In the library there was a jug of some iced cocktail from which Pereira poured enough to fill two small antique wineglasses.
“Will you forgive me, Dr. Hendricks, if I make a suggestion?”
Pereira was wearing a beige linen jacket under which the open collar of his shirt showed his scraggy neck, the shrunken bud of his Adam’s apple dragging up between two strings.
I humored him. “Please do.”
“On your return to England, I think you should look up your old commanding officer. Colonel Varian.”
It took a moment to absorb this, which to me was an impertinent idea. “If I’d wanted to do that, I would have done it long ago.”
“Were you invited to the regimental reunions?”
“Of course I was invited. I just never went. After the war, I wanted to forget about it because I couldn’t understand it. I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. I devoted myself to making sick people well. I chose a different life, and I wanted no reminders of the other one.”
There was a silence, as though I had stated my case too forcefully.
“I expect you were missed,” said Pereira. “One of the Five Just Men.”
“I thought the people I wanted to see wouldn’t be there. I didn’t want to dine with officers. I wanted to see men like Bill Shenton and Tall Storey and all the others in Three Platoon.”
“Do you regret it now?” said Pereira.
I drained the last of the cocktail. “Terribly,” I said. “I thought I could turn my back on the experience of war. I thought I’d find other friends easily enough in peacetime—people who weren’t contaminated by what we’d been through, the things we’d seen. I didn’t understand that I would never again have friends like that. Ever. And then it was too late.”
Pereira nodded. “He might help. Colonel Varian.”
“Help what?”
“To settle things. To resolve them in your mind.”
“You’re sounding like a therapist.”
“What I meant was this: he might explain what happened. I think you know what I mean. Would you do it to please an old man?”
“I’ll think about it.”
In the evening, the local mayor and his wife came to dinner. There was talk about the island’s future and the vagaries of local government, but of my life, of my father’s, or that of Alexander Pereira, nothing more was said. In the morning I offered my thanks, spoke vaguely of a return visit, and went down to the calanque, where the water taxi was waiting, the motor chugging throatily. When we were a short way out to sea, I glanced back and made out the end of Pereira’s garden on the cliff, where I half expected to see him and Paulette waving. But there was just the line of trees, a glimpse of tiled rooftop, and, closer at hand, the foaming white wake.
* * *
BACK IN LONDON, it was easy to pick up the threads of my life. I thumbed through the mail that Mrs. Gomez had piled on the hall table; I was anxious that there should be no envelope addressed to me in Annalisa’s swirling hand; yet when my wish was granted I felt a lurch of emptiness.
The blank rhythm of the city was unchanged. There was still the faint grumble of lorries on the Harrow Road as they changed gear outside the cemetery; the convenience stores remained open all night with their odd-looking vegetables, cigarettes, and pornographic magazines; and there was still nowhere to park. The answering machine this time held no invective, no surprises, and when I had fetched Max from Cricklewood, I set about confirming some appointments for the coming weeks. Within forty-eight hours, it was as though the island interlude had never taken place.
Over the next few days, however, my mind followed a secondary path. It’s a strange thing to see a photograph of your father looking so much younger than yourself; the first reflex—of protectiveness—seems inappropriate. I wished I had been there with him in that war, but which of us would have assumed the role of mentor? I had been an officer and he an NCO; yet in all other ways he was my senior. Would we have settled on being friends? I would have feared to shock him with my modern, worldly ways. Yet how or why should I seek to protect a man who had hurled me into being? It should have been the other way about.
Despite having dismissed the idea, I also thought a good deal about Pereira’s suggestion. There was at least no harm I told myself in finding out if Richard Varian was still alive. I wrote to him, care of the regimental headquarters, and received a reply of such warmth that I was taken aback. He had had a minor heart problem but was otherwise in good health, he said; in the absence of any imminent reunion, would I consider coming to visit him and his wife in Northumberland (though we’d have to keep the old soldiers’ chat to a minimum when Sheila was about)?
