. She wondered if her mother was awake to hear it, and whether if she he
ard it she’d realize that Alex had gone.
—
BY LATE AFTERNOON the heat had become intolerable. Taking a break from the sickroom, Elinor went into the garden and watered the plants. Unlike Rachel—and their mother too, for that matter—she was no gardener, but watering was one job she did enjoy. She took off her shoes and let her white London feet explore the crumbly, moist soil. By the time she’d finished, all the paths were shining wet, and yet, even before she’d coiled the hose and restored it to its place by the tap, they were starting to dry. Steam rising from them, here and there.
Before dinner she went back to her mother’s room, to the sour smell from the commode that no amount of bleach seemed able to remove. And so it ends. She’d been thinking things like that all day: vague, trite little phrases, trying to nudge herself into feeling the appropriate emotions, and never quite succeeding. The truth was that, like Rachel, she was too tired to feel anything very much. During the evening, Nurse Wiggins took over for a few hours; the sisters sat on the terrace in the breathy, moth-haunted darkness, smoking and talking—about nothing very much. Everything was subsumed in waiting.
Elinor was going to sit with their mother for the first half of the night. Neither of the sisters wanted her to be with a stranger when she died. At bedtime they went upstairs together, but outside their mother’s door, Rachel lingered. “You will wake me, won’t you?”
“Of course I will. Go on now, shoo. Shoo.”
Sitting beside the bed, Elinor read for an hour, taking nothing in, listening to her mother’s uneven breaths. Without realizing, she started to match her own breathing to her mother’s, becoming in the process slightly light-headed. After a while, she gave up pretending to read and switched off the lamp. At least, now, she could open the blackout curtains and lean out of the window into the hot, still night.
Even flowers and grass no longer smelled fresh; it was as if everything had been singed. Searchlights fingered the underbelly of clouds, coming together sometimes to form a pyramid of light over the church tower. They seemed, in their constant, quivering, hypersensitive movement, to be living things, like the antennae on a moth.
A rustle behind her. Quickly, she pulled the blackout curtains across and groped her way back to her chair.
“Is that you, Elinor?”
“Yes.” Elinor put her hand over her mother’s eyes to shield them before switching on the lamp. “Would you like me to call Rachel?”
“No, let her sleep.”
Another breath. And another. After each dragging pause, the skeletal chest expanded again. Let go, just let go. Elinor almost said it aloud, only she was too ashamed, knowing it was her own deliverance she was pleading for.
The old woman looked around the room, bewildered. “I thought Toby was here.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
“That was Alex, Mother. Yesterday.”
“No, just now.” The old woman’s eyes focused on the empty space beyond the foot of the bed. “He was standing just there.”
She’s wandering, Elinor thought, resisting the temptation to turn round and check there was nobody there. But then her mother surprised her by turning towards her a gaze that was sharp, alert, even slightly malicious: a glimpse of the woman she’d once been. The thick, white tongue came out and moistened her cracked lips. Elinor bent forward to hear.
“I knew.”
Humor her. “What did you know?”
“You and Toby.” Her chest rattled—she might even have been trying to laugh. “Bed creaking, night after night, you must’ve thought I was stupid, I knew whose room it was coming from.”
Elinor daren’t acknowledge that she’d heard, still less that she’d understood. Instead, she asked, “Would you like some water?”
A reluctant nod. Elinor held the glass to her lips and watched the wasted throat working as she drank. After a while she waved it away. “Did you really think I didn’t know?”
“We used to play, that’s all.”
“Play.”
Elinor dabbed her mother’s mouth with a folded handkerchief and settled the gray head back onto the pillow. She said, brightly, “Alex is coming again at the weekend.”
“Alex?”
So Alex had stopped existing, which seemed rather hard on Alex, whose whole childhood had been warped by his supposed resemblance to Toby. How many other families were like this? The chair at the dining-room table that nobody ever sat in, the bedroom kept as it had always been: school books, toys…On the mantelpiece or the piano, photographs of a face that didn’t age. Other people’s lives molding themselves around the gap.
Another pause in her mother’s breathing. Longer? “I’ll get Rachel.”
This time there was no protest. Blindly, Elinor stumbled across the landing and tapped on Rachel’s door. After waiting a few moments, she pushed it open and peered into the darkness. That familiar married smell, male and female scents combined. “Rachel?”
A hump under the bedclothes heaved and muttered. Then Rachel, still half asleep, staggered to the door, struggling to get her arms into the sleeves of her wrap. “What’s the matter? Is she worse?”
