White Feathers

by Susan Lanigan

  Too late. Quick as a flash he saw the direction of her glance and immediately jumped to his feet, tamping his cigarette in the huge carved onyx ashtray on the mantelpiece. Then he sat down again, clasped his hands together and hid them between his knees. Eva thought the kindest thing she could do was pretend not to have seen.

  ‘This place,’ he said, wincing.

  Eva laughed nervously. ‘I don’t know, it seems like a lovely building.’

  ‘It’s a lunatic asylum, and you know it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but you seem all right.’

  ‘I’m very far from it,’ he said shortly.

  Tea arrived, quicker than expected, served in an ornate bronze teapot on a tray.

  ‘They ran out of gold at this point,’ Christopher commented acidly as he poured the tea, which was served without milk. Unlike Eva, he added no sugar, and sipped infrequently. After a moment or two, during which they sat drinking tea and avoiding each other’s eyes, both of them started speaking at the same time.

  ‘You first,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, no, you should speak, please.’

  Gripping the cup with both hands to steady herself, she hoped he couldn’t see how nervous she was.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘where should I start?’ The words, so innocent, hung in the air. It was obvious he realised this himself, as he said nothing more. Where should he start, indeed?

  ‘Wherever first comes to mind, I suppose,’ Eva answered, with a self-conscious laugh. Christopher became agitated at this, picking at what was left of his cuticles. Eva tried desperately not to wince or intervene.

  ‘It’s been … quite brutal. I did things on the front line that were necessary, but, I fear, unforgivable.’

  The words came out before Eva could stop herself. ‘I’m not one to talk to about forgiveness.’

  His entire demeanour changed, stiffened, his eyes darkening until they were small and almost black as obsidian. Eva’s hand flew to her mouth.

  He moved further down the couch, almost to the end, and fixed on her an accusing glare. Eva laced and unlaced her fingers, wanted to tell him how sorry she was. But Lucia’s earlier warning rang in her head like a gong. To mention it now would be disastrous. It did not help that she felt more love for him than ever, seeing him opposite her, hurt, like an albatross with a broken wing. She wanted to take him in her arms and never let him go. But, as for Christopher … she had no idea if he felt any sort of love for her at all.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said abruptly, rising from the couch.

  29

  To her surprise, he took her arm as they went outside, even though it was only to interlock his elbow with hers, a courtesy rather than a romantic gesture. He walked quickly; she stumbled to keep up before getting used to his pace.

  ‘Still clumsy,’ he remarked, not looking at her. ‘Of course, there’s not so much call for dancing these days.’

  Eva said nothing, not wanting to shatter any détente. They walked for a while through grass still wet with rain, the traces of it dampening his trouser legs and soaking her hemline. On he walked, his profile set, the slant of the wind only making it seem sharper, as if it had shaped his cheeks. He had always been a thin man, but he had lost weight since Eva had last seen him.

  She was about to make some anodyne enquiry after his health, but then Christopher started speaking. ‘You said I could speak first, so I should, I suppose. I haven’t been here all that long. Just since July the … 6th, I think? The trouble started on the 1st. Things got a bit busy, as I think you are probably aware. We were just getting off a supply train and preparing our stuff when they started hurling bombs at us with all their might, all raining down on us like billy-o. There were a few of us there; I was with Purcell, a private who was assisting me. I’d recently got my promotion, such as it was, and he didn’t take kindly to it, believe me. Still, I shouldn’t have laughed about the letters to his dog. That was wrong of me.’

  ‘His dog?’ Eva struggled to keep up with the conversation, and with him.

  ‘He left the damned letter on the table. It was while we were training back in England. That was last year. God, the training was interminable; we were all bored out of our minds, so there was bound to be an upset about something petty. Anyway, I spotted the letter on the table in our quarters, and I thought it must be addressed to his wife. It said “Dear Emma” or somesuch, and I would have ignored it, but then it said she was a “heartless little dog”. I wondered to myself if he usually addressed his wife in that manner, but on closer inspection it became clear he actually was referring to the dog. I won’t repeat the rest of what I read. I don’t want to embarrass the poor man’s memory. I should never have been reading it in the first place. Anyway, when he came back, I teased him about it – cruel of me, I suppose, but I hardly cared at the time. Not very funny, though at the time I found it hilarious.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’ Eva said, starting to laugh.

  ‘I was feeling rather bitter.’

  Her laughter died as fast as it had started.

  ‘Anyway, he never quite forgave me for that, but we muddled on. We were friends, after a fashion. It was always him and me, that was the nub of it. That’s how they hook you in. Drill into you how important it is not to let your comrades down. I tried to stay aloof, but eventually it worked, even for me. I too am a “piece of the continent”, as Donne would have it. So there we were, just off the train with orders to report to the clearing station when they began shelling us. Oh, God, Eva, it was a mess.’ His voice faltered, then he continued: ‘I saw people and horses running, but they got caught, and all of a sudden they transformed into bits of burning flesh, man and horse all mixed, floating down to the ground, little flames licking around each bit. I turned around to Purcell, and I remember him saying, face white as a sheet, “Gosh, getting a bit hairy now, Fritz is giving us a good pounding,” and I responded – I don’t know, “you don’t say,” or somesuch, not really looking at him, scanning the terrain to see when the next attack was coming. But he didn’t say anything in response. So I turned around, and …’ – he started to shake – ‘it must have happened without a sound, because I didn’t hear a thing. Where Purcell had been a few seconds before were tiny fragments of flesh and blood on the ground. Just like that. Not even an eye.’

