The silence grew. He stared at me for a while. I avoided his eyes. He finally looked down again at his paper and turned the page.
“There’s a report here about the Nuremberg trials,” he said. “They’re trying the Nazi doctors now. The details are horrible. It’s almost enough to make you believe again that what we did was right. Of course, these people had to be defeated. They were the face of pure evil. What they did to the poor people in those camps… it defies belief.”
I too had read the stories, secretly, sneaking newspapers home in my handbag and reading the articles in the bathroom because I was afraid of upsetting Robert. Such a silly, girlish deception.
“But I wonder, was it as simple as good versus evil?” he went on. “Even knowing what we know now. When I think what it took to defeat the Nazis, I wonder. I’m not just talking about lives. It’s the principles we squandered, the lines we crossed, the destruction we meted out, the future we locked ourselves into – all because we told ourselves, or were told, that it was the only way to end the horror. Were we right? Maybe we should be on trial too.”
He paused and ruffled his hair with his hand, as though the action could somehow release the answer from wherever it was hiding. I said nothing.
“I just can’t get my head around it, Lina. I was able to put up with all of it, most of it, until the very end because I believed in the cause. I like to think of myself as educated but perhaps I was blindly following an ideal that was simply not true, that we adopted to make it all bearable. To ensure our own individual survival, every one of us. I don’t know how to measure if what we did was ultimately worth it. Or whether it was ultimately forgivable. Even if it was, who on earth should we seek forgiveness from now?”
I took his hands in mine.
“We have to forgive ourselves, Robert. We have to move on. You cannot look back, darling. None of us can. There are no answers there, only questions. If you just repeat the questions, you’ll go mad. The questions can do no good now.”
He smiled sadly.
“The problem is I can’t go forward until I have the answers, Lina. It’s like I need to know that what we did was justified. Because if it wasn’t, we’re just killers. As bad as the Gestapo, as bad as the Nazis. How can we go forward if our entire self-knowledge is built on a lie? I saw things, Lina. I did things. It is not enough to have survived. It is maybe too much.”
I opened my mouth but never got to say what I was going to because at that moment, Diane, you started crying. I bent to pick you up and when I turned back to the table, Robert was signalling for the bill.
“Anyway,” he said after he paid and was folding the paper to put in his pocket, “I mainly bought this to look for a job. We can’t live off my mother’s money forever. I need to do something else.”
We walked home together through the snow, shuffling like old people, our faces too cold to speak. There was, in any case, nothing to say. I was not going to ask him what he had seen or what he had done. Those of us who were still alive in 1947 were all guilty of surviving. That fact alone was enough to deal with without having to rake over the embers and dig up the bones. That is what I thought then. That is why, even if you had not cried at that moment, I was going to shut Robert down, pull the brakes on his train of thought. I was too young and too stupid and too self-obsessed to realise that he was looking to confess his sins to the one person he believed would still love him. I failed Robert that day and he did not bring up the subject again in the few months that remained to him.
CHAPTER 18
On Wednesday, September 10th that same year, I woke to find myself alone in our bed. Robert must have left already even though it was still early and I could hear no noise coming from your room next-door. I lay there, watching dust motes dance through the golden rays piercing our thin curtains, revelling in the fact that I felt rested and relaxed. Your colic had begun to ease around March and you had grown into a bubbly, capricious one-year-old with a mop of golden curls bouncing above a pair of fierce eyes. As your tummy settled and I gradually caught up on my lost sleep, my despondency lifted. That’s all it took. It seems absurd but it’s the truth: the worst winter of the 20th century came to an end and my child’s stomach settled and I reclaimed my identity and my sanity.
I was not entirely cured, of course. I still felt on edge and every crying bout sent me into a panicked spin, terrified that the colic was back. There was also Robert. It was clear that whatever was goading him was not letting up. In April, he started working at a law firm in Watford. Despite not having finished his degree, he was allowed to research cases and offer advice. I hoped this new venture would reignite the spark that had been extinguished by the war. I thought naively that being out of the house, mixing again with other men and becoming involved in the humdrum legal affairs of our corner of Hertfordshire would ground him. But if anything, he became more distant, less engaged. I don’t know how he behaved at work. I never met any of his colleagues. I can imagine why. The light-hearted, funny student who swept me off my feet in Oxford had quietly slipped away, leaving a shell of a man with only a passing interest in the world in which he found himself. He was not often a jolly companion.
The depression that tore your father apart was not a typical mental illness, as we might understand it today. It was contextual rather than chemical. The whole nation was suffering from a version of it as the 40s rolled on with the rationing and shortages and the physical reminders that war had changed everything forever. You mustn’t worry about a genetic predisposition for depression, Diane. It only just occurred to me last night that I might be frightening you with this story. A depressed father and a cruel mother. What a family legacy. But don’t worry. I believe in nurture over nature every time. And in any case, what happened to us did not come from within.
