I wanted to hug him forever so that he would never need to feel like this again – especially not about something as unworthy as this down-at-heel teahouse. The impossibility of it made me feel nauseous.
He told me he’d been among the last soldiers to leave the beach. They’d been held up on their way to Dunkirk by streams of refugees and a ferocious air bombardment. They nearly missed the flotilla.
“A lot of lads were killed on the way. I don’t know how to describe it, Lina. The whole thing is so surreal. It’s like we don’t have a language for this. How on earth can I make you understand? Especially here.”
“Please try,” I begged. “I want to understand, Robert. I really feel we need me to understand. If we’re to get through this together, then you have to try to tell me.”
You see, Diane, I did have good intentions then. I did want to share his burdens. It became so complicated later.
“Okay. Maybe if I try to tell you just one thing.”
He took a breath.
“I’ll have a go at describing the attacks on the way to Dunkirk. It happens like this: You hear the plane, you fling yourself into the nearest ditch or if you can’t find one, you just hug the ground, pushing and pressing down with every muscle. It’s like your body thinks that if you just try hard enough, you might sink out of sight. The bullets whine and the shells hiss and the noise is like nothing you’ve ever heard. Like a thousand damned souls screaming. The bullets whistle so close you feel like you’re dying again and again. Even when they don’t hit you, you think they have and you wait to die. And then it stops and you get up and you realise that you’re standing there because Jimmy isn’t. He’s lying at your feet but it could just as easily have been the other way around. It would be just as meaningful and just as meaningless. I hadn’t realised that before. How thoughtless it would all be. I assumed we’d be more… active. I thought we’d have some say in it but we don’t. Nothing we do matters in the end. I hadn’t realised how random it would all be. Silly of me, I suppose.”
He shook his head as though he still could not grasp the concept.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him as he talked, his words running faster and faster as his mind rewound. I feared that if I blinked, he might disappear. And then there was his voice. Robert always had a way of speaking that made his listener feel as though this was what they were born to do – to hear this handsome man with his measured speech delivered in a rich, deep voice. Now, his intensity had a raw edge that was even more mesmerising. I could no more stop listening than stop breathing.
“Somehow we got to the beach and then we had to wait again and they were still shelling us and firing at us and then I might’ve blacked out for a few hours. I was so hungry and so thirsty and it was so noisy with the planes coming over and strafing and bombing the sand and the sea. People were shouting orders and screaming prayers and cursing. I shut down. My brain couldn’t take any more. I must’ve slept, right there in the hole we’d dug in the sand. The next thing I remember is running into the waves and flinging myself over the side of a small fishing boat. Two other lads climbed up after me. We fell onto the deck and then we just lay there. We couldn’t do a thing. I didn’t even say thank you to the captain. Big, bearded older man with a medal on his heavy jacket. Must’ve fought in the Great War. He’d the look of someone who’d seen it all before: he didn’t even flinch when a shell landed right in front of us, showering us all with water and bits of whatever was in the water where it hit. I caught him looking at us a few times. He didn’t look happy or sad. He didn’t congratulate us or pat our backs or even smile. That’s how I knew he’d seen war himself. He understood. I shut my eyes and blocked out the sound and the screams and the dead, dull noise the bullets make when they hit water. I’ve never felt so tired, Lina. I swear that if I’d have died then, I’m not sure I would’ve even noticed.”
He tried to force a smile.
“Somehow the gloomy captain got us out of that mess and into the open sea. He transferred us onto a military ship and next thing I knew we were in Dover and people were cheering like we were heroes. And then they put us straight on a train for Reading. We got some strange looks I can tell you when we got off the train here. We hadn’t even washed. A bunch of wide-eyed boys, blood stains on their shirts, wild hair, filthy from the mud and the sand and the sea. A lad next to me on the train had a piece of seaweed sticking out of his collar. When I pointed to it, he just took it out, looked at it for a long moment and then slowly put it in his mouth and began to chew. He was eating seaweed, Lina. Can you imagine?”
