The Blasphemer: A Novel (12 page)

A second dolphin appeared and the two circled below, their swimming synchronized as they turned on their backs to get a better view of the strange fish they had found. Daniel knew he was approaching another shallow ‘reef flat’ because the water was alive with blue tangs and angelfish. As he swam over a coral garden, grazing it with his fins, he recoiled at the sight of volcanic funnels and what looked like human brains. Beautiful in any other context, they were sinister now. A school of yellowtail floated past within inches of his facemask, making him flinch. A blue-spotted ray scuttled off in a cloud of sand. Once it felt safe, it slowed down and, with graceful beats of its wings, disappeared from view. Daniel could hear parrotfish pecking noisily at the hard coral now. He could also hear the sound of his breathing amplified by the water. The ocean was too tranquil; too neon-blue. Clownfish were hovering among the waving tentacles of sea anemones. He
wondered how they could be so oblivious to the plane that had crashed in their environment. How could everything be back to normal so quickly? A small reef shark appeared, the black tip on its dorsal fin sweeping back and forth as it patrolled the shallows. Daniel no longer felt afraid.

You can’t hurt me. Not today.

He swam over a coral wall and looked down over a sheer drop. It gave him vertigo, making him feel as if he were floating in the sky, contemplating the ground. This thought triggered a sense memory of the crash; a feeling of panic; of falling out of the sky; out of time. He could make out a craggy labyrinth of rock below, and it looked like a twisted fuselage.

The crash, he figured, must have left him with mild concussion because memories were flowing back to him with frightening clarity, placing him back in his seat in the plane. He could hear the screaming of the engine. He could feel the noise, too, vibrating through his seat, through his groin, through his bones. He remembered thinking to himself: It’s over. It’s over. He shut his eyes as though to shut out the memory, and his mask began to steam up as hot tears wet his cheeks.

After three quarters of an hour, he brushed against an object floating on the surface. He shouted and recoiled with revulsion, thinking it was the decapitated body of the flight attendant. Now he saw it was something half eaten, a sea lion perhaps, and pushed it away, trying not to be sick. He realized that he hadn’t counted the flight attendant. There were nine dead, not eight.

Not wanting to run into another dead creature, he opened his eyes and began swimming breaststroke, keeping his head above water to see where he was going. When his neck began to ache he alternated with front crawl. Every fifteen minutes or so he stopped for a sip from the Lucozade bottle. Soon after he had emptied it, he began to feel dehydrated and cold. His sense of direction, of time and space, was slipping. He was adrift now and, with the randomness of delirium, thoughts of his great-grandfather’s letters began melting through his mind. He tried to recall what they
had said, to picture Nancy’s face as she was reading them, and his father’s face as he handed them over, almost reluctant to let them go.

THE TEMPERATURE IN LONDON HAD RISEN BY TWELVE DEGREES
overnight and the softly falling snow had sharpened to sleet and drizzle. This, Philip thought, is more appropriate. November weather. Remembrance Sunday weather. He usually travelled to Bayeux for the ceremony, officially because he was a director of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, unofficially because that was where his father was buried. But this year he had been asked to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph on behalf of the Handbags, as members of the Royal Army Medical Corps were known.

The wreath he was holding, a red cross of poppies on a white cardboard background, was chafing his knees as he rocked back and forth on his heels, waiting. Umbrellas had gone up in the crowd around him but he had no need of one today: his dark-blue beret was keeping his head dry. He had angled it so that it covered his missing ear. Earlier that morning, he had checked and rechecked in the mirror that his cap badge – the rod of Asclepius – was one inch above his left eye. He checked, for the third time in ten minutes, the row of polished metal across the breast of his overcoat. Along with his campaign medals – Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the First Gulf War – there was a silver cross standing out against the charcoal grey of his coat material, an MC. With leather-gloved fingers, he flicked an imaginary speck of dirt off his shoulder, as if that, and not the medals, was what he had been staring at. He straightened his back, raised his chin and looked around.

