Supply of heroes, p.23
Supply of Heroes, page 23
The cross on the pillar was truly gone, but he doffed his cap and blessed himself anyway, crying, “In Gottes Namen!”
Had he seen the black figure when it leapt onto the pile of coal in the body of the barge before him, he’d have been certain it was God’s Son down from His cross, risen once more from the dead and come at last to punish him for all his sins.
12
Hyde Park was London’s way of being in the countryside. Its lawns were tailored to look like the lawns of paradise surrounding the great rural houses for which every Englishman, whether as lord or servant, felt an innate nostalgia. This morning the earth still smelled of rain from the night before and the wet leaves clung to each other in sodden piles instead of frisking about in the late October wind. The chill air sent the park animals scurrying about; the mad but pointed hoarding of nuts and berries had begun. Animals always feel an autumn panic for food, and this year the people of London felt it too. First the young men had disappeared, and then the groceries had. Vendors in London no longer filled their shelves. Fresh fruits, meats, and vegetables were sold by subscription now to the upper classes, and the display of provisions served no purpose if it was all spoken for. At the markets of Covent Garden only damaged produce was offered to the population at large, and each evening the scraps discarded between farmers’ carts grew more meager as the scavengers contending for them grew more numerous. The fine ladies and older gentlemen on their way to the nearby Opera felt assaulted by the pitiful scenes that they found more and more difficult to ignore. Even in Hyde Park, now, one saw old ladies collecting chestnuts in their aprons, shooing squirrels.
Pamela and Jane were sitting on a bench watching Timmy and Anne chasing pigeons. The grass was wet and the children’s shoes would be wrecked, but who had the heart to rein them? Though Timmy at three was two years younger than his sister, he had a boy’s wildness, which gave him the initiative. Anne imitated all his moves, careening from one bird cluster to another, scaring them into flight, but she lacked his fierce abandon. He had given himself over to the chase because he believed in it. His sister knew full well they would never catch the birds, and that knowledge, like a dirty secret, inhibited her.
Jane and Pamela, by contrast, sat quietly. They were alike in appearance. At twenty-seven Pamela was five years Jane’s senior, but each dressed the part of a modern young woman, without Victorian flamboyance. They wore somber, unplumped, form-fitting ankle-length skirts, shades of blue and brown but decidedly not black. Pamela’s long kid gloves gave her a citified air that Jane lacked, but her relative sophistication was undercut by the toy bear she held. The fur on one of its fists was sucked smooth.
Since coming to London, Jane had taken to varnishing her nails. Her nails had become a rare vanity, in fact, but that was because in all her years at Cragside—all that manual labor—she’d never had long fingernails. She was staring at her nails now, thinking that her life in London as Pamela’s companion and the children’s bonny aunt could easily have been her life in Cragside, less the work: it was that cozy, that comfortable, that small. It hadn’t begun to depress her until Dan Curry’s letters had inexplicably stopped coming three weeks before.
“Oh, he nearly got that one,” Pamela said delightedly. Timmy had come within inches of snagging a pigeon. “He’s rather wonderful, isn’t he?”
Jane agreed, and the happiness Pamela took in her children always gave Jane pleasure, but her heart was with Timmy’s earnest sister. Jane knew how difficult it was for a girl to be forever measured against a gifted male. She said, “He’s just showing off for Anne.” Jane had believed that Douglas’s great feats—pitching stones cricket-style to hit particular fence rails, then later coaxing horses to leap those rails—had been performed for her benefit, even when he didn’t know she was watching him. Douglas was years older. To her he was the young god who came home from school twice a year. And because of their sudden progression from total strangers to fast friends, she was always heartbroken when it came time for him to leave. In truth, she did not know him; she worshiped not Douglas but the image she created of him in his perennial absence. That was the difference between her and Pamela—she took the loss of her brother for granted. To Jane this absence of Douglas seemed, if not natural, inevitable, and so did the pain of her loneliness. Unlike Anne, Timmy, or their mother, Jane had been raised to solitude, and what had made her know it, and feel it, were those rare periods of her brother’s company. These memories stabbed her into thinking of Dan, and they made it seem inevitable that her main experience of him should have been his absence too.
