by Lucy Foley
His questioner goes to speak, makes a small noise like a hiccough, and seems to think better of it.
He does not look once at the man in the dock. He has not done this for him.
That evening he has a visitor.
‘You saved him. He told me what you said.’
‘I do not want to talk about it.’
This seems to throw her. ‘I can understand that,’ she says, regaining her poise. ‘What you did for him – it was extremely brave.’
‘Was it?’
‘I believe it to be so.’
‘I am not certain that it was, though.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think, in fact, it might have been a kind of cowardice.’
‘I do not see how it could have been that.’
‘You don’t?’
‘No.’
‘Well. What if I told you that in the end I did not do it because of my sense of good and bad, but for you?’
She does not answer.
He does not know what makes him do it. Perhaps it is the whisky; more of it than he would normally drink, and earlier. It makes things seem possible. He raises his hand – she is only a couple of feet away – and places it against her warm cheek.
She is very still.
Neither of them speak.
Where his fingertips brush her neck he can feel the rhythm of the pulse beneath the skin.
He wants her to look at him.
She clears her throat. She keeps her eyes trained upon some unknown spot on the floor. ‘I understand that there is a great debt. First the boy, and now my brother. I see this. I know it. It is not accepted lightly. I understand how much I owe to you. I do not know how I could ever repay you. But I understand that you have been a long time from home… without a woman’s company.’ She swallows. ‘If—’
He withdraws his hand as quickly as if she had burned him.
‘What are you saying?’
‘I – I am not sure.’
‘There is no debt.’ He wants to take her by the shoulders and say it, but he will not risk touching her again. ‘I am not that sort of man. Do you see?’
She is silent.
‘Please. Tell me that you understand that.’
She nods. For a long time after she has left he sits as though stunned.
That night he lies awake. For perhaps the first time, he loathes the silence of this place. He would like to be back in Pera, with the clamour of the streets after dark, full of Rabelaisian scenes, comic and sordid and anonymous. Men go to forget themselves in those streets, whether from all that they have seen and known in the last few years, or from responsibilities at home. He has been there, and for both reasons. It would not work now, anyhow. Not unless he got extremely drunk. And he can get drunk here just as well as there. He climbs from his bed, and walks to the study. The treasured bottle of whisky is there upon the desk, as though waiting for him. He holds it up to the light. A third remains. Not quite enough to get so drunk as he would like, but it will do. He would like very much to forget the expression on her face when she had offered herself to him. He would also like to forget the thing he did, when he had no right. Her offer had been repugnant to him in the extreme, but she is not the one to blame for it. In making that gesture, in that moment of gratitude, he had forced it from her.
Nur
On the ferry back to the European shore she sat absolutely still, her gaze unmoving. To the casual observer she would have looked like one stunned by a new grief. It is such a common expression, has been for so many years now, that it is not worthy of special notice. Those passengers embarking and disembarking at the stops before her own stepped over and around her.
Something has broken, and it is her fault. The knowledge of it sits inside her. She cannot quite bring herself to recall the details of the exchange in the study – her mind can only feint toward it, then retreat, scorched. And yet she cannot leave it alone.
The expression he had worn when she had made her offer. The thing that shames her most is not the impropriety of it, though that is bad enough. It is the lack of truth in it. She knows that she would have given herself to him willingly.
Nur
‘He has been here every day, Nur canım. Asking to speak with you. I cannot imagine what the rest of the building thinks of us. An English soldier. It is not seemly.’
‘I know, Büyükanne.’
The old woman sits a little straighter in her chair, and fixes Nur with a gimlet eye. ‘I never thought that I would say this to you. I disapprove, heartily. But I think you should see him – if only to prevent him from destroying the door downstairs with his knocking. The humiliation of it!’
‘I cannot see him.’
‘Whatever there has been between you – and I know that it can be nothing, because you are a clever girl, and a widow, and of good family, and my granddaughter, and only imagine the shame of it – I think that you must. You owe it to him. He saved Kerem.’
‘I know, but—’
‘They are leaving, all of them. The British, the French, the Italians. It was announced this morning. I would not say this to you if it were not the case. But if you do not see him now it will remain with you forever, whatever it is. You will never be free of it. Do you understand?’
Together
She has come to see him. He should have known that it would be thus; on her terms.
There is so much to explain, and so little time in which to do so. The Allied scramble to leave now is something hasty, rather indecorous. They came into this city as conquerors, asserting their right to rule, seizing property, instruments of law, determined to remake it in their image. Now they are party guests fearful of overstaying the welcome of the host.
‘When do you leave?’
‘In the next couple of weeks. I have to arrange transport for the patients, first, make sure that they are properly accommodated.’
She tries to imagine the journey for the sick men – by rail, perhaps, or in the listing hold of a ship. But the distances of that journey are unfathomable, in her ignorance they dissolve into abstraction. He knows those distances well. He has conquered them – he has travelled their vastness to be here.
