Exposure

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Does your dad work in London?’ Susie Patch asked Sally.

  ‘No, he works away. He’s in the Navy,’ said Sally instantly. It was what she and Paul had decided to tell everyone. Even when they talk about Dad to Bridget, they say he’s in the Navy. She’s so little that otherwise she’ll forget and say the wrong thing at school. Already, they think she believes it.

  ‘Dad’s on a ship, isn’t he, Sally? That’s why he can’t come home.’

  ‘Yes, but don’t talk about it to Mum. It makes her sad, because she misses him.’

  ‘I’m sad too,’ says Bridget, but she doesn’t look it. She is rosy and noisy and she talks back to Paul and Sally in a way she’d never have dared in London.

  The tide is high now, and water almost touches the rim of snow above the tideline. There’s too much snow for them to go wooding. Paul has recently learned another thing, which is that when a load of seaweed washes up after a storm you can collect it and the market garden half a mile the other side of East Knigge will pay tuppence a sack. There are people in the village who will pay, too: Mr Austin and Mr Porter, and the two old ladies who live in the house by the church. But the Pearce twins sell to them and they would beat Paul up if he tried to muscle in. It doesn’t matter. He and Sal can easily drag sacks as far as the market garden.

  Bridget digs with her mittened hands and picks up stones to chuck into the water. Her throw is poor and they fall short. Paul takes the largest stone from her and shies it professionally so that it skips and skips and then sinks. He bends down and brushes snow aside until he finds one of just the right shape and flatness, and then he casts it out with the flick of the wrist that Dad taught him on the ponds of Hampstead Heath. If the stone skips seven times, then Dad will come home. Skip, skip, skip, skip. Skip. Paul clenches his stomach, willing it on, but the stone goes down.

  He’s going to plead guilty. He is guilty. He can barely remember picking up that briefcase or the way it felt in his hand as he brought it home. The briefcase is irrelevant. It’s the cause but it’s not the reason why shame hangs over him like fog. Lily knows nothing about Giles Holloway, because he, Simon, has never said one word about him. He remembers Giles telling him once that Tolstoy gave his diaries to his wife to read, the night before their wedding. There she read about the woman by whom her future husband already had a child. You have to imagine a girl of eighteen, Giles had said, a girl brought up in unimaginable ignorance, which was called purity, reading of her husband’s lust for gypsy women and of the child he had fathered. It was the night before her wedding, when she was full of the hopes and dreams that had been stuffed into her since she was a child. Those diaries would change the marriage, no?

  It was the kind of talk Giles loved. There seemed to be no end of long afternoons, with the light fading and a chill making its way through the glass of the window. They would unstick themselves from their sweat of sex and Giles would roll on to his back and talk about the stabbing of Christopher Marlowe or that photograph of Lord Alfred Douglas where you can see the vanity and venality of the man as clearly as if it were printed in words across his forehead. He talked about taking the train from Moscow to Mongolia, about Ankara in 1937 and Berlin in the autumn of 1945. He was in Kreuzberg one day – in the American sector, Simon. There was a column of Trümmerfrauen – rubble women – cleaning bricks. The wind blew back one woman’s coat, and on the lining there was her Frauenschaft badge. The others closed around her, protecting her from Giles’s gaze. Was geht es Dich an? What’s it got to do with you?

  Simon can’t remember what he said when Giles was talking like that, about worlds Simon hadn’t begun to encounter. Perhaps he said nothing. It wouldn’t have mattered. They weren’t the kind of conversations where you had to bat the ball back, or, worse still, bat the ball back in style. He ceased to be Giles’s lover and became his child. He could lie there and browse on what Giles knew, taking from it whatever he wanted. There were rolls of fat under Giles’s chin, and his hair was thinning. From this angle, he didn’t look good. In his clothes, with his car and his style, he was invulnerable, but not now. Simon was the stronger here. He was young; he was immortal. Death and age would never happen to him. It made him feel tender towards Giles, at first.

