‘OK. How’s Jo?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Exactly what I asked. When I phoned her the other day to ask her to stop you leaving me all these messages, she started crying and told me you’ve been bullying her. Is that true?’
‘Of course not.’ Toby thought of everything Jo had done and felt his blood pressure rising. ‘But I can’t bear her sloppiness or refusal to take proper messages. An old friend of mine came round twice a few weeks ago and because she wouldn’t take his phone number or address I’ve had no way of finding him. And it’s important that I do. I have to know why he wanted to get in touch after so long.’
‘That doesn’t sound bad enough to justify terrorizing Jo. You need to be careful of her. She’s a lot more sensitive than you think and you of all people ought to know what that means. She’s also exceptionally efficient under normal conditions, and she does a very good job with the visitors. You’d have difficulty getting anyone else as good for twice the salary the trust pays her. I’ve told Henry he ought to pay her more. The least you can do is be kind to her.’
‘You’ve seen Henry?’ Toby said, wishing he hadn’t sounded so sharp. But it was hard not to, now that he knew why his godfather had been asking all those questions yesterday. His face burned as he realized Margaret must have told Henry about their fight and her black eye.
‘No,’ she said, sounding quite kind. ‘But he phones me at intervals to check that we’re all right and not needing anything. He cares about us.’
‘That’s not fair.’ Toby thought of all the lonely evenings when he’d longed for her. ‘You’ve just told me you hated getting all my messages.’
‘True.’ That edge was still there in her voice. ‘And I suppose the fact that you didn’t try to find us physically does at least tell me you’re not a wife beater after all. They always come after you.’
‘What are you talking about? Wife beater? Margaret, you know I’m not.’
‘What’s that bleeping? It sounds like your other phone. You’d better answer, and I must go anyway. See you at the play. Don’t be late.’
She’d gone before he could say anything more. He waited for the answering machine to pick up the call. The sound of Ben’s voice made him back against the wall.
‘Hi, Toby! I couldn’t get through on your mobile, so I thought I’d just remind you that there must be no mistakes at next week’s sale. If you’re listening to this, pick it up.’
Toby lunged for the receiver: ‘Did you break Mer’s arm, you bastard?’
‘Of course,’ Ben said, sounding surprised. ‘I told you we’d give you a taster of the kind of punishment you could expect for letting us down. Be thankful you weren’t made to watch it. You will be next time. So think about that when you go into the auction next week. And it won’t just be an arm, either.’
Toby couldn’t speak, and Ben didn’t say anything else. When Toby heard the click of Ben’s phone, he rewound the answering machine tape and wiped it. He didn’t want Jo hearing anything Ben had said.
‘What’s the matter now?’ she asked from behind him. His hands slipped off the controls of the machine as dizziness made him reel.
‘Toby, what’s going on? Who were you talking to about me hearing something?’ She sounded frightened.
He turned to see her staring at him. One of her hands was almost touching his elbow, as though she thought he might fall over.
‘You need help,’ she said, peering even closer into his face. For once she sounded almost gentle. ‘Let me get you a doctor.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I’m not. You look awful. And I know you’re cracking up. You hear voices from people who aren’t here. You talk to yourself all the time. You’re obviously not sleeping. You’re scaring me, Toby. Please let me call your doctor. Please.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m fine, except for having to deal with the mess you’re making of your job. Haven’t you finished typing today’s letters yet?’
‘Of course.’ The sympathy in her expression closed in until it was as mean and spiteful as usual. He felt his hands curling into fists.
‘They’re on your desk, waiting for your signature,’ Jo went on as though she was rubbing salt into a deep cut in his flesh. ‘But you’ll have to post them yourself. I’m going home. I’ve got a migraine.’
Once she had gone, Toby sat beside the phone. He couldn’t think what to do. His skin itched, as though microscopic creatures were crawling all over it, and his eyes kept watering. He wondered if he was suffering from lack of fresh air. Or perhaps it was just the constipation that had made his insides set like concrete.
