Give Us This Day (47 page)

4

Hugo’s news came early in the new year, although Adam and Henrietta got an advance hint of it at the Christmas reunion.

This had gone smoothly enough this year, for Giles and Romayne, caught up in what promised to be the toughest and rowdiest election since the introduction of universal male franchise, were far too busy to leave their constituency and travel down to Kent.

The breach between Alex and Giles, Romayne and Lydia, had not healed during the last few years, and Adam sensed that Hugo, innocent cause of it, was still unhappily aware of the family rift, but the paths of the three brothers rarely crossed these days. Furthermore, even Alex had to admit that public opinion had swung in a wide arc since the mood of obsessive patriotism at the time of the South African War. People, even important people, were beginning to ask themselves if they had not made fools of themselves in public during that spell of euphoria, and a generous peace with the Boers went some way to convincing the electorate that there was a great deal to be said for Lloyd George’s opposition to the war, so unpopular at the time.

The fact remained, however, that Hugo was still little more than a hulk, carted round by that tireless wife of his and that barking parade-ground sergeant he employed as a watchdog. Sometimes, in the long hours of the night (Adam did not need much sleep nowadays), he wondered about the boy, and how he would fare as the years passed and he faced the prospect of travelling down them as a passenger. His faith in Hugo’s wife, however, was considerable, and he listened with the closest interest whenever she appeared at Tryst, projecting various plans to achieve rehabilitation. Most of them, Adam decided, were harebrained, but he admired her audacity and the way she explored every new prospect of salvaging Hugo’s manhood from the wreck of that shambles out on the veldt.

It came, he learned later, during a pilgrimage Sybil and Hugo made to Netley Military Hospital, in the autumn of 1905, with the object of a final consultation with Udale, the surgeon to whom Hugo owed his life.

Udale was permanently stationed at Netley now, caring for several hundred maimed victims of the fighting, and after a prolonged physical check he pronounced Hugo completely fit, but privately expressed some concern regarding the patient’s state of mind.

“He’s too… too
passive
,” he told her, while Hugo was making a tour of the wards. “Ordinarily this might not matter, might even be a help and a handhold but not with a chap like Swann. More than anyone I know, he concentrated his entire being on physical prowess, and you’ll never capture his interest with any of the usual pursuits of the blind. It isn’t as if he had ever been engaged in manual labour, or work calculated to tax his brains. We have to hit on something that will focus his mind on some kind of variant of his former occupation, that is give him a renewed interest in his muscles, sinews and staying power.”

“He exercises regularly,” Sybil told him. “He’s walking and riding every day, and he spends a good deal of his time swimming.”

“I wasn’t thinking of exercise. He needs to use that magnificent body of his to someone else’s advantage.” Sybil remembered, during the second stage of convalescence, how insistent Hugo had been on regular massage to counteract a flabbiness encouraged by the helplessness of a man without sight. She said, “Do you do much massage here, Mr. Udale?” At once Udale’s quick mind sparked and he thumped his desk, exclaiming, “Why, Lady Sybil, that might be the answer! Massage! Professional massage, and I don’t mean on the receiving end.”

“He once took a course in massage and spent one day a week at a teaching hospital soon after we came home. It didn’t seem to interest him at the time.”

“But it might here,” Udale urged. “You say he learned the theory? Well, why don’t I hustle him along to our gymnasium?” And he picked up his desk telephone, the first Lady Sybil had ever seen, and turned the handle with emphasis, asking the operator to put him through to Corporal Corkerdale at the gym. But Hugo confounded them both so completely that afterwards Sybil speculated seriously on the theory of thought transference, currently fashionable among some of her friends in Belgravia. The N.C.O. in charge of the gymnasium, learning that Mr. Udale intended to bring a blind officer down for a visit replied, instantly, “Would that be Lieutenant Swann, the athlete, sir?”

“That’s who I had in mind. How did you guess?”

“But he’s already here, sir. Working on Sergeant Toller’s legs.”

”
Working
on them? How do you mean exactly?”

“Well, sir, manipulating. He and Toller served together in South Africa, and Mr. Swann told me he was qualified as a masseur and would like to give Toller a going over. Did I do wrong to give my consent, sir?”