From his position in Whitehall, a few rows behind the Chiefs of Staff, he could make out, through the gathering mist, Nelson’s column. He closed his eyes for a moment and, when he opened them again, the column had disappeared from view. He studied instead the monolithic slab of Portland stone in front of him. It looked severe and beautiful. As he read and reread its simple inscription – ‘The Glorious Dead’ – the massed band of the Guards Division began playing Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’. Coming as it was from his deaf side, the adagio sounded more muffled and colourless than usual, but no less autumnal. Despite the cold there were still some leaves clinging on to the trees. In the overcast light, the branches had become almost invisible so that the golden and copper tints looked as if they were floating on the still surface of a lake. As Philip studied one particular branch, its leaves began to shimmer, stirred by a gust, and, almost as one, relinquished their hold and began spiralling slowly to the ground, only to be caught up again in a flurry. Dead leaves defining the shape of the breeze. He checked his pocket watch, a silver half-hunter inscribed with his grandfather’s initials. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month was approaching. He bowed his head and felt the silence deepening, like a shelf of sand sinking away beneath his shoes.

A numbing inner stillness descended upon him. There is no such thing as silence, the composer John Cage once said, and Philip knew the truth of this. When he went from being Lt Col Philip Kennedy RAMC to Lt Col Philip Kennedy RAMC (Rtd), he was presented with a silver sword and a rare collection of BBC recordings of the silences held at the Cenotaph since 1929. Whenever he listened to them he noticed the chimes of Big Ben were followed not by silence but by ambient noise: distant planes, birdsong, the shuffle of feet. Broadcasters knew that such near-silence had more resonance than shutting down the airwaves for two minutes. But for Philip the two-minute silence was crowded in other ways. In what amounted to a family tradition, he had not known his father, who in turn had not known his father. Neither man had grown old, as he, the son and grandson, had grown old.
They had instead been frozen in youth, their likenesses recorded in a few granular photographs, their names carved on stones in foreign fields. They were strangers to one another, grandfather, father and son, yet once a year, on the same November morning, they met for two minutes in the silence.

Though he was breathing in through his nose, the cold air was aggravating the back of Philip’s throat, making him cough. It was making his eyes water, too, but that was as close as he ever came to tears. He almost envied the damp-eyed young widow holding a wreath next to him. Iraq possibly. Or Afghanistan. She was sniffing and dabbing at her cheeks with a tissue. It wasn’t that he lacked compassion; merely that he had never cried in his life and was too old to learn how it was done. The closest he had come was when his first wife had died of ovarian cancer, or rather when, at her funeral, the five-year-old Daniel had felt for his hand by the graveside. He thought of this now and of how, more recently, when his older sister had died, he had delivered a eulogy in a voice so steady Daniel had come up to him afterwards and said in an affectionately teasing undertone: ‘Marble, Dad. You’re made of bloody marble.’ Actually, he thought – but did not say at the time – it is you who is made of marble, Daniel. When your mother died you decided there was no God, that it was all a lie, that you would have to put your faith in science. You have never once wavered. Never once reconsidered your rejection. If anyone is made of marble …

His thoughts on his son, Philip felt in his overcoat pocket for his mobile, turned it on to check for messages, and, seeing there were none, turned it off again. He did a mental calculation: Daniel and Nancy had left Heathrow on Thursday morning, they were due to fly on to the Galápagos Islands the following morning but their flight had been delayed by a day. So they should have got there on Saturday morning. Yesterday.

Philip had been trying Daniel’s mobile every few hours, but had not wanted to leave a message about Martha’s hypo. That would only cause unnecessary worry. Besides, he had wanted to talk directly to Daniel about another matter. He wanted to say that, upon reflection, he thought it would be best if Nancy did not
translate Andrew Kennedy’s letters from the trenches. He would explain why when they returned.

A frown knotted his brow. Why wasn’t Daniel answering his mobile? He had said he would call when he reached the islands. Presumably he hadn’t been able to get a signal. That must be it. It made sense actually, because when they were at the ice rink there had been a voice message left on Martha’s iPhone that sounded like Nancy, but it had been too broken and crackly to make out what was being said. A bad signal. Unable to get through on Nancy’s mobile either, Philip had rung the travel company. They had said that the seaplane had landed safely near the Galápagos Islands. But Philip was still uneasy. As a precaution, he had called in a favour from Geoff Turner, a friend who worked for the Security Services. Could he double-check about the flight? See if the British Embassy in Quito had heard anything? The friend would see what he could do.