Sunlight, broken by the bare branches of the garden’s trees, was dappling the mossy paving of the garden. It seemed months, years even, since he’d walked anywhere for pleasure. Maybe that was partly why everything seemed so awful. A bit of ordinary exercise in the fresh air might put things in perspective. And it might help his digestion, too. Yes, in a while he’d lock up the gallery and walk across the river.
He was just beginning to feel a faint memory of enjoyment from stretching his legs as he strode across the Millennium Bridge’s so-called streak of light when he saw ahead of him Ben’s thin, dark woman, walking beside a small boy. At first the child distracted him; then he realized the woman must have brought him with her for cover. They were leaning against the parapet, and she was peering back at the Gregory Bequest Gallery, pointing to it and saying something Toby couldn’t hear.
Hanging back, glad of the concealing crowd, Toby waited to see what she would do next. Had she been there when Ben had broken Mer’s arm? Toby began to comfort himself with ideas of what he would like to do to her.
Trish pushed open the corrugated-iron door at the front of the trench exhibit and looked back.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
‘Yes.’ David’s black eyes were showing a lot more energy than usual. ‘Jamie says it’s great. Really lifelike. And Mr Thompson thinks we should all see it. For the project, you know.’
‘Good. On we go, then.’
The museum was still full, even though it was only about half an hour until closing time. Trish had been amused as they wove their way through the crowds upstairs, between the tanks and the submersibles, to see that there were very few girls in the various family parties and those there were had all been dressed in combat clothes.
The trench door clattered behind them. The darkness seemed almost complete, although there was a small flickering red lamp high up on the trench wall to their right. Guns crashed and voices shouted. Bodies seemed to be all round them. Trish couldn’t distinguish which belonged to the crowd and which to the exhibit’s figures until she brushed against them.
‘Of course, the real thing would have been wet, David,’ she said. ‘Our feet would be squelching through the mud, and there would be rats running around.’ She suppressed all the descriptions she had read of body parts and excrement.
They passed a lens-like glass square in the wall. Trish peered into it and found that it was a periscope, giving her a view of the bleak emptiness of no man’s land. David couldn’t reach up to it, but they found a child’s-eye version a little further on.
Trish’s eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness and she could see a large group ahead of them. Maybe a school party; maybe just a big family. She didn’t want to push her way through, so she slowed down as she rounded the next dogleg.
Toby grabbed the boy by the arm and hissed: ‘Don’t say a word.’
Rather to his surprise, the boy kept his mouth tightly closed. He did pull against Toby’s grip, but he made no sound. Toby held on and dragged his captive with him, against the flow of people, till they got to the corrugated-iron entry door.
‘We must get to the toilets,’ Toby murmured whenever someone protested. Toilet wasn’t one of his words, but he assumed it would sound normal to these sightseers, and probably to the dark-haired woman’s child as well. ‘Can’t risk an accident.’
The boy glared up at him with so much hatred that Toby nearly hit him there and then. But he managed not to. Instead, he dragged him down the corridor towards the gents and pushed open the door with his shoulder. He wasn’t going to risk letting go. Luckily there was no one at any of the urinals and the doors to all the loos were open. Thank God for that. He dragged the boy into one cubicle and locked the door.
‘Don’t look so scared,’ he said, contemptuous of his quarry’s white face and shaking body. What a loathsome little wimp! ‘I’m not going to touch you. Not this time anyway. But I want you to give your mother a message.’
‘My mother’s dead,’ the boy said viciously. His black eyes looked enormous, but there were no tears in them. That surprised Toby more than the lie or the spite.
‘Rubbish. She brought you here.’
‘No, she didn’t. I’m on my own.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m talking about the woman who came in with you: tall, thin and dark. She called you David. I heard you both talking, so there’s no point lying.’