Then she realises that she is wrong: that perhaps she does know them. Not in the way he does, not by the memory-ache of muscles, the blistering of tired feet, the blur of landscapes seen and hazily retained. But she does know. Those distances are between them now, encompassed by only three feet of air. The gap in understanding. The spaces, unnavigable, between culture, history, religion, sex.
This, then, was why they can never fully understand one another – the thing that separates them just as efficiently as any geography. Hoping for anything else must be a kind of pitiful vanity.
He will take mementos with him, perhaps, like all the others. Trinkets bought in the Grand Bazaar. A few grainy memories in which the city may remain unchanged, eternal, stamped with permanence, but in which the faces will become blurred by time as the memory fades. Features will dissolve into confusion, and they will mean nothing to him.
George
He steels himself to begin.
‘That evening, when you came to me—’
‘I do not want to discuss it.’ She will not look at him. He can see her thinking: how can he shame her like this? Can he not understand her humiliation?
He has to explain. ‘I did not refuse you because I did not want to accept what you offered. It is difficult to express how much I wanted to. But I had a reason. Not just because I did not want you to think that was why I acted as I did in court. And not just because I did not want you to demean yourself – though I think you should know that you could never do that, in my eyes. I think you are, quite simply, a better person than any I have known.’
Such clumsy, faltering words. All of them inadequate. All that he would like to say – and these words are not helping him but thwarting him from truth, sincerity.
The unwieldiness of language. Of all of them, perhaps English is the most
unwieldy, the stiffest. No little thanks to the Victorians with their fondness for machines, efficiency. His tongue, perhaps his whole education, is the product of a mechanical design: a design for conquering, for Empire-building. Over a century it has been tempered, cauterised of finer sentiment.
Perhaps there exists another tongue in which he might express himself better. Ancient Greek: the Greeks with their subtle, unembarrassed understanding of the ways of the heart. But he must make use of the poor tools at his disposal.
‘I refused because I have not been honest with you, because there is so much that I have not told. I have been a coward. I am not quite sure how to begin.’
Before he can, there is a knock upon the door. Sister Agnes, or Bill, perhaps. For the coward in him it is something of a relief – a little more time in which to think of how to do it.
‘Have you heard the news, old fellow?’ It is Calvert. His relief at the interruption ebbs from him.
‘Just a moment, Lieutenant, if you wouldn’t mind.’
He knows in an instant that it is the wrong thing to have done, pulling rank. Calvert’s face goes very taut. The tell-tale colour appears upon his cheekbones.
‘The thing is, Captain, it’s rather important. I was asked specifically to come and inform you.’
He turns to Nur. With his look, he tries to say, I’m sorry. She gives a small nod.
He turns back to Calvert. ‘What is it?’
Calvert looks scandalised. ‘I cannot say it in front of this woman.’
‘Ah, but I’m sure that you can. I have no concern whatsoever that we are to be betrayed. Either that, you see, or it will have to wait.’ He is almost enjoying himself now, common sense be damned. He cannot understand why he ever tolerated Calvert’s company, even allowing for the fact that at such a time as this beggars cannot be choosers.
‘So be it,’ Calvert says. ‘I suppose it doesn’t signify greatly now, anyway.’ He rocks a little upon his heels. And George feels a sudden trepidation. ‘Well. Our regiment’s got its marching orders – finally, considering some of the chaps went home weeks ago. Time to go home, old chap. Back to our loved ones.’ He leaves a delicate pause, just long enough for George to hear the sound of impending disaster. ‘Back to our wives.’
Of course, it is not the thing he says so much as the way he says it. George sits, stunned, feeling the fact of it pass over him. He looks toward Nur and sees that she knows it too.
Then
He had two weeks’ leave. London was at once miraculously the same and irrevocably changed – the latter, perhaps, because of the change in him. Norton, one of his fellow medical officers, had invited him to a supper in Bloomsbury. It was a revelation. People like this had existed before the war, no doubt, but he had never encountered them then. The women in particular seemed to have come from another planet; the future. They wore clothes that looked foreign – loose, printed fabrics, silk headscarves, gold jewellery that defied any preconceived notions of taste. A couple of the men were conscientious objectors. They gently ribbed Norton, who was their friend, for his ‘damned patriotism’, and spoke of the struggle between classes rather than states. George tried very hard not to appear surprised or offended by any of this. He realised that he had already grown used to the idea of himself as a hero. In the streets he had felt the silent approbation of passersby. Here he felt like a curiosity, rather quaint, even a freak.
He drank more than he ought to have done – it was difficult not to, after the months of relative abstinence – and more than he really wanted to, considering the only drink on offer seemed to be sweet vermouth.
He tried to remind himself that these characters, here, were the exception. He went out onto the small, wrought-iron balcony that looked out over a square of green, diminishing in the dusk to blue.
‘A pipe? How quaint. My father smokes one.’
He turned toward the drawl, and felt something inside him give. ‘Excuse me, madam, but what would you prefer I smoke? An opium pipe might be more to your taste?’
