Birdsong. Part 30

"I suppose so. Pretty dry, even to a Scot like me."

Elizabeth could sense Gray beginning to recall; she pressed him. "What else do you remember? Tell me everything."

"Never wanted to go on leave. Said he had no home to go to. He liked France. I remember visiting him in hospital when he'd been wounded. Must have been nineteen fifteen. No, nineteen sixteen."

Gray spent some minutes trying to date the visit while Elizabeth fruitlessly interrupted.

"So is there anything else? Did he have any friends? Anyone I could speak to now who would remember him?"

"Friends? I don't think so. No, there was some sapper. I can't remember his name. He was a loner."

"But a good soldier."

The line crackled as Gray considered.

"He was a terrific fighter, but that's not quite the same thing." Mrs. Gray's voice came back on the line. "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to take my husband away now. He isn't used to this kind of thing and I don't want him to get tired out. Do you understand?"

"I do," said Elizabeth. "I'm very grateful to you both. I do hope I haven't been a nuisance."

"Not at all," said Mrs. Gray. "There's a man my husband used to write to. His name was Brennan. He was in a Star and Garter veterans' home in Southend. It's not far from London."

"Thank you very much. You've been very kind."

"Good-bye."

There was the sound of a receiver rattling in its cradle.

In the silence Elizabeth could hear the thump of music from the flat upstairs. The Swedish sedan had again failed to start, and Elizabeth was compelled to take the train from Fenchurch Street, one of British Rail's recent corridorless variety, with new orange plush on the seats. She brought a cup of coffee down the rocking carriage, wincing as the boiling fluid seeped out from under the lid and onto her hand. When it was cool enough to drink, she found its taste merge into the atmosphere of diesel fumes and cigarette ends, so it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. The heating was turned up full and most of the people in the carriage seemed on the point of unconsciousness as they looked out of the window at the flatlands of Ess.e.x sliding past.

Elizabeth had telephoned the matron of the home, who told her that Brennan was barely worth visiting, but that he would see her if she came. She felt excited by the prospect of actually meeting someone from that era. She would be like a historian who, after working from other histories, finally lays hands on original source material. She had an unclear picture of Brennan in her mind. Although she knew he would be old and, to judge from what the matron had said, decrepit, she still envisaged him in uniform, with a gun.

It was raining when she emerged from the station in Southend. She opened the door of a blue Vauxhall taxi in the forecourt. The car moved off over the glistening streets, along the front with its long, dejected pier and crumbling Regency hotels. As they went up the hill, the driver pointed out toward the sands, where a c.o.c.kle boat was fishing with an attachment that looked like a giant vacuum hose trailing over the edge.

The home was a large Victorian building of red brick just visible beneath the pattern of fire escapes. Elizabeth paid the driver and went inside. There were stone steps leading up to a reception desk. Huge, high-ceilinged corridors led off in either direction. The receptionist was a plump woman with a mauve cardigan and tortoisesh.e.l.l gla.s.ses.

"Is he expecting you?"

"Yes, I think so. I spoke to the matron, Mrs. Simpson."

The receptionist dialled two digits on the telephone. "Yes. Visitor for Brennan. All right. Yes." She put the phone down. "Someone'll come for you," she said to Elizabeth. She picked up the magazine she had been reading.

Elizabeth looked down and brushed a crumb from her skirt.

A woman in a nurse's uniform came up and introduced herself as Mrs. Simpson.

"You're for Brennan, aren't you? If you'd like to step into my office a moment." They went a few yards down the corridor and into a small overheated room with filing cabinets. There was a calendar on the wall with a picture of a kitten in a basket. On top of a table was a spider plant whose green and white shoots trailed down almost to the floor.

"You haven't been here before, have you?" said Mrs. Simpson. She was a surprisingly young woman with peroxided hair and red lipstick. The uniform sat oddly on her.

"What you have to understand is that some of the men have been here almost all their lives. This is all they know, all they remember." She stood up and took out a file from the cabinet. "Yes. Here we are. He was admitted in nineteen nineteen, your Mr. Brennan. Discharged nineteen twenty-one. Returned nineteen twenty-three. He's been here ever since, paid for by the government. No surviving family. Sister died in nineteen fifty."