I finally roused myself and went downstairs. I put the kettle on the stove and then I heard you gurgling. I remember smiling as I looked up at the ceiling, imagining you on the other side, arranging your teddies into a line as you did each morning before we brought them downstairs for breakfast.
I made tea and went to get you. As I turned to the stairs, an envelope on the hall table caught my eye. I was sure it hadn’t been there the night before. It was yellow and there was a drawing of a lighthouse on the front. But there was no light shining from the lantern room and the sky around it was black.
For a terrible moment, I wondered frantically if I had dreamt the end of the war. But no, this was real tea in my mug. I was in our house, in Folly Lane. I could still hear you gurgling, louder now, demanding attention. I picked up the letter. A single word: Lina.
I sat on the bottom stair, the letter clutched in my hand. What was this? Had he left me? I slid my shaking finger under the fold and pulled out a postcard. I saw the back first. On it, Robert had written:
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
On the other side, there was a black-and-white aerial view of a town dominated by a magnificent church topped by an ornate spire. I had never seen the place before and had to turn the card over again to see if there were any clues. The photo was of Caen in 1929. Why would Robert have left this to me? I knew he had fought around Caen and that the town had been heavily bombed after D-Day but I still couldn’t fathom the meaning. But the words from Edward Thomas’ Lights Out had left me trembling with fear. I knew how the poem ended and now I mouthed the final lines:
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.
Your gurgling had turned into impatient cries so popping the card into the pocket of my dress, I ran up the stairs, grabbed you from your cot, threw a coat on you and raced downstairs to get the pram. I half-walked, half-ran to my parents’ house. I didn’t know where else to go. I was filled with the deepest sense of fo
reboding, more terrifying even than the endless, suffocating anxiety I had felt all those years when Robert was fighting abroad.
By the time I got to Hatfield Road, tears were streaming down my face and my breath was coming in childish gasps. You stared at me from the pram, eyes like blue pools under your white bonnet. I kept repeating: “It’ll be okay, darling. It’ll be okay” but it was a pointless mantra. There was a heavy stillness in the air that spoke of an unbearable absence.
Charlotte opened the door as I ran up the path.
“My God, Lina, what’s happened?”
I fell into her arms, sobbing like a child. I couldn’t speak. I just took the postcard out of my pocket and gave it to her. She looked at it, took the pram into the hallway, picked you up and led the way into the kitchen.
When you were in your high chair, demolishing a biscuit, she sat down at the kitchen table and read the postcard.
“Is this his own poem?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“And Caen? Why Caen?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, Charlotte, but he fought around there after D-Day. He never talked much about it though. I don’t know what this means.”
To my eternal shame, Diane, I was already trying to absolve myself in Charlotte’s eyes. It is true that Robert did not talk much about Caen but it is also true that I did not ask him to. Robert opened the door several times, like that day in the teahouse, but he could not force me to enter. I had to want to and instead I turned away. I knew this even as I crafted my excuse. The start of my lifelong effort to deny my own responsibility for my tragedies, you might say.
Charlotte rose from the table.
“I’m going to ask Henry to call the law firm in Watford to see if Robert is at work. That is the first step and if he is there, that’s fine and you can ask him about the postcard this evening when he comes home. I’m sure he’ll have an explanation. It might not make sense to you but these men have to live by different rules when they come back. You must realise that.”
She left the kitchen and it was just you and me, Diane. I wiped your face and sticky hands and I whispered, “What will we do, you and I? What will we do if he is gone?”
I remember you laughed loudly and I tried to smile.
The thing about imagining the worst is that it is always a tiny bit cathartic. Even as you practise despair, you know, in that tiny section of your brain that holds itself apart from the general panic, that you may be wrong. That part of the brain observes your meltdown with a quiet, slightly supercilious smile, insisting sotto voce that this not real. All the chaos is the fault of the imagination, that childish mischief-maker that regrettably, it says, can never be tamed. So although I was terrified, I did not fully believe what I told myself must be.
Henry came into the kitchen and sat beside me. Robert was not at work. He had not, in fact, been in work since the previous Friday. He had called in sick on Monday and they had assumed he was still under the weather.
“But he was out at work, all this week. He left in the morning and came back in the evening. He said everything was fine. He said the office was still a little chilly but that they were going to fix the broken window soon,” I said. Charlotte had been staring out the window. Now she came and sat beside me, putting her arm around my shoulder. I turned to her. She must have some answers.
“If he wasn’t at work, where was he?”
Henry and Charlotte looked at each other and then Charlotte said I should lie down and rest while Henry went into town to see if he could find out any more.
“Maybe I should go home,” I said. “Maybe he is there now. It might all be a terrible misunderstanding. Maybe he told me something and I forgot. I do that sometimes, especially when I’m tired.”
“I’ll go and check,” Charlotte said. “I’ll take Diane. She’ll enjoy the walk and you can lie down for an hour. By the time you wake up again, I’m sure we’ll know more or he’ll have turned up somewhere and we’ll all feel silly for having made such a fuss.”