Later, we went to a nearby hotel and booked in for the night. I slipped the plain gold band I’d bought for such eventualities onto my left hand but the receptionist clearly couldn’t have cared less. The hotel was too close to the train station for fusty morals to be a consideration by 1940.
We spent the rest of our time together in bed, rediscovering each other, mapping the changes that eight months of war and absence had wrought on our bodies. Robert was leaner, there were hollows under his ribs, his legs were hard-packed muscle all the way along. There was a new desperation to his lovemaking. He did not take his time. I suppose he thought someone had taken it already. I too felt under pressure. I wanted to get to the end so that I would know that I could still excite him. But then when he had come, all too soon, I felt as though I’d been cheated. To be more accurate, I felt as though we’d been cheated. This desperation, this frenzy, it was not us. It was what the war had done to us. It was false, distorted. It made me want to cry.
“Sorry, I’m so sorry,” Robert muttered as he fell back onto the pillows. He shook his head. “I’ve been dreaming about this moment for months. I wanted it to be perfect.”
I stroked his hair but said nothing. This was no time for platitudes. It would be insulting to us both.
“I missed you so much, that’s the thing,” Robert said. “I just can’t control it.”
“It won’t always be this way,” I said. “We won’t always be this way. We just have to see it out.”
Robert sighed again and raised himself onto his elbow. He looked down at me, tracing his finger around my face, under my eyes, around my nose and across my cheekbones as though his touch was bringing me to life, as though he was my own Geppetto.
“I worry so much about you here. Anything could happen and I’m stuck over there, barely able to keep myself alive, never mind do anything at all to protect you. It’s all wrong. They say we have to protect our women and children but then they take us away and make us fight in another country. Don’t get me wrong, Lina. I understand the reasons. I know we have to beat Fascism. This is a fight worth fighting but sometimes I get so angry I can’t breathe, or see, or move. I just have to sit, blind and furious, hoping that nothing will happen until the rage, or whatever it is, passes.”
I pulled him down so that we lay face-to-face, staring into each other’s eyes. I kissed him slowly. His lips curved under mine.
“I love you, my gorgeous Gertrude,” he whispered.
We lay like that until it was time for him to go back to the barracks. I helped him dress, holding out his shirt and then turning him so that I could fasten the buttons.
“You don’t have to do this. You can stay in bed,” he said. “Fall asleep so that I can carry that image with me.”
“No, I want to help,” I replied. “You can easily call up a picture of me sleeping. You were always the first awake in Oxford, remember? No, I want you to remember me helping you. Every time you button your shirt, know that I would do it for you a million times if I could. Feel my fingers. Here. And here. And here.”
I started to tickle him, something he always hated, and he backed away, laughing as he tried to grab my hands.
I hate goodbyes and I will always try to lower the tone. Remember, Diane, I’d had nearly a year of learning how to smother any pain in fake cheer, vulgarity or profanity. We were all getting good at it. I couldn’t help myself. If I was to say what I really thought a
s Robert prepared to leave, I would break both our hearts. And what good would that do. We were fighting for freedom and we were not yet free to feel, not free to love and certainly not free to give voice to our deepest fears. We censored ourselves so that we could stay alive. Loose lips could sink more than just ships.
I held it together until the door closed behind him. Then I cried for hours, tears of relief, and anger, and frustration. I slept fitfully, waking to find the world had not ended, I was still alive and I was expected back in London.
That is how the rest of the war passed for Robert and me; long, terrifying absences punctuated by brief, frantic, unsatisfactory reunions.
After Dunkirk, Robert was based in Aldershot for a few months but then he was sent overseas again, first to North Africa, later to Italy and then back for a few months before D-Day. I saw him twice in 1942, twice in 1943 and three or four times in 1944, before he left for France and the final push.
