Hero

by Paul Butler

  “I just wanted to see if your legs were real.”

  She frowns at me from the dim light of her cave, the rag doll bent double as she wriggles backwards.

  “What do you mean if my legs are real?”

  I’m vexed with myself for engaging with her fancy, but the question is necessary. Several times recently I have believed Lucy to be teetering upon the edge of some nightmarish abyss only to find that it is merely my own imagination infusing some childish twitch of thought with dangerous unreason.

  She continues to shuffle backwards in a sitting crawl, a sullen monkey in retreat. “I just wanted to see,” she whines. “The soldier in the park. His were made of wood.” A touch of indignation is in this statement and a sense of comparison too, unflattering to myself.

  Lucy now skips, rag doll still collapsed under her arm, to the window. She gazes out into the bars of daylight visible through the blind.

  “What soldier? What park?” I demand, aware of a burning at the roots of my scalp. It isn’t just my soldiery being questioned that makes me smart. It seems that as soon as my back is turned in this family everything spirals out of control. Strangers intrude. Children roam free and graves threaten to yawn and spill their dead. Who is this veteran with wooden legs and how did my daughter come to encounter him? How did she come to peek into the tortuous methods through which half-men are cobbled back into the semblance of wholeness?

  “Who were you with?” I ask, feeling my lips burn. “Mummy?”

  Lucy flinches, half looks back—an adult reaction to a question if ever I saw one.

  “No,” she says quickly. “I was with Elsa.” She pauses, lost between giving too much information and not enough. “It was in Christchurch Park.”

  I pick up my pen once more but my fingers tremble with rage. Has Lucy seen my anger? She has witnessed at least one blistering argument between Sarah and me regarding Elsa. I fix my gaze towards the invoice on my desk and let the pen nib hover around the signature line while I pretend to read through the numbers again.

  Elsa is the rapier point with which Sarah tortures me. She doesn’t know it is torture, and it isn’t done deliberately. But it hardly matters because the result is the same. Elsa is the governess Sarah hired behind my back six months ago. She has no special experience with children that I can tell, but that wasn’t the point for Sarah when she brought the young woman into the house. Elsa isn’t merely a governess. She is part of Sarah’s grand design to heal us all, to undo the war and stitch us all back together afresh.

  Before the war Elsa’s people were in the Newfoundland fishery. Beaumont-Hamel ground her men-folk—husband and two brothers—into the earth like so many on that first day of the Somme. Though from different islands, Sarah and Elsa were part of that intricate web of sisterhood, robbed of persons they loved on the very same day. Somehow Elsa had ended up in London and through Mr. Eaves, a mutual acquaintance and distant cousin to the Baxters, Sarah heard about her. I can well imagine how the light must have come into Sarah’s eyes when she saw the missionary possibilities. Here was an orphan of the same storm that had killed her own brother and wounded her own husband far more deeply than any scars might suggest. Sarah’s whole life’s work spun around those losses. Through the visor of her relentless kindness and her merciless search for meaning, she must have seen an opportunity for some kind of grand reunion of suffering. But she was cunning too. She was acutely aware of the offensiveness of her charity— whether aimed at Elsa or myself, or both—and had the guile to mask her intentions. She wanted Elsa, she told me, because in their Ipswich docks the Baxters had once built ships for Newfoundland whalers. Elsa’s father had been a sea captain and her brothers would in time have followed suit.

  It was this evasion that became the focus of our argument. The whalers the Baxters supplied were Basque and French, I told her. They had little or no relationship to Elsa’s English and Irish ancestors.

  The overture to Elsa’s arrival had been the slamming of doors and the crashing of glasses. I remember how, through the rising smoke of discord, I turned from my wife a final time and caught, through the partially shielding leaves of the large aspidistra in the corner of the room, Lucy’s wide-eyed stare. She had witnessed the whole battle.

  How disquieting to ruminate on the thoughts that lay behind those clear blue eyes. I have since sensed the unnatural silence of a spy within our walls. Now, as my five-and-a-half-year-old daughter pretends to stare through the window, I have some idea of the creeping vines that entangle her young thoughts. She can sense my anger as a cat senses rain, and she is trying to weigh each influence—the stranger, Elsa, my mother, the park—for its potential to either calm or enrage. Her infant understanding is in a constant grapple with her precocious experience of life’s slipperiest recesses.