“No,” Udale said briefly, “you hit the bullseye in one, Corkerdale. I’ll explain later,” and he replaced the earpiece and recounted the conversation to Sybil. “We’ll go down and watch,” he suggested. “I’ve time before my next round.”

* * *

His tour of the wards, in search of two or three men he had met in the early days of his convalescence, had been depressing for Hugo. Failing to find those he sought—Sergeant Toller, hit in both legs by a shrapnel burst at Modder River and confined to a wheelchair ever since, was one of them—he soon discovered that the pity he generated among the crippled servicemen more than outweighed any comfort or cheer he could dispense. As one young officer put it, rather crudely, “I’m short of one leg and one arm, but what’s that compared to your problem, Swann? Damned if I feel like complaining when I meet a chap who has lost his sight. Nice of you to look in.”

Someone told him Toller was exercising on the bars in the gym so he let his watchdog guide him there. Toller retained both legs but they were little more than props, and the two casualties sat side by side on a bench comparing notes. Toller, having seen Hugo canter the open mile at Stamford Bridge just before the war, showed more tact than the officer upstairs. “You’re looking pretty fit to me, sir. You must be taking a deal of exercise.”

“Oh, I exercise,” Hugo said. And then, petulantly, “It’s about all I do these days, Toller.”

“I can’t get enough,” the sergeant complained, “but it’s not my fault. The quacks tell me I could get the use of my legs back in time but the fact is… well, I’m dog-tired in five minutes and have to give up, what with that and the pain. It’s no wonder, I suppose. I stopped about two pounds of lead out there, and it was a bloody miracle I didn’t lose both legs. But I might as well for all the use they are. Feel here, just below the knee joint,” and he guided Hugo’s hand to scarred and pitted areas of flesh where Toller’s calf muscles had once bulged. “I was a bit of a miler myself,” Toller went on, “never in your class, of course, but I brought home some pots in my time.”

“You could again,” Hugo said, unexpectedly.

“How’s that, sir?”

“You could again. There’s no permanent damage to the bone structure, is there?”

“They say not, not in either leg. There were five fractures at the time but they all healed. It’s torn sinew and wasted muscle, I suppose. No damned go in ‘em, sir.”

There was not much Hugo did not know about leg muscles. Ever since he was the boy wonder on the Exmoor plateau, he had submitted to the routine calf massage of his brother Giles and, later, to that of his trained fag in anticipation of some cross-country event, he had been a student of muscles and how they responded to the strains put upon them. In his championship days, he had met, in many a stadium dressing-room, dozens of coaches, most of them professionals, who had taught him how to eradicate the stiffness from overtaxed muscles, how to nurse minor injuries, and, above all, how to induce a suppleness that was essential to muscles subjected to the strain of a prolonged training session. Legs, for so long, had been Hugo’s stock-in-trade, and he knew his own as well as his father knew the main roads of the Swann network. His accumulated knowledge told him that what the doctors said of Toller’s legs was probably true. All the man needed to walk again was expert massage over a long period, combined with a graduated course of specially-designed exercises using a few simple items of equipment. He said, “I’d like to have a shot at you, Toller. I’ll lay you ten to one in sovereigns I could put some real go into those stumps. Given time and plenty of grit on your part.” And after a brief word with the gym instructor, he went to work, hammering away at Toller until he shouted for a respite.

He was so engrossed that he did not notice Udale and Sybil enter and stand beside the gymnast who was watching Hugo with interest. Corkerdale said, in a quiet aside, “He’s a dab hand at it an’ no mistake, sir. We could do with someone like him to chivvy ‘em up. And it’s not just the way he goes about it either… it’s…”

“What else is it, Corkerdale?” Udale, unlike most members of his profession, was a good listener, particularly when confronted with a specialist in one field or another. “Well, sir, it’s Lieutenant Swann being blind… beggin’ your pardon, Ma’am… I mean, not letting it gripe ‘im, the way it would most of us.”

“Go on,” said Udale, gravely. When Corkerdale hesitated, Udale said, “I’m right in assuming there was an idea behind that idea, wasn’t there?”

