Ashenden (26 page)

“Oh.” Something else he had forgotten. “I’ve a visitor this afternoon.”

“All the more reason to spruce yourself up.” Mullins reached across the desk and picked up the newspaper. “May I? They’ve been asking for it.”

“Help yourself.”

Mullins nodded. “Lose the beard, sir. I should. The whiskers. Such as they are.”

“That would mean looking in the mirror.”

“Has to happen, sir, has to happen one day. You’ll feel better for it.”

He doubted that. What would make him feel better would be an end to the waiting. You could get used to war. You could almost get to like it.

*  *  *

The house was not another hospital: that was made clear. (They’d seen enough of hospitals.) Instead, they should think of it as a place of rest and recuperation and take advantage of the opportunities and amenities provided. The park was extensive for those who liked to walk and well stocked with game for those who liked to shoot. Otherwise, they might want to fish or take a boat out on the river, play billiards or improve their minds in the library. Menus for the day would be posted up on the notice board in the lower hall each morning. Those on a prescribed dietary regime should make themselves known. They would all agree that Mr. Henderson had been very generous in making his house available to them. Were there any questions? The secretary, or housekeeper, or manageress, whoever she was, a trim female with polished brogues and a lovat tie, peered over her wire-rimmed spectacles.

“What are the local girls like?” said Pettigrew. “As nice as you?”

The secretary ignored the question and the laughter that came after it. “Next?” she said, pointing.

“I wondered if th-th-th-there would be any b-b-b-basket weaving.”

Bolton turned his head and winked at Harrison. Harrison winked back.

The secretary consulted her clipboard. “No basket weaving is scheduled. If you would like to make a request, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, m-m-m-miss,” said Bolton. “I f-f-f-find it helps with the tr-tr-tr-trench foot.”

Harrison expelled a laugh as solid as a pellet. He almost expected to see it roll away across the floor.

*  *  *

Late morning and Harrison decided he would go for a walk. The idea had occurred to him after he finished shaving. While he stropped the razor and lathered his chin, he thought he might leave a mustache behind, but in the end, mesmerized by the scrape of the blade plowing clear tracks through the white soap, revealing
the blue veins in his neck, he carried on until all of it went and his face, naked, thin, twenty-two years old, peered out of the mirror like a skinned rabbit. Mullins was right. He did feel better, even if he didn’t look it. When he buried his head in the towel, for a moment he was back home on a Sunday morning, the smell of cooked bacon coming from downstairs, his mother with her hat on, coins for the collection plate in her gloved hand, ready for church. Coming? she would say, and he would shake his head and say he’d rather go for a walk.

Turning away from the mirror, Harrison stared round at the room where he shared nightmares with Newman, the two camp beds, sheets and blankets all rucked up, half falling on the floor, the faded floral wallpaper, the brown-and-white pottery cow on the mantelpiece filled with cigarette stubs. In the washbasin bristles floated on the scum. He ought to do something with the dirty water, but he couldn’t think what. Tip it out the window? Instead, he came out of the room, went along the corridor, and felt his way down the cantilevered stairs into the great void of the hall.

“What did I tell you?” said Mullins when he poked his head round the door of the library. “That’s the ticket.”

The air was blue. A fug of coal fire, cigarette, and pipe smoke hung like a pall over the room. It could have been a railway station. There was the same sense of transit, of marking time or shuffling through. The padre was writing at a desk in front of one of the large windows. Two of the men were playing cards. Bolton was rocking himself in an armchair and Pettigrew was over by the drinks table. The others were probably in the billiard room.

“Care for one, Harrison?” said Pettigrew, waving the stopper of a decanter.

“No, thanks.”

“Are you sure?” asked Pettigrew. “Never too early for a stiffener. Buck you up no end.”

“No, thanks.”

“Feel better, don’t you?” said Mullins.

“Much.” He cast his eyes around. “Where’s Newman?”

“Having his dressing changed. Sister’s here.”

“Of course.” He nodded. “Have you seen this morning’s paper?”

Mullins gave him a cautious smile. “I took it off you, remember? About twenty minutes ago?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “I forgot.” He rubbed his chin. “Well. I think I might go for a walk.”

