by Chris Jory
‘Get yourself down here at nine and we’ll be there by noon.’
Three hours? Could she really have gone that far?
‘So who then, Norman? Is it her? So far away, three hours by car?’
‘You’ll see when we get there,’ Norman smiled.
Jacob knew it must be her, but Norman would not say, must have felt the name would cause Jacob to shrink away again, like he had since he got home twelve months before, shying away from her, leaving her be. So no confirmation, just anticipation, just bittersweet hope for Jacob, led towards her now, to something he knew he should not do, to be fair to her, better let her go. But now he could not stop himself, the thought of her sucked him in. Twelve months since he had got back, five long years without her, he had lost himself in the interim, found himself again, a version of him, of what he had been, the only version he could be now, the version he did not want her to see. But the pull was there, and so he relented and he loved it again, the thought of her, daring it, daring life to let itself back in, a little miracle to turn him around.
He revved the bike down the hill to Elm Tree Farm and across the yard, Vera at the window, Norman on the doorstep already, dressed for the day in a tweed jacket and tie, and his best brown brogues shone to a shine you could see yourself in.
‘Let’s go, then, Jacob?’
‘Let’s go, Norman.’
They stopped for coffee off the A34, then down through the roads Norman had memorised on the map, the names and numbers, ticking them off as he went, and Jacob sensed the tension in Norman as something neared, the silences lengthening, his eyes fixed on the road. And then the turning, off the main road, through a Surrey village, familiar somehow but from another season, something he had seen before in the dark, in a New Year’s dusk in the war, and then they were pulling up the gravel drive, the brick-built house at the end, four tall chimney stacks sticking themselves into the sky, almost as high as the tops of the trees, and the shimmer of the lake, and then Norman pulling the car down through second and first and coming to a halt, not by the door but away to the side, thirty yards away.
‘But why here, Norman?’ said Jacob, desperate. ‘Why bring me here, to Ralph’s house? I thought it would be her, isn’t it her?’
‘Go on, lad,’ Norman said as he patted him on the knee and the door of the car shifted open. ‘I’ll wait for you here. Take all the time that you need.’
‘Thank you, Norman,’ said Jacob, uncertain, and he stepped out of the car and he felt Norman watching him, watching him walk across the gravel now, towards the house, painful, limping, something broken that has been carelessly repaired by hands whose heart was not in it, bodged together, so no one could fix him now, not even her, whatever Norman might say, and certainly not Ralph, so why bring him here? To confront him? To forgive? Jacob was wiping away his hope now, the hope that had sprung from reunion, but with it the guilt was going too, the guilt he had felt at the thought of her, of reopening the wounds she would have healed, the ones she must have buried since he had gone, covered them over with scabs, cracked and weeping things to pick at slowly down the years until they really began to heal, only for him to go and lose his discipline and go and see her, to pick them off again and set the wounds weeping. But the problem now was Ralph, sprung upon him suddenly it seemed. Perhaps it would be better this way, the way Norman had planned it, no time to brood before the reunion, no time to plan what to say to the man who had left him there, left him burning in the plane, his plane, the skipper’s ship, burning by the hatch over Dortmund, Jacob burning himself away to nothing at someone else’s post before he left the dead ones to it and jumped. Then four years of absence, an absence within himself, nothing there, then his own re-emergence, something peeking out again, but now suddenly Ralph, the prospect of him, thirty yards away, behind that heavy door. And what to say? What could he say? I forgive you, skip, for what you did? I forgive you for leaving me this way, burnt away now while you got off Scot free, sailed away down, left me there? Oh yes, I loved the flying, loved the Lanc in my hands, and I pushed you away, I wanted to save you. But you didn’t have to go, did you Ralph, you didn’t have to leave me, not when it really came to it, not at the end? Twenty yards now, limping in, limping towards the door. So let me see, how to do this, nice and direct perhaps … Ralph, it’s me. Do you remember? Your old mucker. Thank you