Hero

by Paul Butler

  Once I heard about his decoration, I didn’t think too much about Lieutenant Jenson. The memory was sacred to me, and there was an ironic justice in it all. In my mind Jenson had indeed achieved some kind of immortality, and he looked down upon us all from the clouds. Watching him through a trickle of passengers, white-faced, unhappy behind the steering wheel, with a girl who looked uncannily like Lieutenant Baxter, tore at the seams of my reality.

  Janet soon told me all I needed to know. She has a network of spies spread all around the county and Isabelle, the Jensons’ housekeeper, is a distant acquaintance of hers. Careful not to raise suspicions regarding the nature of my curiosity, I got her to feed me information, and pieced together how Mr. Jenson had married the sister of the man he slew.

  Every time I closed my eyes over the days and nights that followed, I saw those two faces, father and daughter behind the wheel. The word announced itself each time I beheld the double blur of their features, a heavy two-syllable word like a lead bell falling from a tower: penance. His daughter is his sackcloth. The profound, static misery of his expression was explained.

  Then, days later and quite by accident, I met Lucy in the park. Her governess had gone to the hut to buy her an ice cream, and the child had taken the opportunity to scrape up fistfuls of gravel and throw these missiles at passing ducks. I shouted at her to stop. She turned, fragments of stone falling from her hand. She stared at me for a long time. When she approached it was with a curious sense of respect, even appreciation, for being scolded.

  What I saw in her questions, in the way she reacted when her father was mentioned, in the way she tried to trip up walkers with my crutch, was a kind of woundedness I had never encountered before. So this is the next generation, I thought. Here is what comes when a man kills his friend then marries his friend’s sister to punish himself. She made me ache for a lost chance of my own; I had never even tried to find a wife. And she made me realize that the act I had witnessed and experienced as a triumph was in fact a mountain, impassable and vast, for the man who had erred. It must have been straining within him like an oversized parasite, threatening to break him in pieces. Here was my chance, I thought. After years of wincing every time I heard the words glory and war in the same sentence, after nights of helpless fury, of the nagging and relentless pain in my non-existent legs—ghosts that would never let me forget—here was an opportunity to absolve a man in torment and rescue a child from certain misery.

  The breeze now curls around me, tugging at my trousers, exposing the stilts of my legs. One of the bricklayers overturns his mug and lets the fluid drip into the earth. The distant boom and bash of drum and cymbal tumble on the wind, followed by competing brasses. The dubious music fades as the breeze changes direction then comes on again with increased energy. I remember now the new bandstand in Christchurch Park and the men in overalls giving the paintwork its final touches. I wonder whether Janet was right, after all. A looming anniversary is trouble indeed. My plan now seems both foolish and presumptuous, and I can barely credit my blindness.

  He thinks me a blackmailer. How could he think otherwise, emerging as I did, limping and scraping, from his deep-buried past? I always had the face of a fox, designed, my teachers once told me, to be the object of suspicion. Now my body allies me even more decisively with seditious forces. I create unease wherever I go.

  I think of my letter, that crass love song to tenderness and humanity. Would it even have made any difference if he had read and understood? If he is offended by attempted blackmail, would he not be doubly offended by pity? It’s the knowledge I possess that drove him to fury, not the uses to which I might put it. How could I fail to see that?

  When I am at large in the world, it seems, I am a walking catastrophe, a malformed stick-insect that offends every eye. Only in my proper sphere do I have a purpose. My true habitat is a subterranean place of lights and heavy equipment, an alternative to life where object and movement exist in two dimensions rather than three, where hands do not grab my collar and project me down staircases, and where I have the sense to turn feelings into scenery, not into words.

  The breeze swells with a sudden pulse of military fervour— crash, crash, blow. I don’t recognize the tune but I can inhale the jingoism; it fills me with the urge to curtail this holiday and return to the safety of work. Only the anticipation of Janet’s disappointment, tugging softly at my sleeve, gives me the slightest pause. Everything else about this town in sun–shine seems alien and repellent. Strike up the band and blow yourselves to kingdom come once more. I won’t stand in your way.

