The Grass Memorial

by Sarah Harrison

  I am sorry, dear Rachal, to tell you these things, and indeed I may never send this letter at all, but I believe it was our sense of our own uselessness and helplessness that made these terrible sights so hard to bear. And because we had only the day before experienced something of the effects of roundshot, we could scarcely begin to imagine the plight of still more seriously injured soldiers who lay where they fell, unable to move. We understood that the order had been given that on no account was a man’s comrade to pause to lend comfort or assistance, this was the task of the hospital orderlies who followed after. It therefore followed that there must be still more horrible suffering which we were spared the sight of.

  And here is a strange thing – one of the TGs on our side, the man whose pony was so over-excited earlier – told us that he had been forward to the point where he had been able to view Telegraph Hill through his spyglass and had been able to make out a kind of miniature improvised grandstand in which sat quite a crowd of smart people, ladies included, with picnics and parasols and champagne and opera glasses, invited we suppose to watch the presumed rout of the enemies of Russia – ourselves. It seems to me strange and almost unbelievable that people should regard as entertainment an activity in which occurs the kind of hurt and destruction which we have witnessed – from nearly as detached a viewpoint – today. I have struck no blow, nor been struck, nor even approached the thick of this day’s fighting, and yet I am more depressed and exhausted than I can ever remember. And this after a victory!

  For it has been a victory, and a famous one, did I tell you that? In spite of what seemed like the unassailable position of our enemy (and in this strange game it’s odd that the enemy becomes ‘ours’ as if we had some proprietary interest in him) our army carried the day. It must be allowed that were it not for the heroic French and their wild and courageous zouaves who scaled the cliffs to the west we should not have been able to take the redoubts, but take them we did, at a terrible cost (though not as great as that exacted from the Russians). Our commanders were at all times courageous. Lord Raglan in particular. The staff officers are fine and conspicuous in their plumed hats and smart uniforms, but he cuts anything but a warlike figure in his blue frock coat, and nearly always proceeding at a dignified pace and speaking with a low voice. If he is cautious we know that it is because, although stiff in manner, he cares for and respects the men in his command.

  And what men, Rachel! Not only brave as lions but honourable also. For when the smoke cleared and we saw the side of the hill it was littered with more Russians than British, but our fellows went among them with their water bottles, giving what comfort they could without favour. It is a dreadful irony that war and battle should have the effect of making men savages one minute and angels the next. But it is not something that I shall ever forget.

  Our frustration today is a two-edged sword. For can any man honestly put his hand upon his heart and say that he wishes to stare death in the face? I wonder.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet . . .

  . . . As though they perfectly knew

  The old lost road through the woods –

  But there is no road through the woods’

  —Kipling, ‘The way Through the Woods’

  Stella 1996

  Stella arrived at the Elmhurst composed. She had after all done this before. Boldly, she presented herself as an old hand: they politely ignored her. While she knew they were only doing their job she found this misplaced discretion excruciating – like being delicately brushed by the nettle that she wanted to grasp.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, in response to the greeting of the slender Asian beauty behind the reception desk. ‘I do hope you’ve given me a room on the garden side this time?’

  The receptionist smiled a faint, sweet smile: she was not to be drawn. She wore a snow-white belted dress, too chic to be called a uniform; minute diamond earrings like grains of sugar.

  ‘Later on, Miss Carlyle,’ she enquired, looking up at Stella with Parker poised, ‘would you like us to call you a taxi? Or have you arranged a lift?’

  ‘I’ll look after myself thank you.’

  ‘Good . . . fine. Well now, let me show you your room and then you can make yourself comfortable.’ She came out from behind the desk. ‘May I take your bag?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘This way.’ She led the way to the lift, trailing a wake of some fresh, sophisticated scent. Her perfect matte skin and slender figure seemed untouched by the messy business of life, let alone the rude hand of man. Which was why, thought Stella bitterly, she was employed here. But if such an appearance was intended to be soothing, it did not soothe her. Beside this paragon Stella felt grubby and spoiled.