“Outdoors?”

He nodded.

“Want company?” He was a good man, Mullins, salt of the earth.

He shook his head. “I think I can manage.”

“Right you are, sir.” Mullins said. “Lunch in an hour. Cauliflower soup to start. Mutton to follow. Spotted dick for afters.”

“That’s something to look forward to.”

“Isn’t it just, sir?”

*  *  *

Getting out of the house was easy. He went down the side stairs and left by the door that led into the kitchen courtyard. There he peered through the window into the office where he had been sitting earlier, as if he were looking for himself, and saw that he had left his tobacco tin and his cigarette papers behind. He went to fetch them. When he returned to the courtyard, he wondered if he might need his notebook and went and fetched that, too. He was putting it into his pocket when Mullins came out.

“You still here, sir?” said Mullins.

“Looks that way.”

“Are you certain you don’t want company? I could do with stretching my legs.”

That might have been a joke. Mullins, who had a wound in his groin that hadn’t healed yet, used a cane.

He shook his head. “Kind of you all the same.”

Mullins lit a cigarette. “Force of habit, sir, in case you’re wondering. The wife doesn’t like me smoking in the house. Can’t seem to bring myself to smoke indoors wherever I am.”

“Quite right.”

“The lads say, ‘Sergeant Mullins, smoke in the dugout! The Hun will have your head off.’ And I say, ‘Blame the wife!’ ”

The courtyard was cobbled. It had rained earlier and the cobbles were slippery. Across the yard a door stood open. Harrison went over and looked inside. It was some sort of outbuilding, a storeroom, and it was full of coal. He picked up a lump and dropped it again, sniffed his fingers. He’d forgotten how much he liked the smell of coal. Pasted to the back of the door was a poster that said that if every family in Britain saved a lump of coal every day, it would mean eight million more tons for the war effort. He couldn’t quite do the sum.

“That’s the way out, sir,” Mullins said, behind him. “Over there.”

“What did you say?”

“The other direction.”

“Of course.”

He turned round and saw the archway, the land on the other side of it. The big gray sky and the watery sun.

“Lunch in half an hour, sir,” said Mullins, throwing away his cigarette. “You wouldn’t want to miss the mutton.”

“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to do that.”

Mullins limped inside and took his kindness with him, which was a relief.

Through the archway he could see the land, dotted with stands of trees. There was no one there. For once the guns were silent. A hush fell on his ears.

Some of them had a great need to be alone, as he did. Most preferred company and distraction: cards, billiards, singsongs round the piano. Yet he knew it was not as simple as that. He knew, for example, that he only tolerated being alone because he was attached to the others, however loose and circumstantial the connection was. Because they were there, he was able to set himself apart. For those who preferred company, he suspected it was the other way round, that distraction was their way of keeping their solitariness to themselves. Similar thoughts had occurred to him in a trench. You were never alone in a trench, and you were always alone.

The open countryside that he could see reminded him of a dog
they’d had when he was growing up and the way the dog covered the ground, doubling back, circling, off at tangents, sometimes deaf when called. You might keep to a path, set off towards a destination, but a dog describes the terrain, brings it home to you, as if it is all within your reach or compass. He pictured the dog running across the fields and he saw her blown to bits, the bits blown up and buried time after time. Her feathery tail severed in the mud.

Land was something else now. It was graves. Perhaps it had been graves all along. You might think no one was there, the fields were empty, but they weren’t. They were full of flesh.

He stood in the archway for some time, feeling the protection of the house to either side, a protection he did not feel in the booming indoors, and thought his parents would be impressed by the place if they could see it. It was the sort of house they would appreciate, and his father would know about the architecture. Perhaps he ought to take them up on their offers to visit him, which came regularly in letters, along with the local news. They had come to see him in hospital at a time when he was in no position to refuse. All he remembered about the visit was his mother being brave with a handkerchief, the cheap bird brooch he had given her for her birthday when he was sixteen pinned to the collar of her coat, and his father talking about the first eleven at the school where he taught. To get them to leave, he’d started to moan—the pain was real, but the moaning was a performance—and Sister had come with a syringe.