During those years, he grew leaner and harder. I watched him struggle to hold onto his hope, his humour and his belief that there could be anything beyond this war. We laughed about his inexplicable ability to endure every campaign without a scratch but eventually the joke wore thin and felt dangerous, as though we were daring the gods to do their worst. The other soldiers called him The Untouchable and, as the years went by, I did feel that Robert could be touched by less and less. He laughed less, he cried less, he was less thankful. Every lucky escape just condemned him to another day.
When his mother died in February 1944, he was granted compassionate leave to attend the funeral. We drove down to Felixstowe in my father’s car. Robert took the wheel and barely said a word, except to ask me occasionally if I was cold or if I would like to have a nap. To be honest, I was afraid to sleep. Afraid of what this silent, sombre man might do if I didn’t keep my eyes fixed firmly on his face or on the white-knuckled hands gripping the steering wheel. I finally understood what Charlotte was always looking for in Henry’s face – early signs of a realisation that enough was enough.
Felicity Stirling was buried next to her husband in a gorse-studded cliff-top cemetery that seemed to be tilting towards the sea. Her brothers stood gaunt and grim in dark coats and hats under the low sky while Robert dropped a handful of earth onto her coffin. Nobody spoke apart from the vicar, whose words were torn from his lips by fierce winds before they could register with the small congregation. It was probably just as well. What could he say?
As we walked back to the car afterwards, Robert finally spoke.
“It’s so odd to find death still has some dominion here. That we still have rites and prayers and ceremonies to mark the moment. But then I suppose Mother’s death was different. There was time to prepare. She wrote to me a few weeks ago, telling me that she didn’t have long. I didn’t realise how short it would be though.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. “I could have gone to see her for you.”
“She begged me not to tell anyone. I think she was embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed? Why on earth would she be embarrassed?” “Oh, you know Mother,” Robert said and the flicker of a smile crossed his face. “She felt there was a certain lack of decorum in dying in such a trivial way during such difficult times. She was embarrassed by the banality of it. I honestly think she would have preferred to be killed during an air raid. She was a stickler for propriety. A time for everything and all that.”
I laughed tentatively and he joined in and then we dissolved into hysterics, giggling and gasping until we were breathless and clinging to each other with tears running down our cheeks as the wind roared around us.
The rest of the day was devoted to the polite tedium that accompanies ordinary death. I did not get a chance to really talk to Robert again and the next day, he left soon after dawn to rejoin his unit. It was probably best as I had no idea how to help him through his sorrow. At some point, you become anaesthetised to grief. If only temporarily. I was also ashamed and shame is a great silencer.
My suffering during the war was nothing as compared to Robert’s but it was not empirically nothing. I learned, unwillingly and with little grace, how to endure the endless waiting. During those years, like so many others, I lived for letters. As long as Robert’s letters kept coming, I could wait in hope. Those little white envelopes that he always addressed to Lina ‘Gertrude’ Rose and decorated with a small sketch of a lighthouse on a pile of rocks. I read them hungrily, desperate to get to the signature at the end, that expansive ‘R’ and the crumbled scrawl that led to the dominant ‘t’. I would feel my shoulders relax, my breath return as I finished, at last truly believing that he was really alive, or at least had been alive when he wrote those lines. Those insubstantial pieces of paper were my lifeline even though the voice on the page became less and less familiar as the years passed. It was such a long war, Diane. So impossibly long.
CHAPTER 12
Today, it is raining. I feel invigorated sitting here, listening through the open windows to the steady pulse of drops hitting the bone-dry ground. I fancy I can see the flowers stretching a little higher, delighted with this unexpected bounty. There is a stone bird bath outside the window and now that it is full – I am afraid I neglected it since my arrival – dull chiffchaffs and sprightly blue tits are frolicking around, flapping their tiny wings and bobbing their heads like sages on steroids. I’m sitting here at the dining table, diluting my slight hangover with black coffee and wondering vaguely whether there is any point to this story I am telling you. Is this whole exercise just a brush to sweep the minutes along? They will pass anyway, without any help from me. They are passing faster and faster each day.
