‘Did he ever talk about the PoW camp?’
Pepe looked towards the counter, they could hear his mother singing in the kitchen beyond.
‘A little, perhaps, and perhaps more towards the end. Why do you ask?’
‘Did anyone ever escape?’
Pepe shrugged. ‘I did not hear – but then, for most of them it is something they do not want to remember. There’s a picture of Dad in the camp. Would you like to see it?’
He was back in a minute. The picture was black and white and had inevitably faded with the years but, like most wartime photographs, the quality was pin-sharp. Five men in white vests and overalls sat on the steps of a PoW hut. Each held a spade in one hand and a variety of vegetables in the other, leeks mostly, with onions and celery.
‘Here,’ said Pepe, putting a finger on the figure on the right. But Dryden had already spotted the family resemblance, disfigured only by the meagre diet of the camp.
‘They had a garden,’ said Pepe. ‘Dad always said it kept them sane as well as fed. They sold some in the town – a surplus, so I guess they were good at it. Il Giardino – that’s why he chose the name.’
Dryden was looking at the smiles. The teeth gleamed, but this was no synthetic effort for the camera. The eyes glittered too, and each man’s arm was hitched to that of his neighbour, in a gesture of friendship and solidarity – and perhaps something else. Conspiracy?
‘They shared the work, the six of them.’
‘Six?’ said Dryden.
Pepe shrugged. ‘I guess the sixth took the picture.’
7
The Tower Hospital stood a discreet distance from the town, a position reflecting its original function as a workhouse. The mean neo-Gothic buildings crowded around a single turret which bore an illuminated clock face. The bricks exuded sorrow and lost lives, its thirty years as a workhouse having been followed by nearly a century as a mental institution. But now a million pounds had been spent on its refurbishment by a private-sector medical health company, an investment which failed to obliterate its tragic past. It was, and would always be, a monument to Victorian melodrama, a statement in brick of power and menace, its serried mullioned windows picture frames for lost faces. A half moon hung from the corner of the turret as Humph swung the Capri through the open iron gates and braked theatrically on the gravel drive.
The cabbie killed the engine and fished in the glove compartment for one of his airport miniatures. Selecting a Grand Marnier, he passed Dryden a Bell’s whisky. This tiny ceremony, the pre-visit drink, was one of the rituals which held their lives together. Humph, unable to stop himself, readjusted the picture of his two daughters which hung from the rear-view mirror, an eloquent reminder that they had both, in their own ways, lost a family. Dryden flipped down the vanity mirror and ran a hand through his hair. His face, medieval in its austere symmetry, was usually enlivened by his vivid green eyes, but now they were dimmed by the approaching ordeal of the daily visit.
‘When will you see them next?’ he asked, nodding at the snapshot as he swigged the whisky.
Humph tapped the picture: ‘Sunday. The zoo.’
It was always the zoo. Humph was a man of set routine and little adventure. His wife had deserted him five years earlier, running off with a village postman. The cabbie had, unsuccessfully, contested her attempt to gain custody of the girls. The last time the family had held hands had been on the steps of the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand: a brief show of solidarity for the sake of the children. Now Humph saw them once a month, at his wife’s convenience, for four hours. The girls, Humph indicated, found him an increasingly eccentric and peripheral character. One day, and perhaps one day soon, he would leave them to the rest of their lives without him. In the meantime he comforted himself by attempting to knock postmen off their bikes on a largely random basis.
‘So which zoo animal do you feel most affinity with?’ asked Dryden, reaching for a second bottle.
Humph gazed at his friend and sighed. ‘Guess.’
‘Gazelle?’ suggested Dryden.
‘Correct,’ said Humph, punching the play button to start his language tape and closing his eyes.