  “Where was Elsa when you were talking to the stranger?” Though my voice is quiet, the faintest crackle lurks beneath my words like that of a still-glowing ember.

  I watch her shoulders twitch, and she resists the impulse to turn towards me. “Getting an ice cream for me,” she declares with the strained joyfulness of a bad stage actress.

  I stare at her for a moment longer. A gust strikes the window, and the blind rattles back and forth against the sill. Even though her face is side-on, I can see her eyes narrow, not like those of a child, but rather like I used to see in the trenches when men burdened by cold, exhaustion, or fear became suddenly aware of a hopeful change in the wind, mindful of a world outside their present existence. The fire is gone from me. I long to be with my daughter, who stands upon the other side of the world; it must be a delusion—a trick with mirrors perhaps—that she appears to be standing by the window in my office. The small, neat figure with the rag doll is surely my own projection. She is merely a wounded man’s misconception, a living embodiment of his inability to conceive innocence. I float away from my shoulder to where Lucy stands, turn back to myself, and watch the seedy, hunched figure sitting at the desk, holding the trembling nib of his pen like some cruel parody of impotence. I seem a thing of twists and buckles, a body of crushed tin cans from which jealousy oozes like rancid juice. How dare this creature soil the innocence of youth! How dare he infect his own daughter with his terror!

  A tentative knock sounds on the door while my mouth struggles to give form to this conciliatory impulse.

  “Come in,” I say very softly, a small kindness meant for my daughter, but as usual, undelivered.

  The door opens. Coombs, the foreman, enters on his incongruously delicate steps—large feet in constant motion with the carpet as though it burned his soles—and nods in deference before starting.

  “About the horses’ hides from the Jacob farm, Mr. Simon,” he begins.

  I nod, and lay down my pen. My fingers ache as I do so, and I realize I must have been gripping it unnaturally tight.

  “Too old, sir. Infested with maggots.”

  “All of them?

  “Most. Gone right through to the other side.”

  “What about the bullocks’ skins?”

  “Oh they’re fine, Mr. Simon. Came straight from the slaughterhouse. The team is scraping them now.”

  “Thanks, Coombs—anything else?”

  “A gentleman came to see you while you were out, sir.” His feet shuffle on the carpet again. “Wouldn’t give a name, sir, but says you and he are old comrades from the war.”

  A silence thickens around us, and a high note sings in my right ear. I never considered during my convalescence in France, even during my first months back in Suffolk, how omnipresent the war would remain. Had I known, I might have found a way not to return.

  Coombs’s eyes are alive with a timid admiration as he watches for my response, but all I feel is a weight around my shoulders, my albatross returning for perhaps the third time this week. The war is a calling card and is in liberal use. The gentleman in question might possibly be from the same battalion, but he is most likely using the term “comrade” loosely, a general kinship claimed
by salesmen, would-be employees, someone in town looking for a quick contact.

  “Thank you, Coombs. If it’s important, he’ll return.”

  “I hope so, Mr. Simon. The poor gentleman had some trouble climbing the stairs to your office. Badly injured in the legs, I believe. I would have told him you weren’t in if I had seen him first.”

  “Yes,” I conclude testily. “Thank you, Coombs. I’ll deal with the Jacob farm.”

  Coombs nods again and shuffles out, closing the door quietly as though it were the gate to a sacred tabernacle. A new gloom sweeps through me at the thought of this “comrade’s” infirmities and his painful attempt to negotiate the open staircase that leads to the upper floor. The nature of his injuries robs any future meeting of the “Hail fellow, well met” bravado I am usually able to muster for these brief encounters. Empty sleeves and crutches transport me to the battlefield, to the smell of burning soil, and fill me with panic.

  The grandfather clock, which is placed halfway along the empty wall opposite my desk, ticks through the silence. Both hands reach towards the ceiling as though yearning for escape. I look towards Lucy, whose sulk is now turned in my direction. I attempt a smile.

