The Grass Memorial

by Sarah Harrison

  Jamie called again. ‘So what did you reckon?’

  ‘It’s not my bag. But then your programme’s not directed at me.’

  ‘No, but I was pretty pleased with it, it was a nice little package.’

  It was clear he hadn’t the least idea of her connection to the subject and she wasn’t going to tell him.

  ‘Congratulations,’ she said. ‘Case proven.’

  ‘Er – which case was that?’

  ‘Rudeness isn’t clever and it isn’t funny.’

  ‘You’re joking, right?’

  ‘Deadly serious.’

  ‘Sorry I spoke.’

  The difference between theatre and cabaret audiences was one not only of scale but of character. With Sorority Stella had played to numbers far smaller than this, and in numerous places where food and drink were being consumed, but in those days the eating and drinking had been a sign of the band’s lowly status. If you could coax people to look up from their chips for a second you might get asked back.

  At the Parade on the Park the shining ones with their fifteen-quid hamburgers and five-star pitta wraps were in themselves an accolade, the outward and visible sign that Stella and Derek had arrived. The urbane burble of well-heeled dining, the swift glide of waiters, the sparkle of immaculate tableware, all caused Derek to murmur as they entered: ‘Well, girl, this is where we came in.’

  The difference was that Stella discovered the special delight of entertaining a smaller, mellower audience. In many respects this was less like the Loch Ailmay Hotel and more like her impromptu performance at the Harbour Light. She was singing to the converted. She could feel the warm wave of sophisticated appreciation that came across with the first round of applause: she had only to give these people what they wanted and expected, and that she could do.

  The songs she’d written for this show were funny, wistful, ironic. Like that indefinable expression in her eyes that she took to be ageing, a little of the caustic edge had gone from her wit, a little more uncertainty had taken its place, an inconclusiveness, a blurring of the outlines that made the last line of each song hang in the mind like a question. To begin with it had been an instinctive, unconsidered development. But the professional in her, hearing it, had deconstructed it and identified its components.

  She could tell the songs worked by the way people’s faces lost their assumed, social expressions and became introspective, their thoughts and feelings led by her and not by the people around them. In the large, low dinning room of the Parade she didn’t have to push her voice, and Derek was by now so perfectly attuned to her that his accompaniment, always faultless, now seemed artless as well, as though her voice simply trailed the strings of notes like a gossamer scarf floating in her wake.

  She wore the black dress, with tight black ankle boots; dramatic eyes, no lips to speak of, no jewellery; hair fiery and farouche, with a single black feather like an Indian brave’s.

  Something happened that she couldn’t account for, but it did her no harm. For the third and final encore they signed off with ‘Are You There?’ and on the last soft, yearning phrase her voice sank to a whisper, and then faded. Derek allowed the piano to fade away after her. It might even have passed for a calculated coup de théâtre.

  Unusually for Derek he did not comment on this lapse.

  On these sultry late summer evenings Robert had taken to going for walks. He’d set out at about six without much thought for what direction he was taking, stop after about an hour at a pub and have a whisky and (less often) a sandwich, and decide on the rest of his route according to weather, location and his own mood. He walked to Regent’s Park, round the outer circle and back round the inner, skirting the fantastic outlines of the zoo at dusk; went up to Primrose Hill and watched the sun wallow down over the city as people and their dogs orbited the lower slope; tramped the streets as far as Islington and followed the canal, getting a boat’s eye view of the New Labour terraces; penetrated Soho and thought it sad and changed; traversed the hinterland of the West End to Hyde Park and as far as Kensington Gardens where the rollerblading young swooped and twirled like urban swallows and the indigent bedded down on benches while the affluent jogged, puffing and sweating, round the perimeter.

  After the stifling longueurs of the day with its pretence at routine and paperwork, its brain-numbing forays into daytime TV, its nervy obsession with broadcast and printed news and its peculiarly wearing mixture of boredom and anxiety, the toxic anonymous bustle of London was soothing. It was both a distraction and a concealment. When he began his walks he was quite overwhelmed by the brash vibrancy of the streets, but as time and distance went by there was a comfort to be derived from being part of it.

  His own appearance before the board of enquiry had gone as well as could be expected. He knew that humility, plain and simple, was the best card to play on such an occasion, but it was not his strongest suit. Even more than coming across as an arrogant bastard he dreaded being seen as a hypocritical creep. He answered the questions as briefly as was consistent with being civil, and tried for a tone of pragmatic regret without undue remorse. When the fatherly figure from the GMG had asked him wheedlingly how his own behaviour appeared to him ‘with the benefit of hindsight’, he had been lured into replying that he regarded hindsight as an affliction rather than a benefit, which had caused one faint, wry smile, and most heads to dip discreetly towards their notepads. But in the main he felt that while he had not exactly won them over he had commanded their attention and respect and could do no more.

  With two days to go before the outcome was due to be announced Seppi rang to say he was in town for a trade show and invited him to dinner. They went to an old-fashioned French restaurant near the V & A. Seppi was right back to his dapper, prosperous, sanguine self: Natalie was much recovered and the prognosis was encouraging, business was good, and the trade fair an amusing jaunt. But his natural inclination to celebrate was tempered by concern for his brother.