bomb-aimer, top job, let’s go home, what you always said. Yes, Ralph, let’s go home, I’ll take you there, like I always did. You sure made it didn’t you, Ralph, you sure made it home? And a lovely house it is, the lake at the back, the punts where we sang away our hearts that New Year’s Eve, counting ourselves down to nothing together, the punts lashed up, holding us all as one, you and me and Charlie, George, Jim, Roland, all of them, all gone now, all burnt to fuck as Beauty went down. Ten yards, Ralph, slowly does it, let me think now … five yards … and what should I say, when I see you, what words will come? Will you recognise me, when you look me in the eye, will you see those nights in me, the ones we spent together, or will the nights we’ve spent apart since then blind me from you? Your heavy door’s in front of me now. Oak, your father said, oak like us then, young and strong, indestructible, warping now, more than a hint of rot around the edges. Will your father be here too, the surgeon with those photos that he left on the desk that night, the burns victims he treated, carefully rebuilding them in a way that the German didn’t bother rebuilding me? Perhaps that’s Norman’s plan, perhaps it’s your father he has brought me to see, a magician, a reconstructionist, someone to put me back together again now, properly this time where the German would not. So I’m at your door now Ralph, alive still, oceans of time before me, but all alone now, alone in all this time, time that life will not snatch away from me as it threatened to do any day back then when I had it all, everything I needed, companionship and love, and too little time to live it in, too little time replaced by too much now, nothing to fill it with, no one left to fill the void. Now the heavy iron knocker, the one shaped like a fox’s head with the worn-down nose where people have gripped it, rammed it down against your door, my hand on it now, lifting and falling, calling you, Ralph, calling you now.
Jacob waited on the step, then lifted the knocker again and let it fall, more gently now, uncertain. Then a noise inside, someone coming down the stairs, and a familiar sound in the hall, that cough, the one he recognised from all those nights he had spent with the person who coughed that way in the war. The cough stilled him, and he glanced back at Norman in the car, looking, peering out through the rain-specked windscreen at the figure on the doorstep, the boy he loved, waiting, watching for the horrified reaction, another potential sin for Norman to judge her by.
Then the door was open and she was there.
She looked at Jacob, right in the eyes. And she knew before he spoke, he didn’t have to say a word.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Jacob?’
‘Yes, Rose. What on earth are you doing here?’
She paused, began to speak, stopped.
‘May I come in?’ he said.
She stepped back and let him into the hall. He remembered the room off to the left with the leather chairs, the study to the right and the Victorian oils and the desk where the photos had been that New Year’s Eve, left by Ralph’s father in an attempt to dissuade.
‘Please,’ said Rose. ‘Come through into the kitchen. I think I have to sit down.’
They sat at the table and stared at each other.
‘My poor dear,’ she finally said. ‘What has happened to you?’
‘Landed myself in a spot of bother, that’s all …’
He tried to smile but no longer had the face with which to do it, just a wrinkling of the thing that served as a nose, the suggestion of a twinkle in an eye, the old Jacob in there somewhere, the canary trapped inside its cage. She saw him looking at the thing on the window sill, the Victorian candle-holder from the mill-house near Cambridge.
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br /> ‘Our light,’ he said, picking it up, putting it back again. ‘No candle in it now?’
‘I don’t really use it any more. Haven’t done for years.’
Then his eyes were on the photo in the silver frame, just as she was reaching for it. Too late, so she left it there and paused.
‘Not that?’ he said.
She looked at him.
‘Not that? You and Ralph?’
‘Jacob, I’m so sorry. If I had known …’
‘But Rose …’
‘Why didn’t you come sooner? If only I’d known …’
‘I couldn’t have come. And it’s better this way, really it is.’
‘You say that like you really mean it.’
‘I do.’
‘But if I’d known, I would never have … things could have been so different. They would have been, for sure.’
‘It would have been no life for you. Not now, not with me this way.’
‘Let me make you something? Tea? Are you hungry? There’s some cake …’
‘Maybe a cup of tea, thank you.’