  I feel a smile slinking into my face. I realize that I don’t quite mean it, that I remain in hope that some time, when the chafed flesh heals, I might crawl back into the daylight and explain, with patience and discretion, to ears that may wish to hear, that heroism is not what we believe it to be, that flesh and blood have their own standards and these do not conform to steel and fire, to nations and generals.

  My eyes lose themselves in the mossy green of the river, in the rapid small spirals close to the near bank and in the much slower downstream lurch of the mid-channel. Movement, all movement, suddenly seems too slow to be endured: rivers snailing towards the sea, cliffs eroding by tenths of an inch, nerve endings dulling with infinitesimal gradualness, wounds closing at leisure, blind to the suffering of their hosts. At Twickenham, a group of us all think the same way about the war. Up until this moment a part of me had conned myself that the whole population of England, and beyond, had been steadily moving with us along the same route. But distant cymbals crash, the drum booms, and I realize that all this time, apart from our small, huddled group, and some others like us, there has been no movement at all.

  A sudden eddy on the rim of the water draws my attention to an object, soft and pliant on the foamy wavelets that hiss against the sand. A clump of soaking orange wool—a rudimentary wig—tops a round head. I recognize the rag doll, and allow the chill, which, despite the warmth of the day, runs through me suddenly. Nothing you can do, I tell myself. It’s time to go home.

  CHAPTER 33

  Sarah

  They are the first people I see when I come around the corner from the main station building and onto the platform. Lucy reclines within Elsa’s embrace, while Elsa, in turn, leans back against the red brick wall facing the train. Her hands rhythmically stroke my daughter’s shoulders. The one a miniature of the other. Anyone would assume they were mother and daughter.

  When I catch Elsa’s eye she doesn’t exactly look away. Her gaze in fact meets my own, but her face tilts, looking askance. It is as though she was hoping not to be seen. I swoop upon Lucy, feeling like a wounded gull unsure of my aim. Elsa seems to shrink against the wall, an unusually elegant gargoyle caught in the act of living. Her hands move from Lucy’s shoulders. Mine take their place. Lucy gazes up at me blankly.

  “I’ve been looking for you.” These are the words that come from me, not in the sob I was expecting to hear, but in a voice perfectly calm and composed. I glance up towards Elsa. “I’ve been looking. I didn’t know where you would be.”

  Elsa’s face is rather pale. Her silence, her look, her refugee-like stance backed onto the wall, the way she has just removed her hands from my daughter’s shoulders dispel any lingering doubt: Elsa was intending to take Lucy from me.

  The roots of this fear have been growing for the last half-hour, muscling their way into my chest, crowding my breathless mouth with stems and leaves. But the seed, I realize, sprouted earlier, when I witnessed Elsa’s strange composure in the tannery, when I saw her lead Lucy silently around my husband and down the staircase, the two of them gliding like pre-dawn spectres, their movements unsullied by sound.

  My hands now squeeze Lucy’s shoulders hard and plunge her limp body into my breast. Her small chin presses into my shoulder blade, and her hair is wound around my knuckles. She gasps a little but doesn’t pull away. I steal another look over her shoulder, just to be sure, just to be certain I have not acc
used Elsa unjustly in my mind, but her face quite openly admits it, her eyes skimming in regret around Lucy’s hair, then meeting my own in a kind of abject resignation. She straightens quite unexpectedly, eyes widening in alarm. She is looking beyond me, towards someone approaching.

  The air changes. I am breathing something fiery yet stale, a horribly familiar stench. I turn, Lucy still clutched in my arms, my knee grazing the concrete.

