Exposure

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘You mean they read your letters home?’ Lily asked him.

  ‘Yes, you had to give the envelope to your housemaster unsealed. If you licked it by accident they made you do the whole thing over again.’

  ‘My God. No wonder you don’t like writing letters.’

  He feels a rash of shame now, all over his body. If Lily ever read those letters he’d written to Giles – if Lily even knew of their existence—

  It would be the end. She trusts Simon as she trusts no one else. If he’d told her straight away, it might have been all right. There was this chap I knew when I was at Cambridge. He could have come out with it then, right at the start. It would have been difficult but she would have seen he was trying to be honest with her.

  Tolstoy gave his wife his diary to read, just before their wedding. Giles told him that, and then he said something more about it later: he said that what Sonya read in the diary must have become a running sore in the marriage. It was self-indulgent, he said, to tell all; you were trying to clear your own conscience at the expense of the other person.

  But the truth was that he hadn’t avoided talking to Lily about Giles out of consideration for her. It was because he was afraid. She might have been disgusted, even frightened. She might have said that after all she couldn’t marry him, because it was too much of a risk. She might have thought that he was only pretending to desire her, or that he was marrying her in order to appear normal. He’d had no idea how she might react and after weeks and months it became impossible to say to her: You know, Lily, I ought to tell you that before I met you I was in love with another man.

  He said nothing, and it began to seem right to say nothing. What happened with Giles was quite separate, and anyway the whole thing was over before he even met Lily. It didn’t even seem like concealment any more: it felt natural to be silent. He loved Lily. She was his life now. Everything else was irrelevant.

  She’ll go now, though. All she’ll be able to see is a shabby deception, a betrayal as long as their marriage. She’ll leave him. He sees her putting on her coat in the hall, and tying the belt tight. She calls for the children, and obediently they come down and get ready, without looking at their father. No scuffle for shoes, no argument about a scarf. Bridget takes Lily’s hand and they all troop out of the front door. Paul is at his mother’s side. They don’t look back and no one says a word. Down the front path they go, and up the street, the children a phalanx around their mother. Gone.

  25

  Cold Obstruction

  They’ve put an oxygen cylinder by his bed. Giles doesn’t need it all the time, but he feels safer with it there.

  The pleural effusion was drained yesterday, and his breathing is easier. Or, as Sister puts it, he is ‘more comfortable’.

  She asked him if there was anyone he would like the hospital to contact. He went through them all: his colleagues, the old friends from a thousand parties, the boys, but the thought of it made him tired. He didn’t want any of them.

  Only Simon. He’d like to see him, but he’s in prison. So much for that. What would be the point of it, anyway? Simon wouldn’t want to see him, not now. Even if none of it had ever happened and Simon were able to come, it would be no good. He’d perch on that chair by the bed, feeling sorry for Giles but bored and uneasy, wanting to get away.

  Ma Clitterold has been in several times. She brings grapes, and newspapers, and his letters, which he never bothers to open. She sits stolidly, without making conversation. Her bulk is as disapproving as ever, but she won’t abandon him. He is her gentleman. She’ll be there at his funeral, dressed decently in black, her feet overflowing her shoes. He might give her the Kandinsky, but she won’t care for it or know what it’s worth. She wouldn’t give it to a jumble sale, out of respect. Julian would like the Kandinsky, but he’s not getting it.

  The Kandinsky will still be there, and Giles will not. Here it comes: a wave of terror, topping the sea wall, turning his insides to water. And there it goes again.

  There are no leaves on the branches outside his window. Very likely there never will be again, as far as Giles is concerned. The moment for asking Anstruther how long he has got seems to have passed. Nobody talks about death. He can quite see why not, from their point of view, and most of the time he goes along with it. They are busy people and have to get on with their work. They don’t need weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. But sometimes the breath of health and the cold outdoors on their skin gets to him.

  Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;

  To lie in cold obstruction and to rot …

  Yesterday he’d muttered the lines while Nurse Davies was changing his drawsheet. She must have caught some of it, because she immediately began to chatter about the bunch of huge, hideous daffodils brought in by Ma C.

  ‘Lovely flowers you’ve got. Aren’t you the lucky one? I’ll just top up that water for you when I’ve finished making you comfortable.’

  Giles felt ashamed. What the hell did he think he was doing, quoting about the most dismal speech from Measure for Measure at a girl who was doing her damnedest to make sure his arse wasn’t covered in bedsores?

  He has been examined by Barnes-Wilson, as a matter of form. Beneath the professional manner, boredom and even irritation showed. A patient for whom one could do nothing was clearly not of interest to Barnes-Wilson. The nurses, afterwards, seemed more consoling than before. Or perhaps it was that he noticed the difference. The nurses were not irritated with him, even though day by day they looked after him and he only grew weaker and more ill. They did not blame him for it, and remained interested in the small things that might make him, as they were always saying, ‘more comfortable’. Trivialities, these would have seemed to him once, when he was well. Hardly worth the bother, especially when a chap’s going to die anyway. He knows better now. The nurses won’t let him lie for long in one position. They help him to turn, and rub his buttocks with methylated spirits. Ten times a day, they expertly rebuild his pillow-mountain, and ease him back into position when he slips down. He’s so damned weak.

  When Anstruther told him about the cancer, what had he thought of first? Pain, probably. Oh, and extinction, of course. Good old extinction, always worth sparing a thought for that. What he didn’t think about and didn’t know about was this weakness that changes everything. Weakness swallows him deeper into itself each day.

  He dreams of falling from shocking heights, and wakes with a jolt, sweating, struggling for air. Nurse Davies has left the bell within reach. He puts his finger on it, but he doesn’t push the button. He knows that he’s breathless from panic, not want of oxygen. If he keeps very still, his breathing will steady. He hears footsteps, and the nurses’ night-time voices. They’re only just outside. No need to call them. He turns his head to see the luminous hands of his travelling clock. Only ten to two. Ma C. brought in his little folding clock in its brown leather case that has been all over the world with him. Who’d have thought it would end up here? There it is, ticking away, just as it ticked in Vienna and Istanbul. My God, what sights that clock has seen.

  You have to end up somewhere. No good being surprised. That’s weakness. Giles has seen surprise on the faces of the newly dead. They were torn out of their lives. They didn’t expect it, those young men dying in ditches, behind orchard walls, on little roads that were white with dust. It’s only looking back that he really sees how young they were. How young we all were. It didn’t strike him at the time. No wonder they looked surprised and even offended. This was the full stop, with their lives snatched away from them. You only had to make one mistake, because death never made any.

  He understands it now. It’s taken a long time but now everything is falling into place. You have your time and then it’s over. So easy to say and so meaningless, until you understand, really understand, feel with every weak inch of you that it applies to you, not only to all those others. Soon he, Giles Holloway, will lie on this same bed, perhaps with that look of surprise on his f
ace. The nurses will kindly plug all the holes in his body so that he won’t leak over the sheets, and lastly they’ll cover his face. Someone will close his eyes, holding down the lids for just long enough while gazing rather abstractedly into the middle distance, just as they gaze at their watches while taking his pulse.

  The skin is pouched under his eyes. The flesh is being raked off him. Not a pretty sight, Giles old boy. No one would want to touch you now. The nurses have to, because it’s their job. There doesn’t seem to be anybody much left, otherwise.

  It’s like being at a party, in a crowded room, holding forth, everybody round you, laughing, the faces shiny and the mouths open. Every time your glass empties someone fills it. You breathe in smoke and hot perfume and you come to a climax: roars of laughter, waves of it, billows of it over the heads of the guests and out through the open windows. You are raised up. You are invincible, your words like a thousand swords flashing in the air over your head. Old Giles is on terrific form tonight. And then, between one drink and the next, they are gone. The room is half-empty. More than half-empty. The wreaths of cigarette smoke are cold. Your hostess stands by the door with a fixed, weary smile, looking straight ahead of her. You stumble, and can’t remember where you put your coat.

