by Dai Smith
‘You’re all four having your medical board next Thursday,’ she said. ‘So you’d better make yourselves ill again if you want to go back home.’
‘I don’t want to go back “home”,’ Brownlow-Grace said, laying sardonic stress on the last word.
‘I don’t know,’ Dad said. ‘They tell me it’s a good country to get into, this ’ere England. Why, I was only reading in the Bombay Times this morning there’s a man, Beaverage or something, made a report, they even give you money to bury yourself with there now. Suits me.’
‘You won’t die, Dad,’ Brownlow-Grace said kindly. ‘You’ll simply fade away.’
‘Well,’ said Sister Normanby. ‘There are your fresh flowers, must go and help to remove a clot from a man’s brain now. Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye,’ they all said, following her calves and swift heels as she went.
‘I didn’t know a dog had sweat glands in his paws before,’ Brownlow-Grace said, looking at his copy of The Field.
The others didn’t answer. They were thinking of their medical board. It was more interesting really than Sister Normanby.
III
Weston preferred to spend the earlier hours in a deck chair in the garden, by the upraised circular stone pool, among the ferns; here he would watch the lizards run like quicksilver and as quickly freeze into an immobility so lifeless as to be macabre, and the striped rats playing among the jacaranda branches; and he would look in vain for the mocking bird whose monotony gave a timeless quality to the place and the mood. He was slow in recovering his strength; his three operations and the sulphanilamide tablets he was taking had exhausted the blood in his veins; most of it was somebody else’s blood, anyway, an insipid blood that for two days had dripped from a bottle suspended over his bed, while they waited for him to die. His jaw and shoulder-bone had been shattered, a great clod of flesh torn out of his neck and thigh, baring his windpipe and epiglottis and exposing his lung and femoral artery; and although he had recovered very rapidly, his living self seemed overshadowed by the death trauma through which he had passed. There had been an annihilation, a complete obscuring; into which light had gradually dawned. And this light grew unbearably white, the glare of the sun on a vast expanse of snow, and in its unbounded voids he had moved without identity, a pillar of salt in a white desert as pocked and cratered as the dead face of the moon. And then some mutation had taken place and he became aware of pain. A pain that was not pure like the primal purity, but polluted, infected, with racking thirsts and suffocations and writhings, and black eruptions disturbed the whiteness, and coloured dots sifted the intense sun glare, areas of intolerable activities appeared in those passive and limitless oceans. And gradually these manifestations became the simple suppurations of his destroyed inarticulate flesh, and the bandaging and swabbing and probing of his wounds and the grunts of his throat. From it he desired wildly to return to the timeless void where the act of being was no more than a fall of snow or the throw of a rainbow; and these regions became a nostalgia to his pain and soothed his hurt and parched spirit. The two succeeding operations had been conscious experiences, and he had been frightened of them. The preliminaries got on his nerves, the starving, the aperients, the trolley, the prick of morphia, and its false peace. The spotless theatre with its walls of glass and massive lamps of burnished chrome, the anaesthetist who stuttered like a worn gramophone record, Sister Normanby clattering the knives in trays of Lysol, the soft irresistible waves of wool that surged up darkly through the interstices of life like water through a boat; and the choking final surrender to the void his heart feared.
And now, two and a half months later, with his wounds mere puckers dribbling the last dregs of pus, his jaw no longer wired up and splinted, his arm no longer inflamed with the jab of the needle, he sat in the garden with his hands idle in a pool of sunlight, fretting and fretting at himself. He was costive, his stockings had holes in the heel that got wider every day and he hadn’t the initiative to ask Sister for a needle and wool; his pen had no ink, his razor blade was blunt, he had shaved badly, he hadn’t replied to the airmail letter that lay crumpled in his hand. He had carried that letter about with him for four days, everywhere he went, ever since he’d received it.
‘You look thrillingly pale and Byronic this morning, Weston,’ Moncrieff said, sitting in the deck chair opposite him with his writing pad and a sheaf of received letters tied in silk tape. ‘D’you mind me sharing your gloom?’
Weston snorted.
‘You can do what you bloody well like,’ he said, with suppressed irritation.
