‘Well then, I’m afraid . . .’ Hardcastle began, but he was thrown off by the piercing stare she gave him. ‘Look here,’ he said, spreading his hands on the desk, ‘I’ll admit, I’ve gone about as far as I can. Sometimes, in these cases, it’s just a question of waiting. Time heals all. But I’ll tell you what, there’s a chap I know who might be able to help. He’s done well with some of the more . . . intractable cases. Why don’t I give him a call and see if he can pop over?’
Lillian was pleased to see him blush when she smiled at him.
‘That would be very kind of you, doctor.’
That night he lay awake and thought about Lillian. Even when she wasn’t there, he liked to imagine what she might be doing. He thought about her walking under the trees, sitting on the train, or letting herself into her aunt’s house in Holland Park. He tried to recount to himself every second of her visit, from the moment he saw her come into the common room, to the moment she kissed him and left.
He knew he hadn’t been in good form when she arrived. That episode looking out across the garden had put him out of sorts. But it was a fine afternoon, and she’d suggested that they go and sit in the garden. Stephen had stiffened in his wheelchair, gripping the arms uneasily, but he hadn’t tried to stop her. He’d let her push him out onto the lawn, but when she stopped in the open air he had motioned her on towards a chestnut tree.
‘You’d prefer to sit in the shade?’ she asked, and dutifully pushed him there. He still sat uneasily, looking up now and then at the canopy of five-fingered leaves, only starting to yellow around the edges. It wasn’t shade he craved; it was cover.
Once they were settled, she’d brought out her writing pad. It was a big artist’s sketchbook that she brought with her every day, together with a handful of pencils. But she didn’t use it for drawing. Instead, she turned to a blank page, placed it in his lap and wrote a short formula:
2n + 1 = p + 2q
He’d frowned, trying to make sense of it. Numbers, letters, what did it mean? He shook his head and looked at her questioningly. She looked astonished.
‘Oh, Stephen, don’t tell me you don’t remember it. You must. It’s Lemoine’s conjecture.’
He shook his head. It was as if he’d never seen it before.
But she’d patiently written it out again, and added a few examples using real numbers. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, a light came on. He took a pencil and wrote a few more himself, and then a similar formula. He wasn’t sure what it meant at first, it just popped into his head. But Lillian smiled and squeezed his arm.
‘Yes, yes. That’s it exactly. Very good, Stephen.’
And they went on like that for the rest of the afternoon. It bothered Stephen that he sometimes made mistakes, that sometimes he didn’t know what he was writing down. He felt like he was walking in a labyrinth, and at every turn he was presented with an array of doors to pass through. Most of the time he picked the right door to go through, but sometimes he didn’t, and Lillian had to correct him. Then disappointment settled over him like a cloud, and it was hard to shake. It didn’t used to be like that. He used to know the right door, instinctively, before he even tried to open it. He used to know not only the next door, but the three that came after it.
Of course, he’d already tried to explain this to Hardcastle, but he was sure he didn’t understand. He wrote on his notepad and showed him: ‘Not good at maths.’
Bemusement clouded Hardcastle’s heavy face, until Stephen added: ‘Used to be.’
Hardcastle had just shrugged.
‘It’ll pass,’ was all he said, before he pressed on with his analysis. It had turned into a routine: endless questions about the minutiae of the attack. His preparations, his men, what he saw, what he did. Crucially, what did he remember about the last few moments before the shell knocked him down? He’d been speaking before that, had he not? He’d been shouting orders, encouragement to his men. What had happened in those few seconds? He had to know. It had to be in there somewhere.
Stephen smiled bitterly to himself in the dark. He didn’t know. He’d been awake one moment, unconscious the next. That’s all he could remember. Hardcastle was blundering about and he knew it. All he could do was keep leading Stephen down the path to the same point, the same dead end. Every session was the same, and Stephen had started to resent those afternoons in his office. It wasn’t just Hardcastle’s lack of imagination, nor his inability to effect a cure – or just bloody fix him – but also the fact that Hardcastle wasn’t a soldier. Oh, he wore the uniform all right, but what the hell did he know? He’d never been to the front, he’d never been under fire. He didn’t know what it was like. How could he, when the horror he saw was second-hand? All he could do was tell him to try and put it out of his mind, but they both knew that was no bloody use.