Philip always felt a small stab of melancholy when he thought of Daniel. It wasn’t that he thought his son a failure – far from it – it was more that, despite their best efforts, they had never managed to be close. As a child, Daniel had never caught his attention. Philip had pretended that he was interested in his games, and drawings, and songs, but his look of distraction had never been well concealed. The truth was, Philip had never even caught his own attention. He knew this. He was aware of his hollow centre, of his cauterized emotions, of the father-shaped hole in his own life.

He checked his medals again. They didn’t just glitter, they cast a shadow. Philip had lived in the shadow of his father’s posthumously awarded VC all his life. In the summer of 1944, Captain William Kennedy, ‘Silky’ Kennedy as he was known – the nickname came from his insistence on wearing silk underwear bought from Jermyn Street – had led his unit in a suicidal charge on a farmhouse, a German machine-gun position that was pinning down British and Canadian troops on the road to Tilly-sur-Seulles. Silky had managed to put it out of action with grenades but was shot several times in the chest as he did so. A glorious death. Philip often wondered what manner of man his father had been: brave,
obviously, but also phlegmatic and good-humoured, he imagined. According to regiment folklore, Silky Kennedy had looked down at the bullet holes in his tunic as he lay dying and said: ‘You have to admire the grouping!’ His last words.

Philip studied the rows of Chelsea pensioners in their wheelchairs. They were from the Second World War, Silky’s generation. There were no First World War veterans left to take part in the march past, although he had noticed, with a disapproving eye, a Wren in her forties, thirties possibly, holding a wreath of poppies on behalf of the SAD campaign. Shot At Dawn. The red poppies had white centres. These symbolized the white patches of cloth placed as targets over the hearts of the soldiers shot for cowardice and desertion. Philip had been asked to support the campaign but had declined. He had also argued at a meeting of the War Graves Commission that the SAD campaigners shouldn’t be part of the parade. They made a mockery of the men – men like his father and grandfather – who had given their lives gallantly in battle.

His thoughts were on his grandfather now. Private Andrew Kennedy’s name was listed on the Menin Gate Memorial as one of the missing, and according to regimental records he had been killed in action on the first day of Passchendaele, but that was all that was recorded about him. There was no other mention of him in the day-to-day war diaries kept by the officers of the 11th Battalion, Shropshire Fusiliers. No latrine duty. No sentry duty. Nothing about his training at Étaples, the infamous ‘Bull Ring’. He was the Unknown Grandfather. The letters he had written in French represented the first contact Philip had had with him, the first indication, after a lifetime of speculation, of what kind of a man he was. What would they reveal? That Andrew was cruel? Gentle? Lazy? What? The letters seemed to represent a threat to Philip’s own legitimacy, somehow. They raised long-buried suspicions. Half-suspicions. Why were they written in French? This was why they made him feel uneasy. Sometimes it is best not to know these things. Would Nancy have begun translating them yet? Damn, he wished he could get through to Daniel on the phone.

He passed his cross of poppies from one gloved hand to the other
and wriggled the fingers of the now empty hand to get the circulation back into them. This prompted a distant memory. When he had arrived at Sandhurst, his fellow officer cadets had wanted to shake his hand. Word had spread that not only had his grandfather been killed at Passchendaele, but his father had won a posthumous VC for his part in the Normandy Landings. It was quite a double: two generations of fighting men buried in foreign soil. It
was
remarkable. It
did
merit a shake of the hand. Philip accepted that. But he had nevertheless been a reluctant celebrity at the academy. Even the commandant at Sandhurst had joined in. ‘If there is such a thing as heroic blood,’ he had said, ‘you must surely have it.’ Philip had muttered something about how everyone was capable of selflessness, given the right circumstances. But he had often wondered since whether that was the case, whether there might not be a bravery gene.