  ‘Let’s have champagne, my treat – you need cheering up.’

  ‘I’m surprisingly cheerful,’ said Robert. ‘But bored out of my skull.’ With this one unconsidered remark he realised how clearly and damningly he had indicated his priorities, and Seppi was quick to pick up on it, waving a hand way to the side above shoulder height.

  ‘Forget this nonsense with your work. You’re a good doctor, it’s going to be okay. How’s Sian? We simply can’t believe this is happening.’

  ‘Well, it is.’ Robert couldn’t keep the impatience out of his voice. ‘And you had better believe it.’

  ‘But why . . .?’ Seppi let the question hang as the champagne was popped and poured. ‘But why, Roberto? Why throw away so many good years at this late stage of the game?’

  The one thing Robert could not do was tell his own brother to mind his own business. Family was business in common.

  ‘We weren’t happy, shall we leave it at that?’

  ‘Who’s happy all the time? What happened to “for better, for worse”?’

  ‘We were the cause of each other’s unhappiness.’

  ‘That’s marriage. Get over it.’

  ‘Seppi—’ Robert looked away, eyes closed, then back at his brother ‘—spare me the homespun philosophy. Please.’

  ‘You don’t seem all that happy now if I may say so.’

  ‘Can you wonder when I’ve got this bloody enquiry hanging over me? Some hysterical fool of a woman could wreck my entire career, I’m not exactly dancing on air!’

  ‘Okay. And is there someone else?’

  ‘Yes, but it appears to be over.’

  ‘She was the cause?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Sure! You’re such a fool, Roberto.’ It was an admonishment but Seppi’s voice was gentle. ‘Look at yourself.’

  ‘I have been.’ Suddenly tired, Robert rubbed his hands over his face. ‘And if it makes you feel any better, I don’t like what I see.’

  Seppi picked up the menu. ‘You’re the same as you
always were, a clever useless bastard. She’s out there somewhere, getting on with her life while you sulk. Maybe she spares the occasional thought for you, who knows? Let’s order.’

  After that, dinner followed a predictable pattern, eased by alcohol into a mellow trough of fraternal wellbeing. On the pavement outside, with a cab thrumming patiently at the kerb, they embraced, rocking slightly like dancers.

  Seppi slapped Robert’s back. ‘Come and visit us, will you? We’re always there, we’d love to see you.’

  ‘Thanks, I may do.’

  ‘And good luck with everything.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  They drew back, hands still on each other’s shoulders. Seppi gave his brother a little shake. ‘I nag you because I love you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Seppi got into the cab, sat down and leaned out with his hand on the door.

  ‘If you can’t go back, go forward. And pocket the pride, Roberto, it’s not worth it!’

  As Robert wandered up Kensington Gore towards the park, he considered the worth of pride. It seemed to him that recent events had stripped him of virtually all his. He’d heard it said, and possibly even said himself on occasion, that others placed on you the value that you placed on yourself. If that were the case, he thought grimly, he had better hang on to the last remnant or it was a poor look-out.

  He crossed into the park. It was midnight, but away from the glare of the streets and with a full moon the spaces of this rus in urbe were luminous. It looked tranquil but seethed with the rustling secrecy of night. It was easy to imagine that time more than a hundred years ago when this place and others like it had been the biggest sexual market place in London, the air alive with the susurration of illicit liaisons both private and commercial, the paths teeming with the nocturnal traffic of prostitution. A huge open secret in the close fabric of Victorian society.

  Now it was still here, the sex, but more in the form of couples using the park through choice or necessity. Less clandestine, he supposed, but more furtive. In a time of so-called individual morality and pick-and-mix principles, what was right? Despite, or because of his Catholic upbringing Robert had a horror of organised religion whereas Sian had been a churchgoer of a bloodless Anglican kind. But now he could almost have wished for divine intervention, for a shaft of light to split the sky and a sonorous voice to tell him what to do: the atheist’s simplistic way out. And, he reminded himself, not even a realistic one since it assumed he had a choice. The truth was he was finding out what it was to be in other people’s hands, and it was a humbling experience.

  He crossed the bridge and followed the western side of the Serpentine in the direction of the Bayswater Road. The water was silken smooth, though he could hear the occasional soft splash of animal goings-on near the bank. By the statue of Peter Pan he stopped and sat on the step at the foot of the statue. A host of small carved creatures, rabbits, butterflies, birds, fairies, clustered at his shoulder. He wondered how many tens of thousands of children’s hands, touching and stroking, it would take before the statue’s detail was worn away, and the boy who never grew up was standing on top of a bumpy bronze outcrop like a termites’ nest ...

  He lit a small cigar and inhaled deeply, savouring it. Exhaled, long and slow. As the first haze of aromatic smoke evaporated he saw a woman on the far bank. She was standing on the path, flanked by the dark masses of trees and shrubs that lined the bank on either side, her silhouette clear against the pale moonlit grass.

  Given his recent reflections on the park’s history he could be forgiven for thinking he had seen a ghost. Robert peered at the woman’s long, high-necked dark clothes and neat black boots . . . the extravagantly coiffed hair . . . the rakishly elegant feather . . . her still, white face. For a long moment, time blurred.

