The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  Now we come to the bitter heart of this story, Diane, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you everything yet. You will have guessed already that something definitive, maybe something dreadful, happened to Robert when he came to France as part of the D-Day invasion. Why else would I be here? But, you see, I didn’t find out what it was until many years later in the most unlikely of places – a noisy bar in the heart of Saigon in 1963. If you are to understand why things unravelled the way they did, I have to keep this information to myself for now. You must see things through my eyes. It is the only way we can get to the truth, or at least to my truth. We can never get to Robert’s now. He took it with him. You’d better hope I don’t do the same and drop dead before I get to the end of this missive. I like to think of this, my last work, as a kind of Scheherazade safety net for my increasingly precarious existence. But it’s all in my head. It always is.

  My reticence to fill you in does not just lie in some kind of professional allegiance to a linear narrative, however. I have never set much store by that. I am being sneaky, as all novelists must be. I have to keep you turning the pages. That is always the greatest challenge: to weave a spell so powerful that it withstands all of life’s other distractions. We structure deviously, we hoard information, we use sleight of hand, we manipulate. I’ve done all of this in my books and this time, I have something even more potent to add to the mix. You cannot skip ahead because there is nothing to skip ahead to. You will have to keep opening these yellow envelopes if you want to know the whole truth. I will have to keep filling them. I hope we both do.

  Robert fought his way into France from the beach here at Lion-sur-Mer. He pushed inland with the other Brits, Americans, Canadians, French, the terrified, the clueless, the courageous and the cowardly.

  As ‘our finest generation’ moved forward, inch by painful inch, war’s dominance over the continent shrank, and village by village, town by town, city by city, the end came. Peace arrived like a gentle mist, wispy and insubstantial at first but swelling slowly until you realised it was everywhere and you wondered why you hadn’t noticed its presence before.

  At the time, I knew very little about where Robert was or what he was doing. He had stopped sending letters. We were beyond letters. We no longer had the energy to give voice to our hopes, our fears and our dreams. We were all hoarding our words for the day we would be able to spill them out, face-to-face, all the words that had been smothered for six long years by other implacable noises. We knew it was coming but we no longer dared to believe in the obvious. Besides, the imminent end of the war did nothing to lessen our fear of the imminence of death. Someone has to be the last to die.

  Then, in May 1945, it did stop. Just like that, as though some magnificent muscle-bound hero had finally managed to slam the lid back on the box of buzzing horrors that had burst open in 1939.

  I was lying in bed in Swiss Cottage, staring at the ceiling and wondering if I would ever feel something other than weary, when Michelle knocked on the door. She opened it a few inches and popped her head around. Her face was ashen.

  “It’s over. They just said so on the wireless. Germany has surrendered in France. It’s really the end.”

  We didn’t cheer or laugh. Had I been religious, I might have fallen to my knees but as I was not, silence was the only respectful response. We were saved, delivered finally from ourselves.

  Michelle stepped into the room, loose-limbed and wide-eyed as though she was sleepwalking. I beckoned her over to the bed. She sat awkwardly and then I pulled her down beside me and we lay there, arms around each other, crying into each other’s necks, as the room grew dark. Outside raucous cheers vaulted from house to house, from our street to the next and on and on, maybe to wherever Robert was spending his night. We could hear singing and shouting and all the indistinct high-pitched caterwauling that marks a public celebration.

  “If he’d just hung on for a few more months,” Michelle said. She was no longer crying but the deepest sobs would have been easier to hear than the desolation in her voice.

  Her Joe had been killed in what came to be called the Battle of the Bulge. I have to say, Diane, I cannot bear how we have trivialised this term to mean little more than the willpower needed not to eat too many biscuits. I find the misuse of the language of war deeply offensive. It ages me, I know, but I don’t give a damn. I am outraged when I see the words ‘battle’ and ‘frontline’, ‘taking flak’ and ‘in the trenches’ in financial news today. Some things should be sacredly singular.

  Michelle eventually fell asleep in my arms. When I woke in the morning, she was gone. It was officially VE day and we were all expected to celebrate.

  I didn’t want to be with anyone I knew but neither did I want to be alone. I wanted to mark the day anonymously, free of the weight of love and regret. There was no point going to work as a public holiday had been declared. I wondered idly if I would ever need to go into the Ministry again. Our part of the war was over, even if men, women and children were still dying in sweaty, unfamiliar foreign lands, each last breath creating a universal sigh that would eventually end in an almighty mushroom-shaped exhalation that would silence the guns, all at once, at least for a while. From inside my room, I heard London rejoice – wild cheers echoing among ruined houses, laughter exploding, machine-bursts of song and under it all, the honking of thousands of horns. I went outside and started walking.

  My memories of the rest of that day have a dreamlike quality because reality felt like a dream. How could it be that the war was over? Six years ago we had lost our grip on reality, then the new altered state became normal and now we were being asked to believe that something that seemed so immutable could end. At the stroke of a pen. If that could really be true, then why did it take so long?

