Random Winds (37 page)

“But why do I write like this, when I am awake and I am here now?”

The less one has of money or time, the more skillfully one learns to use them. An hour for a supper, one night in the London flat or at an inn near the hospital, rarely a whole day’s and night’s leave—these were the equal of weeks in an ordinary life. Everything was heightened, sharpened and quickened.

They walked on country lanes and rested under trees. At Canterbury, struck to silence and awe, they stood before the altar where Thomas à Becket died, went out afterward into Kentish fields, smelled the hops harvest, passed the aristocratic pile of Knole and had dinner by candlelight in a room where Dickens had dined. They rode the trains to nowhere and back. In stormy weather they took shelter in museums or stopped to watch Lady Cavendish, Adele As-taire, dancing with GIs. They wandered the streets. One day Mary took him to the place where Alex’s mother had been killed in the 1940 blitz. The very earth was mutilated, an open wound filled with a rubble of blasted stone and tumbled brick.

“She was on her way to the Anderson Shelter in the yard. She was hit not six feet from the entrance.”

Half a house stood at the far end of the enormous hole, and over it all had crept the lovely purple willow herb, a veil drawn on a disfigured face.

“It was September seventh,” Mary said. “A warm day, I remember. The leaves were blown off the trees. It was like green shredded tissue paper, all over the streets. And then there were the fires. Ships on the Thames were burning. It
looked as if the river were burning too. And the streets were full of cats, isn’t that queer?”

“Cats?”

“Yes, they were lost, looking for their homes. But their homes weren’t there anymore.”

“Come,” Martin said. “Come now.”

Back in the flat they sat down to their plain supper, boiled potatoes and eggs, eaten with wine and by candlelight on the gleaming table which had once held crystal and flowers. Luminous pale fingers touched Mary’s forehead and fell across the white lace at her neck.

“The lace comes from an old teacloth that belonged to Alex’s mother. I rescued it,” she said.

The homely remark touched him. Her hands, which had once worn polished nails, looked rough. One nail was darkened from a bruise. The naturalness of these things made him feel married to her.

“You look tired,” he said. “With that house and those children, aren’t you doing too much?”

“There are only two left The others have gone back to their families. Anyway, I could say the same to you about doing too much.”

“I have no choice. Besides, I’m used to it.”

“And I’m not. I’ve been spoiled all my life.”

“That’s not a word I would ever use about you.”

“But it’s true, Martin! All that life we had before the war, all the privilege which made things for people like me so charming, that’s over, you know. Alex has been saying so for years. He saw the war coming long before any of our friends did, and he was right. So I believe him when he says it will never be the same again. And perhaps it’s just as well that people like us won’t have so much and others will have a little more.”

Yes, Martin thought, remembering the waiting room in the hospital where that other England brought its ailments, seeing again the wizened clerk-faces, sickly white, with rotting teeth.

“Only I do wish, I hope, we’ll be able to hold on to Lamb House,” Mary said.

“I hope so. I know what it means to you.”

“Oh, not for me! For Alex and the children. It’s their heritage.”

“Not for you?”

“When the war’s over,” she said quietly, “I’ll leave Alex. The girls will be grown by then, and it won’t matter anymore.”

Something opened up in Martin like a taut spring releasing.

“Leave Alex?”

“I don’t say that easily. We’ve lived under the same roof so long, he and I. My friend: that’s how I’ve come to think of him. My friend. But it’s time, or it will be soon.”

He wanted to say, to cry out to her,
Then you and I?
But a packet of unopened letters lay in his pocket, like a warning hand upon his flesh. That morning, a moment before he had left his room, they had arrived from home. Home. So long ago! So far away! Press the eyelids shut and try to imagine oneself back across that ocean, try to hear American voices. Faces dim and fade. They blur and vanish. So long ago! So far away!

From the radio in another room came the BBCs music: the majestic andante from Schubert’s great C Major. It lifted and swelled like a vast, calm, moving ocean.