  It’s Simon, his eyes a version of how they were in the tannery, wild and red-rimmed—the eyes of a deranged Saturn about to devour his children. I prepare for the blow upon my face and even sink my hands deeper into Lucy’s hair as though for protection. But nothing happens save for the waiting breath of our train and the faraway beat of a military drum. Simon’s lips are trembling. His eyelids twitch. Within these movements is a sense of falling, a suggestion of imminent collapse. It is this that sets my spine tingling with an unlikely hope, and returns the nagging truism to my mind. No, I think, this is the darkest hour, not Simon’s nightmare, not his desertion last night. This is the point of thickest, blackest pessimism. My husband has assaulted a cripple. A trusted employee has tried to abscond with my daughter. And now my drunk and shaking spouse stands over my daughter and me. Only the dullest of imaginations would have him thrash us in public. Only melodrama would have a scene play out this way. Taste, if nothing else, dictates some form of departure, some lightening of tone. Dawn has to break; it is a law of nature.

  His hand moves towards us, an open hand, I note, though it still makes me scramble backward a half step, jiggling Lucy along the way. His lips move into an awkward, desperate smile; his eyes soften. The expression is new to me, one I have never seen during our marriage, during any point of our courtship, either after or before the outbreak of war. I could almost believe the soul of another has stepped into his skin.

  “Everything’s all right,” he says. His voice is raspy but delicate, a crocodile attempting a pirouette. “Let’s all go home.”

  I watch him for a moment and realize he is in earnest, that he has reached the rim and has backed away from some precipice glimpsed on the other side. Suddenly I’m sorry for scrambling from him, especially in the open, in the dazzling light, where porters and passengers might peer and wonder. He’s had his fill of humiliation.

  Trembling slightly, I rise to my feet, Lucy’s arms around my neck, and look at him as though nothing is wrong.

  “Yes, let’s go home.”

  I glance at Elsa. Whether I meant it as a warning shot or an invitation, I’m not sure. It’s the latter message that gets conveyed and she comes closer into the group. I’ve no wish to argue either with her or myself. Conflict has strangled all our lives. I’m grateful for the blessed lull. The thinnest shard of desperation, it seems, has pierced the dome of night, spilling a long-imprisoned dawn. Is this not the essence of prayer, an impossible hope, magnified and sharpened by extreme misery? If so, then mine has been answered for the moment, and in words never before spoken by my husband: everything’s all right. It’s enough, this small miracle. I have glimpsed something.

  I board, Lucy in arms, ahead of my husband and Elsa. The first chuff sounds and steam billows around us as Simon closes the door. I think to ask my husband about the car, but stop myself, remembering the last drunken ride to Dunwich, knowing how easily words can dispel a temporary calm. Settling into our compartment, hearing the brush of clothing upon seat fabric, the pat of warm leather as Simon checks his wallet for cash, I feel as though we are a troupe of stage actors, playing at cozy familiarity. I feel the heat of my husband’s forearm against mine. It remains where it is, warmth gathering slowly beneath my skin. A glance reveals to me that he is looking down at his feet, awake, breathing evenly, his eyes bloodshot but calm.

  Lucy lifts her head from my shoulder and turns towards the window, scanning the bright platform and the drifting steam. She gives a small sigh, neither happy nor sad. Elsa sits meditatively, her hands upon her lap. Her neck moves easily like a newly oiled spring as the train jerks into motion.

  The change in my husband’s mood is a mystery, requiring, for once, no coaxing, no strategy from me. It seemed to fall like the first drop of rain after seven years’ drought, and in phrases entirely new to our marriage. Everything’s all right, he said for the first time in seven years or more. Let’s all go home. The promise it holds seems impossibly delicate, like a palace of ice-crystal in the blistering heat of the desert. I imagine the whole of today and tomorrow lived in this mood of quietness.

  The train chuffs harder, gaining momentum, and the rails, like living vertebrae, send dull rumbles and sharp clatters through the seats. The sun smears the window with great yellow dollops, turning our heads, battering our eyelids. Everything that was dead is suddenly alive. Within me some deep, withered thing, a cluster of grey leaves, unrecognizable in their dry and curled-up state, begins to sense the faint pulse of moisture. I wonder whether it could be possible for us, after all, whether I dare steel myself for the faint hope of a normal life.