In late October I boarded a British Rail train at King’s Cross. The process of revealing so much to Pereira had taken me to a place in my mind where I felt less cautious than at any time since the war, and my curiosity had overcome all reservations. I’d picked an early departure so I could have breakfast in the restaurant car, whose first-class seats were then yours for the rest of the journey. The fried food was served by white-coated stewards, who seemed to enjoy what they did, piling the plates of their regular customers. I changed train at Newcastle and took a taxi from the local station through swelling countryside, where sheep farms rose on drystone walls.
The driver talked about the failing coal industry, in which his father and grandfather had worked for a private mine owner. I followed the pale hills with my eyes, beginning to feel a sense of trepidation as we approached Varian’s remote village. We went, as instructed, up a lane by a pub and left at a fork onto a stony track that took us eventually to the front of a gray stone house with a pillared entrance. To the left were barns and outbuildings, to the right were paddocks and fields; in the porch an arthritic sheepdog came slowly forwards, wagging its tail.
Having paid the driver and watched him disappear, I pushed open the front door and went into a stone-flagged hall. I called out, and after a few moments there were footsteps.
A white-haired man with a trim moustache came round the corner in well-pressed trousers and a ribbed navy-blue pullover with a cravat. I recognized the almost-black pools of his eyes.
“Nice to see you again, Robert.”
He held out his hand. I took it. Then I found that I had embraced him. He put his arms round me, and we stood together for a long time. I can’t say what sights and memories, half-revived, seemed to pass as if through our hands into the shoulders and the answering life of the other man.
We separated, dry-eyed, a little awkward, and, in my case, somewhat calmer.
“You’d better come and meet Sheila. Put your bag down right there. Get off, Sherpa. Go on, bugger off. This way, Robert. How was the journey?”
We had lunch in a draughty dining room with a fine view over the hills. Sheila Varian looked somewhat older than her husband: him you could picture still working in some capacity—consultant, chairman; she had the trembling movements of an old dear.
“How long did you stay in the army?” I said.
“Another twenty years,” said Varian. “We were in Germany, then Aden. It was a good life, but I missed the men I’d known in the war. At one time I thought I’d persuaded John Passmore to stay on, but in the end he found the lure of his classroom too great. He became a headmaster.”
“I’m not surprised. And when did you retire?”
“Almost fifteen years ago; but you, Robert, you made a name for yourself in your field. I read your book.”
“Oh, God. That.”
“I thought it was very interesting. I remember at the time—in the war, I mean—you weren’t even certain you’d go back to medicine.”
“I wasn’t sure of anything then. And I had a long way to go before I qualified. I was a student until well into my thirties.”
Varian smiled. “I don’t imagine many of your fellow students had the MC.”
Sheila Varian looked up politely. “Did you win a medal?”
“I didn’t deserve it.”<
br />
“Where was it?”
“Medjez Plain. Tunisia. The platoon sergeant major did the hard work. Shenton. He should have had the medal.”
“He did win the MM later on,” said Varian.
Sheila said, “I’m surprised you two haven’t met since the end of the war. What about the reunions?”
“We could never tempt Robert along.”
“Enough army stuff,” I said, glancing at the framed photographs on the piano. “How many grandchildren do you have?”
* * *
AFTER LUNCH, RICHARD took me out for a walk. I asked him about the land and the farming, about his children and so forth, but it was not long before we got back to the subject we had in common.
“Do you remember that young girl’s diary?” said Richard. “The one I was reading from when you were wounded?”
“Yes, I do. It touched me. It gave me a different perspective.”
“Some years after the war, I went back to Anzio, and I found her.”
“What?”
“I was able to locate where the Dormitory had been, pretty much.”
“Was there anything left of it?”
“No. But a village had been built nearby, and I asked in the local bar. She’d written her name in the diary. Antonia Carrapichano.”
“Pretty name. Doesn’t sound very local.”