So much of life and art is silencing those pernicious internal voices that prate on about how futile all existence is, how pointless all effort. As a writer, I am an expert in the willing suspension of common sense. We all have to be but writers more than most. If we dared to acknowledge the fundamental pointlessness of our lives and of our work, the world would be a seething ball of fury or a place of utter stillness, devoid of art. There would be two choices: to rage or collapse. Through a monumental collective suspension of rationality, we do neither. We refuse the evidence because we yearn to survive.
Before I boarded the ferry to come here, I spent a day walking around some of my old haunts in London. I can’t quite manage the trek to the top of Hampstead Heath these days – the spirit may be willing but my knees have other ideas – so instead I hobbled to the top of Primrose Hill. It’s relatively easy if you come in from Swiss Cottage and take the gentle, meandering paths through the trees, the ones the serious walkers and joggers avoid. It was a cold, grey day but the top of the hill was still busy with tourists, all flapping, outstretched arms, flashing cameras and the gaiety that comes from having broken free from the chains of daily routine. I eased myself onto a bench, looking down at the zoo in Regent’s Park and beyond to the jagged skyline of a city that once doubted its survival and now celebrates its continuance with an ever more frenzied rush to evolve, to push out and up.
Below me, the Snowdon Aviary spread its mesh-and-aluminium wings above the trees and the half-hidden sluggish canal with its grass-topped barges and tough city-slicker swans. I could hear the screeching of the Aviary’s ibis, cranes and egrets. I saw their exotic silhouettes flitting back and forth behind the mesh. I have always loved the view from Primrose Hill, even during the war. I would sometimes sit on the hill and watch the German planes roar over the city, bombs head-over-heeling from their bellies like huge raindrops. It was such a colourful, somehow seductive, spectacle: the sun glinting on the windows and wings of the weaving, whirling planes; the yellow noses of the Messerschmitts, flak rippling across the sky like unfurled party streamers, barrage balloons burning and the criss-cross of brilliant white contrails, like piping on a blue birthday cake. Then later, oily smoke swallowing the sky above the docks; planes spinning down like so many flaming Icaruses; and the white pinpricks of incendiary bombs sparkling like stars that
had tumbled to earth.
There was a terrifying, awesome beauty in the destruction. I knew as I was watching that people were dying below me, cut down because they lost in the daily lottery that was life then, but I would have known that too if I had been hiding in the shelter in Michelle’s backyard, my ears full of vaselined cotton wool. Watching the destruction play out in all its dreadful beauty from the top of Primrose Hill was more honest and less frightening than sitting in the dark, hearing directionless booms and thuds and truncated screams. Was it wrong to hold both awed admiration and fear in my heart? I am not the only one. Soldiers in the Great War marvelled at the stark beauty of skeletal trees rising above rigid waves of muddy ground that glowed red in the flash of flares and exploding shells. Very little of life is either/or.
You may be raising your eyebrows at my callousness. Hold your fury, Diane. Worse is to come. This is perhaps the hardest part of my story. And yet it is not the reason for everything. I can’t believe that. But there is a voice that whispers, has always whispered: if I hadn’t done what I did, if I hadn’t let guilt poison my heart, would Robert still be here? I no longer have much to look forward to but the prospect of that voice falling silent one day soon is truly exciting. I yearn for it to stop.
The rain is still beating down. The elements will be of no help to me today, I fear. I can hardly pretend I need a walk to clear my mind. At my age, pneumonia would probably be the price of such folly. The weather will offer me no reprieve. There is no one to take this cup from me. I filled it and I must drink it and it is already five to midnight.
What can I tell you about my time in London during the Blitz that you will not have heard before, Diane? There are never any new stories, of course. We can only tell the old ones, reshaped and refracted through our own unique gaze. Like everyone else, I saw pulverised buildings, dead bodies and severed limbs. Dreadful at first, your stomach churns, you throw up and then within a week, or maybe two, it is no longer dreadful. Worse, it becomes tedious.
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