Sleep usually wouldn’t come until the small hours. The nights were too quiet here and the silence took on an ominous weight, as if something dreadful were just about to happen. It helped to focus on the little sounds that were close by. As he lay awake with his fists clenched on the coverlet, he listened to Redfern snoring. His room-mate was an artillery captain who always slept underneath his bed, and his light, regular snore was soothing to Stephen’s ears, though he sometimes snorted awake with a little mewing cry. Sometimes too, he wet himself, but he mostly kept his madness safely bottled up under the bed.
Redfern was a slight man with receding fair hair and watery blue eyes, and he had been blown up on three separate occasions. Miraculously, apart from the concussion, he had not received so much as a scratch – not even the last time, when his entire battery was destroyed and he was thrown twenty feet through the air after a German shell hit their ammunition dump. On the surface, he exhibited no obvious symptoms – at least not in the daytime. He neither stammered nor twitched and, apart from biting his nails constantly, he appeared to have no other nervous affliction.
Redfern’s problem was that he had no memory whatsoever of his life before the war. He could recite chapter and verse about his movements at the front: where his battery had been, fire plans, ranges, elevations, even the number of shells fired in any given day. But he couldn’t remember that he had been married for years. When his wife and teenage daughter came to see him they were complete strangers to him. Every week it was the same pantomime – and what made it worse was that he was so anxious to be polite to these people. After all, they had taken the trouble to come all this way to visit him; it was the least he could do. They brought him pots of homemade jam and knitted socks and the three of them would take tea on the lawn and spread the jam on thin slices of hard bread. Redfern always played along for all he was worth, sipping his tea in a genteel fashion, with his little finger extended. But when he looked at his wife and daughter he seemed to gaze right through them as if they weren’t there. His watery blue eyes betrayed the yawning gulf in his mind, and mother and daughter always left in silent tears, supporting each other down the long gravel drive.
But at least he was quiet, and that was why he shared a room with Stephen. The screamers were kept upstairs, and they were what really set his nerves on edge. It was worst on the quiet nights, when they would suddenly rip the silence apart with a long, piercing shriek, like the noise of a shell going over. Strangely, it seemed to relieve the pressure in him – as if the pent-up demons had been released – and once it was over he felt more at ease, the danger past.
But sometimes it was a longer process; he could hear the screams and shouts bubbling upstairs, gradually building to a crescendo. Tonight, it started with a series of low, shuddering sobs, as if some poor soul was suffocating. Christ! He twisted the coverlet under his chin, wishing he were deaf instead of dumb. Then came the howling, shattering the stillness as it rose in pitch and ended, quite abruptly, with an audible thump. He flinched, knowing the poor bastard had flung himself against a wall. He heard sobbing afterwards, then the hurried footfalls of the night nurse. There were worse things than not sleeping.
* * *
The next day, Hardcastle came to see him in his room. Redfern had gone to breakfast but Stephen was still in bed. His breakfast lay untouched on the tray Nurse Winslow had brought. It had been one thing after another last night. Another bout of screaming in the small hours had kept him awake most of the night, and now he felt groggy and slightly nauseous. Hardcastle seemed equally uneasy. He knocked politely on the door and then poked his head inside, grinning nervously, like a schoolboy sent to the headmaster.
‘Ah, Ryan. Thought I’d find you here. Mind if I come in?’
Stephen shook his head, and Hardcastle came in and sat gingerly on Redfern’s untouched bed.
‘How’s the leg?’ he asked, and when Stephen shrugged, he scratched his head absently and said, ‘Yes, yes . . .’ his voice trailing off. But then he seemed to remember himself and went on; ‘I had a meeting with that girl of yours yesterday. Quite a formidable young lady, is your Miss Bryce. I mean that in the nicest possible way, of course, but I’m sure you already know that, eh?’ Hardcastle grinned and Stephen smiled back politely.
