‘I managed to keep hold of my camera during the crash. I thought you might like it.’
‘That’s sweet of you. Won’t you come in?’
Susie followed him into the room and, after closing the door behind her, ran her hand along the top of the flatscreen TV, languidly circled the bed, and played with the dimmer switch before opting for muted lighting that cast her scarred features into partial shadow. When she settled it was on the bed, with the side of her head resting on an upturned hand, as if offering it on a plate.
‘Just opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio, but I think it’s corked,’ Daniel said as he slipped his jeans on and buckled the belt. ‘Have something from the minibar. I’m on expenses.’
Susie smiled shyly. ‘I don’t drink actually,’ she said. ‘But I do smoke.’ She held up a small bag of grass. ‘Are you allowed to smoke in the rooms?’
Daniel shrugged.
‘Do you mind?’
Daniel shook his head. ‘Smoke it myself from time to time.’
Susie sat down on the bed and began rolling.
Daniel put some music on, a jazz compilation provided by the hotel. He tidied up some magazines and clothes and sat down at his desk. His bare feet felt cold and achy. He stared at the photograph. ‘Nancy and I are having – what was the expression she used? – “breathing space”.’
‘Oh.’ Susie licked the cigarette paper, rolled and twisted one end. Next she tore off a strip of card, curled it into a roach and inserted it in the other end. This she put into her mouth as she struck a match. A blue spiral of smoke circled her as she stood up and walked towards the window. ‘Nice view,’ she said as she exhaled. ‘All those pretty boats in the marina. And there’s the water shuttle. You ever used it?’
‘No. Well, once. Long time ago.’
A pungent, aromatic smell filled the room.
‘Don’t you hate hotels that have windows that don’t open?’ Susie said. ‘I feel like I’m trapped in a box.’The mournful bellow of a fire engine could be heard far below. Susie pressed her cheek against the glass as she looked down. When she stood back, there was a cloud on the glass left by her breath. She squeakily drew a peace sign on it.
‘Doesn’t make much difference to me. I’m no good with heights anyway so I tend to avoid the windows.’ Daniel stared at his guest. ‘It’s my fault.’
‘What is?’
‘That Nancy and I have separated. I climbed over her to save myself.’
‘I know.’
‘You know?’
Susie took another drag. ‘Nancy told me when we were waiting to be rescued.’
Daniel looked at his toes. ‘We still haven’t discussed it. Not properly. Don’t suppose we ever will. I don’t think we can. As soon as it is out there, between us … I don’t know, I guess we couldn’t take it back.’
‘You know, you were a hero that day. You saved me. Don’t you remember? I was trying to open my lap belt like a car seat belt and you unclipped it for me. You saved Greg, too. He told me … I wish I could have saved him.’
‘You were next to him when … ?’
As she walked back across the room, Susie handed the joint to Daniel. He nipped it between his thumb and finger and took a deep drag, holding it down for a few seconds before exhaling, looking at the spliff and nodding. He felt instantly light-headed.
Susie sat back down on the bed. ‘I don’t know how long he’d been face down in the water. Someone shouted, “Hey, look!” and I looked and he was floating face down. The thing I find strange is that he was so … loud. He was always … It seems odd that he would have gone so quietly. The coroner said he died of hyponatraemia, brought on by the cold. It’s a type of kidney failure. It was an existing condition … He was so strong. I kept holding him until the helicopter came … I was pregnant.’
‘You said.’
‘I told you I miscarried. That was a lie. I had an abortion … I couldn’t face … It was a legal one. The doctors said it was,’ she tapped her head, ‘ “psychologically justified”.’ A tear trickled down one of the lines on her cheek and settled in the dimple at the corner of her mouth. She sniffed. ‘Look at me. I was determined not to cry.’
‘Crying is good for you.’
Susie sniffed again and wiped her face with the heel of her hand. ‘Is it true the salinity of tears is the same as the salinity of the seawater?’
‘Think so. If it isn’t it ought to be.’
‘We both survived, you and me.’