Dryden considered the brightly lit foyer doors of The Tower. Inside, the defining characteristic was plush silence, aided by the thick-pile carpets. Laura’s medical bills, which were considerable, were still met by the life insurance company following the accident at Harrimere Drain. They had had little choice but to pay for the best for their client since Laura’s accident had been front-page news across Fleet Street. As an actress who had enjoyed a brief spell of fame in the prime-time soap opera Clyde Circus, Laura attracted the ‘rat pack’ up from London as soon as the TV company’s PR firm had leaked the news. Her condition only added to the media frenzy. Locked In Syndrome (LIS), a recently diagnosed phenomenon, was big news too. The victims remained conscious to some degree, while their physical shell remained inert, often as the result of extreme psychological trauma. For several months the tabloids had feasted on the story, from ‘Cinderella soap star battles for life’, through to ‘Clyde star may never speak again’. Eventually interest waned, especially after she was written out of future episodes when it became clear her recovery would be protracted at best. All that was left was the annual anniversary story in November, around the date of the original crash.
Meanwhile the insurers paid the bills. But Dryden was under no illusions they would pay for ever. One day they would suggest a less expensive scheme of care which meant he would have to raid their savings, and then his in-laws’, to pay the bills. His guilt over using the private sector was mitigated by the knowledge that the NHS was hardly designed for long-term care, and every bed was needed, while every penny he and Laura spent reduced the undoubted wealth of the shareholders of the insurance company. The NHS would have long ago suggested Laura spent time ‘at home’ – whatever that meant. If he were feeling domestically minded he might spend twenty minutes a day on board his floating home outside his bunk bed. If home was any four walls around the person you loved, then home was Laura’s room in The Tower.
Dryden finished the second bottle and got out of the cab without a word. Humph settled back into what he fondly imagined was his ‘thinking’ posture – head back, hands held across his stomach, shoes off.
‘Good evening,’ said a voice in perfectly modulated Polish.
Humph repeated the phrase and fell instantly to sleep.
Dryden skipped through the automatic sliding doors of The Tower, enlivened by the alcohol, and smiled at the nurse on reception who looked up briefly, tried a professional smile which only got half done, and went back to her magazine.
Laura’s room was on the ground floor, overlooking The Tower’s extensive grounds. He always knocked, respecting her privacy, as did the nursing staff and doctors. She was propped up in bed, her auburn hair splayed across the pillow so perfectly that Dryden knew one of the nurses had done it, a tiny act of kindness which always made him want to weep. Medical equipment in the room was discreet but hi-tech. A batch of gaily coloured feeding tubes and waste pipes were attached to her left arm, ferrying in and out the nutrition she needed and the poisons which would kill her if they stayed in her bloodstream. Her face was obscured by the TV monitor of the COMPASS, a device which allowed her to communicate when she drifted, periodically, out of unconsciousness. A transparent air tube was snagged into her mouth allowing her to suck and blow commands to the computer, and to the screen which displayed a letter grid.
ABCD
EFGH
IJKLMN
OPQRST
UVWXYZ
Laura had become adept at moving the cursor over the letters using the air pipe to spell out sentences which the COMPASS was able to print out. Her emergence from the deep coma which had engulfed her after the crash had been glacial: five years of minor victories, heartbreaking setbacks and the occasional flash of pin-sharp consciousness.
The COMPASS provided a portal to the wider world. Using simple commands she c
ould connect, via a broadband link, to the internet and send e-mails. Her messages were often disjointed and patchy but Dryden had written several introductory paragraphs for her which she could copy and use – explaining her circumstances and asking indulgence for any errors, misspellings or lapses in logic. A wireless network mobile phone attached to the computer allowed her to text messages as well – a medium she loved. She could also activate CDs and DVDs. Laura’s eye movement was erratic so the computer screen had to remain about three feet in front of her face during daytime hours – at night it was withdrawn on a flexible arm and the nurses laid her down, an arrangement she said she found restful, even if she didn’t remember sleeping.
Dryden entered the room and listened: silence, except for the tiny whistle of her breath and the faint gurgle of the feeding tubes. Through the french windows Dryden watched as the moon lit the formal gardens, gilding a huge monkey puzzle tree which stood in the centre of the carefully manicured lawns. The last of the daytime mist hung by the walls, seeping away into the damp earth. The daily smogs were inevitably followed by these preternaturally clear nights, as though the moon wished to reclaim the light lost by the sun.
