I barely looked at her but registered only that she wore a dark coloured coat and tendrils of her long, dark hair, beaded silver in the mist, splayed out wildly about her shoulders, blown forwards by the wind behind, to cling across her face. One hand hovered up about her forehead, presumably to pull away the obstructive swathes, and her small, thin shoulders crumpled inwards in defence against the onslaught of the weather. And though her general aspect denoted an intrinsic sadness, it did not occur to me that she was there for any other reason than some kind of official business or more possibly, to meet one of the crew who worked the Barneveldt. I knew that for the preservation of wartime secrecy, my own family and those of my companions would not have been informed as to the vessel nor the date of our arrival. They would know only that we were coming home.
I bumbled into her, my shoulder taking hers along with such momentum that she buckled backwards, swaying away so that my arms, which had automatically sprung out to try and steady us both, failed to reach her. Murmuring my apologies, I barely even glanced at her before turning away to hurry on. But she put out her hand to stop me.
‘Wait! I’m sorry. Please. Can you spare me just a minute?’ Turning to one side against the wind that she might gain a greater purchase on my arm, she was immediately disordered by the wild intrusion of her hair which, tangled and unruly, swept again more determinedly across the lower part of her face so that she was forced at once to let me go. I waited as she struggled to disentangle her nose and mouth from its damp, persistent clasp. Pushing it up and aside in obvious frustration, she lifted her head then and put her face directly into the wind so that the volume of her hair flew out behind her. She was much younger than the curvature of her back and shoulders had at first suggested. She turned back to me but no sooner had she done so, than her face was partially enveloped once again.
‘You’re one of the survivors? From the Sithonia?’ Although there was little more than a foot between us, I could barely hear her voice above the wind. The fine, grey dampness in the air had finally decided and turned more definitively to rain.
I leaned in towards her, straining to understand and, with what was unquestionably an effort, she raised her voice again. ‘The Sithonia? You’re a survivor?’
I nodded quickly, closing my eyes and wrapping my arms tightly around my chest. I began to lift my feet alternately, in a vain attempt to keep the blood in my toes, in my ankles and in my knees from freezing altogether. I prayed that she would have the wherewithal to appreciate my impatience to be gone and, taking the inadequacy of my clothing into account, keep her enquiries literally to the minute she had proposed.
‘Joe. Joe Green. Do you know him?’ Again her hand sought my arm and as her fingers reached and clasped my elbow, I heard the sharp incision of his name. My feet stopped moving. The cold, the wind, the grey, depressing rain receded and abruptly ceased. There was nothing else except this woman, removed, alone and undisturbed by the raging clamour of the elements around.
‘Do you know him? Joe Green.’ She held on to me and as she asked again, I felt her pull my arm slightly as if to bring me to.
I could not reply. I just stood there, staring at her hand upon my elbow with the slow burning realisation of who it was that stood before me rising up from beneath my stomach and blasting my body with its sickening truth.
‘Um, I’m sorry. He’s not… I don’t think I should…’ Oh God, what was she doing here? She must know that he is dead. Didn’t Latimer get word home? Why doesn’t she know?
‘Who are you?’ I blurted finally, although there really was no need for her to answer.
‘Maggie. My name is Maggie. I’m sorry. I am his… you know him then?’
‘He didn’t… Joe’s not…’
‘I know. I know that.’ She took her hand suddenly off my sleeve and, grasping the edges of her coat, she wrapped it more vehemently about her body. Again, she pulled her hair back away from her mouth as though its obstruction alone might well explain her inability to form the words that could no longer be avoided. She drew herself up and made an attempt to lick her lips.
‘He is dead. I know.’ She stopped and looked down, arrested momentarily by the stark finality of her admission, an admission that implied a level of acceptance she had not before realised she was capable of acknowledging. The words hung between us and neither of us moved.
‘It’s not that… it’s just that I wanted someone who knows… who knew him.’