  ‘Goodnight,’ you say. As you lean in to kiss her cheek she turns away so that you brush on nothing.

  ‘Goodnight, Giles,’ she answers, and her voice is cold, admonitory.

  You go down the steps, grasping the railing, and don’t know what it is that you’ve done. The square is full of massed, inky shadow. You’ll walk home to sober up. Damn her anyway, silly bitch, a wet blanket if ever there was one. Shouldn’t give a party if she doesn’t like parties. They were laughing. They loved every moment of it.

  No one much has come to see him. The best of them are dead anyway. His real friends. Mulching the ditches of Normandy. That line out of The Waste Land about the ships at Mylae and some character called Stetson. The ships at Mylae. Quinqueremes and triremes. You’d have been in a damned sight of trouble at school if you didn’t remember about Mylae, and Giles still does. The defeat of Hannibal Gisco at sea, in 260 BC. Pretty bloody unlikely to have a chap called Stetson at Mylae, but there you are.

  That bloody T. S. Eliot. What the hell did he know anyway? Where was he in the war he wrote about so well? The First World War. He was at Oxford. All that stuff about corpses sprouting. Corpses don’t sprout, Tom old boy, not in any war. They swell up until the features disappear. They fall apart. They rot in ditches instead of leaping over them.

  Some of us survive and end up in Berlin and there are women still wearing their damned Nazi badges on the inside of their coats as they dig their country out of the rubble.

  Wirtschaftswunder, that was the word for it. Economic miracle. Led by pretty much the same bunch of old Nazis that had run everything through the thirties and forties, as far as Giles could see. And the same bloody fools let them do it, and talked about building a fortress against Communism in the heart of Europe. Giles, old boy, your Russian’s rather good, isn’t it? We need chaps like you to keep an eye on what the Soviets are up to. Men who had about as much conscience as my hairbrush, prating about freedom.

  Sister has asked him about his next of kin. When he was first admitted, he gave them Ma Clitterold’s name, making a joke of it. But Sister was serious: she wanted more. A brother or sister, perhaps? Perhaps not, thought Giles. Lucy was two years younger than him, and what she didn’t know about breeding English springer spaniels wasn’t worth knowing. The last time they met, Lucy had held forth about the dogs’ ear infections while posting potted-meat sandwiches into her mouth. She didn’t ask Giles about his own life: never had done. Probably well aware that she wouldn’t like the answers. She couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to pig it in a London flat, when they might live in the country.

  Lucy is a parody of what she has set out to be. He remembers her at six, dipping her finger into warm puddles of gin and tonic after one of their parents’ parties. She was always afraid when the noise rose, voices blurred, and doors flew open with a crash. Well, she got away as fast as she could, down to deepest Dorset, where she married a man without curiosity, had no children, bred her dogs.

  Lucy would bury him. He could rely on her for that. She probably would send the Kandinsky to a jumble sale. He ought to do something about that bloody Kandinsky, but he’s too tired. He can’t be bothered. There’s no one much he wants to see.

  The nurses are very good. Sometimes, when they hold a beaker to his lips, he sees those same hands making him comfortable for the last time. He’s stopped being afraid of drowning in the fluid that gathers in his lungs. He couldn’t ask Anstruther about it, but one night he asked Sister. She said there was no need for him to worry about that. They would continue to drain off the fluid, and when the time was right, they would increase the morphine to make him more comfortable. She explained what morphine did when it was administered in the right doses.

  ‘Mr Anstruther is very good on morphine,’ she said, and wiped his face.

  Good on morphine, Giles gathers, means giving a patient lots of it. Well, he’s all for that. When the time comes that’s what he’ll want: the warmth of it trickling through him and the distance it brings.

  In the morning, Sister stands by his bed, holding his wrist. ‘Have you thought any more about your next of kin?’ she asks mildly, keeping her eyes on the watch that is pinned to her uniform.