Daniel noticed that Susie wasn’t wearing a bra, as she hadn’t been wearing one on the seaplane. ‘Sort of,’ he said distractedly. ‘I still don’t feel like I did before the crash. I feel off-centre. Sometimes I wake myself up with my own shouting. Sometimes I’m afraid to sleep. I’ll get all shivery like I have a fever but at the same time I’ll be feeling clear-headed. It’s hard to describe. It’s like everything is more vivid. Wet seems wetter. Blue seems bluer. I feel more energized and restless. People tell me I keep smiling. I sometimes feel that, since the crash, I have found my true self – that a glass wall that separated me from the rest of the world has come down. It was like, before it happened, I was underwater and everything was muffled. I was hearing sounds coming from a distance. Now I hear everything clearly. Does that make sense?’
‘I guess.’
‘At the Wildlife Foundation this morning, I got freaked by something I saw. It was a leatherback turtle. Something about his face. I had to get away. Ended up at the Museum of Fine Art, and I was looking at some paintings there and it was as if I was really seeing them. Like they were real. Like I could step into them. Like I had never seen a painting before. It was fascinating and horrible at the same time. I found myself wanting to run away from there, too. Running, running, running. Found myself standing on the Harvard Bridge looking down into the river. I’d taken my clothes off. I don’t think I was going to jump. The truth is, I don’t know what I was thinking. I found myself there, the wrong side of the railing, hanging on, staring at the water, naked. A cyclist stopped and asked me what I was doing. I said I didn’t know. I was like this surprised spectator.’
‘So you climbed back over?’
‘Yeah. Put my clothes back on. The cyclist asked me if I was sure I was OK, then he went on his way. I hailed a cab and came back here.’
Susie placed the ashtray on the bed, took off her glasses. Thought. ‘I was a virgin when we married,’ she said. ‘All my girlfriends teased me about it but it was one of those pledge things. Greg had been with lots of girls … I haven’t been with anyone since. It hasn’t seemed right. Too soon.’
‘When it’s the right time, you’ll know.’
Susie patted a space on the bed next to her. Daniel hesitated then sat, bringing with him a mug he was using as an ashtray. He handed the joint back to her and she grinned and said: ‘Wanna blowback?’
Daniel let out a loose and unexpected peel of laughter. He hadn’t heard the expression ‘blowback’ for years, since he was a student, and it struck him as comic. ‘Your generation still calls it that?’
‘I thought we invented it.’ With the joint burned almost all the way through, Susie placed the lit end in her mouth, with her lips clenched tightly on the unburning end, and formed a tube with her hands. This she pressed to Daniel’s open mouth and exhaled, forcing the smoke through. Daniel felt the room slide. The smoke alarm went off. Susie mashed up the joint in the ashtray and wafted her hand over it. They both erupted into giggles. When the alarm stopped, the jazz seemed louder. Oscar Peterson. Daniel began miming to it, playing a piano with fingers alternately stiff and loose, wrists broken, shoulders hunched, nodding.
Susie copied him.
‘You haven’t heard music until you’ve heard it stoned,’ Daniel said. ‘You hear every note so clearly, almost three-dimensionally. You can shift your focus from instrument to instrument as if you are actually inside the music looking around.’
Susie placed the ashtray on the floor and laid her head in the crook of his elb
ow. Soon the sound of her sleeping could be heard. Daniel turned the bedside light off and fell asleep, too. When he woke up it was still dark and he was alone. He turned the light back on and checked his watch. There was a note on the bedside table. ‘Nancy is a lucky woman. Call me when you’re next in town. Susie xx.’ Alongside this was the photograph of him and Nancy. He lay back on the bed and kissed it.
His flight was leaving in three and a half hours. No point trying to get back to sleep. Time to have a shower and pack. He could get breakfast at the airport.
For the first half of the flight he rehearsed what he wanted to say to Nancy. That he knew how she was feeling. That he felt it too. That he was deeply sorry about what happened on that flight to the Galápagos Islands, but that he was only human. Another time he might have acted differently, might have put her life first, but in those confusing, adrenalin-charged seconds the fight or flight mechanism had proved too strong. That wasn’t him. He hadn’t been the one to desert her. Biology was to blame. Two million years of evolution. He would tell her that the crash had left them both traumatized, but that they could overcome whatever problems they were having by talking, by listening. He would tell her how, in Boston, he had lost his equilibrium. He would tell her about the cathedral, the turtle, and the paintings in the museum that came to life. He might even tell her about what happened on the bridge. She would understand. Nancy always understood.