‘Only because we met in the queue for the security check.’ The piping voice was breathless. And no wonder, producing such a load of rubbish. ‘She asked me what my name was and what I’d come to look at. I don’t know her. I’ve never seen her before in my life.’
‘You can’t be stupid enough to think I’ll believe that, but it doesn’t matter either way. You can take a message to her whoever she is.’
‘She’ll probably have gone and I won’t find her again. She was on her own, too. No. No, she wasn’t.’ The boy shoved both hands into his pockets. His voice trembled, but he still wasn’t crying: ‘I mean she said her boyfriend would be waiting for her. He’s big and quite old. He’s a policeman called Inspector Lyalt, she said. He’s a policeman. She won’t be on her own.’
‘Never mind her bloody boyfriend. Concentrate. This is the message: tell her to stay out of my life. I know what she’s up to. And I know she works with Ben Smithlock. But I won’t have it. Make her understand that. OK?’
‘No,’ the boy said, looking stupid. ‘I don’t understand and I can’t give her any message because I don’t know who she is. And I won’t ever see her again.’
And then, before Toby realized what he was doing, the child flung himself on the floor, flattening his body like an animal, and crammed himself through the gap under the door. Toby could hear him panting and slipping as he ran across the travertine.
Toby unlocked the door, planning to follow, when he heard footsteps outside. He bent over one of the basins to wash his hands. The newcomer unzipped his trousers and relieved himself into the nearest urinal. He was a total stranger, who didn’t even look at Toby and obviously suspected nothing. Toby breathed more easily, dried his hands and left.
Trish almost walked into the tall figure on her left and put out a hand to regain her balance. The hardness against her palm told her she was touching one of the exhibits. She squinted in the darkness to see more.
‘Look, he’s standing on what they called the firing step. It gave them a chance to shoot over the edge of the sandbags, but it meant they were at risk of getting a bullet in the brain,’ she whispered over her shoulder, not wanting to disturb anyone else as she shared her few facts with David. ‘They called wounds like that Blighties, or Blighty ones, because they were so serious you got sent home for treatment.’
‘Are you a guide then, miss?’ said a shrill voice from the level of her waist. ‘Where’s your badge? The others have all got badges on a chain round their necks.’
Trish peered at the child she’d thought was her brother and saw a quite different, brown-haired boy. She smiled at him, before squinting through the darkness beyond.
‘Sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I thought you were someone else. D’you want to get past me?’
She pushed past him, and the three people behind him, but she still couldn’t see the black-eyed pointy face she wanted.
‘You’d do better going out the far end and coming back in again,’ said an irritable male voice. ‘There isn’t room for two-way traffic on these duckboards.’
That seemed so sensible that Trish nodded and fought her way out of the trench, checking every child she passed. None of them was the right one.
Outside, the light seemed very bright, and the foyer almost empty. She ran through it, calling his name.
No one answered. Trish told herself not to panic. He was nine, quite capable of surviving a few minutes without her and finding his way back. Even so, she went back through the trench four times, checking all the nooks and twists in case he was there. On one pass, she was momentarily distracted by a glass case to her left, which contained a life-sized model of a VAD in uniform beside all sorts of smaller exhibits.
Peering into the case, she saw a photograph of a train filled with wounded soldiers. Some men were climbing the high steps up into it, helped by nurses in uniform. Beside the train were rows of stretchers, each one containing a bandaged, semiconscious soldier.
‘And that,’ Trish said aloud, ‘is why the paintings had to be stuffed into narrow tubes. Of course!’
‘Trish! Trish!’ She heard David’s voice, whispering and urgent. She looked round and saw him at last, white faced and running towards her from the lavatories.
‘Can we go, Trish? I don’t like it.’
‘Of course. Are you feeling ill?’
‘No. But can we go now? Please.’ He was tugging at her hand. She could feel his palm slippery with sweat and castigated herself for being so insensitive. He’d been so excited by the idea of the exhibit that she hadn’t thought carefully enough how male voices shouting and guns and the aura of death might affect him.
