‘Is there anything you need doing while I’m here?’ he says, hovering in the kitchen door while she slaps butter on to bread.
‘You could change the bulb on the landing if you wouldn’t mind.’
Of course he doesn’t mind. He’s relieved to be doing something that only he can do. He gets the stepladder, says, as Grandad always said at such moments, in his younger days, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. He puts the stepladder back in the bedroom and goes down to eat.
When she comes in with the sandwiches on a tray they talk about Geordie and his illness, Frieda reproaching herself for not having spotted the signs sooner. She seems to think if only she’d got him to the doctor more quickly he might have lived for ever. Once or twice Nick notices slips of the tongue: she talks about ‘your dad’ when she means her dad. Tiredness – she must be absolutely knackered. ‘Grandad,’ he corrects, gently, but then thinks, Why bother? She’s only unconsciously recognizing a truth.
When his father died, Nick stood by the grave, eyes stinging, not from grief, but from a kind of despair at his failure to feel anything. His deepest reaction had been one of relief: that he wouldn’t have to try to talk to him any more. Cars and cricket, cricket and cars. They’d sit on either side of the fire during Nick’s disgracefully rare visits, like a couple of bookends with no book worth reading in the middle.
Once the sandwiches have been eaten and the tray taken away, he asks, ‘How bad are the nights?’
He sees her hesitate, the struggle between loyalty and desperation painful to witness. ‘Bad,’ she says at last.
‘Nightmares?’
‘Worse than that. He wakes up and it’s still happening. I can remember him being like this when I was a little girl. I used to stand at the kitchen door and watch your gran try and get him back into the house. But he’d got over it, that’s what I can’t understand. He hasn’t had turns like that for years. And now it seems like it’s all coming back. You know, he thinks he sees Harry being killed. But the thing is, it’s not like he’s remembering it, it’s like he’s actually seeing it. He’s shouting “Harry” and waving his arms about and when you get hold of him he doesn’t see you, he’s in a world of his own. To be honest I’ve been frightened of him once or twice and it’s an awful thing because he never once lifted a finger to any of us when I was little. He was never a violent man.’
‘Look, when he comes out, I’ll do the nights.’
‘You can’t,’ she says immediately. ‘When’s the baby due?’
‘Not till October. I can manage the first few weeks.’ To himself he’s thinking (hoping?) that a few weeks may be all that’s needed. Shepherd said he could go any time. ‘You need your rest,’ he says. ‘You can’t do nights and days.’
She blinks doubtfully. ‘Well, if you’re sure. I can’t say it wouldn’t be a help, ’cos it would.’
On his way back to the hospital, Nick calls at Geordie’s house to check that everything’s all right. It’s typical of Geordie that he won’t surrender his independence and go to live with his daughter, though there’s never a week goes past that Frieda doesn’t try to persuade him. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m all right as I am.’
And until recently he was. He lives in a terrace of two-up, two-down houses, in what used to be a poor district, though now it’s rising rapidly as young professional people move in. It’s an attractive area, only a short drive from the city centre, yet the houses back on to woods and fields.
The house smells cold, musty and unlived in, though Geordie’s only been in hospital a week. Nick checks the windows and the back door, but everything’s secure. He goes upstairs, switches on the light in Grandad’s bedroom, not knowing what he’s doing here. Wanting some contact perhaps, some feeling of closeness that he doesn’t get from that semi-stranger in the hospital bed.
Two books on the bedside table. One’s called Soldier, from the Wars Returning and includes an interview with Geordie, though that’s not why it’s there. It’s there because of the inscription on the title page, To Geordie, with love and admiration, Helen.
The other’s a scrapbook for cuttings of his public appearances. Not many recent cuttings, only one in the last three months, but before that they come thick and fast. Grandad at the Imperial War Museum, talking to children in schools and colleges, on a televised trip to the battlefields, framed by the arches of Thiepval. The record of an ordinary man who, by living long, had become extraordinary.
