We That Are Left (17 page)

Eleanor said nothing. Carefully she placed her hat on the sideboard.

‘Life goes on,' Jessica said. ‘Whether you like it or not.'

Her mother turned, her eyes burning. ‘For you,' she hissed. ‘Life goes on for you.'

When the Armistice was announced on a dull grey Monday morning in November Oscar was at a training camp near Rhyl. He locked himself into a lavatory cubicle and cried. All through that autumn, as he had marched and drilled and succumbed to measles and learned about poison gas and machine guns, the Bulgarian, Turkish and Austrian armies had collapsed one by one into surrender but Oscar had wound his puttees and scratched his rash and known he would die. His physics books lay unopened on the shelves. There was no point in contemplating the future or a world of infinite wonder. His own world was proscribed, preordained. He would drill and drill and then he would die. He would die face down in the mud, his mouth pressed like a lover's against the rotting cheeks of those who had gone before. That was the way of it, lives laid down upon lives like sedimentary rock. Their orders came through on the last day of October. They would be in France by Christmas.

Less than two weeks later it was over. The celebrations in the camp were wild, the men shouting and singing as though they meant to drown out all the horrors of history. Later, as the drunkenness soured, there was a good deal of slurred swagger about precisely what they would have done if they had only had their chance at the Hun. The brutality of their
imaginings frightened Oscar. For the first time it occurred to him that, if you took away a man's freedom and gave him instead a greatcoat and a pistol and a belly full of hate, there might come a time when he no longer wanted to change back. Oscar drank and drank and waited in vain for the elation to come. After the first desperate weeping purge of relief he felt only shame. Through the static of the alcohol in his blood, he could hear the whisper of it, that he and all these other grotesquely undamaged men who roared and cheered and stamped their boots in triumph had cheated, because the triumph did not belong to them and because young and strong and whole as they were, they would only ever be pale shadows of those who had gone before.

They did not go home. Demobilisation would take time, the Commanding Officer informed them. The British Army was four million strong and the logistics were complex. Last in, last out, that was the way of things. The men would remain at the camp until informed otherwise. Oscar wrote to his mother to tell her he would not be home for Christmas. Her letters back were brief, her handwriting lopsided. He hoped she was not letting herself get too tired.

Nobody knew what was happening. The camp crawled with rumours. Some said that it was to be turned over to the Canadians as a demob centre for Canadian soldiers stationed in the south-east and that they would all be allowed to go home, others that only ‘slip men', those with the written guarantee of a job, would be demobbed. Three weeks before Christmas the story went round that they were to be shipped off to Russia to support the White Army against the Bolsheviks. They would fight after all. In Siberia in December the temperature at night reached minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Some twenty thousand men were already on their way.

It was snowing in Rhyl when Oscar received the letter from Mrs Doyle who lived next door. Mrs Doyle's youngest son Jimmy had lost both legs at Loos and sometimes late at night you could hear him crying through the wall. Beyond the
window Oscar could see the flakes swirling black in the glare of the unshaded outside light. Mrs Doyle said she was sorry to write when it would only alarm him but she did not think she could wait any longer. His mother was very ill. She asked if Oscar might be able to come home.

The CO granted Oscar a week's leave. The two middle-aged women sitting opposite him on the train patted his knee with their gloved hands and told him they were proud of their boys. They wore tweed overcoats buttoned to the neck and gauze masks on elastic over their mouths. When they muttered together about the preventative effects of vinegar and quinine the gauze pulsed in and out of the space between their lips. Oscar thought of the little girls in the village school in Wales who sang as they skipped with their ropes in the playground at dinnertime.

I had a little bird

Its name was Enza

I opened the window

And in flew Enza.

Mrs Doyle was just leaving as he arrived at the house in Clapham. She blinked at Oscar and said it was not right, not when everything was supposed to go back to normal. She said that she would be back again the next day, that a friend of his mother's, a young nurse who had proved a great support to her, had promised to look in that night and check that she was comfortable.

‘How long has she been ill?' Oscar made himself ask.

‘A while, dear. But worse these last two months.'

‘Why didn't she tell me?'