  I wouldn’t have believed it if I’d stayed inside but all the shops were decked in red-white-and-blue banners and yards of bunting. I wondered if they’d had the bunting ready. For how long? Days, months or years? People were hugging each other and smiling and crying and shaking their heads. I was wearing my WAAF uniform and I had to keep stopping to be kissed, by men and women, soldiers and civilians. Dogs wore tricolour rosettes and barked at everyone, bewildered by the crowds fizzing along usually quiet streets. There was a giddiness in the air and I fancied I could see it hazing over the city as I looked down from the top of Primrose Hill. But then I thought of Penrose and how he had loved that skyline. I thought of Michelle, sitting at home in her tiny house, realising that the war was over and that I would leave and that then she would be on her own with two fatherless girls and that that would be her life until the end of her time. I thought of Sarah, rosy and drunk and about to die, and all the other people who had ‘bravely given their lives’ by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I retched and ran to the trees at the side and threw up until there was nothing left inside and tears were streaming down my face.

  “Alright, love? Having a bit of a turn there, are we? Need a little help?”

  A wild-haired young man with bulging eyes was leaning against a nearby tree and smoking in the way one does when one has drunk all night. His soldier’s uniform bore the marks of the night’s carousing, peacetime battle scars.

  “I’m fine,” I gasped, wiping the tears from my cheeks. “I think I just threw up the war. It’s just… too bloody much.”

  He laughed, a gentle chuckle that aged him.

  “Too right,” he said. “Here.”

  He held out a hip flask.

  “Take a swig of that. They used to give us rum over there, before the big ones, and if it was good enough for that madness, it’s good enough for this.”

  I took a swig.

  “What’s your name, doll?”

  “Lina.”

  “What’s that short for then?”

  “Nothing. It’s just short for all that is me, I suppose.”

  He laughed again, motioned for the hip flask and took a generous mouthful.

  “You’re a smart one. Well, Lina-short
-for-nothing, let’s go. I’ve a feeling you’ve had a rough time of it these past years. God knows, I have. I reckon we’ve earned this party.”

  I hesitated. Could I bear to be with anyone today? Could I bear to be on the streets, celebrating as though something good had happened instead of something bad just not happening? Could I be with this man when I still didn’t know where Robert was, or when he’d be back or how? Could I bear not to be?

  “What’s your name?” I asked, stalling.

  “Tommy,” he said, laughing. “I’m the original Tommy. Who else would you want to spend today with, right?”

  I laughed and there it was, gurgling up from some deep well inside, a rush of relief and hope and love for the world that was so strong it nearly made me gag again. It really was over.

  I reached for the hip flask.

  “Give me that,” I said. “I hope you have a refill.”

  “You’ll have to catch me first,” he said. “Let’s see what a dinky, little WAAF like yourself can do when the chips are down.”

  He sprinted off down the hill, holding the hip flask aloft and whooping with every stumbling step. A bunch of girls and boys saw him and suddenly they were all running after Tommy, whooping and stumbling and falling and rolling. I ran too, all the way down the hill, faster and faster until I felt like I must definitely fall on my face and I didn’t care at all because it felt so good to just feel afraid of falling.

  After that, we walked through Regent’s Park and Maryle-bone and Mayfair until we got to Buckingham Palace where we joined thousands of people chanting, “We want the king, we want the king.” People in their best hats and suits and soldiers in uniform and children with victory-clean faces and celebratory curls. Everywhere I went, people cheered me and I tried to hold onto the idea that they were only cheering my uniform. I did not want to be cheered. I did not deserve to be cheered. All I had done was not die. That’s all any of us could claim. But my anger subsided because in the end, we were all happy for a good reason.

  There were too many people to count. We were pressed up against each other with barely room to move our arms. I wondered where we would have put those who had died if they had been luckier. We were so many here and each one of us must have had three or four or more ghosts dancing above our heads, cheering and crying because they were happy for us but sad they could no longer fit into this crowd.

  When the King and Queen and their daughters came onto the balcony, it was as though we’d learned nothing. We roared like animals, earth-belly creatures seeing the light for the first time. Then out came Churchill, his hand flashing the victory sign, as bald and stooped and fierce as ever. Another giant roar. I couldn’t help myself, I joined in, feeling as cheap and stupid as I ever had but unable to defy the primeval urge to salute these tiny, powerful deities on their altar in the sky. After that the day seemed to spin faster and faster into the night. Thinking back, I can only summon flashes of unrelated images, blurred and indistinct. Faces swimming out of a background gloom, glittering eyes and wide smiles and bared teeth. But there are other faces too: wide-eyed and confused, tear-stained and haunted. I think one of those faces might be mine.

  I remember sailors and their girls dancing in the fountain at Trafalgar Square and a couple kissing improbably at the top of a lamppost. I was so worried she would drop her handbag. I was swept into a conga line somewhere near the Strand, feeling stupid and then stupidly happy, kicking my legs and grabbing someone’s waist and losing my grip and then running forward, bent double with laughter. I was kissed by soldiers and sailors and Wrens and WAAFs and ATS and policemen. It was crazy and so very unBritish but at some point, I realised I desperately needed to be kissed and to kiss back. I saw young men pulling down advertising hoardings to make bonfires, I saw children waving Union Jacks in the ruins of bombed-out buildings, I saw exhausted men and women, sitting on the pavement, leaning into each other, eyes closed, fast asleep in the middle of the maelstrom. They looked like children as all people do when they sleep. They looked like they might never wake up, lucky things. What a time to fall asleep. If they slept long enough, might these youthful Rip van Winkles forget everything we had seen?