“But he’s so fast and surefooted.” Pamela sighed, and Jane sensed that the sight of the child put her sister-in-law in mind of Douglas too. Here they were, a pair of women whose men were gone. Why had they been unable, she wondered suddenly, to comfort each other?
Pamela’s sighs had filled the house in Chelsea. Her sighs had weight, and their accumulated density, when added to that of Mrs. Wells’s curdled silence, had made even that spacious mansion too small for Jane. Pamela’s sighs seemed to consume Jane’s share of oxygen, leaving her choking with claustrophobia. If she and Jane were to sit together for long, it had to be outside like this; not even the Chelsea garden would do. It was Jane who insisted on Hyde Park, because there the fear of suffocation left her. She wanted an expanse of grass like the one that ran in Cragside between the house and the cliff above the sea. In that open air she could once more admire Pamela for not being near tears all the time, as she was herself, and for not clamping down morosely as her mother had. Away from Chelsea, Jane could marvel at Pamela’s level of cheer, an ample brightness based on her resolute expectation that Douglas would return. This was not hopefulness on her part, or mere optimism. Pamela was simply incapable of imagining a life without Douglas, although Jane knew she was already living it. Hence that unconscious, constant stream of sighs, her one expression of desolation. Pamela’s sighs were driving Jane insane. She would never have said so.
A policeman walked by in his blue-black helmet and white gloves. He saluted the women without stopping.
Why did he look so pleased with himself? Jane wondered. Nothing embodied the prosaic sobriety of the English better than London bobbies. They were the perfect emblems of the triumph of rationality over passion, which was the central fact of English supremacy. Ever since the Romans defeated the Druids, organization had been defeating feeling, and that was why England ruled Ireland yet. Jane had never considered herself fully Irish, but since coming to London she’d sensed that she was even less English. There were feelings in her heart that nothing could defeat, and here that seemed somehow wrong. It seemed un-English of her to hurt so, to be at the mercy of her longing, and to need to express the chaos of her emotions. Expression was under interdict. If England caught on fire, she thought, it would find a way to swallow the smoke. There would be no scream, no cry. There would be, she saw, a national sigh, the sound a ship makes before slipping beneath the sea.
Jane pointed at the policeman. “Did you read about that ship sinking in the Channel, how the sailors, as they went down, aimed the searchlights at the flag? If London was sinking, they’d aim the searchlights at the bobbies.”
Pamela gave her sister-in-law a look. “That’s a strange comment, Jane.”
Jane touched Pamela’s sleeve. “I meant only what symbols they are, don’t you think?”
Pamela let her eye follow the policeman. She said absently, “They’re the same as the police in Dublin.”
It was true. How little Jane had understood before. The police in Dublin, though native-born Irishmen, were English too. She said, “We’ve become dear friends, Pamela, but we’ve never discussed the fact of my being Irish, how it sets me apart.”
Jane’s hand still rested on Pamela’s sleeve. Pamela covered it with her own. “That isn’t so. You aren’t set apart. I don’t believe that for a minute. You aren’t really Irish, Jane. Any more than Douglas is.”
“But we are, Pamela. Don’t you see?”
Pamela shook her head. This was a conversation she had had dozens of times with her mother, who’d disapproved of Douglas for this very reason. Pamela tried to keep impatience from her voice as she used one of her old arguments. “The Duke of Wellington was born in Ireland. Lord Kitchener himself was. That doesn’t make them Irish. Is George Bernard Shaw Irish? Or was Oscar Wilde? Or Edmund Burke? Or Jonathan Swift? Really, Jane, some of the best Englishmen come from Ireland. The Irish are the Catholics, you know that.”
“And if I was to become a Catholic, what would that make me?”
Pamela pulled away. “Don’t be silly.”
“I’m serious, Pamela.”