Laura was asleep. Her eyes were closed and the printout from the COMPASS screen held a letter she had been writing to her parents at their retirement home outside Lucca. The machine added timings to the pages, the last having been printed almost three hours earlier. Sometimes Laura would remain silent for days, increasing anxiety that she had slipped back into the deeper state of LIS from which she had emerged so slowly.
Dryden sat, trying to ignore the thought which had entered his brain like a maggot, the thought that he preferred it when Laura was silent.
‘Laura,’ he said out loud, to ward off the thought, and touched her arm. It felt cold and unyielding, but he fought the inclination to recoil.
He considered his wife’s immobile face, captivated by the childish notion that he could change the past and return to life as it had been in those seconds before the headlights of the oncoming car had forced them off the road, down the bank and under the water. He wanted Laura back as Laura had been, not a life spent sitting dutifully by a hospital bed. And if he felt like this, how did she feel? Able only to breathe, swallow and move the tip of the right-hand index finger and her eyes. But for her there was escape, into the world of unconsciousness where he could never follow. For Dryden there was only one world, and at its centre was a hospital bed, and his wife.
The COMPASS clattered into life and made him start. He looked at Laura’s eyes and they were open already, focused on the PC screen, but slipping slightly, as if the effort could not be sustained.
‘HI. DAY?’
They were beginning to develop their own shorthand, saving Laura the effort of operating the suction control. The sharp question was a good omen, a signal that tonight she was with him, a visitor to his world.
He bent forward, caressed her head and kissed her hair lightly, remembering through the touch why he loved her. ‘OK. No, very good. A body – they found it under the old PoW camp on the edge of town – I told you the archaeologists are digging there. Looks like this guy got caught when the tunnel fell in. Poor bastard – he had a gunshot wound in the head. No one seems to care anyway. I thought I’d find out who he was.’
Beside Laura’s bed stood a corked bottle of Italian wine – Frascati – and a packet of Greek cigarettes. Dryden took out a wrapped parcel from his overcoat pocket and placed the rest of the focaccia beside the wine. Laura loved the smell of food and drink which had surrounded her in childhood. The cigarettes reminded them both of their honeymoon. Dryden poured himself some wine and waited for Laura’s response: sometimes it was immediate, sometimes he had to repeat himself. The doctors said that her hearing was intermittent when conscious.
The computer printer clattered. ‘MY FEFT.’
He sat on the edge of the bed and reaching under the single linen sheet found her right foot and began to massage it under the arch.
The COMPASS shuddered as she spelt out a sentence laboriously: ‘I WROTE TO DAD ABOUT COMINH. I SAID WAIT TIL SUMMER. OTHERWISE A WASTE ZES?’
‘Yes,’ said Dryden. He’d met Laura in the north London café in which she had been brought up. Her father was a diminutive Neapolitan with a genius for preparing fresh food, her mother, bowed down by a lifetime of kitchen work, oddly silent. They’d finally retired to a house overlooking Lucca in the hills above the industrial valley in which the railway line ran to Florence. In their e-mails they described the work on the house, preparing a room for Laura, complete with the medical technology she needed.
‘Drink?’ he asked.
This had been the latest improvement. The doctors said she could take small amounts of liquid directly rather than through the pipes. Dryden retrieved a drinking funnel from beside the bed and poured a half inch of the wine into the bulb, placing the flexible pipe beside the suction connection already looped over her lip. He held her hand as the level dropped in a series of barely perceptible retreating tides.
‘POWS?’ she prompted.
Dryden looked for a moment at the printout before he understood: ‘Yup. Italians apparently – at least for most of the war. But there’s something odd: the bones they found, it looks like he was crawling in, not getting out. Work that out, I can’t. Who was this guy?’
The COMPASS laboured and Dryden could see the sweat breaking out on her forehead. ‘I COULD FIND OUT ID.’ The sentence had taken her two minutes to type.
Dryden nodded, pressing her hand. ‘OK – please. See what you can do.’
Laura craved these tasks, he knew. Sometimes she would retrieve data for him from the internet, tracking down background details for the stories he worked on for The Crow. But more often she’d simply forget the question, as if it had never been asked.