  I lost Tommy after we saw Churchill at Buckingham Palace. He’d been a real gent, shielding me from the worst jostling of the crowd, keeping me topped up with rum or vodka or whatever he managed to get his hands on. The best thing was that he never asked who or when or why. I was just Lina and he was just Tommy and on this day, that was enough. The unbridled euphoria could only be borne if we did not speak of the war. We had to play at being born again on May 8th, newly hatched fledglings with no past and no definite future, just this moment. Many years later, I stumbled across a news report from that day. The authoritative voice of the male presenter ended his narration with these words: “We are living in the midst of many great events. We know that in the days when war seems remote and far away, these will be historic pictures. They will tell another generation how England celebrated Victory in Europe Day.”

  I hope I have given you another perspective, Diane. I hope it is more nuanced than that news report with its rousing tunes and irrepressible sense of triumph, with its inexplicable description of our war as “many great events”.

  CHAPTER 15

  I was demobbed in September, travelling back to my training camp in Cheshire to hand in my uniform and receive my release papers, railway warrants and clothing coupons. A middle-aged man with empty eyes and a limp grip shook my hand and said, bizarrely, “Thank you for coming”. I almost said, “Thank you for having me.” The supper party was over.

  With hindsight, I should have seen that my war was just beginning. I should have remembered Charlotte and Henry but I was unable to hold myself apart from the universal tidal wave of relief. We needed to believe in a happily ever after, if only for a short while.

  Outside the barracks’ gates, girls hugged and cried and stood around as if unsure where to go next. Many had fallen out of touch with the families they would now return to, older and wiser and less biddable. It was such an odd thing to expect – that we would just go back home. After all we had done, and some of these girls had been posted overseas or had flown planes around Britain, we were now expected to slot back into our pre-war roles, as if nothing had happened. It says a lot about society that they expected us to do that. It says more about us that we mostly did just what they expected.

  In a way, it was just a more extreme version of what every woman does today. We, or rather you, because I cannot count myself among these ladies, give birth, nurture the baby and then you are expected to leap into your high heels, get back to work and say not one word. They say women are good at multi-tasking. No wonder. We are required to have multiple personalities just to be what we want to be and to do what we have fought to be allowed to do. Each version of ourselves – mother, carer, careerist, sex toy – can and must take on a unique role and we must be all at the same time. My case is different, of course. I jettisoned several of those roles in 1947.

  Let me try to explain why.

  After I was demobbed, I went home to St Albans to wait for Robert. Charlotte and Henry were a little gaunter, more inclined to pensive silences and uncharacteristically skittish despite the outbreak of peace. We all felt a bit lost in those first weeks and this was their second rebirth. They were, however, delighted to have me home and we settled quickly into a kind of inert routine, waiting for our lives to begin again.

  On a bright October day, we decided to go for a walk on Nomansland Common. It had been an unusually mild autumn, although gales would flare a week later, sweeping the laggard leaves off the trees and speckling the ground with thin branches as though the trees were creating their own confetti to welcome ‘our brave men’ home.

  I still did not know when Robert would return. I knew he was on his way, retracing those costly steps through the shattered lands of Belgium and France, but I was beginning to lose faith that he would ever reach St Albans. I was Penelope, waiting for Odyss
eus and I feared he had found Calypso. As the weeks went by, the euphoria of VE Day faded, forcing me back into the arms of my nemeses: patience and forbearance. I had struggled with these brutal masters even when there was a war raging. I found it almost impossible to bear their strictures now that peace had been declared. I wanted my real life to start. I needed it to begin so that I could be reborn, free from fear and the original sin of my affair. The longer Robert stayed away, the more I feared that I could still face the ultimate retribution for my infidelity. His return would constitute a kind of absolution, I thought.

  Charlotte and I walked together, arms linked. Henry was ahead, swiping at grass heads with the ebony cane he had taken to carrying. The sun was warm on our necks, blackberries winked darkly from the bushes and the leaves crackled under our feet. Out here, you could pretend nothing had happened. Squirrels still scampered up the trees, flinging themselves brazenly from branch to branch; shy blackbirds still loitered in the dank shadows; the wind still nuzzled the dying wild flowers and the wispy grasses; the conkers were still falling. Nature had seen us do our worst and had shrugged her shoulders. Out here, she felt indestructible. But we were fooling ourselves. Nature was putting on a show. She too had been mortally wounded by our war.

  We were all aware of the Rubicon we had crossed in August when the Enola Gay dropped her noxious load onto Hiroshima. For the first time, we saw that we could obliterate the very essence of life, and end time. It is a sublime irony that the plane was named after the pilot’s mother – a giver of life – and the bomb dubbed “Little Boy”. And they say writers are fantasists. We are all, every day, guilty of linguistic hypocrisy. Collateral damage, casualties, carpet bombing. We sanitise what we dare not visualise.