‘What good would it have done?' Mrs Doyle said. She patted his hand, her face creased with pity. ‘It'll be a shock, dear, I know. Try not to show it.'

It was a shock. His mother turned her head as he opened her bedroom door and smiled. Her face was grey, all cheekbones
and protruding jaw. Her hair was grey too. She was so thin she scarcely made a bump in the bed.

‘Darling,' she said.

He read her poetry as she drifted in and out of sleep. He did not try to understand the words but there was something calming about the steadiness of the metre. The room grew dark. Oscar did not turn on the lamp. Instead, he held his mother's hand, listening to the faint wheeze of her breath, in and out, his thumb moving gently over the bumps of her knuckles.

The doorbell made him jump. When he opened it Phyllis Melville was standing on the doorstep, a brown paper bag in one hand. She was wearing a vividly striped knitted scarf wound several times around her neck and a red velvet hat like a squashed pancake. He blinked at the brightness of her.

‘You came,' she said.

Oscar waited downstairs while she tended to his mother. For something to do he boiled the kettle and laid the fire in the parlour. There was no coal, of course, but somehow his mother had got wood, enough to be stacked on both sides of the fireplace. There was something very comforting in the ordinariness of the ritual, the first tentative lick of the sputtering match, the blue-green shrivel of the newspaper as it caught. Oscar leaned closer and blew, coaxing the flame into life. In Rhyl someone else lit the fires.

When Phyllis came back downstairs he had made a pot of tea. He offered her a cup.

‘I ought to get back,' she said, picking up her coat from the arm of the sofa. ‘I've a very early start.'

‘Just half an hour,' he said. She hesitated. Then she put down her coat.

‘All right. But only if we can have a proper drink.'

‘I'm not sure there's anything in the house,' he said, but Phyllis was already opening the corner cupboard, taking down
glasses and a half-full decanter of whisky. She poured them both two fingers.

‘Water?' she said.

‘Like that is fine.'

She sat in the chair by the fire, her feet tucked under her and the glass cradled in both hands. She hardly looked any older than she had done three years before except that she had cropped her hair short like a boy's. It suited her. She did not speak. Instead, she took a gulp of her drink. Oscar took a small sip of his. He had never liked the taste of whisky.

‘She's dying, isn't she?' he said. ‘Tell me.'

‘She has cancer.'

It shocked him to hear the word out loud. The tumour had originated in the lung. Now it was in her bones. It made them brittle and easily broken. She had fractured two ribs just from coughing. When Oscar asked about radium treatment Phyllis shook her head. Radium pellets could be inserted into a contained growth, but the seeds of his mother's cancer were no longer contained. They had scattered, germinating and taking root in several places. There was nothing else that could be done. The specialist at the Cancer Hospital had prescribed morphine for the pain and told his mother to come back when she could no longer manage at home.

‘How long does she have?' Oscar made himself ask.

‘Weeks. A month, maybe.' Her gaze was grave, steady. ‘I'm very sorry, Oscar.'

Oscar was silent. He thought of the cancer seedlings, pushing up like cress through the soft marrow of his mother's bones. ‘Do you mind if we don't talk about it any more?' he said.

‘Of course not.' She did not try to say anything else. The silence stretched and settled between them like a cat but Phyllis did not shift about in her chair or clear her throat or glance at him with the smile-frowns that people used when they wanted other people to say something but did not know how to ask. She gazed into the fire and there was a concentration
about her silence, as though whatever it was she was thinking was interesting and important. The flames lit her pale face like a lamp.

In the grate a log collapsed, sending up a flurry of sparks. An ember winked on the rug. Phyllis stretched out a foot and stamped it out. Then she stood up and fetched the whisky decanter from the table. Propped up on the mantelpiece was one of the photographs Oscar had taken at Ellinghurst, a detail of a gargoyle on the gatehouse. Oscar had manoeuvred the camera until the gargoyle's mouth was lined up with one of the chimneys on the main house. The gargoyle looked as though it was smoking a fat cigar. Phyllis smiled.