He shook his head, shook himself free of complex thoughts. Not now. There’s time enough to think. She hasn’t left Alex yet. The war isn’t over. So, not tonight Just let pure sweetness flow tonight. Drink the wine, a bottle of sunshine taken from a vineyard on the Rhine before the war. There ought to be flowers on the table, but there are none. Imagine them, then. Imagine iris, and roses so darkly red as to be touched with blue. Think of Mary wearing velvet again. Remember night birds, lemons, the sigh and crash of the sea …

He dozed. Mary stroked his forehead. He had been on his feet in the O.R. for eighteen hours straight. Her fingers soothed and soothed. He was half aware of the mohair afghan being lightly settled over his shoulders. A pity to waste our little time in sleep, he thought, and struggled to keep awake, but lost.

He dreamed. His mind roved. At the same time, he knew he was dreaming.

A letter had come from Tom; at least it seemed to have come from him. He had had a terrible spinal wound, yet he wrote that he had seen Jessie somewhere in the Pacific. Jessie’s back had grown perfectly straight. She was tall and very rich, with a bag of gold coins at her waist. She was married, and her husband’s name was Alex. Claire appeared. She had a baby, a boy named Enoch, but Enoch was bigger than Claire. He was already in college. Now he was on a tanker going to Murmansk. The tanker went up in flames, while he, Martin, stood watching, unable to move.
Jump!
he screamed.
Jump! You didn’t save him
, Hazel cried.
You knew he was Claire’s baby
. Her face was so sad; he had never seen such a terrible sadness. But perhaps it wasn’t Hazel’s face? Was it hers or his mother’s? It was such a sad, old face. It was the first thing he had noticed about her.
I’m going to Germany to look for you, Martin
, she said,
because it’s so lonely here without you
. The word was drawn out so he could hear the wail in it:
lonely
.

He woke abruptly. One lamp was bright in the room, on the table next to the telephone. Mary was sitting there with her head in her hands. He saw that she had been crying.

“You didn’t hear the telephone,” she said.

“No. What is it?”

“They called from home. My friend Nora did. She didn’t want me to walk in alone and find the telegram.”

Ned, he thought, the boy. Oh God, no, not her boy.

“It’s Alex. He’s dead. Oh Martin, Alex is dead!”

Kneeling on the floor, he put his arms about her waist “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. He was gentle, he was kind.”

“It’s so rotten cruel! Hard! Cruel!”

“I know. I know it is, my darling.”

“You see death every day. But I—”

For a long time he held her with her head resting on his. At last she spoke.

“How am I going to tell Ned and the girls? I won’t be able to think of any words.”

“You’ll think of them.”

“Emmy’s been homesick. I’ve spent hours on the telephone with her. They’ve been so afraid for their father.”

“You’ll know what to say. Tell me, isn’t Ned stationed near me?”

“About an hour’s drive, I should think. Oh, do you think—could you?”

“I’ll switch hours with someone. And there’s a fellow in transport who’ll get me a car. You remember, he’s dropped me off a few times at Lamb House?”

“I remember.” She began to cry again. “Martin, I’ve just thought, what if it were you? How could I bear it?”

“People do. And you would. But it isn’t likely to be me.”

“I know you feel guilty about not being overseas.”

“I do …”

Yet—if he had to go now and leave her, how hard it would be. All, all a welter of conflict, the whole damn business of living! A man’s guilts and his desires, pressing and pulling at him.

He caught her to him. In the midst of death, life clamors. Something like that went through his head.

“Unhook the collar of your dress,” he said. “The lace. I don’t want to tear it.”

He picked her up. Almost as tall as he she was, but so light, so firm and light, so supple and fine. My lovely. Never, never anything in all the world like this! Never. Oh Mary, life clamors.

Winter fog hung in the trees. The car was an open one, and the cold beat about their heads as Martin drove. The boy sat staring straight forward. His first tears had been shed and swallowed. Only a prominent Adam’s apple bobbed now and then in his thin neck. They sped through villages, down High Streets deserted, as afternoon neared evening and people went indoors to shelter. And Martin recalled the day they had buried his own father, on just such a still day between Christmas and New Year’s, with the dry ground frozen and no wind.