Elizabeth calculated. He had been there almost sixty years.

"They're very ignorant, most of the old-timers. They haven't kept up at all with what's been happening in the world. We do encourage radio and newspapers but they can't follow them."

"And what exactly is wrong with Mr. Brennan?"

"Amputation," said Mrs. Simpson. "Let me see. Yes. Injury sustained during final offensive, October nineteen eighteen. Sh.e.l.l blast. Left leg amputated in field hospital. Returned to England. Hospital Southampton. Moved to North Middles.e.x, then Roehampton. Admitted September nineteen nineteen. Also sh.e.l.l shock. Do you know what that means?"

"Psychological damage?"

"Yes, it's a catchall expression. Soft in the head. Some of them got over it, some of them didn't."

"I see. And will he know who I am? I mean, if I explain why I've come?"

"I'm not sure I've quite made myself clear." Mrs. Simpson's genteel voice took on an exasperated edge. "This man lives in a world of his own. They all do. They have no interest in the outside world at all. Some of them can't help it, of course. But everything's done for them. Meals, toilet, everything."

"Does he have many visitors?"

Mrs. Simpson laughed. "Many visitors? Oh dear. His last visitor was... " She consulted the file on her desk. "His sister. In nineteen forty-nine." Elizabeth looked down at her hands.

"Well, I'll take you along to see him, if you're ready. Don't expect too much, will you?"

They walked down the green linoleum of the corridor. The brickwork was tiled to waist height on either side, then met high overhead in a semi-cylindrical shape from which hung yellow lights on long plaited flexes.

They turned one corner, then another, past piled laundry baskets, past a pair of swing doors from behind which came a sudden burst of cabbage and gravy before the more general smell of disinfectant rea.s.serted itself. They arrived at a blue-painted door.

"This is the dayroom," said Mrs. Simpson. She pushed open the door. There were a number of old men sitting round the edge of the room, some in wheelchairs, some in armchairs covered with pale brown plastic.

"He's over by the window."

Elizabeth went across the room, trying not to breathe too deeply of the hot stagnant air, which smelt of urine. She approached a small man in a wheelchair with a rug over his thighs.

She held out her hand to him. He looked up and took it.

"Not that one," said Mrs. Simpson from the doorway. "Next window." Elizabeth let go of the man's hand with a smile and moved down the room a few paces. There was an orange-and-brown-patterned carpet over the centre of the floor. She wished she hadn't come.

The little man in the wheelchair was like a_ _bird on its perch. He had thick gla.s.ses bound on one side with adhesive tape. Elizabeth could see his blue eyes watering behind them.

She held out her hand. He made no movement, so she took his hand from his lap and squeezed it.

She felt self-conscious and intrusive. Why on earth had she come? Some vanity about her imagined past, some foolish self-indulgence. She pulled up a chair and took Brennan's hand again.

"My name is Elizabeth Benson. I've come to visit you. Are you Mr. Brennan?" Brennan's blue eyes rolled in watery surprise. She felt him hold on to her hand. He had a tiny head. The hair was not so much grey as colourless. It lay flat and unwashed against his skull.

She made to take her hand away, but she felt him try to hang on to it, so she left it in his, and moved her chair up closer.

"I've come to see you. I've come to see you because I think you knew my grandfather. Stephen Wraysford. It was in the war. Do you remember him?" Brennan said nothing. Elizabeth looked at him. He was wearing a striped woollen shirt with the top b.u.t.ton done up but no tie, and a hand-knitted brown cardigan. He was so small, with one leg missing; she wondered how much he weighed.

"Do you remember the war? Do you remember those days at all?" Brennan's eyes were still awash with surprise. He could clearly not grasp what was happening.

"Shall I just talk for a minute or so? Or shall we sit quietly for a bit?" He still did not answer, so Elizabeth smiled at him and laid her other hand on top of his. She shook her head so that the hair that had fallen on to her cheek was held back over her ear.

Brennan started to speak. He had a little high voice like a girl's. It came up through a weight of phlegm Elizabeth could hear moving on his chest; after every few words he took thin sips of air.