  He stood up, crushing the cigar beneath his foot, and moved to the opposite side of the path, near the water. As he did so he was possessed by the absolute certainty that the woman was looking straight back at him – not just gazing across the water, but subjecting him to the same intense scrutiny. The air seemed to close around them, cutting them off in their dreamlike state. Because of the not great but unbridgeable distance between them Robert felt that to move would be to break the spell. He would have called, but his throat seemed to be silted up with the heavy, electric silence.

  The woman moved, and he saw that she was wearing a black cobweb shawl, and to rearrange it she spread it wide, like wings, with her thin white arms, before folding it back around her. The arms, the gesture, an inclination of the head that revealed glossy fronds of spiked hair, made him catch his breath.

  Stella, he thought – are you there?

  Until the man moved she was only aware of the minute red pulse of his smoke in the darkness at the base of the statue. A tramp, she assumed. She often walked here if she had time to kill before the show, there was a sort of nocturnal fraternity of which she was a part.

  But when he stepped forward to the water’s edge she knew he was watching her. There was an urgency, a focus, an immediate shock of connection . . . She could tell from his stance that he could not only see her, but was gazing intently. She was rooted to the spot. His gaze was like a soft net thrown over her, holding her in place. She was suddenly cold. Taking a long, shivering breath she opened her shawl and wrapped it close around her heart.

  Around the memory of Robert.

  A second later a lone swan slid across the dark sheet of water between them, the spreading V of its gentle wake softening and melting until the point where it touched either bank, linking them together.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  ‘The water is wide,

  I cannot get o’er.

  And neither have I wings to fly . . .’

  —English folk song

  Spencer 1997

  After the ’61 reunion Spencer had said he wouldn’t ever be back, but this was different. This time, it was a pilgrimage of an entirely personal kind, made on his mother’s behalf.

  No one apart from Caroline – not even Hannah – could have persuaded him to change his mind. And even she had influenced him from beyond the grave. He’d half promised that he would take her back to England for a holiday, but she’d never pushed the matter and when she became ill she deteriorated with such terrifying speed that it was clear no such trip was going to take place. After she died he tried to clear his mind of the whole thing. But his seventy-seventh birthday, when he could no longer avoid thinking of himself as old, caused him to take stock, and Caroline’s wishes were right there in the debit column. He suggested to Hannah that they go together as part of a longer trip to Europe.

  ‘Europe we should do,’ she said. ‘Some time. But the England bit’s all yours.’

  ‘Not really, I’d be going there for my mother.’

  ‘Yours and hers then. Whatever.’

  Spencer didn’t press her. She was nobody’s fool, she sensed a no-go area. She had always treated the past, and particularly the war, with a reserve that was part discretion part self-protection. He didn’t kid himself that it was only he who had secrets: he still knew almost nothing about his wife’s lost years, and the lost baby. They’d rebuilt themselves and there was nothing to be gained by digging up the foundations.

  In the end he did go on his own, and it felt right.

  He went to Church Norton for a day, but only to see what the locals had done with the money. Over the years he’d resisted all further attempts to get him back, responding first with many excuses and expressions of regret, and winding up more recently by dumping the invitations unread in the bin. All that was over, not just the war but the subsequent meeting with Rosemary. They had not exchanged so much as a letter since. What happened had been a good and fitting farewell.

  It was a cool, playful English summer’s day with high cloud, splashes of pale sunshine, occasional handfuls of rain on the breeze. But they’d done a good job with the memorial – a P–51 propellor mounted on a handsome ston
e triptych bearing the badges of the various flying groups, and flanked by flagstaffs – and he was touched to see that a small memorial garden by the gate on to the road was carefully tended and bright with flowers. The litter bin was overflowing, and he picked up a Coke can that had gone astray and stuffed it back in, wiping his hand on the grass afterwards. Inside the gate was a a small plinth with a bas-relief layout of the airfield as it had been during the war, and ‘You are here’ to help sightseers orientate themselves. All around, it was much the same as his last visit, the same runways still intact, the ready rooms full of straw and sugar beet, one smart new barn, and the munitions sheds at the bottom of the hill pretty well gone back to nature, their brick skeletons all tangled with bindweed and bright with willowherb, daisies and dandelions.

  He heard the rumble of an engine and saw a tractor making its way up from the direction of the new barn, where there was road-traffic access. He felt conspicuous standing there in his baseball jacket and cap, such an obvious Yank in this rustic English scene, and sure enough the tractor pulled up at the intersection. The driver killed the engine and got out, walking slowly towards him looking at the ground as the English so often did, to show that although they were coming your way they were not going to embarrass anyone by too much early eye contact.

  Spencer decided to make the running.

  ‘Morning! I was taking a look at this fine memorial.’

  ‘How do you do?’ The driver, a man in his mid-forties, held out a hand and they shook. ‘Don’t mind my asking, but have you got a connection with all this?’

  ‘I was here in the war, yes.’

  The man nodded, not one to make a big song and dance, then repeated the nod in the direction of the propellor. ‘You fly one of those?’