“What, about becoming Catholic?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“About being Irish. You mustn’t deny it. You think of Cragside as if it were on the coast of North Devonshire. It’s in County Clare! You think of my father as if he were an honor’s-list pensioner away for his retirement. He’s an Irishman, and he’s at home, Pamela. Our people have been in Ireland for four hundred years. If my ancestors had gone to America, we’d be Americans by now surely. Why can’t we be Irish, then?”
“Because Ireland belongs to England. America doesn’t. You’d feel differently, Jane—I’m older than you, I know these things—if you’d gone to a proper school. Your father should never have kept you—”
“School has nothing to do with it!” Jane said this so angrily that Anne stopped running where she was and looked nervously back at them.
“Please, Jane.”
“I’m sorry.” Jane knotted her hands in her lap and fixed her eyes upon them, upon her varnished nails. Whose hands are these, she thought?
Pamela put her arm around Jane, while pressing her son’s toy bear to her own breast. She said softly, “I have only one ambition, Jane darling, and that’s to have Douglas back. He can come back as an Australian aborigine, as long as he comes back. I don’t care if he’s Irish, Jane. I don’t care if you are. I love him and I love you.”
That’s not what I meant, Jane thought. But she rested her head on Pamela’s shoulder, and she let her strong, resilient English sister-in-law hold her, even though she felt no real comfort in her words.
Their carriage was waiting for them on North Carriage Drive between Marble Arch and Speakers’ Corner. It was nearly noon by the time Pamela, Jane, and the children approached from the sprawling green park. Jane was carrying Timmy piggyback, and Anne for once was the one to run ahead. She was drawn by the high-pitched ranting of a stout, red-faced, bald-headed man who stood on an upended crate behind a crude, hand-lettered sign that read, rome the home of beelzebub!
Timmy tried to slide down from her shoulders, but Jane held him. An old woman thrust a pamphlet at her: The Healing of Christian Science. Because she tried to decline politely, she was distracted from her effort to hold Timmy, and he succeeded in slipping out of her grasp. He ran after Anne toward the fiery antipapist. There were half a dozen orators, each declaiming to the broad gray weather: South Africa, Christian Science, the antipapist, Salvation Army, and a woman denouncing whiskey. Pamela said, “I’ll get them,” and she went after her children, leaving Jane momentarily alone.
It was then that a ragamuffin boy ran by her, then came back to stop in front of her. “Hello, ma’am. This is for you.” He held out a small piece of notepaper. She wasn’t going to take it, but the boy said, “The gentleman give it to me.” She took it and he ran off.
Jane was instinctively furtive, turning aside to open the note. It said, in his familiar hand, “Find a reason for staying in the park. Your Dan.”
Curry watched from a hundred yards away. He was dressed in a dark suit, tie, and a bowler hat, and he carried a mackintosh over his arm. His hair was cut short and, for the first time in five years, his face was clean-shaven. His unweathered skin was raw and pale. He had arrived at Southampton on the liner from Genoa the night before. His papers identified him as an insurance salesman from Cork who’d traveled to Switzerland for treatment of a mild consumption. He was on his way back to Ireland now. He had no justification, counterfeit or real, for having come to London.
Jane was stooping to kiss the children. She straightened and then, one guessed, began explaining herself a second time to the other woman. Curry admired the slim line of her figure. From that distance he couldn’t make out her face clearly, though he recognized the particular angle at which she held her head when she was being earnest. He remembered the slight tremble of her gestures when she was being unsure of herself, and he thought he saw that in her hands and arms now. She kept glancing around, looking for him, he knew.
At last the woman relented and, kissed Jane lightly on the cheek.
Curry began to draw closer.
With her children on either side of her, the woman backed away toward Carriage Drive. The children waved while the woman eyed Jane impassively. Then they mounted their carriage and a moment later they were gone.
Jane turned and looked for him.