‘Goodness.’ She took a step back. He had seen her inside, holding forth. He saw now that she had a curiously compelling face. The nose a little too long. It lent her a rather aristocratic appearance. Her lips were full, almost bruised-looking. It was the sort of face at which the longer one looks, the longer one needs to look.
‘My apologies,’ she said, silkily. ‘But one has to find an opener, you understand. You looked so stern, scowling out at the world. I had to find a way in.’
Her name was Grace – it didn’t quite fit her. There was something too compliant, too soft. She lived a bohemian life, she told him, proudly, but as she spoke it became clear that her lifestyle, with its freedoms, came from privilege – not the sort of want that one might associate with the word. On closer enquiry a great deal about her seemed similarly counterfeit. Yet where this might have, should have, been a deterrent, he only found her the more intriguing for it.
‘It is so seldom,’ she told him, ‘that one meets a man of good heart, and conscience. One who does what he does out of a real conviction of doing good. So many of them just want to play the warrior, to beat the drum.’
He had felt the words like a kiss.
‘And the conchies here … I’m not so sure that they are any better. One shouldn’t say that of one’s friends, of course, but one can love a friend dearly and also understand that he is a frightful coward. Goodness,’ she put a small white hand – wink of gems – to her mouth. ‘I have become a little too honest. I think that vermouth must be cut with gin.’
She had put a hand on his forearm. It felt like another kiss. More.
A little while later she had stretched herself against a chair like a cat, arms above her head, and he could not help but notice the free movement of the uncorseted breasts beneath the silky stuff of her dress. Everything became very simple. He wanted to take her to bed very much – perhaps never had he felt so strong and uncomplicated a desire in his life. And she seemed to feel the same.
She had made it as plain as could be that she wanted him, too. She had an apartment in town, she told him: her father had bought it for her.
He had vaguely seen Rawlings raise his eyebrows as they left, but had felt no shame. He, too, had become a being driven by self-interest: specifically his desire.
The apartment was a reflection of her person: she had been unable to disguise the fabulous privilege that underpinned it with any trappings of bohemianism.
He could hardly hold himself back; he knew from the beginning that it would be a struggle of will. She tasted of cigarettes and vermouth and rouge. Her mouth became a smear of plum-purple. In the crook of her neck, perfume and sweat. She bit his shoulder, her sharp nails found the skin of his back.
Afterward, she laughed. His head hurt with the force of it: he felt as though he had smoked from an opium pipe. Within a couple of hours he had become obsessed with her. In the morning, as they lay in her great white bed, he had said: ‘I think we should get married.’
She had laughed at him, climbed out of his embrace, and gone to the washstand by the window where she cleansed herself with a sponge – nude, unselfconscious, quite possibly visible from the building opposite or from the street.
‘Darling,’ she said. ‘You cannot ask someone to marry you before breakfast. Besides that, it is ridiculous. I am far too good for you.’
‘I think I might be in love with her.’
Norton had laughed. ‘Not with that one, I hope, for your sake. She’s as mad as a March hare.’
‘I can’t stop thinking about her.’
‘It’s been three days, my friend. There are other sorts of fascination, you know.’
‘I asked her to marry me.’
Norton spat out a mouthful of beer. ‘She didn’t say yes?’
‘No.’
‘Well, thank goodness for that. Thank goodness one of you has some sense.’ He seemed genuinely frustrated, even angry. ‘Go and visit a whore, for God’s sake, like a normal man.
I had you down as an intelligent sort, someone who knows what’s what. I hope for your sake that she does the decent thing and continues to refuse you.’
He looks across at Nur. How can he begin to explain any of it to her? Her face is turned from him; he is powerless in the face of her coolness, her performance of indifference. Because it must be a performance, mustn’t it? He knows that he has no right to want it, but he wants her to care.
He could kill Calvert – he really feels it – in this moment. His hatred for the man is enough that he could do it and not care, would feel only the satisfaction of the act.
It would change nothing. Whatever blame can be laid at the other man’s feet it is only the revelation of the fault, the greater guilt that is his. Now, looking at how he has behaved he is repelled, as he would be by the actions of another man, a stranger. He has always had an idea of himself as somehow inherently good. But if one is to judge the man by the deeds, he does not come out well in this. He wonders now quite how it all came about, almost as though he is not the one who has lived it, who has acted and chosen, and concealed. If he were inclined to pardon himself – which he is not – it might be seen as a series of accidents.
He had spent most of his next leave in Scotland and came to London for the final part, staying in a small hotel in Pimlico. A couple of days spent exploring his old haunts, amazed that both he and the world were so different while they had remained unchanged. There had been a card for him at the hotel when he returned. As soon as he picked up the envelope he had a premonition that it was from her; the flamboyance of the hand, perhaps.
Darling G. Something has come up. We must meet. Take me for supper?
When she arrived she looked better than ever. The new fullness suited her, he thought, especially as a contrast to these pinched times. It was as though she were immune to the war, as though it had been unable to touch her. Irritated though he was with her, her power over him seemed undiminished.
She had two glasses of champagne, and came to the point. ‘Do you know, I rather think we should get married, after all.’