“It’s Boxer, isn’t it, Bernard?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake…!” he began explosively but checked himself, reached out and patted her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Pip! There’s damn all anyone can do about it! I’ll be okay, only give me time, for God’s sake give me time to get used to it!”
The shoulder pat and the manner it was administered made her feel desperate. She realised that if she was to achieve anything at all with him she must take the lead now—this instant. No amount of time would make any difference to him, not so long as he was left floundering about on his own with his thoughts pounding the treadmill of memory.
“You’ll have to talk about it some time, Berni,” she said, firmly. “You might as well start now and tell me! If you only knew it I’m the person who can help, because I’m the only one who has ever thought of you and Boxer as two persons and not one!”
He looked closely at her then, holding her in his glance for nearly a minute. Finally, he said:
“That was the one time that I left him to cope on his own, the one time, Pip! He wouldn’t come away when we began pulling back but just stood there, firing into the battery! It was so bloody silly when you think of it. He couldn’t have been firing at anything, there was so much smoke! Then, when I copped it, it was him who found me and carried me about for hours. I don’t know how the hell he did it under those conditions but he did, somehow, and he got tourniquets and dressings on me somewhere or other. I wouldn’t be here now but for that, they told me so in the Jerry hospital. Then I began thinking what it meant. It meant that he could have got clean away, without any trouble…almost everyone in our troop did, you know, but old Boxer couldn’t have tried to get back to the beach. He just picked me up and walked slap through it all, right into the Jerry lines and gave himself up! It’s so damned funny that he should have done that, after me turning my back on him the way I did!”
“Why do you feel so bad about it?” she asked quietly. “Why aren’t you proud of him? You ought to be!”
He shook his head impatiently.
“I’m telling you, it was only a minute or so after I’d turned my back on him! Don’t you see, Pip? I was fed up to the back teeth with him! I remembered everything you’d said to me, that I couldn’t go on and on looking out for him the way I’d always done! Then he went and did a thing like that for me! I can’t get that out of my head!”
She was silent a moment, considering. “You’re looking at it all wrong, Bernard,” she said at length. “Sit down and listen to me. You’ve got to start looking at it the way it really is, and you’ve got to begin right here and now!”
She pushed him towards the deck chair that stood against the boundary fence and took a seat facing him on the low railing separating the tiny verandah from the garden.
“You being hit like that was the luckiest thing that ever happened to Boxer,” she said. “It gave him the one chance he’s ever had of being someone, of doing something on his own and out of his own head, instead of just something you told him to do! Now then—listen Berni—how do you know that it hasn’t done him a tremendous amount of good? How can you tell whether he’s the same person any more, now that he hasn’t got you to do all his thinking for him? You just turn that over for a minute or two while I go in and make some tea!”
She left him sitting there looking out over the moonlit Nursery. When she returned with the tea he was still there and she noticed that his cigarette was carrying an inch and a half of ash.
“Well?”
Suddenly he threw away the butt and sat forward.
“It adds up!” he said. “It adds up, Pip!” He got up. “Turn on the dining-room light a minute!”
She put down the tea and went back into the room to switch on the light He took a much creased letter from his battledress pocket and spread it out on his knees.
“There’s a bit here from one of his letters that Dad showed me. It puzzled me Pip but now it doesn’t. Listen: ‘…it isn’t as bad as you think being here, I’ve got a new name. I’m “The Gaffer.”…’What exactly is a ‘gaffer’, Pip, I always thought it was some kind of boss?”
“It is,” she told him, “it’s a name they sometimes give the head of a gang of workmen, up north.”
“The head, you say?”
“Yes. A kind of foreman, who gives the orders!”
He began to show excitement. “That’s what I thought it meant, but it seemed so funny old Boxer being a gaffer and giving orders. D’you really think.…”
“I’ve always thought that you never gave him a chance, Bernard,” she said, “so what’s the point of torturing yourself for the one you couldn’t help giving him? Here, drink your tea, and then go back to bed and to sleep, silly!”
He was silent for a while, slowly stirring his cup, then laying down the spoon and lifting it to his lips. When he had emptied it he said:
“Do you really want us to get married, Pip? Are you quite sure you aren’t doing it because I’m like this now?”
“That’s right,” she said with a smile, “now begin worrying about that side of it! At least I can do something about that!”
She did too, for afterwards he was much easier to manage and she soon discovered that by far the best way of handling him was to bully him.
Louise would sometimes hear her teaching him to reload his safety razor with one hand and would smile and nod to herself, as Pippa’s voice came from the bathroom—“Now then, you’ll only drop it if you scoop it towards you, stupid! Press your thumb against the handle and wedge the razor against the back of the basin…. Here, let me show you…like that!”
Or when she was in his bedroom, teaching him to knot his tie—“Hold the thin end against your chest with your elbow, silly, then flick the broad end over and through…that’s better, you’ll get the hang of it in no time, so long as you think and aren’t in such a dreadful hurry all the time!”
“She’s quite wonderful,” Louise said to herself. “How lucky we are to have her here and so much in love with him!”