‘Oh dear, have I gone and hurt you again? I’m always hurting people I like,’ Moncrieff said. ‘But I can’t help it. Honestly I can’t. You believe me, Weston, don’t you?’
Disturbed by the sudden nakedness of his voice Weston looked up at the waspish, intense face, the dark eyebrows and malignant eyes.
‘Of course I believe you, monkey,’ he said. ‘If you say so.’
‘It’s important that you should believe me,’ Moncrieff said moodily. ‘I must find somebody who believes me wherever I happen to be. I’m afraid otherwise. It’s too lonely. Of course I hurt some people purposely. That dolt Brownlow-Grace for example. I enjoy making him wince. He’s been brought up to think life should be considerate to him. His mother, his bank manager, his batman, his bearer – always somebody to mollycoddle him and see to his wants. Christ, the fellow’s incapable of wanting anything really. You know he even resents Sister Normanby having to look after other people beside himself. He only considered the war as an opportunity for promotion; I bet he was delighted when Hitler attacked Poland. And there are other people in this world going about with their brains hanging out, their minds half lynched – a fat lot he understands.’ He paused, and seeming to catch himself in the middle of his tirade, he laughed softly, ‘I was going to write a lettercard to my wife,’ he said. ‘Still, I haven’t got any news. No new love. Next Thursday we’ll have some news for them, won’t we? I get terribly worked up about this medical board, I can’t sleep. You don’t think they’ll keep me out in India, Weston, do you? It’s so lonely out here. I couldn’t stay here any longer. I just couldn’t. ‘
‘You are in a state, monkey,’ Weston said, perturbed and yet laughing, as one cheers a child badly injured. ‘Sit quiet a bit, you’re speaking loudly. Brownlow’ll hear you if you don’t take care.’
‘Did he?’ Moncrieff said, suddenly apprehensive. ‘He didn’t hear me, did he? I don’t want to sound as crude as that, even to him.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s not a bad stick,’ Weston said. ‘He’s very sincere and he takes things in good part, even losing his arm, and his career.’
‘Oh, I know you can preach a sermon on him easily. I don’t think in terms of sermons, that’s all,’ Moncrieff said. ‘But I’ve been through Burma the same as he has. Why does he sneer at me?’ He was silent. Then he said again, ‘It’s lonely out here.’ He sighed. ‘I wish I hadn’t come out of Burma. I needn’t have, I could have let myself go. One night when my leg was gangrenous, the orderly gave me a shot of morphia and I felt myself nodding and smiling. And there was no more jungle, no Japs, no screams, no difficulties at home, no nothing. The orderly would have given me a second shot if I’d asked him. I don’t know why I didn’t. It would have finished me off nicely. Say, Weston, have you ever been afraid of death?’
‘I don’t think it’s as simple as that,’ Weston said. ‘When I was as good as dead, the first three days here, and for a fortnight afterwards too, I was almost enamoured of death. I’d lost my fear of it. But then I’d lost my will, and my emotions were all dead. I hadn’t got any relationships left. It isn’t really fair then, is it?’
‘I think it is better to fear death,’ Moncrieff said slowly. ‘Otherwise you grow spiritually proud. With most people it’s not so much the fear of death as love of life that keeps them sensible. I don’t love life, personally. Only I’m a bit of a coward and I don’t want to die again. I loathe B
urma, I can’t tell you how terribly. I hope they send me home. If you go home, you ought to tell them you got wounded in Burma, you know.’
‘Good God, no,’ Weston said, outraged. ‘Why should I lie?’
‘That’s all they deserve,’ Moncrieff said. ‘I wonder what they’re doing there now? Talking about reconstruction, I suppose. Even the cinemas will have reconstruction films. Well, maybe I’ll get a job in some racket or other. Cramming Sandhurst cadets or something. What will you do when you get home?’
‘Moncrieff, my good friend,’ Weston said. ‘We’re soldiers, you know. And it isn’t etiquette to talk about going home like that. I’m going in where you left off. I want to have a look at Burma. And I don’t want to see England.’