  He never talked to Lily about Giles, not one word. He put it all behind him and hid those months with Giles, even from himself. But now they won’t be hidden. They pull his sleep apart. He remade himself with Lily. When the children came, he was in a world that he’d never dared imagine. He unlocked the door; he went in; that happiness was his. It was Lily whom he loved. He didn’t want the past. There was no future with Giles, and there never would be, outside Simon’s room. He didn’t want Bobbie’s or the Nightshade, or the constant, careful checking of public behaviour. He didn’t want the secret society which was all he’d be allowed, as long as he was with Giles: signalling to others, and being signalled to himself. He rejected it, along with Stopstone and his parents, his brothers and his school, and he made himself believe that it was nothing to him any more. He’d been a boy with Giles, impressionable and over-eager. His real, adult life was what mattered. He’d chosen Lily, just as Giles once chose him. Lily and he, together. He put his faith in the present, and the future.

  There’s no present in prison, or none that anybody wants. By day you live in the near future. The next smoke, the next meal. It’s not good to look too far ahead, but an hour’s time is always likely to be better than now. At night, the present dissolves and there’s nothing to hold on to but the past from which Simon has been trying to escape for as long as he can remember.

  He could talk about Stopstone with Giles. There was his mother in the glare of the sunlight, with a bed of salvias behind her. Her cat stretched and stabbed the air to catch a butterfly. And there was Simon, six years old and cowering behind the bathroom door as his brothers ramped up and down the stairs. They were looking for him. That night they pulled him out of his bed and hung him out of the window, but when they swung him back and dropped him on to the floor he got away. He ran downstairs to where the light was, and burst in among the grown-ups. What a figure he cut, snotty and shivering in his wet pyjamas. They were about to go in to dinner. His mother dug her fingers into his shoulder, and marched him to the door.

  ‘What a fuss about nothing. Off you go to bed.’ She softened her voice, because there were guests, but her fingers were hard. He wanted to kill his mother. If he could have done it, he would have done it. He was wicked, he knew that. No one must ever know.

  The past rushes at him like an animal. Only one place – one bed, one endless series of afternoons full of hard white Cambridge light – has ever sent it growling away. Giles knew everything. Giles did not think him wicked. Giles roared with laughter, until the bed shook.

  He is the sum of those long afternoons with Giles in his bedsit on the Madingley Road, as much as he’s the sum of his years with Lily. He’s the father of three children but that can’t wipe away the fact that in his own way – the only real way Simon has ever known – Giles fathered him and made him what he was.

  If thou, Lord, should’st mark iniquities,

  O Lord, who shall stand?

  He must get out of here. He can’t stand it. The routine grinds on day after day, mimicking normality. Slopping out, scraping a blunt razor over his cheeks with soap that won’t lather. He smells the stink of himself. Breakfast: the porridge that is no worse than school porridge. Jostling dirty bodies, teeth bared. The man whose name he doesn’t know, who stands too close. Men who are dulled and yet at flashpoint. Bread with a smear of marge and bright pink jam that tastes of wood. Simon eats it with his left arm curved around his plate, as if someone might snatch it away. His right hand grips his mug of tea. There’d be a fucking revolution if there wasn’t any fucking tea, even in here. So says Proctor, he with the nervous whinny in place of a laugh. He is charged with fraud, and has taken a shine to Simon.

  ‘You’re an educated man, I can tell,’ he says, and away he goes
into a mass of rambling, confused detail about his case. He interrupts himself, brings himself back to the point, sheers off again into knowing what ought to be done better than any lawyer. He is stupid, cunning and arrogant. Simon can’t make sense of any of it, but soon he understands that this doesn’t matter. Proctor sucks his teeth, shakes his head and is satisfied that the complexity of his case has defeated Simon, the educated man. For what is education anyway but a nod and a wink above the heads of the world. Professors, doctors and lawyers: they’re all conmen at heart, and Proctor’s on to them. But he’s servile, too. He carries his case about like a patient going from doctor to doctor with a rare illness that he has diagnosed himself.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t help,’ says Simon. ‘It’s not really up my street.’ That was a mistake. Proctor looks at him narrowly. Is Simon trying to come it over him? Quickly, Simon adds, ‘You need a legal brain. But you seem to have a pretty good grasp on it yourself.’ It’s the kind of appeasement he’s grown used to here. One thing he saw straight away was that anyone who thought he was any better than anyone else was in trouble, unless he could back it up with violence.