  He grunts. Lucy won’t do. He doesn’t want Lucy here, getting in the way when he’s dying. Or worse still, that husband of hers. He supposes that if one had a child, things would be quite different. A son, for instance.

  It’s this weakness that makes him think of Simon Callington. Simon in prison. It’s done, it’s over, what the hell is the point? If Giles were himself, he would put Simon out of mind, quick-sharp. But he’s not himself.

  Those digs Simon had on the Madingley Road. A wretched narrow little bed. Simon wasn’t like all the others. He was there with Giles because he wanted to be, and as soon as he stopped wanting, he’d be gone. It made things easy but at the same time it made them more difficult than Giles had ever known. You couldn’t press Simon. He would write his essay, and finish it too. He would heat up his baked beans as if it were the best meal in the world. He didn’t seem to have any family that he cared about, and he threw his mother’s cheese out of the window. Nothing had ever made Giles forget that glancing smile Simon gave him as he turned away. And those letters. There’d never been anything like those letters. He’d kept them all.

  He’d been drinking whisky that afternoon in Cambridge, while Simon wrote at his rickety desk. Nothing in that room was made properly, or worked properly. Simon didn’t care. The whisky bottle was by the bed, and Giles drank steadily, but not too much. The gas fire popped, because one of its elements was broken. Simon drank his own glass of milk, and then the glass he had poured for Giles. He was talking about his forthcoming National Service, and Giles was thinking about nothing much, when suddenly it hit him that if there was another war, Simon would go to it.

  It must be how people felt when they had children. Giles had flinched. His flesh had crawled at the thought of Simon’s flesh, battered, broken open, rotting. At his eyes, full of shock and offence at his own dying. He’d wanted to gather Simon into him and hold him there so that no war would ever be able to tear him away. But that was all nonsense, of course.

  There was never an afternoon like that one again. Never in his life.

  Simon can’t come to see him, because he is in prison. There’s nothing to be done about that. He won’t want to see Giles, even if he could. He must hate me now, thinks Giles.

  You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Was Simon an egg? Ridiculous, when you looked at it like that. But someone has to suffer. Today the struggle, and all that. History was stronger than either of them. Inevitable, that was the word. Better not look too closely at what you believe, Giles old son, or you may find tha
t there’s nothing there. He’s followed that rule for a good many years now. Trotting home with his files.

  Clowde has what it takes. Very soon he’ll be Sir Julian. I’m not like him. That poor bastard Petrenko thought he was getting a passport and a new life in exchange for the bank vault of information he was going to open. But Julian wasn’t having that. He knew which numbers to call: he always did. Petrenko must have been careless, they said later. The Soviets must have got suspicious, guessed that Petrenko was about to fly the coop. Petrenko was trussed up in the back of a car, mouth taped, ears taped, eyes taped. And then a flight back to Moscow. He’d have been begging them to kill him long before they obliged. They had him taped all right. He’d been going to spill the beans. The Julian bean and the Giles bean and God knows what other beans beside. You can’t make an omelette out of beans.

  Compared to Clowde, Giles was a bit of a joke, with his excellent Russian and his loudmouthing at parties. He got out his Minox and his measuring chain and photographed trivia for other trivial men to look at in offices God knew where. And so one thing leads to another, and that is your life.

  Simon is in prison.

  Simon with him in that room in Cambridge.

  Not Simon with his three children and his pure-as-a-lily-in-the-dell. Not that Simon. The boy: his boy. The only one out of all those boys.

  Who are you trying to fool? Simon wasn’t a boy then, and he certainly wasn’t yours. He was there in that room with you on that afternoon you’re making so much of, but only because he wanted to be. As soon as he stopped wanting it, he was gone. Simon took a good look at you guzzling your dinner at the club and decided that he could do better. He thumbed a lift back to Cambridge, wrote more essays, no doubt threw more cheese out of the window. What he wanted wasn’t you.