"Such fireworks. We was all there, the whole street. There was dancing. We was out all night. Barbara and me. My sister. She fell down. In the blackout it was. Had to put it up every night. Fell off a ladder."

"Your sister fell off a ladder?"

"There was that song we all sung then." He took an extra gulp of air and tried to sing it for Elizabeth.

"And do you remember anything about the war? Can you tell me anything about my grandfather?"

"The relief of Mafeking that was. They give us such a bad tea. I can't eat it. It's muck. It was that b.l.o.o.d.y Hitler." His hand was warm between hers. A tea-trolley was brought into the room and made its clanking, metal way toward them.

"All right, Tom. You got a visitor then?" boomed the woman who pushed it.

"What are you doing with a pretty girl like this? You up to your old tricks I expect. I know you, you old scoundrel. Leave it there, shall I?" She put a cup on the small table near Brennan's elbow. "He never drinks it," she said to Elizabeth. "You like a cup, love?"

"Thank you."

The trolley rattled off. Elizabeth sipped the tea. She felt her gorge rebel against the extraordinary taste and quickly put the cup back on the saucer. She looked round the room. There were perhaps twenty men in the stifling atmosphere. None of them was talking, though one was listening to a small radio. They all stared ahead of them. Elizabeth tried to imagine what it must have been like to spend sixty years in such a place, with nothing to differentiate one day from the next.

Brennan began to talk again, looping from one random recollection to another. As Elizabeth listened she could see he believed he was living in whatever era he was recalling: that time became the present for him. Most of his memories seemed to come either from the turn of the century or from the early forties and the Blitz.

She pressed him once more with her grandfather's name; if he did not respond she would leave him alone and not meddle any more with things that did not concern her.

"My brother. I brought him back all right. Always looked after him, I did."

"Your brother? Was that in the war? Did he fight with you? And my grandfather? Captain Wraysford?"

Brennan's voice piped up. "We all thought he was mad, that one. And the sapper with him. My mate Douglas, he was my mucker, he said, 'That man's strange.' But he held him when he died. They was all mad. Even Price. The CSM. The day it ended he ran out with no clothes. They put him in a loony bin. They bring me this tea, I say I don't want that. My brother's good to me, though. Caught some good fish too. I like a nice bit of fish. You should have seen the fireworks. The whole street was dancing.

His grip of time gave way again, but Elizabeth was moved by what she had heard. She had to look away from Brennan, down to the orange-and-brown carpet. It was not what he said that was important. He had told her that her grandfather had been strange, whatever that might mean in such a context; he told her they thought he and some friend of his were mad, and--though this bit was unclear--that he had comforted a dying man. She didn't feel inclined to press him for clarification, however. Even if he had been lucid enough to give it, she felt it would have made no difference. It was not what Brennan said; it was the fact that some incoherent part of him remembered. By hearing his high voice in the tiny mutilated body, she had somehow kept the chain of experience intact.

She sat, feeling great tenderness toward him, holding his hand, as the limited range of what he could recall began to play itself again. After another ten minutes she stood up to leave.

She kissed him on the cheek and walked quickly across the cavernous room. She said she would visit him again, if he liked, but she could not bear to look back at the small body in the chair where it had perched for sixty years.

Outside the high Victorian walls, she ran toward the sea. She stood on the road that overlooked the water, breathing gulps of salty air in the rain, digging her fingernails into the palms of her hands. She had rescued some vital connection, she had been successful in her small errand; what she could not do, which made her curse and wring her hands, was restore poor Brennan's life or take away the pity of the past.

"It's for you," said Erich, wearily proffering the telephone receiver with its tangled flex to Elizabeth. "It's a man."

"A man," said Elizabeth. "Erich, you're so precise." It was Robert. He was going to find himself unexpectedly in London that evening and wondered if she would like to come to see him in his flat.

"I'm sorry it's such short notice," he said. "I've only just found out. I don't suppose you're free."

Elizabeth was going to the cinema and then to a party somewhere in south London. "Of course I'm free," she said. "Shall I come round at about eight?"