He decided not to take any diazepam for the flight – he would need a clear head when he landed – but he regretted it the moment the seat belt signs came on and the plane was buffeted by mild turbulence. He drained his glass of red wine so that it wouldn’t spill, and watched the first twenty minutes of a film, a disappointing thriller starring Robert De Niro. He managed to doze, only to wake in panic – the wide-awake, teeth-gritting panic of realizing that you are twelve miles above the earth in a hundred tons of metal – a hundred tons of metal that is carrying a further hundred tons of cargo. He clung on to his armrests for the remainder of the flight. At Heathrow, as soon as he had collected his luggage, he sent Nancy a text. ‘Just landed. Can I come round? Some things I need to collect. Martha there?’
‘Martha at school. Don’t be long. Am going to gym.’
As the black cab pulled into the Clapham Old Town square, Daniel’s heart began palpitating. He breathed deeply, marched up the steps and knocked on the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
IN A DOUBLE-FRONTED GEORGIAN TOWNHOUSE IN KEW, AN OLD man was looking out over the rank of framed photographs on his desk: his son in a Scout uniform; his muddy-faced grandfather in a trench with another soldier who has his arm around him. There was his second wife on the beach, but no photograph of his first. It seemed tactless.
Philip picked up a photograph of himself as a ten-year-old posing with his mother and his sister Hillary, the three of them standing by his father’s grave at the Bayeux War Cemetery, the twin spires of the cathedral in the background. He was wearing his Sunday best that day: shorts, snake belt, kneesocks, checked shirt, clip-on bowtie. His chin was tilted up. Arms pressed flat against his sides. Standing to attention.
A noise. The clink of silver against china. Amanda was placing a cup of tea on the table beside him. She must think him asleep. He half opened his eyes to see her leaving the room and looked again at the framed photograph in his parchment-dry hands. It was taken on 6 June 1954, the tenth anniversary of D-Day. His first visit to the cemetery.
As Philip looked into his own eyes – the eyes of the ten-year-old boy – time slowed, stopped and, like the propellers on an ocean liner changing course, spun in reverse. Spin. A shift of tense from past to present …
Philip can hear the screech of seagulls as they cross on the ferry; taste again the salty air; feel the warmth of his mother’s hand as he steadies himself against the sways and dips.
The streets of Bayeux are criss-crossed with bunting: Stars and Stripes, Union Jacks and Maple Leaves. There are no Australian or New Zealand flags that he can see. Must have been too far for them to come. His mother has said that the Queen may be coming over to Normandy for the anniversary. He hadn’t seen her coronation the previous year. They had no television. But he had seen her picture in The Times. She looked nice. She looked a little like his mother.
When the coach stops, Philip is the first off it and, when he runs to the entrance of the cemetery, he gasps at the sight. More than 4,000 white headstones, row upon row, gleaming in the sunshine and aligned perfectly in every direction, horizontally and diagonally. Not a single blade of grass is out of place. He can hear his mother’s voice calling after him to wait.
Other coaches arrive and the pathways become busy. Widows, uncles, parents, sisters, grandmothers. The headstones all look the same, apart from the occasional one in the shape of a Star of David, or carved with a half-moon and facing a different way. Philip likes that the glorious dead are buried as they paraded, in ranks.Yet they must all have been different, he thinks: some short, some tall, some fat, some thin, some brave, some cowardly. The most common age on the white headstones, he soon realizes, is nineteen. This means they would still have been in their twenties if they had survived D-Day. As he stands among them he feels as if he is in the middle of an army.
His father’s grave proves difficult to find and his mother has to go back with them to the entrance to consult the book in which all the names of the dead are listed. It shows where they are on a map. When they do find the one they are looking for, they are surprised to see fresh flowers have been laid on it. They look around. A number of the other graves have flowers, too.The flowers must be for those with medals. Philip looks up at his mother. She has tears running down her powdered cheeks. Her lips are moving, shaping the words on the headstone.