“Maybe, sir, but who am I to talk about it in front of someone like you?”

“Why not? We don’t know everything, we only pretend we do. Tell me what you were going to say.”

“Well, sir, it’s him being blind. Having someone like that, even worse off than most of ‘em, that is, makes ‘em sit up and take notice, and that’s very good for ‘em, sir, seein’ as how so many are down in the dumps. Do you follow me, sir?”

“All the way, Corkerdale, thank you. We’ll see what we can do about it,” and he watched Hugo shrewdly, so absorbed in the massage that he was still unaware of their entry, so that presently Udale motioned to Sybil to withdraw.

She put it to him that same night, armed with some figures Udale had given her. In Netley Hospital alone there were close on two hundred maimed ex-servicemen, some of whom were permanently crippled, but others for whom there was hope of regaining the use of a limb or limbs under protracted courses of treatment. Toller was a typical case. Encouraged and bullied, he could, in time, make a fifty per cent recovery and might even dispense with crutches. It depended, Udale insisted, more on his own reserves of will-power than upon outside agencies. “Udale swears that you could bridge that gap, Hugo,” she urged. “He tells me that one of the biggest handicaps facing them as regards men with a sporting chance is the unconscious resentment patients feel for those who prescribe their courses and deluge them with advice from the standpoint of the hale and active. He’s very anxious to take you on full-time down there. We can find a house, overlooking Southampton Water, and the sergeant could drive you in every day. Why don’t you think about it over Christmas, dearest?”

He thought about it. Indeed, he thought about little else, ranging the coverts and uplands of the Weald on horse and foot, until there grew in him a conviction that here, perhaps, was a field where he might engage his unused stock of energy that could find no outlet in conventional exercise, taken with no other object than keeping his own body at concert pitch. For by now he had adjusted to his blindness in most ways. Moving in a familiar background such as Tryst, or about their home in Eaton Square, he could walk about almost unaided, and he discovered that an enlargement of his other senses, particularly those of touch and hearing, had occurred much the way Udale had prophesied. He was not exactly unhappy, but he was confused and indecisive regarding a purpose and self-justification, for until the moment of his tragedy his athletic prowess had been an end in itself and he had never ranged as far as the point where he would be too old and stiff-jointed to compete with younger men. It was as though all his life he had been loping up an incline without asking himself why, yet finding a full measure of satisfaction in the certainty that he could move faster and with more precision than any challenger, and this supreme faith in his physical ascendancy had persisted right up to the moment he reached the top of that scrub-sown hill and lay in wait for the Boers manning the outpost beyond. Then, in a single moment, he had lost his bearings and paused to ask himself where he was travelling and why, and what was the nature of the trophy they would award him, and in the period since his mind had been mostly a blank, without anything to focus upon other than moments of guilt concerning that dead boy, or the transitory repose he found in his wife’s body and the prattle of their child, Humphrey.

He was touched, deeply so, by the kindness of those about him, sensing their patient efforts to convince him that he was still at one with them but he knew very well that he was not and could never be so long as he lived, and that he must face this formidable truth sooner or later. And yet he continued, assiduously, to nurse his body, losing no opportunity of keeping it in the peak of training, for somewhere ahead there might be a use for it and, in any case, it was all he had in the way of capital.

A few rare bonuses had come his way since he had learned how to surmount the worst aspects of his handicap, to think beyond the daily challenges of shaving, dressing, and eating his food without having it cut up by Sybil or by the sergeant, and perhaps the most rewarding of these was a heightened physical relationship between himself and Sybil, dating from that first embrace in the tented hospital where, or so Sybil declared, young Humphrey had been conceived. At the time he had regarded it as no more than a release of fear and anger, prompting him to use her body as a buffer for his wretchedness. But when, in more tranquil moments, it returned again and again, promoted by her in a way that never failed to stir him, he came to think of it as a source of solace, freely available as an outlet of tensions within him, and would sometimes try and tell her as much, in stumbling, half-articulated phrases, when he was spent and lying still in her arms. And the wonder of it was she seemed to understand, indeed, to revel in her role as comforter, murmuring over and over again, “But I love you, dearest… you’re everything…”