Oh God, no. Not here. Not now. I am not strong enough. I cannot do it. It can’t be right. He could not, surely, have expected me to stand before this girl, this girl he’d loved, and tell her now that her heart had been mistaken. It was one thing, in heat and pain and fear, scrabbling backwards from the approaching face of death, to promise a desperate and devoted man that I would do it. It was quite another to stand in the cold, grey light of this cold, grey land, before this total stranger and tell her that the foundations of her hope had been built upon untruth. To expect her to believe that Joe, the Joe whom we both had known, had been unkind. Ungenerous. And unfaithful. And in so saying, to deliberately grind her dreams to dust. She would not believe me. I could not do it.
‘Did you know him? You must have known him!’ Seeing something in my face, her voice, importunate now and urgent, sharpened and she stepped towards me. ‘There must be something you can tell me!’
‘No, I… he was in the lifeboat. He was…’ I could barely get the words out. My teeth, my jaws had become so tightly clenched together that I could not seem to get them moving. ‘What was it that you wanted? What is it that you want to know?’
She turned slightly and inclining her head, her whole body, in the direction of the town, she put out a hand again towards my arm in an effort to guide me into moving forward but still, I could not move.
‘Could you come with me? Could we talk?’ she coaxed, more gently now. ‘There’s a place nearby. A café. I just want to talk… to hear about…’
The sorrow, the empty, aching sorrow that no amount of talking could assuage and which was so evident in her request, made only that she might keep him near, prevented her from finishing. It made me want to weep.
I should go with her and just blurt out the truth. I could just tell her that she had been loved and loved so deeply that Joe, at any cost, would reduce her suffering. I could just tell the truth. I could. I could renege. I could choose to imagine his had been the befuddled wishes of a confused and dying man. Pretend it would not matter because I pitied her, pitied her more keenly than she would ever know.
But in choosing so, I would renounce all the faith that he had placed in me, the very faith that saw me standing here, the faith that undeniably had kept me alive and that had, in part, been responsible for his death. I would betray him and in doing so, betray the fundamental hope for her release to which he had clung, which he had made me swear I would uphold. And he had done it because he had understood how it was that she had loved him. He had known her. I did not. I only knew that at the most crucial moments of his life, of my own, he had put his faith in me. And though it sickened me to the core, I knew that he had meant for me to do it. And I knew why. He had loved her. If he had to die, then so assured of the endurance of her constancy, now ever destined to be unfulfilled, he had wanted to provide her with such an unconditional reprieve that she might go on to live her life with no regret. Live her life unhampered by a hallowed image. To love and be loved by some better man. I knew what he had wanted me to do and I had seen first-hand, time and time again, the self-effacing generosity that had motivated his request.
And yet the thought of such an interview appalled me. I baulked at it. The thought of actually having to say the words and then sit by and watch the blight of their effect, to inflict such striking pain on one whose pain was already so apparent would require a level of detachment I was scarcely capable of imagining.
Regardless of my commitment to Joe’s conviction in her long-term relief, it horrified me. Besides, she would not be
lieve me. She would see it in my face. I could not go with her.
‘No. Look, sorry.’ I pulled away, so that her hand, which had not quite reached me, wavered in the wider space between us, stranded. ‘I don’t think I can help you. There’s nothing I can say to you that’s going to help. I’m sorry.’ I watched her hand drop flat against her side.
It would be better like this. That she should never know. I could not do it. Trembling, broken, sick at heart, I could not face the choice. The truth or all that I held most true? Either way would mean betrayal. It was more than I could bear.
I left her there, standing on the quayside, watching me walk away. Putting my head down, I kept on walking, knowing that she watched me go, knowing that every single step I took away from her denied her knowledge and took me further still away from Joe.
I buried my mouth into the collar of my jacket, seeking comfort in the muggy warmth generated by my breath against it. I tried to bend my mind away, to think of something else. Of what awaited me at home, my mother’s food and her embrace, the glittering relief dancing in my father’s eyes. To consider how, stripped of valuables, belongings and identity, I might logistically begin to make my way there. And that having arrived, how I must make sure that Guillaume got his book. I owed him that much.