‘Don’t you?’ Moncrieff said, ignoring the slow emphasis of Weston’s last words and twirling the tassel of his writing-pad slowly. ‘Neither do I, very much,’ he said with an indifference that ended the conversation.
IV
The sick have their own slightly different world, their jokes are as necessary and peculiar to them as their medicines; they can’t afford to be morbid like the healthy, nor to be indifferent to their environment like the Arab. The outside world has been washed out; between them and the encircling mysteries there is only the spotlight of their obsessions holding the small backcloth of ward and garden before them. Anyone appearing before this backcloth has the heightened emphasis and significance of a character upon the stage. The Sikh fortune tellers who offered them promotion and a fortune and England as sibilantly as panders, the mongoose-fight-snake wallahs with their wailing sweet pipes and devitalised cobras, the little native cobblers and peddlers who had customary right to enter the precincts entered as travellers from an unknown land. So did the visitors from the Anglo-India community and brother officers on leave. And each visitor was greedily absorbed and examined by every patient, with the intenser acumen of disease.
Brownlow-Grace had a visitor. This increased his prestige like having a lot of mail. It appeared she had only just discovered he was here, for during the last four days before his medical board she came every day after lunch and stayed sitting on his bed until dusk and conferred upon them an intimacy that evoked in the others a green nostalgia.
She was by any standards a beautiful woman. One afternoon a young unsophisticated English Miss in a fresh little frock and long hair; the next day French and exotic with the pallor of an undertaker’s lily and hair like statuary; the third day exquisitely Japanese, carmined and beringed with huge green amber stones, her hair in a high bun that only a great lover would dare unloose. When she left each evening Sister Normanby came in with a great bustle of fresh air and practicality to tidy his bed and put up his mosquito net. And he seemed equally capable of entertaining and being entertained by both ladies.
On the morning of the medical board Brownlow-Grace came and sat by Anthony among the ferns beside the lily pool; and this being a gesture of unusual amiability in one whom training had made rigid, Weston was unreasonably pleased.
‘Well, Weston,’ he said. ‘Sweating on the top line over this medical board?’
‘What d’you mean?’ Weston asked.
‘Well, do you think everything’s a wangle to get you home or keep you here like that little squirt Moncrieff?’
‘I don’t think along those lines, personally,’ Weston said. He looked at the long languid officer sprawled in the deck chair. ‘The only thing I’m frightened of is that they’ll keep me here, or give me some horrible office job where I’ll never see a Valentine lift her belly over a bund and go grunting like a wild boar at – well, whoever happens to be there. I got used to the idea of the Germans. I suppose the Japs will do.’
‘You’re like me; no enemy,’ Brownlow-Grace said. ‘I didn’t think twice about it – till it happened. You’re lucky, though. You’re the only one of us four who’ll ever see action. I could kill some more. What do I want to go home for? They hacked my arm off, those bastards; I blew the fellow’s guts out that did it, had the muzzle of my Colt rammed into his belly, I could feel his breath, he was like a frog, the swine. You, I suppose you want to go home, haven’t been away long, have you?’
‘Six months.’
‘Six months without a woman, eh?’ Brownlow-Grace laughed, yet kindly.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m the sort who’ll take somebody else’s,’ Brownlow-Grace said. ‘I don’t harm them.’
Weston didn’t reply.
‘You’ve got a hell of a lot on your mind, haven’t you, Weston? Any fool can see something’s eating you up.’ Still no reply. ‘Look here, I may be a fool, but come out with me tonight, let’s have a party together. Eh?’
Surprisingly, Weston wasn’t embarrassed at this extreme gesture of kindness. It was so ingenuously made. Instead he felt an enormous relief, and for the first time the capacity to speak. Not, he told himself, to ask for advice. Brownlow-Grace wasn’t a clergyman with a healing gift; but it was possible to tell him the thing simply, to shift the weight of it a bit. ‘I’m all tied up,’ he said. ‘A party wouldn’t be any use, nor a woman.’
‘Wouldn’t it?’ Brownlow-Grace said drily, standing up. Weston had a feeling he was about to go. It would have excruciated him. Instead he half turned, as if to disembarrass him, and said, ‘The flowers want watering.’