  They stood in the lift gazing slightly upwards as one did for some reason in lifts. The receptionist caught her eye and smiled again.

  ‘It’s chilly out there today.’

  Not as chilly as in here, thought Stella. ‘I didn’t notice.’

  ‘It’s the awful greyness,’ the girl went on. ‘I think I must be one of these light-sensitive people you read about, it completely alters my mood . . . Here we are.’

  They got out on the second floor and the receptionist walked ahead of her, with the merest susurration of elegant underpinnings, down a corridor carpeted in a pale ash green, the colour of new life. At intervals on the walls were hung unthreatening modem paintings in restful colours.

  ‘This is you.’ The receptionist pushed open a door and stood back for Stella to enter first. ‘Bathroom, television, telephone . . . No tea tray or mini-bar, I’m afraid, for obvious reasons, but later on you can let us know what you’d like.’

  Later on. When one life had been terminated and another, currently on hold, continued.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Do make yourself comfortable. If you wouldn’t mind getting into your nightdress.’

  ‘I know the form.’

  Not a flicker. ‘Take your time. And when you’re ready, if you’d like to push the button someone will come and run through a few dull but necessary questions.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So.’ The receptionist withdrew to the doorway with another whisper of silk, a breath of fragrance. ‘If there’s nothing else you’d like to know, I’ll leave you in peace.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Stella hadn’t meant this to sound rude, but there was no reaction, and the door closed soundlessly.

  If there was nothing else she’d like to know . . . Only everything: the answer to it all. She dropped her bag on the floor and went to the window. As it happened they had given her a garden view: a reward, she surmised bitterly, for loyal patronage down the years. For those false starts, those secret, stifled endings. Those dead babies.

  There was a trim flowering plant on the windowsill: a carefully considered message of welcome without the tasteless transience of cut flowers. Bleakly, she undid her bag and got out her pyjamas. She knew they preferred a nightdress but she wasn’t going to buy one specially for this. There was something sacrificial about the process which the receptionist had described as ‘making herself comfortable’: undressing in this blandly tasteful empty room, laying her ragbag of everyday clothing on the back of the chair, getting into the pyjamas and dressing gown and sitting selfconsciously on the bed. It took her less than two minutes. She fiddled with the remote control and found piano music, something rippling and contrapuntal, it might have been Bach.

  She put her feet up on the counterpane and leaned back on the pillows. No one knew she was here. They would only find out if she died, when it would no longer concern her. For a short while, at least until they took her down, she would occupy a little pocket of time and space in parenthesis as it were to the rest of life. She had not even, on this occasion, brought a book, since experience showed that she would not open it, nor be able to concentrate if she did.

  The music finished on a flourish, and the presenter began to speak
. Stella switched the radio off. The ensuing silence was thick and dense. The double-glazed picture window admitted no sound from outside, and she could hear nothing beyond the heavy door. She might have been alone in the building.

  Alone, except for the baby inside her.

  It was the first time she had permitted herself a thought like this, and it shocked her. Looking down at her still painfully concave stomach she seemed to see right through the material of her nightclothes to where that small cluster of cells lay in their warm watery chamber – pulsing and growing to the rhythm of her own heart. Not just her own cells, but those of another person. And added to them the mysterious, unknowable factor which would produce an individual unlike any other. Or, under other circumstances, would have made.

  She had tried often over recent weeks to imagine what Robert’s reaction would have been to her pregnancy. She had stood him up like a tailor’s dummy in her mind’s eye and tried different moods on him for size. It was possible to imagine rage, and jubilation, and a kind of furious mixture of the two which was characteristic of him: less easy to picture indifference or measured argument.

  This was the third time she had undertaken a termination, a fact of which she was not proud, but neither could she pretend remorse. The first occasion had been the result of an early fling, scarcely more than a two-night stand, exhilarating but out of the question. Neither of them had taken any precautions. There was no question of a third night, let alone a shared future. The decision had been made for her.