I made it to the street and stopped, sagging in against the wall. The back of my head fell heavily against it and, working from side to side, kneaded in. I closed my eyes and, curving my face away from the busy pavement, forced my cheek up against the sharp-grained, gritty edges of the brickwork, seeking external feeling, external pain. And the tears that formed and swelled beneath my eyelids, inexorable and unchecked, broke from their corners, to fall and be immediately lost on the rough-hewn surface, already damp and darkened by the rain.
I do not know how long it was before I became aware of it. The familiarity of it, its calm insistence, snagging on the verges of my consciousness, calling me back. Unable quite to register what it was but slowly comprehending that something in me recognised significance, I looked up, confused, barely understanding but seeking out a source.
The man was old. Small and narrow-shouldered: physically nothing like him. He was tending the newspaper stand on the corner of the street and he had his back to me. But I could hear him. Stooping slightly, he stood with his hands in pockets and, in spite of all the insult in the weather, he was whistling cheerfully, whistling as if he had not one single care in all the world.
Joe.
I had told him twice that I would do it. The only care, the last, I had ever known him have, had been for her. And he had entrusted that to me. What had he not done for me? He had never once lost faith. Every single time he’d had a choice, he had chosen me. It left me with no other.
But by the time I had stumbled back on to the dockside, the quay was already more or less deserted.
CHAPTER 15
THE MEETING
I think, looking back, that I had always known that it was not over. How could it have been over? I had felt, even then, as she had walked away from me all those years ago, that I had done neither one of them the justice they deserved. When it had come to it, I had not had the courage to carry out what Joe had asked of me nor the courage to disregard it. He had sent me to relieve her suffering and I felt, I had always felt, that in falling short of pushing home his cause, I had succeeded only in compounding it. I told myself that I had tried to do only what was loyal, what I had been asked, in the most horrifying of ways, to do, but in more than sixty years, my conscience had never been entirely able to rest easy; my heart had never ceased to struggle with the knowledge that somehow I had failed them both.
And so when her letter arrived, only the second and the last that I would receive from her, I found that the weightless fear, crushing and reductive, which caught at my insides and compressed them while I clutched at breath, was accompanied by something smaller, calmer, something that felt almost like relief. She was calling time and it offered me at least, the opportunity for release.
I had not at first recognised her name but when I turned the letter back over and began to read, I saw Joe’s and realised who she was. The thin blue sheet of paper I held in my hand began to shake and the words, which jumped and blurred before my eyes, renounced all claim to meaning.
Guilt, responsibility and shame that had lain for so many years, dusty and unrecoverable, next to the more horrific memories of the lifeboat, had roused and, having woken, disturbed all the unreconciled emotions around them. Now as one, they surged up and unrestrained, broke loose across my being. The fragile framework of my ordinary existence, the carefully constructed edifice of my calm and reasonable mind, quailed at their approach and crumbled into dust. My hand sought my mouth and I felt again the hot and prickling horror of the loss of all control.
I reached out towards the table and steadying myself, sat down.
Over sixty years since the last time and I had told myself that I would never have to see her again. I had not wanted to. However I had tried to think of it, of our last encounter, it broke me apart: what it must have done to her, how I must have caused her pain. From the warm, safe ledge of hindsight, I could see so much more clearly now how frightened I had been, frightened at a time when I thought that fear could no longer touch me and in my fear, I had behaved more harshly than I ever thought I could. I had been afraid, not only of her but of what I felt I had been duty bound to undertake, and fear, no matter how justified, comes hand in hand with shame. At that time, on the back of all that pain, it had pained me just as much.