“No, I don’t think so, she’s awake, that’s all. I thought you’d want to be there.”
“Yes, of course. Oh God, I didn’t think I’d get to sleep at all and I must’ve gone really deep.”
Elinor continued along the landing to the bathroom.
“You are coming back?” Rachel sounded frightened.
“Yes, I just want to splash my face, I was starting to nod off in there.”
In the bathroom, she stood for a moment with her back against the door, then went to the basin and turned on the cold water. Cupping her hands, she threw water over her face, neck, chest, before finally filling the bowl to the brim and pushing her head underneath the surface. Water slopped onto the floor, but no matter. She looked at her dripping face in the mirror, coils of wet hair stuck to her forehead, haunted eyes. Her nightdress was soaked. Her nipples showed through the white cotton like a second pair of eyes. I look mad, she thought.
Now, when it was too late, she wanted to argue. Once. It had happened once. It was all nonsense saying the bed creaked “night after night.” As children, she and Toby had often crept along the passage to each other’s rooms. The only way to stop them was to lock them in, and even then Toby had crawled along the ledge outside their bedrooms, careless of the forty-foot drop onto the terrace below. Only after his death had she looked down at that ledge and realized the risk he’d run. As a child, ten, eleven years old. Why? Why that need? It hadn’t been sexual then, couldn’t have been; he was too young. All that came later. And it happened once. Though, of course, saying you’d slept with your brother only once was a bit like saying you’d committed murder only once. It wasn’t really much of an excuse.
Back in her bedroom, she changed into a fresh nightdress before going to the window and peering round the blinds. Searchlights illuminating steep cliffs and chasms of cloud. Then, as she strained to hear, there came that curiously unimpressive pop-pop from the marshes. A couple of weeks from now there might be German tanks parked on the village green—mid-September seemed to be everybody’s best guess for the invasion—and yet here she was, remembering two children playing in the dark.
She needed Paul, not to talk to—she’d never told him about Toby, never told anybody—no, simply to have him here, his weight and warmth beside her in the bed. As for tonight…Well, she had to go back, see it through to the end, there was no choice. But on the landing she paused, still reluctant to go in. Through the half-open door, she saw a halo of soft light around the lamp, her sister’s heavy shadow. Not long now. Please God, not long.
SIX
All the normal routines of the house had broken down, though food—mainly cold meats and salad—still appeared at mealtimes, laid out on the sideboard in the dining room. Elinor and Rachel ate—when they ate at all—in their mother’s room. Paul, newly arrived from London, sat
in solitary splendor at the dining-room table or, more often, took bread and cheese wrapped in a napkin and went out to sketch on the marshes. He’d responded to Elinor’s plea for help; though, in fact, there was very little he could do, apart from just be there when she needed to talk. The only practical, useful thing he could do was spend time with Kenny, who seemed, for some extraordinary reason, to have become quite attached to him.
Returning late one afternoon from a sketching trip, he found Kenny loitering at the end of the drive. He’d been hoping for a visit from his mother, though nobody seemed to know whether he had any reason to expect one.
“Wishful thinking, I’m afraid,” Rachel said. “I’ve no patience with the woman. I mean, I know she’s probably having a hard time but then, frankly, so are we.”
Paul found the sight of the boy mooching about at the end of the drive almost intolerable. The last bus had been and gone; she wouldn’t be coming now—if she’d had any intention of coming at all. Kenny sometimes invented these visits because he wanted them so badly, though there had been times when she’d arranged to come and then just not shown up. “You all right, Kenny?” Paul asked, turning into the drive. He got a sort of smile in return, though he thought from the boy’s swollen eyelids that he might have been crying. Bloody woman. He went into the house and poured himself a drink—Tim was still in London—but he couldn’t settle so, in the end, he fetched a football from Kenny’s room and they spent an hour in the lane behind the house kicking the ball around, using old coats he found in the under-stairs cupboard as goalposts. The sun sank lower in the sky, its blood-red smears widening to a flood, and still they played. Paul’s shadow lengthened till it threatened to envelop Kenny, while, at the same time, the boy’s shadow fled away.
They played until Paul was too tired to go on. “Come on, let’s go and get something to eat.” Kenny dragged his feet, complaining all the way, but then burst into the hall, eyes glowing, pupils dilated, looking like a little fox cub, with his thin, sharp face and orange hair. He even smelled strong and musky like a wild animal. Paul cut them each a slice of veal and ham pie and settled down to eat. Soon Kenny was yawning uncontrollably, tired out by the misery of his long wait as much as by the football; but at least he’d sleep. Ought to, anyway.