‘Anyhow, I promised her I’d get a pal of mine to look at you. We were at Cambridge together, would you believe? Name of Rivers – he’s working with the Royal Flying Corps at the moment, but apparently he had quite a good run of it working at a hospital up in Scotland. Quite a lot of success with chaps who . . . who have problems similar to yours. So I rang him up and, lo and behold, he’s free this afternoon. Said he’d pop over to have a look – as a favour, you know. You don’t have any objection, do you?’
Stephen shook his head.
‘Good, good. Thought you’d say . . . Well, you know what I mean. Let’s say three o’clock then. I’ll have the orderlies bring you up.’
A new head-shrinker at three o’clock. Well, it couldn’t hurt – but before that he had to undergo the ordeal of the parallel bars. Nurse Winslow wheeled him down to the gymnasium and left him in the care of Jardine, a huge Scot who was strong enough to lift him bodily out of the wheelchair. Before they began, Stephen looked at the bars as a prisoner might regard the rack. Even though he knew he was making progress, it was slow and painful progress. The splinter had cut tendons in his knee that were slow to heal, and there was nerve damage that made it feel as if he was walking with somebody else’s leg. After half an hour he was exhausted, and when he fell on the floor, pain seared through his leg and right up his spine. More than once Jardine had to haul him up by the scruff of his pyjamas – but he never flagged, he never stopped his musical flow of encouraging banter. The last time he fell he thought he was at the end of his tether. Exhausted, he lay with his face on the floorboards, feeling tears starting to well up into his eyes. Jardine hauled him up with a cheery bellow.
‘Come along now, Mr Ryan. This is no time for lying about. Up you get!’
Stephen wanted to lash out at him, kick him with his good leg, slap that bloody smile off his face. But instead his hands found the bars, the blisters burning on his palms, and he held himself upright until the shooting pain became bearable. Jardine winked at him.
‘That’s a good lad!’
Jardine was also an incurable gossip and, like most people, he seemed to think Stephen’s muteness somehow affected his hearing as well. He often interrupted himself to offer, in a loud rasping voice, whatever little scraps of gossip were going around the hospital. Today, the news was bad.
‘You heard about wee Mr Mitchell, the other Irish gentleman? Och! Terrible, terrible! The poor wee man!’
Stephen knew Mitchell only by sight. He was a small, dark-haired young man with an unnaturally pale face and piercing eyes. While most of the men at the hospital were withdrawn to one degree or another, Mitchell was the worst he had seen. He took his meals alone and said hardly a word to anybody – not to the nurses, not to his room-mate. In the evenings he would take a book or a magazine and sit by himself in the corner of the common room. If anybody sat near him, he would get up and go to bed.
Most of what Stephen knew about him, he had overheard. He was, as Jardine said, the other Irish gentleman; he had been a second lieutenant in the Royal Irish Fusiliers. This struck a chord with Stephen, because it was the Royal Irish who led the attack on the left flank, and Mitchell had been with the first wave. He was only a replacement officer, rushed into the thick of it after barely a week in France and the phrase baptism of fire hardly did it justice. Every other officer in his company was killed within the first fifteen minutes. Two of them were close friends of Mitchell, and were blown apart in front of him by the same shell. In spite of this, he had kept his cool, gathering up the remnants of his shattered company and leading them to safety. He seemed to have passed the hardest test; he was mentioned in dispatches and made acting company commander – but when his battalion mustered to move into reserve he was nowhere to be found. They eventually discovered him in a communication trench, sawing the head off a German corpse with a bayonet, singing softly to himself as he worked.
‘He tried to kill hiself,’ Jardine whispered, tears in his voice. ‘Poor lad was near dead when they found him. Hanged himself with a pillowcase. Och, I don’t know what they’re going to do with him, the poor wee man.’
Jardine tried to lead him to the end of the bars, but Stephen stiffened, pushing him away. Christ! It was this place. He felt the walls pressing in on him, cold nausea, and tremors ravaging his body. Christ Almighty! Blackness dimmed the edge of his vision and he lost his grip on the bars, feeling shards of pain piercing his knee. Jardine held him and gently dragged him back to the wheelchair, but it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter. He sat there, racked by sobs, shivering. Jardine looked distraught.