It wasn’t always as easy as this, of course. Sometimes his helplessness would infuriate him and he would fling things about in a rage, weeping with frustration at his seeming inability to perform the kind of task that people with two hands perform unconsciously. Then she would suddenly stop bullying him and adopt different tactics, talking to him as a patient mother soothes a highly-strung child; “Steady, Berni; all right, let’s have a bit of a breather and then tackle it again. There’s absolutely no hurry, dearest! Just relax, and let’s find out exactly where we went wrong!”
Slowly but appreciably she made progress, better and more spectacular progress than the professional physiotherapists were making at the hospital. Jim watched her sometimes out of the corner of his eye, marvelling at her skill and limitless patience and Louise watched too, her heart swelling with love for this tall, sallow, ungainly girl, whose devotion was like something out of a romantic book or film, and not at all the kind of thing one stumbled across in everyday life along the Avenue.
The crisis, for both of them, was delayed until the third week of their honeymoon when they were alone in the chalet that Edgar had rented for them among the sandhills, near Rhosneigr.
Edgar had pushed on in secret with his plans for ‘the little garage’ but he decided that there was no necessity to hurry the young couple, for Bernard had been granted a month’s demobilisation leave and was already in receipt of his disability pension and back pay.
The Army medical people had recommended plenty of sea-bathing as likely to be beneficial to the muscles of his injured leg and Bernard, much to his surprise, found that he could swim almost as well with one arm as he had been able to do with two.
Every morning, rain or shine, he and Pippa ran down to the beach and plunged into the bay, shouting and laughing in the shallow water, and splashing one another like two town children on holiday. Then they would swim out into deeper water and Bernard would roll over and do a series of porpoise dives, exul
ting in an element where his handicap no longer existed.
One morning, when they had been enjoying themselves like this for half an hour, a sudden shower of rain drove them inshore to retrieve their single bathing towel, and Pippa, leaping from the water, shouted: “Race you to the towel, Berni!”
She was long-legged and very fleet, and in the exhilaration of the moment she completely forgot about his stiff leg, and raced up to the chalet, where she had dried herself and peeled off her costume by the time he had joined her.
“Here, Slowcoach,” she said, laughing, and threw him the towel as he climbed the three steps into the chalet. He grabbed at it but missed, and as he bent to retrieve it he misjudged his distance striking his forehead a sharp blow against the corner of the awning rail.
It might have been the familiar ache in his leg, awakened by the sprint, the sharp pain of the blow, or the realisation that even a simple act like reaching down for a towel was now distorted into a problem. It might have been any one of these things coming after months of pain and anxiety, but whatever it was he screamed and rushed into the chalet, slamming the door. A few minutes later Pippa found him on his knees, sobbing into a cushion, his body twisted with a distress that could find no other relief but in the helpless sobbing of a child.
She took the towel and gently dried his shoulders, saying nothing until his body ceased to shake and he remained there, kneeling, his face buried in the cushion.
It was some time before she could trust herself to speak. When her own tears ceased to flow she whispered: “Better now, Berni darling?”
He kept his face turned away from her but he could not conceal his scars and she saw, with infinite compassion, the ugly, puckered knot three inches below his right shoulder. She looked at it intently and her glance travelled down to the wasted calf, pitted with craters of grafted flesh.
She touched him lightly. “You don’t need to worry, Berni, there’s only me here. Don’t be ashamed, Berni darling! I wonder it hasn’t happened long before, it was bound to, you know and it can only do you good!”
He still kept his face averted from her so she laid aside the towel and dropped on her knees, throwing her arms round his shoulders and straining him to her. They remained thus for more than a minute. Then, still not looking at her, he said:
“It makes everything so bloody lopsided, Pip. It’s something you just can’t explain to anyone, not even to a doctor!”
“You don’t have to explain it to anyone,” she told him and laying her cheek against his shoulders she kissed the stump of his arm again and again.
At the touch of her lips he turned suddenly and took her face in his hand, staring down at it and reading in her eyes a reflection of his own misery and deprivation.
“It’s worse when you forget, Pip! You wouldn’t think you could forget but you do, and when something makes you remember again it’s like facing it all over again!”
“It’ll get better, Berni dear. You’ll stop forgetting and stop remembering. It’ll be like a scar that you got when you were a baby, something that’s there but is now simply a part of you!”
He wanted more than he had ever wanted anything to be reassured and convinced.
“How can you know that, Pip? How can you be sure of it, without having been carved about, like me?”
“I was sure that you weren’t dead, Berni.”
He nodded. “That’s so! Pop and Louise told me about that! What made you so sure? How is it that you’ve always known about me and about Boxer?”
She smiled and shook her head: “I can’t tell you that, Bernard. There just aren’t the right words to explain a thing like that, but I always have known, haven’t I? So why can’t you take everything I tell you about yourself and about ‘us’ on trust? Why don’t you trust me, for instance, if I can tell you what’s the best thing for us to do right now?”
“What is the best thing, Pip?”
“To start working, Berni! To start working now, today!”
“You mean that garage your father’s always hinting about?”