  Christopher released Eva’s elbow and brushed his hand briefly across his eye and cheek. Eva opened her bag to fetch a handkerchief, but he frowned and shook his head. ‘No. Not that. I can’t allow myself. If I let one crack perpetuate, the whole glass will shatter into a thousand pieces.’

  Eva waited for him to continue without saying anything. He glanced at her briefly. ‘You were always a good listener. I’d forgotten that.’ Then he resumed: ‘You never get used to it, you know. You pretend you do. You suppress whatever horrors you feel, but it’s only ever an act of suppression. Each time it happens, it’s like going to a bank and taking out more money on credit, knowing you have no collateral and that you’ll have to pay it back some day, if you ever make it back to normal life. Or you will overdraw, and once you’re overdrawn, why, you’re done for. Account closed. The end. And now the bailiffs are coming knocking.’

  ‘I’m not sure that normal life exists any more.’

  ‘Perhaps, but really, Eva, is now the time for logical splitting?’ he said irritably, sounding somewhat more like his old self. ‘Anyway, to get to the end of my miserable tale, I took a ride on an ambulance to the clearing station, with some sort of idea of reporting what had happened. When I got there and tried to tell them, I don’t know if what came out was English, but they took one look at me and sent me to the company doctor, who I imagine was busy enough with real problems that day. I can’t remember a damned thing he said either. Apparently I talked and talked and he couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Then something strange happened in my mind – I can only half-describe it: there was this chattering of voices, like children in a playground, only disembodied and far away, as if I were
hearing them through some sort of drainpipe. Then everything was … dark with excessive bright? Do you remember that passage?’

  ‘Yes, you made me learn it: “through a cloud / Drawn round about thee like a radiant Shrine / Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear”.’

  ‘Precisely. Except I wasn’t wearing skirts. That would have looked strange.’ Christopher chuckled softly. ‘Then … I fainted. Blacked out right there in the middle of the room. They put me into that category, what do you call it? You’re in the field hospital, you know this stuff.’

  ‘NYDN?’ The letters tripped off her tongue, as pat as any poem he might have made her learn.

  ‘Aha, yes! Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous. That’s it. Highly unflattering description, sounds like a hysterical spinster on a rest cure. But, you know, long before the Purcell incident I’d been on the edge, and it was the noise of those shells that caused it. Silence, then noise, then silence – and it takes a few minutes each time to register that it isn’t you. Then to realise that it’s someone else. And what it means. Then you see them as’ – he waved his hands about – ‘little bits of things.’

  Eva did not say how often she feared it had been him.

  ‘Then they brought me here. There’s a psychiatrist I speak to most days. He tells me I’m making good progress, but I fear I’m fooling him. I fear I’m fooling myself sometimes. If everyone thinks I’m all right, I must be.’

  ‘No,’ Eva said softly, ‘I can see’ … your hands … ‘you have a slight twitch.’

  ‘Yes, that’s one of the categories.’ He counted on his fingers: ‘There’s twitchers, pissers, jumpers, mutterers and those poor chaps who soil themselves in terror. It’s hard to be sanguine when you’re surrounded by such wrecks of human beings and knowing you’re a bit of a wreck yourself. A lot of men at the front were scared out of their skins, not of death but of the fear of death, if that makes any sense.’

  Ar eagla na heagla. For fear of the fear. That was a phrase Eva had heard from time to time in Ireland. ‘I had a suicide on my ward,’ she said. She told him about the Munster Fusilier.

  Christopher nodded in recognition. ‘There were a few like that. More than the brass at HQ would ever like to admit. Mind you, I can’t help thinking that everyone who obeyed orders was just as suicidal as your patient. I was never sure what I felt about the men who were shot for cowardice. Pity, mostly, I think. Many of them were just lads, not very well educated and totally naive about what war would actually be like. Poor bastards. Pardon my language.’

  Eva had sucked in her breath at the mention of the executions. She had mentioned Cronin in a letter to Christopher. Would the name ring any bells? He had been at Loos – he might know all about it. To get him off that particular subject, she mentioned her encounter with Brigadier McCrum. Christopher’s response was immediate. ‘He’s a bully. I knew people like him at school. They never really change, and they always make it to the top without getting their hands dirty.’

  The path went close to the cliff, and Christopher moved to its seaward edge and hooked his elbow through Eva’s once more, protectively. She allowed herself to be drawn closer to him – wished for it in fact. Then he stopped, and she stopped with him. Directly in their path lay the body of a seagull. It must have been dead for several days at least, for its body was torn open and insects were eating at it, their black backs shining in the September sun, while the head – eyes and skull long eaten out – was separated from the body by quite some distance. Eva was about to ask Christopher what he thought might have happened to the bird when she noticed that his eyes were ranging over the carcass. And then she saw what he must have seen immediately.