  The second time had been not long before she had left Sorority. She had come off the pill and was using the coil – she was one of the unlucky two per cent. She could not even have said with any certainty who the father was, since she was sleeping with two men regularly (one of them Gordon) and there had been a handful of other casual encounters in the relevant period. The prospect of bringing up a child on her own scared her half to death and the thought of handing it over for adoption made her queasy, so it was with a grim sense of inevitability that she’d come to the Elmhurst again.

  This time was qualitatively different. She knew whose it was. She also knew that there had been a faint, scarcely realised possibility that she might have spoken of it to Robert, that some sea-change might have happened, and that whatever was said might have brought them closer. But that possibility had been stillborn: stifled in the womb by his smug treachery.

  She had not spoken to him since that night at the theatre. He had called several times but she had filtered all calls through the machine. He had rung her doorbell twice when she had been in, but she had not admitted him, had lain curled like an ammonite on her bed with her hands over her ears . . . And he had written her a letter. The letter, lying in her hand like the hand of a child, passive and confiding, had tempted her most. She had even got as far as opening it, but something stern and challenging in the first sentences had stopped her in her tracks. ‘Stella, what’s going on? Why can’t we at least speak to one another? What hope is there if—’ She had thrown it away, burning with unshed tears. She had created this situation, allowed it to develop, suffered its vicissitudes – enough was enough. And he had the gall to speak of hope?

  And yet lying here in the enclosed stillness of this impersonal room she felt for the first time a direct connection with the life inside her. She closed her eyes and seemed to feel the minute, insistent patter of its heartbeat, the drip-feed of life – from her – through the umbilicus, the curious separateness of this relentlessly growing stub of flesh . . .

  She put up a hand and pressed the call button. It made no sound in the room but she supposed that in some distant official zone there was a discreet buzz. She laid her hand on her stomach. Incredible to think that her attenuated, part-worn body could be the source of life, wrapping it secretly and tenderly in fluid, nurturing it, protecting and preserving it without her conscious will according to some atavistic natural order.

  There was a tap and the door opened.

  ‘You buzzed, Miss Carlyle?’

  ‘I was told to when I’d changed.’

  ‘That’s right.’ The nurse was plump and fair with a french plait.

  ‘I have to fill in this form if you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right.’ The nurse gave a little sigh as if empathising with the tedium of it all, and pulled up a chair. ‘Let’s see.’

  Between them they confirmed her name, age, address, nationality, marital status (a phrase whose opt-out implications Stella had always found insulting), and – even more incredibly in this day and age – religion.

  ‘None.’

  ‘It’s in the extremely unlikely event of an emergency,’ explained the nurse. ‘Shall I put C of E?’ She pulled a face. ‘Same thing, really.’

  ‘I have just enough respect for it to think it’s not.’

  ‘Fair enough’

  They covered next-of-kin, allergies and medical history. The nurse, well trained, betrayed not a flicker of interest in the answers, writing everything down in its appropriate space in her clear, round hand. She took Stella’s blood pressure and temperature and checked that she had neither eaten nor drunk that day. She asked, with no perceptible change of tone, how Stella would like to pay.

  When the form was completed she popped her pen back in her pocket. ‘Good. Now let me explain the procedure to you, it’s all very simple and straightforward . . .’

  Did they have no idea, thought Stella, how bizarre that sounded? Was irony deficiency a prerequisite in employees of the Elmhurst?

  ‘. . . about one hour after the premed we’ll take you down to theatre, and next thing you know it’ll all be over and you’ll be able to have a nice cup of tea and whatever you want with it.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  ‘We like you to stay in for at least an hour afterwards and then you can go. Did Sunita ask you about transport home?’

  ‘She did. I’m going to get a taxi.’

  ‘Would you like us to order that for you when the time comes?’

  ‘It’s all right, I’ll call one myself.’

