I want to live …
I will never leave you.
‘Ah now, that’s sad,’ said Andy, plainly.
‘I suppose I’m ashamed of wanting to recover. It seems indecent,’ I explained.
‘But I want you to recover, Mark. And I hope you want me to. Perhaps we should just practise having hopes for each other, if we can’t manage to have them for ourselves.’
I stared at him. ‘Andy—’ I said tenderly—and, at that moment, the Captain came into sight, apparently materialising out of the revetted wall of the trench. He stopped in front of us as we stood and saluted. Andy, who was habitually self-possessed, said, ‘Everything’s very quiet, Sir, I just spoke to the sentries.’
‘Would you find Sergeant MacLean for me, Corporal.’
Andy set off along the trench. John Palmer remained insensible. Sleeping, he had the same immobility that I once thought distinguished dead creatures from living ones (recalling how I knew even from the window of my room that my favourite dog was not merely asleep, but more still yet, like a tent with its ridge-pole removed, somehow collapsed and containing nothing). That was before I came to know that soldiers in the line slept as though visiting with death.
Green stayed standing by me. I knew he had been listening to us before he appeared, and I could feel the contempt coming off him like cold off a slab of ice.
Before long Andy returned with Mac, and both the Sergeant and Captain disappeared into the dugout.
It wasn’t until after Bellevue that Green began to assign me more than my fair share of arduous and dangerous duties. The Lieutenant was in the Base Hospital recovering from his head wound, and Green had a free hand.
Later, I heard someone describe the winter of 1917 to 1918 as our ‘quiet’ winter in Polygon Wood. The line was deadlocked and it was the coldest winter yet. We continued to die. I made up strength in burial parties, and wiring parties. I helped the Sappers mend forward trenches. I stood sentry duty successive nights.
The Lieutenant returned after six weeks. He had changed. He was visibly depressed and detached (I don’t think this was new, just that he now took no pains to hide it). He didn’t seem to notice what Green was doing to me, and I didn’t call it to his attention. A week later I went missing one night in No-Man’s-Land, and Andy and John persuaded him to join them in looking for survivors of our wiring party. He came to find me. And, when he kept watch over me in the dugout—waiting for the end of the ‘morning hate’, when I could be taken out of the line—he said something that let me know he was on to Green (‘Green’s a better butcher than I am—he sent you out, I suppose?’), allowing me to believe Andy and John had informed him of Green’s persecution, which wasn’t the case.
I hated Green. And now he stood before me, waiting in silence, as I remembered. Perhaps he was waiting for me to show some sign of gratitude for his visit, some kind of politeness that would let him imagine I had never known he had persecuted me—or that I’d forgotten it, or forgiven him.
I was outraged. I decided I would not let him imagine I’d forgotten, or was afraid to accuse him. Instead I would walk across the barriers of his power, and confront him.
‘Why have you come to see me, Captain?’ I asked.
He looked surprised. ‘There are several of my men at Walton, and since Oatlands is right next door—’ he said, as though this was self-evident.
‘A gesture of kindness. I see.’
He cleared his throat and began, ‘I must say, Thornton—’
I interrupted him. ‘You should understand my surprise, Sir, since I’m not exactly accustomed to gestures of kindness from you—’
‘Now look here, Private—’ he began, indignant and inarticulate. And since I didn’t have the voice to talk over him I waited for the protests to peter out. Then I crossed all the grounds of pretence between us—because I was weak, voiceless, young, powerless, and it was my only chance. I said, ‘You want me to forgive you for trying to have me killed. Well I won’t. Yes, I know, and I know why, and I won’t ever forgive you.’
He stared at me in shock, then mustered himself for another show of indignation.
‘Don’t pretend. I believe you understand me completely. Your actions were considered and deliberate.’
He watched me in silence a moment, then said, coolly, ‘Are you planning to bring charges of misconduct, Private?’
‘No. It’s enough for me to be able to tell you I recognise you.’ I smiled. ‘I’m glad you came here.’