"I'll see you then. We'll stay in, shall we? I'll buy some food."

"Don't worry. I'll get it," she said with a swiftness based on experience of Robert's shopping.

When she had disentangled her earlier arrangements, she went through into Erich's room to see if she could help him.

"So," he said, the sound causing half an inch of ash to tumble down the front of his cardigan, "the errant knight is paying a call."

"I do wish you wouldn't listen to my conversations."

"If you use the office as a centre for your social life how can I help it?"

"It's not such a very busy life, is it? One man once a month. There must be worse. Cheer up, Erich. I'll buy you lunch."

Erich sighed. "All right. But we won't go to Lucca's. I'm fed up with that man. You see the same trays of sandwich filling day after day. I think he just smears a new layer of mashed sardine over what's already in there. The bottom inch must have been there since Lucca came to London in nineteen fifty-five."

"How do you know that's when he came?"

We immigrants, you know, we stick together. We're frightened of your b.l.o.o.d.y police and your Home Office regulations. The year you arrive is important."

"Does the Home Office give you a course in how to run a sandwich bar? I mean, all these Italians from different parts of their country, all of them grew up with wonderful food and they come here and they all produce the same egg mayonnaise, the same mashed sardines in stale rolls, the same coffee that tastes of acorns, when in Italy it's like nectar. Do the immigration people give them a complete kit or what?"

"You have no respect for us wretched refugees, do you? Be careful or I'll insist you take me to the best restaurant in London."

"Anywhere you like, Erich. It's my pleasure."

"My G.o.d, that man puts you in a good mood, doesn't he? It's like ringing a bell. It's like Skinner's rats."

"Don't you mean Pavlov's dogs?"

"No, I'm an Anglo-Saxon these days. Skinner will do for me. Get back to work, will you? I'll come through at one, not a minute before."

Erich was quite right, Elizabeth thought, as she went back to her desk. Robert rang; she jumped. His voice made her happy. It was better to have some source of happiness than none, though, wasn't it? She had pushed and pulled him and tried to change his mind; she had a.n.a.lysed her own feelings and guessed at his; she had done everything she could to make him leave his wife, but nothing had changed. She had resigned herself to not thinking about the future. The grim conversations and the tearful partings would come back soon enough.

Robert had a small top-floor flat in a block off the Fulham Road. While he waited for Elizabeth he tried to remove traces of his family, though it was difficult to obliterate them completely. The flat had an open kitchen attached to the sitting room with a bamboo curtain dividing them. On the wooden unit between the rooms there were two Chianti bottles with red candles stuck in them, which gave it the air of a Chelsea bistro from the sixties, as Elizabeth frequently pointed out. They could not be thrown away because Robert's daughter liked them.

Half a dozen of his wife's dresses hung in the wardrobe, and there was some of her makeup in the bathroom cabinet.

He could at least remove her photograph from the sideboard and bury it beneath the tablecloths in the drawer. Each time he did this he felt a pang of superst.i.tious guilt, as though he had stabbed her effigy. He wished her no harm; he recognized in her the qualities of dedication and generosity he feared that he himself lacked, but with Elizabeth he could not help himself.

Many of his male colleagues a.s.sumed it was an arrangement of convenience, a lighthearted sideshow of the kind the majority of them enjoyed. Robert knew that Elizabeth also thought so, however hard he tried to convince her to the contrary. When he protested that he was not that kind of man, she laughed at him. He had been unfaithful to his wife for one ill-advised night before he met Elizabeth, but with her, as he tried to explain, it was different. He believed he had married the wrong woman. He didn't want to reclaim some notional freedom, he just wanted to be with Elizabeth. He had been addicted to her initially in a physical way: a week without her body made him vague and irritable. Then the mocking confidence of her character had intrigued him. If, as she sometimes claimed, he used her just as an amusing diversion, why was it not more enjoyable? Why was there so much anguish in what his colleagues nudgingly hinted must be such fun?

He heard her ring at the intercom as he was straightening the cushions on the sofa.

"What on earth is this?" said Elizabeth, fingering his sweater.

"I had time to change out of my suit, so I--"