He ran toward her. She saw him coming but didn’t move. As he drew nearer she still did not react, and he slowed his pace. It hadn’t occurred to him she wouldn’t feel as he did. Her eyes were fixed upon him, but she hadn’t so much as lifted a hand. He stopped, perhaps a dozen yards away. He was oblivious of the nearby orators, their few listeners, the lunchtime strollers. The wind had picked up and clouds had moved across the sky, throwing a blanket shadow over everything.
All at once her hand swept to her mouth and she cried, “Dan!,” running to him.
He took the full force of her weight as she threw herself on him. His hat fell, but he ignored it.
“I didn’t know you,” she said. “How could I not know you? How could I not know you?” She clung to him.
After a long time of simply holding her, he said quietly, “You didn’t know me without my magnificent beard.”
At once she pulled back to look, her mouth agape, wet eyes like saucers. “Good God! You’ve shaved!”
He laughed and hugged her anew, but she pulled back once more to look. Amazement, wonder, and delight filled her face. “You’re handsome! What a chin you have!” She swung about, hanging from his hands. “What cheeks! And your mouth! I never saw your mouth before! It’s beautiful!” And then she kissed him.
When he drew back to look at her, holding her face between his hands, he thought she looked like the Madonna come alive. For him God’s mother was a measure of beauty. Her transparent eyes seemed to offer him access to what was inside her; what he saw was the love she bore him. He touched her neck, then her shoulders, which, even through the bulk of her coat, seemed thinner than before. She seemed altogether frail. “You’ve lost weight. You’ve been unwell.”
She shook her head. “I’ve missed you. That’s been my illness.”
And you’ve been worried for your brother, he added to himself. Since leaving Trier he’d been aiming for this, to tell her, He is alive! Your brother is alive! But now that the moment had arrived, he could not say it. Concern for himself intruded. Once her first happiness at the news faded, then what? He should tell her the rest? Your brother’s captors are my allies? The hope of my nation? I stood with his keepers who let me look at him through the bars of his cage? Concern for himself, exactly. She would hate him.
“Why are you here, Dan?”
“Because of you.” That at least was true, and it was relief to say it. He grasped instinctively how important it was that he not lie. “Because I . . .” He stopped and looked away.
She caressed his smooth chin with her fingers. “Where have you been, darling? I’d begun to be afraid for you too. Your letters stopped.”
Why couldn’t they have come to this hours from now, days or years from now? Why couldn’t he have been with her quietly for a time, strolling with her, in a bright room with her, lying with her? The image of her nakedness filled his mind, but no sooner did he picture her bare, astonishing breasts than he remembered the gold locket hanging between them.
He took her hand from his chin. His eyes blazed into hers, as if he could burn himself onto her, like the mark of a brand, so that she would never be without him. But, of course, she would send him away once he told her. Still it was unthinkable that he should not. “I’ve been in Germany, Jane,” he said simply. And then, not giving her a chance to react, he said the rest so that he would have done it. “I’m on my way back to Ireland. I’ve come here to tell you that I saw your brother. He’s alive and he’s unhurt. He’s in a prison camp near Trier and they are treating him well.”
It was as if he’d filleted her, and he understood that emotionally he had, slicing flesh from bone, cutting her into a perfect butterfly of contradiction, the best news and the worst. How could she possibly take in either?
She fell away from him. A peasant woman with such an expression on her face would have blessed herself to ward off the ghost of what she saw. “What? I’m sorry, what?”
He stepped toward her.
But she held up her hand. “No, just tell me again what you said. What did you say?”
“I said, your brother is alive. I saw him.”
It was like looking now not at a madonna, but at a nun, so little could he see of her: no hair, no eyebrows, no ears, no neck. Only those hard, heartless eyes that made him feel like a mulish pupil who could not make himself understood.
“Listen, take them one thing at a time. Douglas is well. Just take that for now.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No.”
“How can you be sure . . .?”
“You showed me his picture. When I saw him, I inquired. Captain Douglas Tyrrell, Fourth Connaught Rangers. He was captured at Messines, near Ypres. He’s well, Jane. I was as close to him as we are to that bench.”