  “It’s nearly twelve o’clock, Lucy,” I say as kindly as I can manage. “Why don’t you and I take a drive into the centre and see if we can find mummy at the Beehive Tea Shop?”

  Lucy must have been half-watching the time. She’s already making her way to the door while I speak. As she passes by the desk, she gives me the kind of glance with which I imagine a wild animal might greet a fork of lightning. She opens the office door and scampers away. Before I have reached the uppermost of the steep wooden stairs, her feet have pattered down to the workshop floor. The apron-draped scrapers—nine in all today, although with our planned expansion this room and the others will find personnel swelling to one-and-a-half the present number—don’t look up from the tables as they work diligently with dull knives. Coombs chooses them carefully, favouring a deference of manner and serious turn of mind, and he trains them well. Even so, how could they not notice how my daughter strains from my presence like a reluctant moon choosing the widest possible arc with which to orbit its parent planet? I have seen daughters hug and cling to their fathers, but on the rare occasions Lucy is with me at work, she always skitters ahead or else lags behind.

  Now, as I descend to the warehouse floor, I watch her dancing a circle around some folded hides on a pallet. The image is like a dull blow to the stomach; the hides, sagging and shapeless, make me think of France, of coats half-buried in earth and twisted, legless trousers in the rising smoke. Looking up at my approach, she circles the pallet once more, then skips towards the exit. I follow her into the sunshine and watch her climb into the passenger seat, her folded rag doll bumping against the spare wheel and the horn. At least she likes the car. As the thought passes through me, I realize it comes with a hope: Everything merges in this new world of flesh and speeding steel.

  After the war the boom for leather transferred itself almost without effort from boots and jackets to the motoring craze. The treated hide will always be with us, it seems, to connect us to our animal past. Neither guns, nor helmets, nor roads, nor races, can lever us from the primal comfort it gives. Leather is the go-between, a linking mechanization to the human pulse. Perhaps, in this new order, my daughter’s love for a motorcar can merge into a growing affection for the driver. If she is more comet than moon, she blazes a trail of fire and vapour, and her contours are undefined. Fear or distaste may convert; they may burn away, alter their nature, and through some mysterious chemical change, crystallize into the shining rocks of admiration.

  I crank the engine into motion, climb into the driver’s seat, and put the engine into gear. Gravel crunches beneath the tires, and in a moment I feel the breeze upon my cheek. I turn quickly onto the road, overtaking a farm cart on its way to the cattle market, and steal a glance at Lucy, her gaze roaming the ever-changing scenes.

  The world is spinning and I no longer feel trapped. Lucy, Sarah, myself: these three suddenly open up to forgiveness and change. The past is indeed the past, and the world is littered with souls entering and leaving by the thousandth of a second. Why should my life be defined by a moment?

  CHAPTER 12

  Sarah

  Elsa takes the purse from her lap and places it on the floor. A sign, I hope, she is relaxing. The waitress pours her tea first, and we both watch the steam rise. I catch Elsa’s eye as the waitress tips the pot towards my cup. She gives a shy wriggle of the shoulders, usually an indication she has something to say to me. The sloshing sound is oddly comforting in the silence. The waitress withdraws with a slight nod, and disappears behind the angled wooden beam, one of many in the mock-Tudor interior, to take the order at another table. It’s past twelve and I know that soon Simon will be here with Lucy. I’d like to think he might be a little late, that he might have decided to take her for a treat, a drive in the country perhaps. I can almost feel the father-daughter rapport that ought to be. I can hear the jovial tone of voice Simon might use were he to rib her gently as fathers do, and I can easily imagine myself shushing her, smiling, while she laughs with delight. But these are ghosts of possibilities unfulfilled. A tension lurks between my daughter and husband, some unspoken resentment as mysterious and unexpected as a wart on a butterfly. It ages my daughter unnaturally, and makes my husband—my war hero, Charles’s saviour—seem somehow less than a man. It worries me all the more now that things are about to get so much more complex. A new addition to this family seems like a tumour growing where it shouldn’t; there is no room and it will merely squeeze the barely coexisting organs even further out of place. It makes me almost wish that this morning had brought a different outcome.