‘There, there, son! It’ll be all right now, don’t you worry.’
At lunchtime, Nurse Winslow came to his room with his shaving kit and he wrote two lines on his notepad and showed it to her:
Want to wear my uniform.
Don’t want to go in wheelchair.
She pursed her lips doubtfully, ‘Hmm, we’ll just have to see about the second one. I suppose we can get you into your uniform, and then we’ll see if you can manage with a stick.’
Redfern came in and sat on the other bed, biting his nails vigorously as she helped Stephen on with his breeches and boots. He could have managed the rest himself, but here at last was something that she could do for him, and she fussed over him, brushing his tunic and straightening his tie. At last, when he was almost ready, he sat on the bed, buttoning up his tunic, and she sat on the bed beside him, buckling his Sam Browne.
‘I’ve never seen one of those before.’ Her fingers touched the little purple and white ribbon over his left breast pocket, ‘What is it?’
He picked up the notepad and wrote:
Military Cross
‘Oh goodness me!’ Her eyes widened, ‘Is that what it is? I really didn’t know. What a terrible ninny I am! You must be awfully brave!’
Stephen smiled, blushing deeply. Redfern stopped biting his nails for a moment to give him the thumbs up and a wink.
Hardcastle’s office was on the first floor. Usually Stephen was carried up in his wheelchair by a pair of porters, but this time he hauled himself up the banister, leaning heavily on Nurse Winslow, and wondering with each wincing step if he’d let his pride get the better of him. By the time they reached the landing his forehead was beaded with sweat and his hands were shaking. Nurse Winslow gave him a worried look as she pressed the stick into his hand and straightened his tunic.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ she asked, and he nodded vigorously. He put his arm around her narrow shoulders and they set off along the landing. When they reached the door, Stephen leaned against the wall and put all his weight on his good leg. Nurse Winslow knocked on the door and pushed it open for him. ‘Good luck!’ she whispered and he stumped hastily towards the desk under his own steam.
Rivers was standing at the window, gazing out over the lawns. Between them stood the desk, a big ornate affair with a green leat
her top, and Stephen fetched up against it with a loud clank of his stick, quickly shifting his weight to his free hand. He straightened as best he could when Rivers turned from the window and looked him up and down. ‘Captain Ryan, isn’t it? How’s the leg? Getting about on it, I see. Good, good. Please, take a seat. No need to flog it too hard, what?’
Stephen lowered himself carefully into the armchair and rested the stick against the front of the desk. While Rivers seated himself and opened his file, he looked around the office. He liked it in here; it was all wood panelling and bookcases, heavy with the odour of beeswax polish, and it reminded him of the study in Billy Standing’s house. The tall window was filled with treetops and blue sky and he could clearly read the spines in the bookcases; quality stuff – gold lettering in tooled leather. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Aristotle’s Poetics, Lucretius, Ovid, Homer. Familiar names, but from another life. Nevertheless, he could picture himself spending a pleasant afternoon in here with a glass of good whiskey, reading and savouring the silence and the slow ticking of the clock.
Rivers’s head was bowed, intent on the file, and Stephen studied him for a moment. He was short and chubby; thinning grey hair and a pencil moustache lending him a somewhat trim look in his captain’s uniform, with its bronze caduceus on his lapel. Shortsighted, too – the afternoon sun glowing white in the flat, vitreous discs of his spectacles as he finally lifted his head and took them off, his eyes flickering towards the little purple and white ribbon.
Not shirking, Stephen thought and, as if he had read his mind, Rivers looked at him and smiled.
‘I see more of those than you might think in my line of work,’ he said, ‘and the other sort, too. There is no shortage of heroes in hospital.’ He had the air of a pleasant schoolmaster and Stephen realized he was paying compliments to put him at his ease. Maybe it was part of the new technique. He smiled back, but let his eye travel down to his file, lying open between them on the desk. The page was filled with short paragraphs of dense handwriting. Furthest away, he could see the last paragraph contained only two words, but he couldn’t read them. Barking Mad, perhaps?
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