  ‘Fine.’ The nurse’s tone implied that they wished all their patients could be as easy as Stella. ‘So – you’ve got everything you want?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘I’ll be back to give you your premed in—’ she glanced at the watch on her left breast ‘—about half an hour. I’m afraid that’s when we’ll have to ask you to put on one of our horrible gowns . . . In the meantime I’ll leave you to it. Don’t hesitate to buzz again if there’s anything.’

  When she’d gone, Stella turned the radio on again. The music now was baroque – wind instruments soulful as voices, keening a lovely, plaintive tune. She lay on her side and gazed out of the window. From here she couldn’t see the garden, only the slightly stirring treetops, the uneven line of some domestic roofs and the glint of a distant office block, against a sky bruised with unshed rain. She laid her hand once more on her stomach which in this position sagged and swelled slightly with the passing of the years. This, she thought, was how it would feel – later, when even the most meagre and unaccustomed frame stretched to accommodate its burden.

  Soft, unwilled tears slid down her cheeks, the sweat of her secret heart.

  Sunita had just checked in a scruffy, dull-eyed, nineteen-year-old model, barely recognisable without the aid of lighting, stylists and clever camerawork. The model’s surgically enhanced breasts sat like the halves of a melon, hard and round on her bony torso. She was accompanied by her boyfriend, a bullishly confident young man in a black suit and open-necked shirt. When she showed them into their room he threw himself down on the bed with his shoes on and turned on the television while she talked to the girl: he was, thought Sunita, a complete pig.

  Mr Parsloe had a full list, it was a busy day. Returning to her desk, Sunita scrolled down the screen and marked off the model. When she looked up Miss Carlyle was standing there. Sunita smiled.

  ‘Is ever
ything all right?’

  ‘I’m checking out.’

  ‘That is your right,’ said Sunita coolly. It made her uncomfortable when people backed out. They had been doing too much thinking, they didn’t want what was on offer. As long as the women kept moving through the system the Elmhurst was providing a much-needed service. When the occasional one withdrew, it exposed the nature of the business. Sunita, a vegetarian, compared her squeamishness to that of meat-eaters about factory farming. It gave her what she wanted, but she preferred not to know.

  Miss Carlyle agreed that it was certainly her right.

  ‘May I ask,’ said Sunita, ‘why you have taken this decision?’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘Excuse me, I have to ask this – but are you sure?’

  The other woman’s expression said that this enquiry was beneath contempt.

  Sunita persisted. ‘Time is a factor, as you know, and you are, let’s see, fifteen weeks.’

  ‘I’m aware of that.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said Sunita, ‘that we shall have to ask you to pay for the room, which cannot now be used.’

  ‘I’ll pay for everything.’

  ‘You do understand.’

  ‘Perfectly.’ The credit card was already tapping and turning impatiently on the edge of the desk. ‘Will this do?’

  Stella took a taxi home. She made sure that she was several hundred yards from the Elmhurst before hailing one, but even then she felt that her rucksack, like a prisoner’s brown paper parcel, must shriek her provenance aloud. The cabbie made a few attempts at conversation, looking chirpily at her in the driving mirror, but gave up when she didn’t respond.

  She asked to be set down at the corner of Alma Road, and went into the Coffee House. She sat at a table in the window and ordered a large cappuccino, inhaling the hot fragrance of freshly roasted and ground beans. The smell, and the accompanying hissing, bubbling frothing sounds, seemed stronger and louder than before, as though her nose and ears had been suddenly cleared. When the waiter in his long white apron brought her cup she seemed to see each slowly spinning creamy bubble, each grain of powdered chocolate and spiralling tendril of fragrant steam, in the sort of detail more usually provided by dope. The first sip – the dry nip of the chocolate, the fluffy kiss of foam, the scalding sweetness of the liquid – was a revelation. She wondered if the foetus was experiencing the same heightened sensations or whether it was sleeping tranquilly, oblivious to its narrow escape.