‘I like that,' she said. She held out the decanter to Oscar who shook his head, then sloshed some whisky into her own glass. ‘How long before you're demobbed, do you know?'

Oscar shook his head. ‘You?'

‘Same.' She sipped her drink. ‘It's funny, for the last year all I've wanted is for it to be over but now it is I can't imagine it somehow. Going back to doing ordinary things again. Wearing ordinary clothes. Not being afraid to look at one's letters or in the newspaper.'

‘Being ordinary and not feeling guilty about it. That's what I can't imagine.'

She blinked at him in surprise. ‘Yes. That's it exactly. When I think about the boys on my ward, all I can think is that the War isn't over for them at all. That perhaps it never will be.'

His mother had told him a little about Phyllis's hospital in her letters. The men there had all been blown to bits, one way or another.

‘They're terrible pranksters,' Phyllis said. ‘One private's arm flies off every time he salutes. He says it's a fault with the prosthetic but we all know he's a bet with the others on whether he can knock an officer's hat off.'

Oscar smiled and thought of Jimmy Doyle in his wheelchair.

‘It's like a madhouse during the day,' she said. ‘Like herding eels. But then at night, when the lights are turned down and
it's quiet and they can't sleep and there's time to talk—you'd give anything, then, just to take away some of their pain.' She was silent, staring at the fire. Then she took a big gulp of whisky. ‘Sixteen shillings a week, that's what Mr Lloyd George reckons an arm to be worth. Although if you've got a half-decent stump they'll cut that to eleven and six. Anything above the neckline, not a penny. Apparently a smashed-up face isn't worth anything at all.' The sudden savagery in her voice reminded Oscar of his mother. He felt himself closing inside, like an anemone touched with a finger.

‘The ones that make it, they're like very old men. All their friends are dead, and now they're just waiting to be dead too, except that they've still got years and years left of being young.' She shook her head. ‘I'm sorry. You don't want to hear all this.'

‘It's all right.'

‘No. No, it isn't. We should be talking about peace and . . . and Charlie Chaplin.'

‘A Dog's Life.'

Phyllis smiled lopsidedly. ‘Something like that.'

‘I must have seen that film five times. The part where he eats the cakes, do you remember?'

‘I'm afraid I haven't seen it. Though if it has cakes in perhaps I should. I like cake.'

‘But not the pictures?'

‘The pictures too. It's just . . . well, I haven't been for a while.'

‘It's one thing to say for basic training. You see all the flicks.'

‘I'd go with the other nurses, except the cinema near us only ever shows those hateful romances. You know,
Hearts of the World
, things like that. I don't suppose you saw
Hearts of the World
.'

‘Only the poster.'

The poster had shown a German soldier flogging a screaming girl with a cat-o'-nine-tails and underneath the title, in big
white letters, A LOVE STORY OF THE GREAT WAR. By the time Oscar came home after his examinations
Hearts of the World
had been showing at the Clapham Roxy for weeks and weeks and still in the evenings the queue stretched right around the corner.

‘My friend Maud went three times,' Phyllis said. ‘She said that it made her hate the Germans so much she felt giddy. She knew that it was propaganda but she didn't mind. She wanted it. The giddiness and the hate.'

Oscar thought of the men on Armistice Day, baying for German blood.

‘Perhaps hating is better than thinking it's all for nothing,' he said. ‘Perhaps hate makes it mean something.'

‘But what if we can't stop? What if hating is all that's left of us?'

‘But it isn't, is it?' Oscar said. ‘It just isn't.'

‘No,' she said very quietly and she went on looking at him with her grave pale eyes and he looked back at her and he did not say anything because there was a truthfulness in looking that was plainer and more fluent than anything he could think of to say.

He stayed for a week. His mother had good days and bad days. On the good days she sometimes wanted to talk to him about what might happen after she was gone. He learned to recognise the change in her expression, the careful steadying of the breath in her clogged lungs, the way she picked with a nail at a seam in the counterpane. Usually he contrived to escape the room before she could begin. He heard a knock at the front door or remembered a letter he had to write or the kettle he had left boiling on the stove. He did not always manage it. Once she caught him by the wrist and made him sit.