“The father told me it was originally Phoenician.”
“I’m not sure I know where Phoenicia was.”
“Coast of Lebanon, I think—Tyre and Sidon, all that. Anyway, they’d come back to live in the area and they were thrilled when I took the diary back, especially Antonia, who was grown up by then. Sheila was with me, and they invited us both for dinner.’
“I’ve never been back. Not to Anzio or Tunisia. I’ve even managed to avoid Belgium.”
As Richard turned to look at me, I saw his ravaged old face, the deep-etched lines, the moustache, now white, the eyes still unblinking. “It was interesting for Sheila. And for me. To visit a place that had loomed so large in our lives. And in my dreams, sometimes, I must admit. And then to see it was just a rather ordinary bit of pine-covered marshland.”
“I don’t think I could bear that.”
“I found it … helpful. We became friends with the family. When Antonia got married, they invited us to the wedding. We flew to Rome and drove down.”
“Just like that?”
Richard laughed. “Yes. Nowadays you don’t have to fight your way in through a trench full of shit and icy water. You show your passport and stroll through customs.”
“Don’t have to kill anyone?”
“Not a single life was lost, though the car hire was a shambles. They were married in the church at the port, which they’ve completely rebuilt.”
“What’s it like?”
“Simple. Houses like cubes, a bit like a model town. Palm trees along the front. Antonia looked beautiful. You should go and look her up yourself. It might help you. Show you life can still be all right.”
I laughed. “Is this the hardheaded commanding officer I knew in that battalion HQ, surrounded by rotting bodies?”
“I think you make a choice when you reach a certain age, Robert. I decided to make every effort to be positive, to love my fellow man for the few years I have left. You couldn’t see what we saw and still…”
He trailed off as we stopped on a ridge to catch our breath.
“And you?” said Richard.
“I was so young.”
He put his hand on my forearm. There was kindness in his touch—the quality I had suspected when I first set eyes on him in France.
I said, “That’s why I never went back, never went to reunions. It was my way of saying: I won’t be defined by this experience. I didn’t ever want to allow myself to complete the sentence you just started.”
“‘You couldn’t see what we saw and still…’”
“Yes. That one.”
We walked on in silence. I was wondering how much of my work had been driven by my refusal to accept the realities of what I’d seen. My ambition not just to help patients but to achieve something that would change the way we looked at our sickness and ourselves … It occurred to me as we trudged along through the late English afternoon that my postwar life had been little more than an attempt at rebuttal: we are sick, but I can cure us; then we will no longer massacre one another. And more than that: I will somehow show that the atrocities I witnessed did not happen. They were a mistake. They were a delusion—another episode in our century of psychosis.
Perhaps my work as a doctor had in some ways been no more than a denial. One thing I had learned from medicine, however, was that denial was often a good strategy; it could buy time for wounds to heal themselves.
* * *
THERE WERE JUST the three of us for dinner, but Richard had put on a tie and jacket, as I had suspected he would. Sheila was also dressed up a bit, with a necklace and earrings. Tieless, I felt shabby, but at least my clothes were all freshly back from the launderette and ironed by Mrs. Gomez.
Although I tried to steer the conversation away from the war and into areas that would interest Sheila, it seemed to follow a course of its own, and by the time the cheese was served, we were back in Italy.
“By the way,” I said, “I’ve always thought Mussolini had drained those wretched marshes.”
“He did,” said Richard. “But when the Italians surrendered to the Allies, the Germans turned off the pumps, so the marsh flooded again. Then they reintroduced the malarial mosquito and confiscated all the stocks of quinine. To punish the Italians.”
“What a horrid thing to do,” said Sheila. “And did you get to see anything of Italy, Robert? When you were on leave?”
“Yes. I was wounded at Anzio, and after that I had a long summer to recover near Naples. It was … interesting.”
“Didn’t Richard need you back?”
I looked towards her husband.