There was no colour in his face. Against his bloodless skin his hazel eyes had turned an intense shade of green. He said, the emotion in his voice as dazzling as a suddenly and rarely drawn sword, ‘How right you are. I detest you, Thornton. I detest your insolence, arrogance and superiority. Moreover, I can see through you. Others might hold you in a high regard—but I know your “courage” and “cleverness” are a fraud. Men like you, with your fake high-mindedness, lead others into all sorts of follies and delusions. You and your postures of heroism and tragedy—all sick and fake. You say you recognise me, well I know you for what you are. I was never taken in.’
Then he walked away.
Two months later, in October, I visited the Lieutenant at Balmerlawn.
The establishment was one of those English stately homes converted into a hospital for officers, and nominally run by the ladies of the estate. The lady of this estate was a god-daughter of the hawk-eyed Lady Jocelyn, Given’s grandmother.
A VAD ushered me through the quiet, carpeted hallways, and into a marble-floored conservatory. Here, among the cool sappy scent of the exotic flowers and ferns, and in the paled sunshine, the summer—all seasons—seemed checked and distant.
The Lieutenant was sitting in a wicker chair, turned away from one of the walls of glass. I wouldn’t have known him. His head and face above the cheekbones were swathed, a white dome of bandages. He was thin, his skin dry and slack, and he sat supine and fatigued, the unconscious confidence of good health gone from his body.
I thanked the nurse and went towards him. When I came close I saw he had picked several leaves off the basil plant beside him in a blue china pot. He lifted the crushed leaves in a cupped hand to his face, breathing in the colour green.
I waited till he sensed someone near and turned to me. ‘Who is it?’
‘It’s me, Lieutenant, Mark Thornton.’
He remained still, listening, the bandaged face uplifted, then said, ‘That isn’t Mark Thornton’s voice,’ like a doubtful Hamlet faced with the lying ghost. On the arm of the chair his hand uncurled and the crushed leaves speckled the floor. I crouched down before him, picked up the basil-scented hand and brought his fingertips up to touch the scar on my throat. ‘The wound—remember?’
He felt the raised knot of scar tissue, said, in a detached way, ‘Yes, of course it’s you,’ and took his hand away. Then he smiled slightly (or at least I thought it was a smile). ‘Your voice a medicine even for the blind,’ he said, and, when I didn’t answer, ‘That’s a quotation from your German philosopher; don’t you recognise it? I read the book before I sent it on to you at Walton.’
‘And my journal?’
‘Your illicit journal? No, I didn’t read that—I wasn’t game enough to decipher your handwriting. But if you mean did I send it on to you, yes, I did.’
‘You liked Nietzsche?’
‘Not always. Though some of it’s impressively poetic. But I had to negotiate my way around your underlinings. I kept wondering whether they would make you always read the book the way you first read it—or rack your brains trying to remember why this underlined bit was once more memorable and special to you than that.’
‘Yes, but—’ and I misquoted, ‘“My soul has been taught to say ‘today’ as well as ‘once’ and ‘formerly’, and to dance its dance over every Here and There”. So—I will remember how I felt.’
‘How convenient,’ he said, smiling.
Watching him, the words went on in my head, surging defiantly: I gav
e you the right to say No like the storm and to say Yes as the open sky says Yes, silent as light you stand, and you pass through denying storms—
The Lieutenant broke into this soundless invocation, asking, ‘Do you have any news of the platoon?’
‘Andy—Sergeant McCauley—was wounded at Le Quesnoy. A bullet in the thigh. He sent me a letter from Brokenhurst. Apparently the wound is very clean and straightforward, and he thinks he should be back at the front by the end of the year.’
‘So, who does that leave?’
‘Of the original C Company?’
‘Yes.’
‘John Palmer, Jardine, Armitage.’
He shook his head.
‘Sergeant Teasdale’s at Hornchurch now; he’s going home too.’
He sat; still, inexpressive, inaccessible.
‘Captain Green visited me two months back.’
‘Did he?’
I was about to say, ‘He came to see how I had received the news of your injury,’ but caught myself in time. Instead I said, ‘After I was wounded, when I was in the dugout, before I became very ill—’
‘Yes?’