  Simon expects to hear no more of Proctor’s case, but the next day he’s back, his head bobbing too close to Simon’s, garbling the detail of his latest meeting with his brief.

  ‘You want to watch that one,’ says Reg Miniver, passing close as Proctor slopes off at last. ‘He’s got a nasty side to him.’

  They are taking Giles down to X-ray again. Mr Anstruther has popped in to see him about an hour ago. It’s not an X-ray of his leg this time. Mr Anstruther would like to check that his chest is clear.

  ‘Of course. Best to get the full picture,’ says Giles, as if he and Mr Anstruther are on a par in treating this recalcitrant thing which is Giles’s body. He waits for Mr Anstruther to go away again, and when he does, Sister comes in quietly.

  ‘We won’t bother with the wheelchair today,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t know how far I can walk.’

  Sister smiles. ‘No, I meant that we’d wheel your bed down. The orderlies will be here in twenty minutes, and Nurse Davies will go down to X-ray with you.’

  They are looking after him. They understand what he can do and what he can’t. A wash of relief almost comforts Giles, but not quite.

  ‘A general anaesthetic can cause breathing difficulties for quite some time,’ says Sister, as if she has heard the questions he hasn’t asked.

  ‘I don’t feel very well,’ says Giles, without meaning to, without even knowing that the words were about to come out of his mouth. This time Sister says nothing reassuring. She just nods, as if Giles not feeling well was to be expected, and sets about making him comfortable for the journey.

  Giles faints during the X-rays. It’s entirely his own fault. He told the radiographer that he was fine holding his arms up for the side-view, when he was already seeing blotches of darkness. They must have got him back on the bed, because when he became conscious Nurse Davies was holding a mask over his face and telling him to breathe deeply.

  ‘Feeling better?’

  ‘Yes.’ He feels bloody awful.

  ‘Good. We’ll get you back upstairs in a minute and then you can have a sleep.’

  He hears murmuring, conferring. Nurse Davies is on the telephone to someone. Not only can he not hear clearly, but he doesn’t even want to.

  ‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ he says with excessive politeness and his eyes shut. ‘Did you get all the pictures you wanted?’

  ‘Yes,’ says the radiographer. ‘Perfectly satisfactory images.’

  Perfectly satisfactory. This time it is not a wave of relief, but a sea of it on which Giles drifts, content, all the way back up to the ward. Sister brings him, incredibly, a drink of hot Bovril. He hasn’t had Bovril for years, not since he was a child. He drinks some of it and then falls asleep.

  By the time he wakes, winter dusk is already thickening outside his windows. It makes him think of buses looming through fog, and taxis at walking-pace. It’s good to be inside, in the white, clean bed. They have an amazingly clever way of changing the sheets so that he doesn’t have to get up. They roll him on one side, draw the sheet from under him, roll him back and draw the other side out, and then they do the same to replace it with a clean one. They work together, as efficient as anything he’s ever seen. They can give him a blanket bath without ever chilling his body. Wonderful girls.

  Nurse Davies is going off duty soon, but she takes his blood pressure, temperature and pulse first, and notes down the results on his chart without comment, as usual.

  ‘Good about the X-rays,’ he says.

  She glances at him. ‘Mr Anstruther is going to pop in at six o’clock,’ she says, ‘and after that I go off duty. Sister Ransome is on tonight. Now don’t go fainting on her, will you?’

  ‘Keeps you on your toes,’ he says, but a fit of coughing interrupts him. By the time it finishes he’s bathed in sweat.

  He must have dropped off again because when he opens his eyes Anstruther is at the side of the bed. He draws up a chair and sits.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asks.

  ‘Bit tired.’

  Anstruther nods. ‘I’ve had a look at those X-rays.’

  Something in his tone sharpens Giles. He raises his head to look Anstruther full in the face. ‘And?’