I didn’t want to lie down but I did as I was told because I knew they could only do what needed to be done if I promised to stay in one place. As I heaved myself up the stairs, I heard Charlotte and Henry whispering urgently in the kitchen.
“The lads from the rescue services might help,” she was saying. “Ask them where he might have gone. They’ll know the kinds of places people go.”
In the end it was one of Henry’s acquaintances from his nights as an unofficial air raid warden who found your father, Diane. His body was lying in a copse of fir trees high on Dunstable Downs. Apparently the silent grove with its carpet of pine needles and slender burbling stream had witnessed these desperate departures before. When I woke from my nap to find Charlotte sitting on the bed beside me, with Henry staring out the window behind her, I knew Robert was gone.
“Where was he?” I said without sitting up. The certainty sat like a boulder on my chest. I could hardly breathe.
“On Dunstable Downs. I’m so sorry, Lina. So, so sorry. We didn’t know. We didn’t see. We should have been able to see it.”
She started crying, long, breathless gasps. Henry stood rigid at the window. He didn’t turn around. I hadn’t yet thought of you, Diane. I could only deal with what was in front of me and inside of me.
“How did he get there? Did he go on the bus?”
It was an absurd question and an unbearable idea. I closed my eyes.
Charlotte sobbed.
“I don’t know, darling. We don’t know.”
I asked for more details. I needed to know everything. Too late this hunger, I know.
In a tight, hard voice, Henry told me that Robert shot himself with a Mauser, a pistol used by German soldiers. He shot himself in the head. They were taking his body to the morgue at the hospital. Henry would go later to identify it.
My head reeled and I thought I would throw up. I gagged and Charlotte rushed out to get a bowl. But the horror twisting my guts was not something that could be voided. Not then and not ever.
Where did he get the gun and why did he keep it? Did he always plan to do this, I wondered. What did that mean for us? If he was always going to do this – and why else would he keep the gun – then why did we even try to make a life together? Why did he come back to me? The answer to that last question was terrible because it implied that there was something I could have done to prevent this from happening. Yes, he kept the pistol, perhaps with the idea that one day he might need it to silence the voices in his head. But his return, our marriage and your birth told me he’d hoped he would not have to.
I could have stopped this, I thought. I should have. I began to shake. I felt I might fall to pieces, like a wall crumbling to dust. My body could not bear the strain. I started to moan.
“I’ll never know, Charlotte. I’ll never know what I could have done. He told me our story would not end. How could he say that and then leave me? I won’t be able to go on without him. I just won’t.”
Charlotte pulled me into her arms, rocking me against her chest like a baby.
“You will go on, darling, because you have to. Because you have Diane and because you have us. We will all go on. Whatever reasons Robert had, they were his reasons and his alone. You have Diane to think of. Don’t lose sight of that.”
I cannot remember much of the following weeks. I was heavily sedated most of the time. I heard the doctor once, as I drifted back to oblivion, say, “I’d recommend continuing with the pills, Mrs Rose. We don’t want her doing something foolish.” What a funny way to describe what I might do, I thought.
I went to the funeral, of course. Or the shell that was my body did. I was allowed to see him before they closed the casket. They had bandaged his head. The bandage also went around his jaw. He did not look like Robert. He looked like a wax replica. I bent to kiss him but I could not bring myself to do it and so I just touched his cheek. I don’t know what I was feeling. I was drugged and exhausted and I know I should have felt somet
hing profound but I didn’t.
You didn’t come to the funeral. It was not the done thing then and Charlotte insisted you stay away. If that was wrong, I apologise on her behalf. She meant no harm. You would not have remembered it anyway. But maybe there is something more subtle than visual memories. A sense of belonging or a sense of certainty, perhaps. You must be the judge of that.
Robert was buried in Hatfield Road Cemetery on the right-hand side of the stone cross war memorial. Someone must have lied to get permission for a suicide to be laid to rest there. I was not privy to these deceptions at the time. I was incapable of dealing with any of the details. Charlotte and Henry handled everything and took care of you. Evelyn came to stay and helped them. I was lost for weeks. I woke and rose and ate and sat and slept but I was never entirely present. I had switched off.
One day, in early October, I woke to find you by the side of the bed. You had just begun to walk – I think you took your first steps before Robert died but I do find it difficult to remember precisely. Robert’s suicide rippled forwards and backwards, distorting time so that remembering precise dates for that period is difficult, even today when the past is more real to me than the present.
You pulled yourself up on the mattress, puffing and panting and giggling. Triumphant, you snuggled into the space he had left and put your arms out towards me. I stared at you for a long moment and I saw it. Robert’s face. It was in your smile and the unflinching look in your blue eyes. I couldn’t bear that gaze and so I pulled you into my arms, burying your head in my chest. Your giggles ran through me like an electric current. As we lay there, I begged for the strength to see you for who you were. I begged for selflessness and blindness and for fortitude and forgetfulness. In time, my wishes might have been granted by whoever grants such things. But there was not enough time.
The Reckoning Page 19