‘You said, about Green, “I suppose he sent you out.”’
His hands came together and held each other. ‘Yes?’ he said again.
‘I imagine Andy and John told you what he had been doing?’
He averted his head a little, as though he had been looking at me and now would not meet my eyes, a superfluous habitual gesture of desired privacy.
‘Didn’t they tell you?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘No—I knew. I’d noticed.’
‘But you didn’t stop him.’
One hand went up and pressed his lips, as though he felt ill. All his face was now hidden. Past the hand he said, ‘No, I didn’t care.’
I stood up and walked away from him, to stand staring out through the squares of glass at the shrubbery, the sloped green lawn, and the willows on the riverbank.
‘Later I cared,’ he said, quietly.
I turned back to him, but stayed where I was.
‘Do you remember the day you saw me coming out of the line? You were on your way back from the Convalescent Camp.’ He paused listening, his blind head lifted. I didn’t answer him, but he went on, ‘I was running away. Just as I nearly deserted at home, when I returned from the Peninsula. Of course I realised that would be the end of Margaret and me—but I was afraid enough to do it. Then I got my commission, so I sailed.’ He stopped speaking, his face turned to where he last heard me, where I still stood, turning my hat in my hands.
‘Thornton!’ he called, as though he thought I’d gone and wasn’t expecting an answer.
‘I’m here.’
‘I had forgotten about you. And there you were all of a sudden, with the Sappers on the back of that limber, waving at me. I wondered what would become of you, so I had to go back to find out.’
‘Now you know.’
‘I don’t, I can’t see you.’ His mouth twitched up at the corners—an expression I had always thought signalled ironic amusement, but which I now found impossible to interpret.
‘I got so tired of all the new faces, each draft, getting younger and younger. After Bellevue there were only seven men left from C Company on the Pakeha. It felt immoral to be in one piece—’ He touched the bandage. ‘When I got this I thought: “That takes care of that.”’ He put out his hand. ‘Mark?’
I crossed the room again and gave him my hand. He gripped it hard. The curve of his lips formed deep lines in the dry skin flanking his mouth. Then his grip relaxed and he said, cheerfully, artificially, ‘So, from Hornchurch you’re off home?’
I felt myself sinking into something with as incomprehensible an appetite as the mud of Flanders. ‘Yes, Sir,’ I answered.
‘Good for you. Take care, Thornton. It was good of you to visit.’ He shook my hand.
At the door I looked back once at his slump-shouldered figure, in the blue hospital dressing gown, sharp elbows rested on the chair’s arms, hands hanging loose on thin wrists.
Infinitely diminished.
In the corridor I steadied myself against the wall. A young sister stopped beside me, her face exhausted, haunted, calm, and asked, ‘Are you all right?’
I nodded and walked on.
I would be no trouble. I would go home and do useful things.
What were we thinking, Alan and I, on the way over, when we wrote that article for the shipboard magazine, asking, apprehensively, romantically, about our possible deaths? ‘We are risen from our dead selves, need more be said?’ No more need. No, not need, not necessity. There is not necessarily peace or foreknowledge, grace or dignity or meaning. Death? Oh, is that all? Not confusion, despair, paralysis, pain, cold, disease, fear, loneliness, helplessness, uncertainty, noise, disfigurement, deafness, blindness, suffocation and insanity.
Had Alan drifted up from his dead self, like a bright bubble rising through dark water to the light?
Basil
Colour was coming back into the landscape, filling its shapes behind a film of shadow. At the foot of the hill, Hannah called out to Ellen and Jill. They stopped, two slump-shouldered figures in the half-light, against the white side of the camper. Hannah caught up, searched Jill’s pockets, found her car keys and threw them to me. I fumbled the catch and they skidded across the road. By the time I had retrieved the keys and taken shelter in the car, Jill, Hannah and Ellen had disappeared inside the camper and its lights were switched on—sanity and salvation for them in the yellow electric radiance, their lives secured like those of deep-sea divers rushed into decompression chambers after rising too rapidly from the depths.