And yet still, still, I would not have it undone. I would not even now. For there was Joe. He and I had been taken to the gates of hell and he alone had ensured that I had made it back. Despite the hideous responsibility I knew I bore for Maggie’s suffering, I could not, would not renounce my loyalty to Joe. It lay with him still, on the barely floating carcass of a lifeboat, on the scorched and arid beach where we had buried him. It did not matter whether or not his premise for the preservation of Maggie’s wellbeing had been mistaken or if I had been too cruel in attempting to relay it, for I had been and was ever still, bound by a loyalty I could not forswear because it lay at the foundations of my life and he remained, with all his broad-shouldered strength, a cornerstone of my consciousness. I would have tried to do the same again tomorrow. I would have tried to lie to her. For him. I know that even now.
And yet old age has not, after all, lent me the clarity nor the deeper understanding that I had assumed my vain but constant efforts to unravel the tangled threads of life would automatically bestow: rather her complexities have intensified and her ambiguities only deepened. I have not found that there are any answers. I have lost the surety I once had and have found the world no longer staged in black and white. There are so many blurry shades of grey and Maggie has ever stood, a shadowy figure, within the dusky half-light.
It was not as if I had not wrestled with it. In the dark hours I had fought against the crushing purgatory of the thought that Joe could not possibly have meant it. That his mental capabilities, so ravaged by the sickness that had racked his body, had not been reliable. That shrinking before the blank, cold face of bleak oblivion, he had been hallucinating and had simply snatched at the solace to be had from an illusion, from an impractical ideal that could do nothing but deface his epitaph and undermine the prospect of her peace. And had I not then, in attempting to relay such an impulsive and impromptu message, only granted that the ramblings of his unequal mind dictate a ruinous course? Or had my own misgivings merely been a disingenuous excuse, an explanation that qualified my own reluctance to bear the burden of so pitiless a task? Tormenting and recurring, these thoughts had plagued me, plagued me still. And yet in fleeing them, I had ever taken refuge in the safeguard of my most insistent memory and found again his eyes. The way that he had looked at me. Straining to hold off, for precious seconds longer, the invading darkness of perseverant death, surely they had conveyed more purely than words ever could his abso
lute conviction. In the bright, liberating light of my better days, I knew that he had meant for me to do it.
And yet even the certainty that, though I had faltered at the brink, I had actually achieved Joe’s purpose, has, over the passing of the years, gradually loosed its hold and faded. Perhaps, after all, she did not believe me and as time and unreliable memory have taken me further from the horror of our interview, as I have grown old, I have allowed myself the secret hope that maybe she did not. His love for her had been so purely selfless: he had, quite simply, loved her more than he had cared about his reputation in her eyes, about how she, the one person in the world whose esteem he had most craved, would remember him. I have seen enough of life to know that such unselfish love is rare. It could only be a travesty to have been so loved and by such a person, and yet not have been allowed to know it. And that I should have been the one to have robbed her of that understanding. It was unforgivable.
And yet, despite my guilt, despite my knowledge, I had never once been moved to seek her out. To try to put it right. Dissuaded always by the desire to remain, above all else, loyal to Joe and to repay unswervingly the debt I owed him, I had staked my all on the belief that his effort had succeeded, that Maggie had been released from the shackles of life-lasting grief and had better found fulfilment in some other life. I could not have sought her out. If it did not disturb the peace that Joe had hoped she’d find, then might it not have raised the cry that he had been mistaken? Might I have found that she, embittered by betrayal, had somehow been reduced by his generosity? It was not a possibility I was capable of bearing.
But now. All my lifetime to prepare and yet still, I was unprepared. And if I did not choose to answer her, I would never know what I, what he, had done. His legacy of love, all that which had kept me alive, all that I had sought to live by since, would go with me to my grave. I had more courage than that. Joe had seen to it. I looked down at the letter lying on the table and my eye, scanning quickly down the page, sought out and held Joe’s name. His name. Beneath the smouldering indifference of an omnipotent sun, in the lonely, nullifying blackness of the night and before the burnt out, wasted hearts of broken men, it had been etched upon my soul. I recognised its call. He had asked me to make sure. It was not finished.
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