“Robert had been in action for a long time. There was no rush. After we’d taken Rome, there was a lull in the fighting. We all needed a breather. At the time he was wounded we were really up against it. I remember Robert being brought into battalion headquarters by some stretcher bearers. I didn’t want to risk sending him back to the port because the Germans were bombing anything that moved, including hospital ships.”
“Mine was not a bad wound,” I said, “compared to the others.”
“Yes. Poor old Sidwell, hit in the groin, bled like a pig. Passmore in the thigh, Pears in the ribs, and Swann of course…”
“Mine was nothing much.”
I wanted to change the subject but could think of nothing to say.
Richard was looking at me over his glasses, “I thought at first it might be … an accident, one of our own. I didn’t see how anyone else could have got that close.”
Sheila looked appalled. “One of your own men?”
“Yes,” said Richard. “It happened quite a lot. Not so much by this stage of the war, but still more than we would have liked.”
“Oh dear.”
“But then I thought again. And only officers had pistols.”
Something shifted in me. I found my voice again. “Unless … unless someone else had got hold of a pistol.”
I looked out through the dark windows and saw that the rain had started to fall. “Bill Shenton,” I said.
Richard Varian looked down at the remains of the rhubarb crumble on his plate.
“Yes,” I said. “I got him one that morning.”
Sheila pushed back her chair and said, “Shall we have coffee in the sitting room?”
* * *
THAT NIGHT I hardly slept. I knew that I would never be able to remember exactly what had happened that day in the wadis. It was something that lay outside the healthy range of human experience, and it was vain to expect my memory to recapture it: using normal processes to recall what is abnormal is impossible.
In the morning, however, I found that
I now at least had a story I could tell myself—a plausibly robust version of events. And in the theories of Alexander Pereira, that probably constituted a success: by revisiting the day, I had forged a new relationship with it. Whether it was one that I would find easier to bear, however, was at that moment unclear.
Breakfast with other people is a trial at the best of times, and you look with disbelief at their peculiar rituals of cornflakes, eggs, conversation or radio programs. To me, this is not a meal, still less a social function; it’s a transition from sleep to work, with coffee and/or food. However, I found polite things to say about the bedroom and how well I’d slept, then questions to ask about the day ahead. A trip into town and lunch in a pub was part of it; I gathered there would be another couple at dinner.
There was some urgency, therefore, in what I had to establish; and it was with relief that I found Richard Varian alone in his study in the middle of the morning.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“What’s that, Robert?”
“I think you know. Anzio. Is it your belief that Bill Shenton shot me?”
Richard stirred in his armchair. “My belief is that it’s all a long time ago. You were a good soldier, and what happened in those godforsaken marshes should be left there.”
“It’s quite all right, Richard. I’d like to know. It was, as you say, a long time ago, a lifetime, really. Almost every cell in my body—and in yours—has been renewed since then. We are scarcely the same people.”
Varian took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “You were brought into battalion HQ by two stretcher bearers. You’d twisted your ankle quite badly, and it was easier to carry you that way. The MO was nearby, and he said he could patch you up without you being sent back to the port, which I was pleased about, because it was so bloody dangerous there in bomb alley. I didn’t ask much about the wound until later, when the MO mentioned he thought it was a pistol. Two days later, when Shenton was on his way to B Echelon, he asked to see me. He said that you and he had gone out on patrol. He said you’d wanted to bag a sentry but couldn’t get one out alive. You’d killed a few candidates between you. After a bit, he began to worry that you’d lost your judgment. He thought you’d gone bomb-happy. You were both some way behind enemy lines. Then you were surprised and had to run like hell to get back to our line, where you fell in with some other unit, not our chaps, possibly the Foresters. There was some fierce rifle and machine-gun fire, and you were keen to go over into the enemy trench. It seems there was a struggle between you and Shenton. He said you’d gone berserk. As you started to climb out of the trench he shot you through the shoulder with a pistol you’d given him that morning. He said it was the only way to save your life.”
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