On the table beside the wardrobe there’s a photograph of two young men in uniform, not obviously brothers, though they were brothers. Tinted sepia, drained of life and colour, as if the mud’s already reaching out to claim them. Born to die, that’s the impression, though only one of them did. Harry’s the one who copped it, dead in 1916, just before the Somme. Yet in the photograph the shadow of what’s to come seems to lie over them both. Eighteen years old, a self-conscious moustache framing his upper lip, Grandad looks closer to death than he did this afternoon, 101 years old, riddled with cancer, lying in a hospital bed.
Beside it there’s another photograph, a glossy Polaroid taken by Nick on a visit they’d made, earlier this year, to the battlefields. The last week of February, snow on the ground. No time for a man of Geordie’s age to be travelling, but they both knew this would be his last time, and that if they didn’t seize the chance to go together then, they would never go at all.
Grandad’s last, Nick’s first, visit. He’d resisted this for years, but now couldn’t refuse. At intervals, as once when Grandad stood on the lip of a crater, looking down, it strikes Nick with the force of revelation, though he’s known it all his life: he was there.
Nothing Nick had heard, nothing he had read, prepared him for the cemeteries. He wandered round, taking surreptitious photographs of Geordie, neither of them speaking much, content to leave each other alone. They visited the cemeteries promiscuously, in no particular order. One of Nick’s clearest memories is of Geordie standing in a German cemetery, the thin dark crosses casting blue shadows on the snow, like the footprints of birds.
Just as nothing had prepared him for the cemeteries, so the cemeteries, with their neatly tended plots and individual inscriptions, failed to prepare him for the annihilating abstractions of Thiepval. Geordie walked in a straight line towards the monument, dwarfed by its immensity, his figure shadowy in the faint mist that lingered on the grass. Nick retreated to a curved stone bench, ignoring the damp seeping through the seat of his jeans, and stared at the inscription: TO THE MISSING OF THE SOMME.
He was repelled by it. The monument towered over the landscape, but it didn’t soar as a cathedral does. The arches found the sky empty and returned to earth; they opened on to emptiness. It reminded Nick, appropriately enough, of a warrior’s helmet with no head inside. No, worse than that: Golgotha, the place of a skull. If, as Nick believed, you should go to the past, looking not for messages or warnings, but simply to be humbled by the weight of human experience that has preceded the brief flicker of your own few days, then Thiepval succeeded brilliantly.
Following in Geordie’s footsteps, he walked across the grass and up the steps to the stone of sacrifice, feeling the weight of that experience heavy on the back of his neck. Above him, on the vast flat surfaces the complex structure was designed to provide, were columns of names, stretching up precisely as far as the eye could see. Through the arch was yet another cemetery. ‘Inconnu’ on the French crosses, ‘Known Unto God’ on the British stones. Out there were the graves of men whose bodies had become separated from their names; inside the monument thousands of names that had become separated from anything at all. A scrap of blue or khaki cloth. A splinter of charred bone. Nothing else remained. Echoing footsteps, lists of names, arches opening on to emptiness. It seemed to Nick that this place represented not a triumph over death, but the triumph of death.
Geordie stood for a full ten minutes looking up at Harry’s name, and his lips moved, causing Nick to wonder what could be left to say after so ma
ny years. Then he went to lay his wreath on the steps of the altar, standing bare-headed, while outside it began to snow again, small stinging flakes whirling about on a bitter wind. Nick stood beside him. Up to that moment he’d always disliked the easy sentiment of poppy symbolism, but then he became grateful for it, for into that abstract space, with its columns of names and its ungraspable figures, the poppies brought the colour of blood.
Geordie was attempting to graft his memories on to Nick – that’s what the visit was about – and perhaps, in spite of Nick’s resistance, he’d come close to succeeding. Something important happened to Nick at Thiepval and he’d never come to terms with it. There’d never been time. As soon as they got back Geordie started to feel ill, as if the accomplishment of that final visit had given his body permission to let go. At first tiredness, then changes in bowel function, then a constant sensation of heaviness. Nick knew before the results of the tests came through, and he suspected Geordie knew as well. But all Geordie ever said was: ‘It’s the bayonet wound playing me up.’