  “How was your doctor’s visit, Mrs. Jenson?” asks Elsa in her quiet way as she carefully stirs her cup.

  “Oh,” I reply, my expression no doubt a riot of contradictions, “very satisfactory, Elsa, thank you for asking.”

  A shadow moves over us—a man wheeling a barrow out–side. His expression, caught fleetingly, as well as his obvious limp, suggests he is a veteran. It’s a curious, blank stare I have seen many times, a wan-faced emptiness suggesting he is deliberately taking in nothing around him, not the sunshine that skims past the gables above the narrow street, not the skinny woman in the loose-fitting dress who passes him, nor her flesh-coloured stockings. Like a mole seeking the end of its tunnel, he is just getting through, trying to reach the end of the day.

  I catch Elsa’s stare. She has noticed the man too, and her pale grey eyes have narrowed, as though she is peering unhappily into fold upon fold of memory. Now she looks down into her cup, the hint of a bitter, embarrassed smile passing over her face.

  “We met a veteran yesterday in Christchurch Park, Lucy and I,” she says softly. “He served with your husband.”

  I am silent for a moment.

  “She told me about Mr. Smith,” I reply, taking a sip to mask my discomfort. Lucy told me about the man with wooden legs, but I had no idea until now he had served with Simon. I am afraid of this new information. Nothing good can come from old associations. Simon contracts into a thing of prickles and sudden temper whenever the subject of his old regiment looms. “She’s at the age when disfigurement and handicap are novelties,” I add after a pause. “I hope she wasn’t too curious about it.”

  “He didn’t seem to mind. I think he found Lucy’s honesty refreshing.” Elsa leans towards me over the table, her shoulders hunched. “I wonder how many lies such a man encounters when looking for work, how many times he is told that a position advertised in the window has been filled.”

  My hand moves involuntarily to my chest, fingers shielding the gold and onyx Venetian brooch Simon gave me in a rare moment of impulsiveness during last summer’s trip to Italy—a rare adventure in itself. In truth the idea of Lucy’s Mr. Smith working has taken me aback somewhat. I am suddenly aware, not for the first time, of a cultural divide be
tween Elsa and I, a difference that comes and goes as a line of trees might emerge and disappear through the window of a speeding train.

  When we first met, by appointment in Selfridges, Elsa had been too ill-at-ease to accept my offer of tea. Perching on the end of the chair as though reluctantly following an order to sit upon a bed of live coals, her eyes had darted around the room and she had given short and rather breathless answers to each parcel of encouragement that posed as a question.

  “Mr. Eaves says you have attended some of the lectures he’s organized,” I said quietly.

  “Yes, Mrs. Jenson.”

  “I hope you won’t miss London too much when you come to Suffolk with us.”

  “I think the lectures have stopped anyway.”

  “Mr. Eaves said you taught in a school for a few years before coming to England.”

  “Yes, there was a shortage of teachers.”

  “My family was involved in the Newfoundland fishery, in the shipbuilding side.”

  The most curious thing was happening. The pattern of my speech was becoming as disjointed as hers, the pauses between words longer. As a shaft of light spun from the revolving doors and threw itself between us, I felt as though I was looking not upon another woman, but into a mirror, and at myself. She didn’t look like me. Her hair was rather dark, the bones of her shoulders and arms accentuated even through the loose clothing, yet we were, in that odd way that occasionally happens with strangers, facing each other with no barrier or shield in between.

  And now, in the Beehive, Elsa has pointed out something she knows that I do not. Those in my husband’s situation who have been seriously injured stay at home, or live in an institution with expansive grounds and flower beds where they are cared for by professional nurses. If Elsa’s insight is correct, Mr. Smith must be from the ranks and not an officer. Elsa is my counterpart in loss, except that hers are multiplied in number, and the world she sees is harsher—a place of bread, shelter, and work. Why would it be otherwise for a veteran whose family has little money? Of course he would have to either live by charity or find a job. What a secluded garden Simon, Charles, and I had known in childhood. It was pride in our lessons and the inner feeling of accomplishment or failure that spurred us on, not hunger and homelessness should we fail.