The car’s glove compartment was open, revealing the usual clutter of cleaning cloths, tissues, sunglasses, a comb, a packet of life-savers and three pamphlets from the Alcohol and Drug Dependency Centre. I shoved everything back inside, shut the compartment and slumped in the seat with my knees against the dash. In this wedged position I stared upward out the windscreen at the bank covered in moss and wet ferns drooping like lax hands.
I drowsily tried to reshape the night’s events, beginning like a child proposing a new game (‘Say I’m a robber and you’re a policeman’— ‘Say I’m America and you’re Russia’).
Say I went up to a deserted house to take shelter from a storm, and something in me allowed this house to identify me as a person with some experience of the supernatural. Say I didn’t run away, but stood still and opened my eyes wider to see whatever Great Mystery was trying to reveal itself to me (like when, self-important and confident of my own cleverness, I was initiated into the mystery of those coloured cards on the wall of my first classroom: Aa Bb Cc … ). Say I stood then, in the path of the mystery rolling towards me, as She, Ayesha, stood before the column of fire in the caverns of Kor—
The whole bank blanched as a gust of wind turned the ferns palm upwards. The car shuddered. In the camper the lights were switched off.
There is a film technique that shows a figure’s movement through space as a series of overlapping, diaphanous after-images pursuing the solid body. As though people are threads burrowing through space—not here, now and complete, but trailed by shed selves.
Five weeks earlier these streaming selves of mine had caught me up and run, one by one, into me.
I was staying in the youth hostel at Okarito. There we cooked over the open fire and, at night, lit the room with candles. We got up when we felt like it, and washed in rainwater, crouching on wet planks by the tap of the tank. We went at low tide to wade out in the smoky-blue surf and pull mussels off the rocks for dinner. We drank gin around the fire on the beach, stumbling home in the dark over the heaped driftwood, stones and shelves of sand—back to the hostel to lie in bed watching the firelight on the smoke-stained planks of the high ceiling, teasing the mobile made of driftwood, shells, bones and shadow, while outside the sea gnawed the beach, and, sometimes, an awesome ominous thunder sounded as some freakish tide shifted boulders beneat
h the water.
I had lost my watch at some point along the 13k I hitched between Highway Six and the sea, but after three days I stopped trying to guess the time. Towards evening the thickly settled heat was diluted slowly by draughts of wind hissing through the screen of the one open window. Perhaps a small bird would perch, twittering, among the bruised flames of the flax flowers outside, and the sky would slowly turn glossy gold.
On my third evening I had a meal of mussels warmed in butter and lemon juice, then went for a walk. I was forced to turn back two thirds of the way up the path to the Trig—the light was fading and I didn’t have a torch to see myself back down the winding steps. Around me the beech forest was moist, silent, lightless. I stopped where the track crossed the spine of a hill to look at the sea—smooth, grey-green and smeared with silver near the horizon.
Wind plucked at the back of my shirt. It was all quiet, empty and kind. I had everything. I had enough.
I caught up with myself.
I didn’t want to move, but could imagine myself several hours ahead trying to feel my way down the twisting bush track in complete darkness. So in my imagination I sent myself cautiously forward, out of my moment of completeness, knowing that, in another day, I would have to hike out along the blond dust road through the forests and marshes. Knowing that I must be getting along—the leaves of the syringa near the hostel were like limp strips of green leather, and heat had crushed the colour out to the tips of its rods of blossom. My itinerary—Greymouth, Westport, Nelson, Motueka, Takaka, Totaranui—was like a shopping list of places I must acquire in the few remaining weeks of fine weather. So I went on, beating darkness down the path.
Yet, for a moment it seemed that all my contradictory past experiences had huddled into me, reconciled. I was briefly neither ghost nor haunted house. I had been admitted into myself, and the gatekeeper was the otherworldly twilight of a foreign land.
Now, trapped by slips, exhausted and afraid, I began to suspect that the events of my life, my shed selves, had not merely caught me up—peacefully, because of three quiet days of timeless living—but had overtaken me, and that my failures, a woman’s cocked shoulder and averted head, a drowned body, and a houseless valley, were all waiting for me somewhere further along the way.
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