If Nick hadn’t gone to France he might have regarded Geordie’s theory as merely ignorant, but he’d stood beside him in the empty arches of Thiepval, looking up at Harry’s name on the wall, and from that perspective Geordie’s belief in the power of old wounds to leak into the present was not so easily dismissed.
In the hospital Nick stares blankly at the empty bed. He isn’t prepared for this. How can they not have been told? Why didn’t they ring? But perhaps they did. Perhaps they rang Frieda, but she couldn’t contact him. A nurse squeaks up on rubber-soled shoes. ‘Are you looking for Mr Lucas?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s in a side ward.’
Nick goes back along the ward, where men anonymous in pyjamas turn to stare at him as he walks past. He stares through the portholes in the doors of the side wards, and spots him at last. He pushes the door open. The sides of the bed have been raised. It looks as if he’s lying in a cot. Eyes tightly closed, humiliation visible in every muscle of his clenched jaw.
‘How are you, Grandad?’ Nick smells the sourness of sweat on his skin as he bends to give him a hug.
A nurse follows him into the room. ‘He was in the sluice room last night at two o’clock,’ she says. ‘Weren’t you, love?’
Geordie doesn’t answer her.
‘What were you doing in there?’ Nick asks after she’s withdrawn and left them alone.
‘God knows.’
‘Dreaming?’
‘Something like that.’
Nick thinks: I can’t bear this, and a second later is appalled by the selfishness of his response. If Grandad can bear it, he can.
‘It’s the pills,’ Geordie says. ‘I’ve never been one for pills.’
It’s not the pills, and they both know it, but somehow the hospital prescribes the kind of conversation they can have with each other. Nick just wants to see Geordie back in his own home, in his own bed, as fast as possible. ‘I forgot to mention it this afternoon,’ he says. ‘Helen wants to know when she can come and see you?’ When there’s no reply he adds, ‘You remember Helen?’
‘Of course I remember Helen, I’m not daft.’
‘What shall I tell her?’
‘I don’t want her seeing me like this.’
He always made a fuss when Helen was coming. Got bathed, shaved, wore a suit and a tie. Frieda used to say, ‘Look at him, all done up like a shilling dinner. His girlfriend must be coming,’ and bizarrely, behind the teasing, there was real jealousy.
‘Give it a few days,’ he says now, reluctantly, and then, abruptly, brings up the real problem. ‘I want these bloody bars down. I’m like a ruddy great baby sat up in a cot. I can’t have anybody seeing me like this.’
‘They’ll put them down in the morning.’
‘They’d better. If they don’t I’m out of here.’
Nick grips his wrist through the bars. ‘I should be going now. I’ll see you at the weekend.’
‘Aye. Perhaps.’
‘Now what’s that supposed to mean?’
No answer.
‘Auntie Frieda’ll be in tomorrow.’
Nick hovers, knowing that in his grandfather’s position he would find this lingering impossibly irritating. He bends down and holds the thin shoulders whose bones seem to become a little more prominent every day. Old soldiers never die – they only fade away. Though the man who shouts and rages and cries out for Harry in the kitchen or the sluice room isn’t fading away, whatever else he’s doing. ‘I’ll ring and see how you’re getting on,’ he says inadequately, and then walks out down the grey shining corridor, past the WRVS stall with its flowers and balloons and fruit, and out into the car-park, where the stars burn pale against the sodium orange of the lights.
SEVEN
At the exit from the motorway Nick hesitates, then, to the immense irritation of the driver behind him, flicks his indicator from right to left and drives to a row of terraced houses not far from the University library. Four-storey substantial Victorian houses, divided into elegant, expensive flats. Helen has the top floor of one of them. A beech tree, its leaves a virulent green in the light from the street lamp, reaches to her windows.
Nick knocks, hears the television news switched off and then Helen appears, barefoot, in jeans and T-shirt, short dark hair spiked around her ears. ‘Nick,’ she says. ‘How are you?’
‘Not so bad.’
‘Come in.’
This is what he needs, he realizes, following her through into the living room, though it’s probably not what he ought to need.
‘Coffee?’
‘Please.’
‘Or beer?’
‘Beer would be better.’