“Why not. Why ever not? That’s something you can do, Berni and if it isn’t wrong to borrow from banks why should it be wrong to borrow from people like Mummy and Edgar, people who haven’t actually fought in the war, but want to feel that they’re helping the people who have?”
He got to his feet, picked up the towel and stood near the window looking out over the sea. Watching him she saw his hand open and shut. Then, when he turned back to her, she saw that he was smiling, with the tears still wet on his cheeks.
His voice, so tremulous a moment before, was now level and assured. He said:
“Okay, Pip! If you say it’s right then it is right! Make some coffee and we’ll hop the next ’bus to the mainland and see about it!”
It was as though the magic of her faith had swept like a beam into the darkest corners of his mind and she saw with joy that the battle was almost won, that from now on there would be fewer and fewer moody silences, that ultimately he must come to regard the past as the past, without the power to sour present and future. He threw her the towel and went into the bedroom, whistling.
She stood up rubbing her neck and called to him.
“We’re out of milk, we haven’t fetched it from the kiosk! I’ll go and get it now!”
She went out under the awning and began to descend the steps to the beach. Then she stopped, throwing back her head and laughing.
“What’s the joke?” he called through the open shutter.
She came back into the chalet and stood in the doorway, still laughing.
“I was going to the kiosk for the milk! Like this…in just a bathing cap!”
CHAPTER XXX
Wolf Hunt
THE TAXI SET down Elaine at the foot of the steep ramp that led up to the gates of the County Gaol.
She looked up at the red-brick walls that seemed immensely high from where she stood and then at the iron-studded gates, with the little wicket gate cut in the main door. She wondered if one simply rang the bell, as though seeking admission to an ordinary house, or whether somebody now watching from a window would come out and check on credentials, before permitting her to cross the threshold.
Now that she was actually here, and standing outside the gaol she was a little scared by the occasion. She had never been so near to a prison before, indeed, she did not recall ever having seen a prison, except on the cinema screen. Her knowledge of prisons, and of prison customs, was therefore confined to what she had learned from American films. Hundreds of men, she remembered, milled about the big yards in loose jackets and caps with big peaks. From time to time they were chivvied by men carrying guns, and in every film that she had seen about prisons the inmates spent their time hatching plots to escape and eventually did escape, against a background of wild confusion, the crackle of firearms and the blare of sirens.
Standing at the foot of the ramp, and warmed by the afternoon sun, Elaine would not have been much surprised to see something like this happen before her eyes; instead, a deep silence brooded over the building, so deep that it was difficult to imagine that hundreds of men were living on the far side of the wall, and that somewhere among them was Archie Carver, now in the eleventh month of his sentence and about to receive his first visitor.
She shook off the feeling of awe and walked firmly up the ramp to the wicket gate, where a printed notice said: ‘Please Ring’.
She pulled hard at a metal rod that looked like the flush lever of an old-fashioned lavatory and heard the bell jangle far beyond the gates.
Presently, and after a certain amount of shuffling and jangling, the wicket gate opened and a red-faced young man in a drab, navy blue uniform put out his head and smiled at her.
“This way, Miss,” he said, without any preliminaries.
Elaine smiled back at him, and was relieved to see the look of interest that invariably showed in men’s faces whenever her smile was directed upon them. With more confidence she tucked her handbag und
er her arm and stepped briskly through the wicket gate into a narrow yard hemmed in by sheds.
The gate clinked behind her and the smiling, beefy young man pointed to the nearest shed.
“In there, Miss,” he said very politely.
“Thank you,” said Elaine, rewarding him with another dazzling smile.
The feeling of awe and bewilderment left her, exorcised by the flattering attention of the young officer.
Elaine’s presence in the County Gaol was due to a curious incident that had taken place in the meadow behind Number Forty-Three, about a week before.
Archie’s letter inviting her to visit him had now been tucked away in her handbag for six months or more. She had received and read it with surprise, for she had almost forgotten Archie and, more particularly, where Archie was situated.
Time slipped away so quickly for Elaine these days and she had been amazed to discover on reckoning up that it was now more than two years since she and Archie had spent that lively week in Blackpool; it was therefore, almost eighteen months since she had last seen him at her solicitor’s, when they met to discuss the divorce.
Since then things had been shaping rather well for Elaine. She wore a sapphire and diamond engagement ring that must have cost her fiancé at least two hundred pounds. The centre stone was so large that she sometimes found it difficult to believe that it was real, and only slipped it on when she accompanied Woolston on their tri-weekly jaunts to town. She had left it behind today, deciding that it wasn’t the kind of thing one took inside a county gaol.
She had acquired, in addition, a mink stole. Woolston was very clever at thinking up just the kind of gifts she liked, and the stole had arrived at Number Forty-Three by special delivery on Christmas Eve.
On New Year’s Eve, only a day or so before she had received Archie’s letter, Woolston turned up with a large amethyst brooch, and a month later, on the occasion of her birthday, in early February, he had presented her with a huge vanity box, made of soft leather and containing at least three dozen accessories, each mounted in silver!
The Avenue Goes to War Page 50