  The gull’s wings were spread open and surrounded by scattered feathers, some grey, but mostly white. Several floated along the footpath in the breeze. Christopher glanced at Eva briefly, then back down at the feathers. ‘Lots of them,’ he commented, ‘lots and lots of them.’

  His tone was casual, but Eva felt something plummet inside her and settle at the base of her belly, squat and hard. Meanwhile, he released her, deftly stepped around the dead bird and strode ahead at such a pace that she was hard pressed to catch up with him.

  She felt an urge to tell him everything: about Joseph, yes, and how he had brutalised her so badly that she encouraged him to go to war so he would leave her alone; about the desperate moments in Mama Leela’s when she had called out Christopher’s name and received no response; about everything that had happened to her since the day he had walked down the street and out of her life. No, call it what it was: since the day she had fastened that feather on him and sent him away. Lots and lots of them. She hated this tightrope of politeness but had no idea what would happen if she jumped off.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said when she caught up with him, rather short of breath. He gave her a sour look and the lightest of shrugs. To her surprise, she felt a tug of impatience not unlike the one she had felt so often with Cronin. For God’s sake, make an effort. She tried to shake it off, but Christopher noticed it. ‘That was an odd look you had just there.’

  ‘I was thinking of my husband.’ The minute they were out, Eva wished the words back.

  ‘Oh.’ If he had been cold before he was now positively glacial. They made their way down the avenue to the centre of East Cowes in silence. They passed an ice-cream shop, and Eva gathered the courage to ask if he would like an ice; he murmured an unenthusiastic assent. She bought two, and, disregarding good manners, they ate them on the path as they walked, an almost tasteless dilution of water and aniseed. Christopher continued to keep a good two feet away from her, and she did not wish to urge him closer. The sun shone on the beach, a hard, bright light, but the bathing huts were almost empty, the drinks kiosks boarded up.

  Later, in a café, they sat clutching cups of cooling tea. Christopher delivered a strange monologue, his voice unnaturally high-pitched, his entire body like a stringed instrument where the plucked notes were all sharp, and the strings in danger of breaking at any time. He spoke outwards, as if she were not there. Eva could not bear to look him in the eye, which was just as well, since he seemed once more bent on avoiding hers.

  In the middle of his monologue, which was about this and that, again declaring Isaac Rosenberg the new poetry champion, damning Keats and Wordsworth and Hardy in increasingly hysterical tones, she shyly slipped the Rupert Brooke volume out of her bag and across the table. Anything to make him stop. ‘I told you I kept it.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said impatiently, waving it away and continuing to talk. She put it back in her bag.

  His gestures were beginning to attract the attention of the other customers. Eva saw them looking and shaking their heads. She wanted to shout at them: ‘He’s not like those others! He’s all right!’ but she knew in her heart that it wasn’t true. He was not all right.

  After twenty more excruciating minutes, Christopher finally looked at her. It was not a friendly look. ‘Let’s get out of here, for God’s sake.’

  Eva was only too happy to comply.

  They walked back up the hill and out into open terrain. The further they got from the crowds, the more Christopher relaxed, reverting to his usual slouch rather than the wired, puppet-like demeanour he had adopted in the crowded café. But as she drew level with him, Eva saw a bead of sweat run down the side of his neck. It had been wrong of her to judge. This outing had been a real effort for him.

  He wiped his forehead with his hand. ‘That went badly, didn’t it? I don’t know how to behave around normal people any more.’

  ‘You were fine.’

  ‘I was terrible.’ He put his hands in his pockets. Eva said nothing; the only thing she could truthfully do was agree, and that seemed cruel.

  ‘Your husband,’ he said, abruptly changing the subject. ‘You must miss him. To have your mind on him while walking with someone else.’

  She was surprised at the injured tone in his voice. Had he not seen her face? Why had she mentioned Joseph? ‘No.
Well, I mean … we were … No, I don’t miss him. I wasn’t thinking about him for that reason.’

  ‘Why were you, then?’

  ‘You had mentioned some people who were shot for cowardice.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He was one of them. They shot him when he failed to go over the top at Loos.’

  Christopher gave a long, low whistle. ‘Ye gods. But he was Irish, wasn’t he? Why on earth was he fool enough to enlist?’ She watched the thought cross his mind, then he looked at her with horror. ‘You didn’t make him?’

  ‘No!’ Eva shouted, ‘I didn’t. It’s different there anyway. They see the feather as an English custom and don’t care for it.’ It was the first time either of them had mentioned the incident directly.

  ‘But it was after marrying you that he signed up, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Eva said, reddening.

  Christopher’s gaze was that of a judge, and she strongly suspected he was finding her guilty as charged. ‘I was angry,’ she added. ‘I hated him, he—’

  ‘Don’t start that,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Blaming this man for the mess you’ve made of your life. And don’t waste my time with tears either. Or a sob story about your mother. I’m not going to fall for that a second time. You hated him, is that right? So why did you marry him?’