Capt W Kennedy,VC, MC
48/Royal Marines
Killed in action 27 June 1944
He died that others might live
Philip had once overheard his mother talking on the phone to someone about the wording. The army wanted to include his father’s age but there was some confusion about what that was. According to their records, he was twenty-five. But he had always maintained to her that he was a year older. As they hadn’t been able to trace his birth certificate, the age was left off the headstone.
His mother tugs a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabs her eyes. Philip steps forward and looks up at her again, this time for permission to touch the stone. She nods. It is cold. Portland stone. He takes out his pocket watch, the one that his father left him in his will, opens it and shows it to the gravestone. He can hear his mother sniff behind him. His sister steps forward and she touches the stone as well, tentatively, as if worried it might give off an electrical charge. She holds out a drawing she has done of a soldier and places it on the grave.
Philip steps back and feels for his mother’s hand. His sister does the same and the three stand contemplating the gravestone in silence, heads bowed. A gardener working two rows away distracts Philip. He watches him straighten his back and massage its base with both hands before bending once more to untie his knee supports – which look like cut-up sections of an old car tyre. He places them in his wheelbarrow, on top of the clods of turf he has sliced from the edges of lawn. On these he places his shears and spade and a strange-looking cutting tool which is semicircular in shape. He takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves, exposing white hairs. It is getting hot. The gardener takes off his cap too, wipes his bald head, and puts it back on. With his knees bent, he grips the arms of the wheelbarrow, lifts with a sigh and pushes. The creaking of the wheel seems to provide a sympathetic echo to his steps. He is coming towards them. Philip follows his progress out of the corner of his eye. When he senses the gardener is standing behind them, he turns round.
‘This is my daddy,’ Philip says.
The gardener looks at the headstone: ‘You must be proud of him.’
‘He won his VC postu, postum—’
‘Posthumously,’ his mother finishes.
‘He attacked a German machine-gun nest,’ Philip says. ‘He was very brave.’
‘Can you take a photograph of me next to Daddy?’ Hillary says, tugging at her mother’s sleeve.
Her mother reaches in her handbag for the Brownie 127 camera she paid one pound, four shillings and sixpence for on the ferry. Philip and Hillary take up their positions either side of the headstone.
‘Would you like me to take one of you all together?’ the gardener asks.
Their mother considers this for a moment before winding the camera on and handing it over: ‘Would you mind?’ She takes up her place behind the headstone and adjusts her hat. All three wear expressions of appropriate solemnity.
Click. Pause. Clack.
Philip opened his eyes.The sound memory had roused him from his reverie. He took a sip from the tea. It was cold. Leaning on his walking stick in order to rise out of his armchair, he walked stiffly across to the section of his library containing memoirs from the Second World War. His fingers closed around the spine of a book written by Brigadier Frank Waterhouse, a former commando who died in 1998. It fell open on a passage he knew by heart. Daniel must know it by heart, too – as a child he had often requested it as a bedtime story. Philip hoped that he might have left enough time since his last reading of it to have forgotten some of the phrases and thereby enjoy them afresh. It was written in the dry, self-deprecating style favoured by retired soldiers of that generation – none of the boastfulness of contemporary memoirs. Extraordinary deeds rendered ordinary – and more powerful for being understated.
Philip read:
In war, men are judged only on their bravery. Nothing else matters. One of the bravest men I had the privilege of serving with was Captain William Kennedy, ‘Silky Kennedy’ as he was known. I liked Silky. Handsome and strong-jawed, he had what the poet Keith Douglas called that ‘famous unconcern’ – and a habit of carelessly rubbing the back of his neck while assessing the battle ahead. He was one of those officers who affected a certain homosexual nonchalance and flamboyance. On entertainment nights he would sometimes wear women’s clothing and dance with fellow officers. His nickname came from his preference for silk underwear, which he always bought from a shop in Jermyn Street. I do not think he was actually homosexual – I discovered after the war that he was married with two young children – I suspect it was more that he was ‘acting up’ as a counterweight to the savage business of killing. Homosexuals were seen as paragons of wit and whimsy, after all, and such qualities were considered life-enhancing in wartime. When I met him, I was a lowly subaltern and he was a captain and already had an MC. He also had a bit of a reputation. There was a saying that you should never stand too close to an MC in battle. It was partly because they would take unnecessary risks in order to win the next medal to complete their collection, partly because there was a superstition that their luck might run out.
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