‘There’s an association – I’ve got the website address. And there must be records, I guess with the MoD. They must know if someone escaped. See what you can find.’
Dryden retrieved the website address from his notebook and typed it into a document on the PC.
‘HAIR?’ she asked.
He edged onto the bed and felt the warmth in the sheets as he lifted her head from the pillow and held it against his shoulder. Then he picked up the brush from the bedside table and began. ‘We should set a date – for Lucca. I talked to the people here about the trip and they said you’ll be fine for up to six hours off the machine. We can book a scheduled flight from Stansted – if there are delays we’ll just come back. Your dad said they can pick us up at Pisa.’ He brushed for a minute silently: ‘We could sit in the sun.’
They’d honeymooned in Greece but on the way home they’d flown to Lucca to see the family home. It seemed like another lifetime now, the two of them walking the hills, seeking out the deep shadows in the church below the villa, at Santo Stefano. The house, refurbished in the 1980s with cash from the café business in London, had stood above an abandoned vineyard for a century or more. The woodwork was dark and polished, the walls whitewashed. Inside, over the extravagant brick fireplace, hung the inevitable hunting gun and a faded picture of Laura’s father, Gaetano, standing by a military lorry in some sun-drenched North African square, his soldier’s tunic open at the neck, beaming. The buttons on his uniform caught the sun, as did the cool black barrel of the gun he held.
George Deakin watched his blood ebbing away, spilling over the first step where his head lolled, then edging towards the second, then down, by degrees, to the landing below, where it pooled into a kidney-shaped lake in the centre of which sailed the reflection of the full moon. He would die, he now knew, enjoying that double vision: the moon beyond the staircase windows, moving between the mullioned glass panes, and the moon on the mirrored surface below, where his lifeblood lay: a colourless moonlit scene, like the paintings on the walls above.
It was an odd place to die. At the top of the stairs on a moonlit night, with a stomach full of the dining hall’s sumptuous leftover
s, and dressed in his favourite, freshly laundered, underbutler’s jacket. Had he survived the Somme, the mud-caked horror of those three endless days, for this? He licked his lips and tasted illicit brandy, thinking of his mother pouring cool water from an enamel jug.
He felt a fool, dying like this, on the wide polished floorboards of the Long Gallery. All his life he had let superstition guide his hand, except tonight. He’d been watching the moon rise after serving dinner, standing alone on the far side of the bridge over the moat, enjoying a cigarette before locking the doors, when the unexpected memory of the trenches had returned: the sound of the bayonet slicing through the brown army uniform and grating on his ribs, and the warm rush of the blood over his chest, and down into his breeches. He’d not relived the moment for nearly a quarter of a century, but it had come then, on a moonlit night in Norfolk. The day he should have died: 2 July 1916. And now, the day he would die: 10 August 1944. He looked at the hall clock as the hour chimed 3.00am.
By 1.00am the house had been silent, a dog in the village barking on the breeze. He’d locked the main gates, the downstairs stairwells, and the watergate. Then, the keys grating at his thigh, he’d climbed to the Long Gallery to lock the door out onto the roof. He’d learned to walk silently in the house at such times, past the bedrooms of the sleeping guests, up the central staircase to the upper storey. A life of service unseen. So he’d heard their whispered voices from the landing, but had climbed on, pooled in the light of the silver candlestick with the black ebony ring which he held at head height. And when his footfall creaked on the final step they’d frozen: half the pictures already down and one thief kneeling, running a penknife around the edge of an oil canvas to free it from the heavy gilt frame.
Stupidly he’d walked forward, outraged ‘You’ve no right,’ he said, placing the candlestick down on the table by the door and moving to the centre of the room. When the blow struck from behind, and the candlestick fell to the floor, he turned and saw the horror in the eyes of his assailant, a look he’d seen before in the trenches. He felt the deep-seated, internal impact – like the sound of rocks being rolled by the tide. There was no pain, just a sensation on his left side as if he’d been sitting, half-turned, in front of an open fire: a tingling warmth and a deep numbness.
The Moon Tunnel Page 5