The fridge door bangs shut. She comes back into the room hugging cans with a cold sweat on them to her chest, and hands one over. ‘Here you are.’
Sweeping piles of books off the sofa on to the floor, she peels open her own can and applies her mouth to the white foam that bubbles out, laughing and flicking beer from her hands as she sits back. ‘So how are you really?’
‘All right.’
She waits. Don’t pull that one, he thinks. I do the silences.
‘Geordie’s dying.’
‘Oh, Nick, I am sorry.’
‘You’re the only one.’ This comes out so much more bitter than he intended that he reins himself back. ‘Well, you know, I get a bit fed up with people saying, Perhaps it’s for the best, he’s had a good innings…’
‘You’ll miss him.’
‘Yes.’
‘So will I.’ She attempts a smile. ‘Won’t have anybody to flirt with now.’
‘Oh, you’ll find somebody, I expect.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Cancer. They’ve done an exploratory operation. Secondaries all over the place.’
‘Is he having radiotherapy?’
‘There’s no point. It’d just mess him about, and it wouldn’t give him that much longer anyway.’
‘Can I see him?’
‘Give it a few days,’ Nick says awkwardly. ‘The thing is they’ve put the sides of the bed up and he’s so upset about that he can’t think about anything else.’ He hesitates, because telling anybody this, even Helen, seems like a betrayal. ‘He’s taken to wandering about in the middle of the night.’
‘But he’s not confused. Not when I saw him.’
‘No, but you can see why they think he is. He’s back there. Poor old Frieda gets mistaken for the German army. I mean, I don’t think it’s confusion because I think he’d be showing signs of it the rest of the time. It sounds like flashbacks, but why should he suddenly start doing that again?’
‘Fear of death? Pretty powerful trigger.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How’s he going to manage?’
‘Frieda’ll look after him during the day – he’s all right then – I’ll do the nights.’
‘And what does Fran think about that?’
‘She doe
sn’t know yet.’
‘Sure you wouldn’t rather have a whisky?’
He smiles. ‘I think I’ll take you up on that. But only a small one, I’m driving.’
‘You could walk from here.’
‘If I turned up sozzled I would be in trouble.’
‘Small one, I promise.’
While she’s out of the room, Nick passes the time looking along her bookshelves and, for the second time that evening, identifies the red cover of Soldier, from the Wars Returning. This time he opens it and Geordie’s voice leaps off the page.
GEORDIE: Like Rip Van bloody Winkle, I suppose. You don’t hear that story much now, do you? We got told it at school. Friday afternoons, we used to have a story, last lesson before the bell, and that one sort of stuck in me mind. I remember walking home from school – four miles, it was, there and back twice a day – they’d think it was child abuse these days – and thinking all the time about this man going to sleep on the hillside, and waking up years later, and nobody knowing who he was. It haunted me. I used to think it was awful.
HELEN: What in particular?
GEORDIE: The loneliness.
Helen’s focus in the book was on the interaction between the individual veteran’s memories of his combat experience, and the changing public perception of the war. Geordie, from the moment she met him, intrigued her, not merely because he was old enough to remember the trenches, and remembered them clearly, but because he had, at different stages of his life, coped with his memories in radically different ways.
As a young man just back from France, Geordie refused to talk about the war, and avoided all reminders of it. Every November he wore a poppy, but he took no part in Armistice Day commemorations. Instead he went for a long walk in the country, returning well after dark, exhausted and silent as ever. Refused all questions. When obliged to speak stammered so badly he could barely make himself understood. This was the man Nick remembered.
Then, in the sixties, Geordie began to talk about the war. Over the next three decades his willingness to share his memories increased and, as other veterans died around him, his own rarity value grew. In the nineties he was one of a tiny group of survivors who gathered for the anniversaries of the first day of the Somme, and most of the others were in wheelchairs. There were rewards in this for him. He was sought after, listened to, he had friends, interests, a purpose in life at an age when old people are too often sitting alone in chilly rooms waiting for their relatives to phone. But the sense of mission was genuine. His message was simple: It happened once, therefore it can happen again. Take care.