“There you are,” said Mullins, back again.

“Lunch?”

“Yes, sir. The gong’s gone.”

He nodded. “Wouldn’t want to miss the mutton.”

“That’s right, sir. Enjoy your walk?”

“Very much.”

*  *  *

Miss Wells got down from the train. Doors slammed behind her, a couple of people went off, and she stood on the platform, dressed in her best gray tweed coat and clutching a small, square mock-leather
handbag. The air was cold on her neck. It was one twenty-two by the station clock.

The roof that extended over the platform was trimmed with white-painted wooden slats, pierced and shaped like the edging of a petticoat. A pair of fire buckets hung from the brick wall, and three tubs planted with winter-flowering pansies were placed at exact distances from one another. On the opposite side of the tracks the same scene was repeated. She thought about crossing the footbridge and taking the next train back.

“Can I help you, miss?” said the stationmaster.

When’s the next train to Reading? she wanted to say. Instead, she said she was visiting one of the soldiers in the convalescent home and she was not sure how to find it.

“Which one? There’s two. One for the officers and one for the Tommies.”

What a surprise. Of course there would be two. “Ashenden Park.”

He told her where to go. “You can’t miss it. Twenty minutes’ walk at best.”

Near the station a stone bridge crossed the river. Peter would have known this reach, she thought, would have navigated it many times. Peter was her brother, or rather half brother, and the reason she was here.

Up the hill trees creaked in the wind. The bare branches clawing at the sky reminded her how war poked its ugly crooked fingers into lives. No one was left out, not even the children, especially not the children. She saw it all the time. One day a child would be rosy, skipping, noisy; the next it would be a silent white face and another father or brother would be gone. They almost never cried or missed a day. Sometimes a strange viciousness would take hold of them and they would torment other children in the playground simply for the sake of inviting punishment for their actions. To feel bad was to be bad, to inflict pain was a way of suffering it: that seemed to be how it was. It had got to the point where you didn’t ask. What she taught with the battered primers and on the smeared blackboard was nothing compared to what they were learning out
of school. The ones you worried about were the ones who stayed the same, who froze it all up inside.

There was so much grief in the country, it was impossible to mourn. Loss had lost its status. No one could be comforted, because that was to claim a privilege that was not yours. Before the war, when her mother fell headfirst into the tray of digestives she had been sorting, her dead weight dragging the whole lot crashing to the factory floor, people brought their whispered remembrances to the house in their Sunday coats and hats. Her father shouldered, elbowed his way round the front room after the funeral, nodding, shaking hands, agreeing it was the best way to go—“out like a light.” Later, when they all left and while her brother banked up the fire, he talked with a kind of wonder about how their mother had smelled of sugar, about the crushed biscuits in her hair. “They weren’t even her favorites.” These days, the telegrams came, you lowered the blinds or pulled the curtains, and sat alone with the news. They were making shell cases at the factory now.

When she got to the house, she was told by an unsmiling woman wearing spectacles that the men were still at lunch and shown to a side chair in a massive hall. A muted gray light came down from above, and she sat in it as if she were waiting to be called to an examination room. Inside her clothing was the tiny gold heart on a chain that her brother had brought home on his first leave. It had been meant for Ida Firth, but by then Ida Firth had married someone else and he gave it to her instead. She tugged it up and free, put it to her cheek, and felt the warmth it had stolen from her skin.

“Miss Wells?” said the woman, returning. “Lieutenant Harrison will see you now.”

Her first sight of the house, sitting smug on its hill, had brought buried anger to life, flared it up. She had seen the columns on the frontage and thought: politicians, generals, judges. Us lot up here and you lot down there. Now, following the woman’s important footsteps down the stairs, along corridors, and through a courtyard, her anger grew. Everywhere she looked was the privilege of exclusion: those chairs, that cabinet, the wallpaper, the echoing stone
floor. Old things, old money. Even the shabbiness was grand. It was only later, after she left, that she realized that it was the house where her parents had been in service years before she was born, which struck her as an irony of a kind.