  CHAPTER 34

  Simon

  Despite the jogging motion of the train and the rattle and clang of the rails, the image in my mind remains constant: a letter reduced to a nest of a hundred scraps, each with a loop, curl, or line of faint blue ink.

  Too drained to take stock of today, the fresh volley of wild horrors wilfully committed, I focus instead on the letter fragments, some puckered and twisted, others merely lying at rest like a score of miniature white flags. The missive was read once—very quickly—then destroyed in a frenzy. While my shaking hands tore and twisted under the ridge of the bar, the knowledge seeped slowly through my alcohol-dulled brain that the words conspired to give a message very different, opposite even, from the one I had been expecting.

  Now the scraps are stuffed deep into the garbage pail outside the Station Hotel, but the words, most of them, burn upon my thoughts like fresh tattoos. Once understood, the sentiments hauled me into sobriety. I still feel cool reality trickling down my face.

  Smith’s blade found its target yet again. Tiptoeing upon a carpet of felt, the fox eased himself into the barn, and his sharp teeth glided through my unprotected flesh, separating me from the comfortable certainty of guilt and despair, leaving new and unexpected wounds, wounds just as painful in their way, but not enclosed and festering like those to which I had become accustomed. The emotion overcoming me in the Station Hotel was alarmingly fresh. Once more I stood on the battlefield, taking the weight of a man who had emerged through the drifting smoke. Again I twisted my bayonet and pulled back sharply. I heard Charles’s gasp, felt a hand grope my shoulder, and squeeze the joint till it pained. But this time something was different. The quality of my murmured apology, the intonation in Charles’s final words, “I thought you were hurt,” was vivid even to the very touch of his breath upon my face. The experience in its essentials, the facts and the words, had never been forgotten. But they had become hazy and grey like the outline of a shipwreck viewed from above. Suddenly the bizarre and accidental nature of the event was upon me in all its hues and textures. In the contorted face of my brother-in-law, something was mingled with his desperate pain. Dare I call it understanding? Dare I call it forgiveness?

  Smith would dare, of course. But he is merely a pacifist, the least honourable in the eyes of those who might condemn me. They are legion. He is one. And I have always counted myself as one of their number. So who is Smith to absolve me? The question has been throbbing in my brain since the letter’s contents were absorbed. It peaks with each sharp rattle of the tracks, and eases off as the seat beneath me becomes calm. Normally Smith’s opinion wouldn’t matter too much, of course. But, in this case, he and I are the only witnesses, and my own judgment is clearly shot. I’ve heard that philosophers believe a thing becomes real only when looked upon and observed. I have felt this way often. By this reckoning at least, Smith, the only reliable witness, is the only one to count. His exclusivity transforms him from the negligible to the infinite.


  It is sane to recoil from gunfire, he said, human to rebel. Tenderness and horror are the only sane reactions, conformity the only madness. The words rendered me weightless, especially as they matched so precisely a pattern that hovered in my own mind when I was in the trenches, an unmoving cloud formation, never analyzed or acknowledged, never committed to paper, and buried deep after July 1, 1916, never to be unearthed until now.

  The shackles of guilt are gone, but the sensation is in no way painless. I feel the rumble of oncoming change. The uncertainty of it all is terrifying. For seven years, guilt has been the gravity that ties me to the earth. It’s been my excuse and my comfort too. What now?

  Lucy, half-nestling, half-restless upon her mother’s knee, points to something in the passing trees, and claims Sarah’s attention. My wife softly coos encouragement—says something about a deer perhaps—but I don’t catch the words, and in truth I’m not listening, as usual. This habitual indifference may have to change, I realize, in the near future. Lucy is the key. She is the child of my murky tragedy. Smith’s letter has inflated my soul, and I’m now straining at the seams, ten times my normal size. Air circulates in chambers long sagging. Some of this forgotten space relates to Sarah, some to Charles, and some to Lucy. They have all been sharing the same dank cells, the same collapsed and wheezing ventricle of my plodding, sickening heart.