She put the kettle on and stood to hide it as the flames licked its base. Then the kettle’s shrill whistle, a scream. They took their mugs out into the garden and sat beneath the bower where Rose had held him that night in the war.
‘Do you remember when we last sat here?’ she said. ‘That New Year’s Eve? I think of you every time I sit here.’
His face moved, that twinkle in the eye again, rattling his cage.
‘Yes, Rose. How could I forget that? There’s a whole lot I don’t remember, but I remember that night. I remember the good bits mainly, you know, less of the bad. I don’t remember much about the night we came down.’
‘Ralph’s told me some of it.’
‘Yes, I expect he has. I woke up in hospital a month later, feeling like bloody death. They’d smashed me all about when I landed, the townsfolk. Can’t blame them, I suppose. The military saved me, so the doctors said, got me in the nick of time, carted me off somewhere, then into hospital. Couldn’t remember my name, some bugger had stolen my dog-tags when they tried to lynch me. Tommy Bomber, the surgeon called me, wrote it on a sign above my bed. Kept telling me about his family in Hamburg, how they’d lived there until that time in ’43 when we smashed up the bloody place. He lived through it, none of the others did. Decided he’d make me pay, could have rebuilt my face better than this but didn’t. Said I’d dropped anonymous bombs from twenty thousand feet, now I could live without a face.’
‘Bastard.’
‘Well he was actually quite a cultured man. An amateur poet too, he said, spoke excellent English. Just hated my guts. He gave me a letter before he went – bit flowery if you ask me. I’ll show it to you sometime, I’ve got it at home. I read it nearly every day. I’ve been back a year now, you know.’
‘A year? But the war’s been over for five.’
‘Couldn’t remember my name, could I? When the real Tommies came in April ’45, found me in the hospital, they couldn’t work out who I was and I couldn’t tell them. They knew I was RAF, bits of my uniform hadn’t burned, but Tommy Bomber’s not much of a name to find yourself by, is it? Well they sent me back to Blighty anyway. In a Lanc, of all things, with a load of other boys, POWs they’d picked up on the road. I was in hospitals around London for years, then a convalescence home. Then bits began to come back, broken memories, names, then my own. They came down to get me, Norman and Vera. Wanted to check me out before mother and father saw me. Father’s heart’s not what it was.’
Rose reached out a hand and touched his face with her fingertips and he closed his eyes and sensed her on his skin, skin that could barely feel, then her breath on him, up close, and he opened his eyes and she was there, and she kissed him, on one cheek, lingering there, uncertain, then the other, his forehead, the thing like a nose, then she took his hands and lifted them to her and kissed them too. Over and over again.
‘You look wonderful, Rose,’ said Jacob. ‘Better than ever, you really do.’
‘Jacob, I love you still. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Thank you, Rose. I mean, after so long, that’s very kind of you.’
They sat together as the drizzle cleared and a watery sun lit up the clouds.
‘I can leave Ralph,’ she finally said. ‘He’d understand. I’m sure he would.’
‘No, Rose.’
‘Yes, Jacob. Why not? We didn’t know. If we’d known, it would never have been.’
‘No, Rose. You can’t. It’s better this way.’
‘Then why did you come?’
‘I had to see you. I held out as long as I could. A whole year. But I couldn’t wait any longer. I’m sorry if I’ve caused you inconvenience. I should never have come.’
‘No, Jacob. Don’t think that. Please don’t think that.’
When he left she watched him walk across the gravel towards the car where Norman stood, leaning now against the passenger door, waiting for the boy. He put his arm on Jacob’s shoulder and Rose saw him saying something, then looking towards her as he held the door open and he helped Jacob in as the rain started up again. She closed the door and leant against the wall and heard the tyres on the wet gravel as the car pulled away down the drive. She placed her hands upon her belly, held them against the bump, the growth, the growing little piece of Ralph inside of her. Her back slid down the wall and she slumped on the floor and pulled her knees up into her chest and she felt her body lift and fall as she wept but there was no one there to hold her.