‘You know, if you’re soldiering, there are some things you’ve got to put out of bounds to your thoughts,’ Weston said. ‘Some things you don’t let yourself doubt.’
‘Your wife, you mean?’ Brownlow-Grace said, holding a breath of his cigarette in his lungs and studying the ants on the wall.
‘Not only her,’ Weston said. ‘Look. I didn’t start with the same things as you. You had a pram and a private school and saw the sea, maybe. My father was a collier and he worked in a pit. He got rheumatism and nystagmus and then the dole and the parish relief. I’m not telling you a sob story. It’s just I was used to different sounds. I used to watch the wheel of the pit spin round year after year, after school and Saturdays and Sundays; and then from 1926 on I watched it not turning round at all, and I can’t ever get that wheel out of my mind. It still spins and idles, and there’s money and nystagmus coming into the house or no work and worse than nystagmus. I just missed the wheel sucking me down the shaft. I got a scholarship to the county school. I don’t know when I started rebelling. Against that wheel in my head. I didn’t get along very well. Worked in a grocer’s and a printer’s, and no job was good enough for me; I had a bug. Plenty of friends too, plenty of chaps thinking the same as me. Used to read books in those days, get passionate about politics, Russia was like a woman to me. Then I did get a job I wanted, in a bookshop in Holborn. A French woman came in one day. I usually talked to customers, mostly politics; but not to her. She came in several times, once with a trade union man I knew. She was short, she had freckles, a straight nose, chestnut hair, she looked about eighteen; she bought books about Beethoven, Schopenhauer, the Renaissance, biology – I read every book she bought, after she’d gone back to France. I asked this chap about her. He said she was a big name, you know the way revolutionary movements toss up a woman sometimes. She was a communist, big speaker in the industrial towns in north France, she’d been to Russia too. And, well, I just wanted her, more and more and more as the months passed. Not her politics, but her fire. If I could hear her addressing a crowd, never mind about wanting her in those dreams you get.
‘And then the war came and most of my friends said it was a phoney war, but I was afraid from the beginning that something would happen to France and I wanted to hear her speaking first. I joined up in November and I made myself such a bloody pest that they posted me to France to reinforcements. I got my war all right. And I met her, too. The trade unionist I told you about gave me a letter to introduce myself. She lived in Lille. She knew me as soon the door opened. And I was just frightened. But after two nights there was no need to be frightened. You get to think for years that life is just a fight,
with a flirt thrown in sometimes, a flirt with death or sex or whatever happens to be passing, but mostly a fight all the way along. And then you soften up, you’re no use, you haven’t got any wheel whirring in your head any more. Only flowers on the table and a piano she plays sometimes, when she wants to, when she wants to love.’
‘I’ve never been to France,’ Brownlow-Grace said. ‘Hated it at school, French I mean. Communists, of course – I thought they were all Bolshies, you know, won’t obey an order. What happened after Dunkirk?’
‘It was such burning sunny weather,’ Weston said. ‘It was funny, having fine weather. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. The sun seemed to expand inside the lining of my brain and the whole fortnight after we made that last stand with Martel at Cambrai I didn’t know whether I was looking for her or Dunkirk. When I was most exhausted it was worse; she came to me once by the side of the road; there were several dead Belgian women lying there, and she said “Look, Anthony, I have been raped. They raped me, the Bosche.” And the world was crashing and whirring, or it was doped, wouldn’t lift a finger to stop it, and the Germans crossing the Seine. A year before I’d have said to the world, “Serve you right”. But not now, with Cecile somewhere inside the armies. She’d tried.’
‘And that was the end?’ Brownlow-Grace said.
‘Yes,’ said Weston. ‘Just about. Only it wasn’t a beautiful end, the way it turned out. I had eight months in England, and I never found out a thing. The Free French didn’t know. One of them knew her well, knew her as a lover, he told me; boasted about it; I didn’t tell him; I wanted to find her, I didn’t care about anything else. And then something started in me. I used to mooch about London. A French girl touched me on the street one night. I went with her. I went with a lot of women. Then we embarked for overseas. I had a girl at Durban, and in Bombay: sometimes they were French, if possible they were French. God, it was foul.’