‘Come on,’ she said, tugging in her turn. ‘Let’s not wait for the lifts. Race you up the stairs?’
He ran and she followed, hating herself. He seemed no less jittery once they’d got outside, so she hailed a taxi and hustled him in. Only then did he begin to calm down.
‘What happened in there?’
‘Nothing happened. I just didn’t like it. And I had to have a pee.’ He was silent, until they reached the end of their street, when he added: ‘I’m sorry, Trish. It was really kind of you to take me.’
‘That’s fine. It doesn’t matter. Maybe it was all too much after a heavy day at school. Don’t give it another thought.’
‘No. OK.’ He twisted round so that he could peer out of the window, but there was nothing to see except the dark street and the miserable one-legged pigeons who eked out their depressing existence round the parked cars.
‘Look, there are lights on in the flat,’ he said a moment later. ‘Nicky must be in.’
‘Yes,’ Trish said, hearing the pleasure in his voice and fighting an emotion that wasn’t exactly jealousy, but seemed disturbingly like it.
Helen was leaning against the edge of the carriage as the train rattled and swayed. Poor Lieutenant Walters was groaning again. He had two of Jean-Pierre’s tubes in his stretcher, on either side of his legs. She’d been afraid they were hurting her patient, but the last time she’d wiped his forehead and given him a sip of water, he’d told her it was his chest and his head that hurt. The last doctor to see him had assured her that nothing they were doing to his legs could trouble him now because of the damage to his spine. He had no feeling below the waist.
‘Nurse! Nurse!’ It was Captain Coot’s rasping voice. She turned, trying to wear the comfortable, confident smile that was the only thing she had to offer most of them.
‘We’ll soon be there,’ she said, looking down at him. She could see from the saliva on his moustache that he’d been biting his lips, trying not to groan. There was sweat all over his greyish skin. Both his arms were broken and had had to be splinted across his chest. ‘I’m sorry about the rattling. I’ve tried to wedge you in tight, but I know it must hurt.’
‘Not too bad,’ he said. ‘There was a letter in my pocket. Could you see if it’s still there?’
It d
idn’t seem very likely. His breeches had had to be ripped up the seams so that the wounds in his legs could be dressed. As carefully as possible, she moved Jean-Pierre’s tube and felt her way down the side of his body, feeling the stiffening edges of his bloody, ripped breeches. There was the pocket. He flinched and she knew she’d hurt him. But there was a piece of paper in there. She slid her fingers deeper into the torn pocket and pulled it out, carefully replacing the tube.
‘Would you like me to read it for you?’
‘Yes, please.’
She unfolded it, hoping it wasn’t going to be one of the brutal announcements of infidelity or impending marriage to someone else. She couldn’t believe how some women were behaving to these men, and tried to hope it was ignorance of what they suffered at the front rather than the conscienceless cruelty it seemed.
‘My dear Jim,’ she read, tilting the thin sheet to catch the little light there was. ‘I wish you were here. I married—’
Helen broke off to check that he wanted her to go on reading. To her amazement he was smiling and nodding slightly.
‘I married Rupert yesterday. It was a beautiful day, but I missed you. We both did. And mother wept.’
‘I think she’d have wept even if I’d been there,’ the captain said, still smiling even though he winced each time the train clacked over a gap in the rails. ‘She’s an emotional woman, my mother.’
‘So this is your sister, is it?’
‘Yes. My little sister. Just imagine her getting married. And to such a good chap. He was out with us until he got a Blighty one. But he’s well enough to take care of her now. Does she say when they’re due back from their honeymoon?’
Helen looked back at the letter. ‘Yes. They will have been back four days by now. She should be able to come and see you as soon as the doctors have decided where to send you.’ She saw the wound stripes on his hanging sleeve. ‘This must be your third time on one of these convoys.’
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