***
Rose hacked furiously at the mulberry bush with her clippers. She had found another empty bottle hidden away beneath its branches and the bush was paying for it now. Ralph would be home soon, and then she would give him what for. Or perhaps she would ignore it as she usually did, for what good was intervention when things were so wrong? No, she would leave things undecided until he walked through the door, would let her mood decide, her heart would tell her what to do, the usual way. She stopped her hacking and picked at the place where the thorns had got her the previous day, picked off the scab. Then she looked at her watch. He would have landed by now, tucking his usual purchases – a bottle of whisky, a bottle of gin, and two hundred cigarettes – into his suitcase and catching a taxi from the usual place, the driver pointing the bonnet towards the Surrey countryside.
Ralph had been with the airline for two years now and Rose knew he was valued for his calm authority in difficult flying conditions and regularly reproached for his love of a drink or two. His bosses had warned him the previous year that the latter must be curtailed. She had found their letter, hidden away in his desk, and he sought help at a clinic with some success, but the reprieve could only be temporary and when he was off duty for a few days she knew he would be back at the cabinet and half-empty bottles would find their way into the unlikeliest of places, under the bushes by the patio, hung overboard from one of the old punts on the lake by a long length of fishing line so that it drifted concealed in the water – chilled and ready to serve – or behind a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare on the top shelf in his father’s old study.
Rose heard Ralph’s taxi approaching now along the avenue of trees and then the twist of his key in the heavy oak door. From where she stood out of sight in the kitchen she could smell the lilies he had sent her the previous day, the usual peace-offering ahead of his return, their perfumed pink fronds bowed over the side-table on which they sat in their vase in the light airy hall. Two or three flies buzzed about in the sunlight that was streaming in through the door at the end. Off to one side was the oak-panelled study lined with books. On the other lay the sitting room, with a leather armchair each side of the fire where they sat on winter evenings when he wasn’t flying. His frequent trips did not bother her now, she had been used to far worse in the war, and she had recently read that commercial aviation was even safer than travelling by car. It was the motorbikes that most unnerved her now, even if when she was
younger she had liked to ride at speed, sitting behind him with her arms round his chest and the wind in her hair as they flew along country roads together. In the year after the war, he had made frequent trips to see her, his behaviour somehow dutiful, harbouring an obligation the reason for which she could not quite perceive, and she had sensed in him something lost and alone, something that reminded her of Jacob – perhaps it was the way he spoke about what they had done in the war, the language the men shared, the kites and the prangs and the wizard shows, and that look in their eyes sometimes, that faraway look. This comfortable familiarity hung its sticky web around her and though she pushed the spider away it was inevitable, the first fleeting kiss, then the longing – for Jacob or something that somehow resembled him – and the guilty relief when she heard the engine returning again the following week, revving up the engine of her heart, stoking it with fuel, low-grade fuel but fuel all the same, and she ignored the disapproving looks of Alfred and Elizabeth from across the street and Vera’s pointed questions, and Norman’s absolute refusal to see her, to let her set foot near Elm Tree Farm. And when she came down to talk to Vera one day, Norman answered the door and spat out the words, ‘So soon? How can you forget Jacob so soon?’ and he slammed the door shut in her face.
‘I haven’t forgotten him,’ she said when Vera came to see her later. ‘That’s just the point, I can’t forget him, I have to fill the void and Ralph is the closest I’ll ever get to being with Jacob again.’
Now Rose heard Ralph pushing the door open, then the sound of him placing his case on the floor in the hall where he always left it, his footsteps past the lilies, and then he was in the room and Rose was there, in a worn-out summer dress and a hat and a bunch of fresh-cut flowers in her hands, held in front of her like a wedding posy or a wreath.
She was still young until you got up close and saw the lines that life had left upon her face, the Ganges-delta of creases around each eye, a little map of sadnesses etched out by the erosive power of tears.