This boy’s father, though, would lie in no coffin among
flowers, with hands that the undertaker had neatly clasped. This boy’s father—was pieces blown somewhere in the desert air, fragments in the desert sand.

“You know he’s to get a medal for heroism?” Ned spoke unexpectedly.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Mother’s friend has a relative in the War Office and he found out. My father saved four lives. Crazy, isn’t it?”

“Crazy? I don’t understand what you mean.”

“He didn’t have to go to fight, that’s what I mean. They wouldn’t even have taken him if they’d known.”

“Known what?”

The boy turned a clear and earnest face to Martin. “Why—what you know. He wasn’t—he wasn’t—” The Adam’s apple bobbed. “Don’t make me say it when you already know about him, please.”

“I see.” Martin was appalled. Was there no innocence left in the world at all? And he asked, “Who told you?”

“I heard it around the village when I was still in school. I’ve known for years.”

“I see,” Martin said again.

“People are rotten about it.”

“I know.”

“Some boy said he couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. They won’t be able to say that now, will they?”

“It would be a rotten thing to say even if it were true.”

They rode on silently until Martin said, “We’re almost there. We’ll make it by six, I should think.”

More silence. Then Ned spoke again. “Isn’t there anything you want to ask me?”

“What should I ask you?”

“I thought you might want to know whether—whether I’m like my father. I’m not. I’ve had plenty of girls already, and they’re what I want.”

“What you want isn’t any of my business, is it?” Martin responded quietly.

“You’re very decent. My father said you were. He said you were the only person who’d really understood.”

“You spoke of this with him?”

“Yes. After I’d first heard talk, I went and asked him. And he told me. I guess it was one of the hardest things a man might ever have to tell his son. But he did it.”

“And, may I ask, how did you feel?”

“Sick about it. I ran out of the room and cried. I couldn’t talk to him or even look at him for days. But then after a while, after I had thought about it, I went back. He was my father, and a better father to me than most of my friends had.”

A boy like this one could make a lot of people ashamed of themselves, Martin thought.

“I felt sorry for Mother, though,” Ned went on. “She stayed because of us, the girls and me. I knew that. The girls didn’t and don’t. There couldn’t have been much in it for her, could there?”

I love your mother, Martin wanted to say, and imagined the boy replying, I know, my father told me that, too.

But he said only, “She loved her children. You were worth it to her.”

At Lamb House lights were on, the driveway was full of cars. With his arm around Ned’s shoulders, they walked together, Martin with Mary’s boy, into the house.

A week or more before the sixth of June in 1944, Martin had gone south on medical affairs and stood where one could look across Southampton water to the Isle of Wight. From Weymouth Bay across to Portland Bill lay a thousand ships or more, destroyers, landing craft and minesweepers. So in his bones he had known, and was therefore not surprised to be awakened toward morning on the sixth of June by the sweep and drone of hundreds of airplanes flying overhead. It had begun.

In the wards expectant faces look up from the beds. “It’s here,” they say, and then, in some primitive ritual of denial, are silent. For if it failed—one dared not think of that.

First announcements, oddly enough, come over the German radio, sounding as if nothing much has happened. “The Allies have attempted a small landing on the coast of France.”

Later in the morning comes a short statement from the
BBC: “Allied naval forces under the command of General Eisenhower, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies on the coast of France.”

By noon the churches are filled, from Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s in London to the smallest village chapel. Under Gothic stone lace, facing the pale tips of lighted candles, old men and women with sons, and young women with husbands, bow their heads to pray.

Martin would give much to be part of that day in France, even as he knows that its first casualties will soon be rolling down the road to his door.

Through summer and autumn, the momentum quickens. The train gathers speed, it tops the hill and goes roaring down the long straight track. Paris is liberated; De Gaulle strides down the Champs Elysées. The Germans withdraw. The Allies pursue and cross the Moselle River.

In dark December the Germans gather strength for their last stupendous effort in the Ardennes. At first the radio brings bleak reports for the Allies from Bastogne, from Namur and Liège. But in the end, the stupendous effort fails and, late in the winter, the Germans are driven back. The Allies cross the Rhine at Remagen Bridge. The war in Europe is as good as over.