  ‘I’m afraid there are some abnormalities.’

  Giles doesn’t speak. His whole body tenses, surging with adrenalin. He searches Anstruther’s face. Something’s there, in the eyes or is it around the mouth? He knows something that I don’t know. No one, no one, is going to know things about Giles that he doesn’t know himself.

  ‘I thought as much,’ he says.

  ‘I was concerned about the possibility of a pulmonary embolism following surgery, given your state of health, but we seemed to be in the clear. However, with the increase in breathlessness and the pain in your side that you reported to Sister, I thought we should take a chest X-ray.’

  ‘How does one treat a pulmonary embolism?’

  They are on the same side again. The situation is under control. But no. Anstruther still knows something. He is embarrassed.

  ‘I’m afraid …’ Anstruther clears his throat and looks at the floor and then up again. Suddenly Giles sees that behind him the door is open and Sister is hovering. Now, at once, clearly and forever, Giles knows that he has been barking up the wrong tree. They are not in this together. Something awful, irreversible, is about to be said. He must stop Anstruther. He must stop this humiliation of them knowing and him not knowing.

  ‘It’s bad news, I gather,’ he says.

  ‘Yes. I’m most awfully sorry. I’m afraid the X-rays showed a mass in your right lung. A growth.’

  ‘A cancer, you mean.’

  ‘I’m sorry to say that it looks like that. Of course we shall do further tests—’

  ‘But you don’t need to. You can tell.’

  Slowly, Anstruther bows his head. ‘I’m afraid it does look pretty clear on the X-rays. There is a small mass in the left lung, but the right lung is more severely affected.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘If you wish, I can show you the X-rays.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it.’ Cold, staccato, withdrawn. That’s the style. That’s the only way to get through this. If only Sister doesn’t come in with pity in her eyes.

  ‘I’ve sent copies of the X-rays across to a colleague of mine in thoracic surgery,’ says Anstruther. ‘He’ll come in to see you tomorrow morning, to discuss treatment options.’

  Treatment options? Lung cancer was a death sentence; everybody knew that. Even so, a small, weak part of him leaped with hope.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Barnes-Wilson will assess you. It looks as if there may be significant pleural effusion. That can be drained, which will improve the breathlessness. Surgery on the lung itself doesn’t immediately look like an option, but it’s not my area.’ How much more co
mfortable he is, now that they are back on professional ground. ‘Barnes-Wilson is absolutely the top man in the field. He’s doing interesting things with radiotherapy, too.’

  I bet he is, thinks Giles. He does interesting things and then he goes home afterwards, in the pink. Anstruther seems not only far away but also too bright, too distinct, as if someone’s shining a light all around him from behind. Giles is not going to faint again. He will not do that in front of Anstruther.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says. The words make hardly any sound but they clang in his head as if mad bell-ringers are at work there. ‘Going to sleep now,’ and he shuts his eyes, shuts himself off until he is sure that Anstruther has gone. The tumult inside him slowly calms itself. He, Giles, the pulse of him, is still here. When he opens his eyes, he will see his hands outside the hospital sheets. His leg is healing itself. What the hell is it doing that for? Doesn’t it know that there’s no point? Now he realises that he forgot to ask Anstruther the question that everybody is supposed to ask: How long have I got?

  ‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea.’ It’s Sister’s voice. She knows he’s not asleep.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says, opening his eyes.

  ‘Let’s raise you up a bit …’ She is at it again, with her small, strong hands. Another pillow slides behind him, and he is half-sitting. She has brought the tea in a china cup with blue flowers on it. It is steaming and fragrant. ‘And ginger biscuits. I know you like them.’

  Imagine Sister bringing tea with her own fair hands. What a revolution in etiquette. He half smiles.

  ‘I forgot to ask him how long it’ll be before I conk out,’ he says.

  ‘You mustn’t talk like that. Drink your tea. Mr Barnes-Wilson is very good, you know.’

  ‘But not a miracle-worker.’

  Sister looks him full in the face. ‘No.’

  ‘Thought not. Will they be moving me?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. We can look after you here as well as anywhere.’