“Of course.”
He chuckled. “And did she press you on your dreams?”
“Oh, yes. That was easy because I have so many. If anything, I had to tone them down for her. The bit where I was castrating my father…”
“You’re teasing me, Dr. Hendricks.”
Most very old men have an underlying benevolence. Their eyes are said to “twinkle” and their voices quaver—with relief, it’s often seemed to me: relief that they are no longer part of young people’s lunatic striving. Pereira was not like that. In his failing mind he seemed to think that he was still a player.
Paulette brought out a plate of sliced fruit and set it down between us.
“Dr. Hendricks,” said Pereira, “I would like to invite you to stay a little longer. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I sense you may be at some difficult point in your life where—”
“Is there any other kind of point?”
“I’m very old. I’m fit only for the morgue. But something of that young therapist survives in me, something of the idealistic young man I used to be. And I see a troubled soul. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I’m a man. Of course I’m troubled.”
“You could take your pick of the bedrooms. I could invite Céline to dine with us, if you like. I can instruct Paulette to cook any dish you name.”
The tree frogs had set up a noise in the pines as loud as that of the cicadas. Pereira poured me another glass of island white, and I cast my mind back to the sitting room in Kensal Green with its videocassettes and tearful women.
I found that, despite myself, I was smiling. “All right,” I said. “Thank you. I’ll stay till Wednesday. May I borrow your telephone? I need to see if I have any messages.”
“Of course. It’s in the hall. You should feel free to use it any time.”
The old dial telephone, complete with “mother-in-law” secondary earpiece, was on a carved oak chest. French telecommunications had improved from the time you could scarcely make a call overseas; even so, I wasn’t sure the remote control would activate the tape in my flat.
As I pointed the thing into the mouthpiece, I saw Paulette lingering in the doorway to the kitchen. I raised an eyebrow, and she reluctantly withdrew.
To my surprise, the gruff yet simpering voice announced, “This is Robert Hendricks’s answering machine…”
There was one message that intrigued me.
“Hello, Dr. Hendricks. My name’s Tim Shorter. We haven’t met, but my brother’s married to an old friend of yours. I wondered if I could give you lunch at my club in London one day? I shall be in town next month for a week or so.”
* * *
BEFORE DINNER THAT evening, Pereira came into the library with another of his buff folders.
“These are some bits and pieces I’ve put together,” he said. “Let’s start with this photograph.”
Having grown used to the leisurely pace of my host, with his loops and delays, I was thrown by this sudden development. I felt that my defenses were not in place, that we should have built up gradually to—
The print was of its time: sepia on thick paper with a narrow white margin. It showed a group of a dozen men in a field, with a bell tent in the background. On the front was written in pen “Near Armentières, March 1916.” I turned it over, and on the back was written “Hendricks, Barnes, Beard, Wiseman, McGowan, Front, Hughes, Hogg, Treloar, Preston, Campbell, Roe.”
It was only the third photograph I had ever seen of my father, but there was no doubt that it was him. The broad forehead and the well-spaced eyes were those of the snaps I’d seen at home; the company of other men, however, had brought a swagger to him. Or perhaps it was merely the uniform that gave them all, at first glance, a purposeful look. When I looked at them more closely, I saw that, with a couple of exceptions, the smiles were put on for the camera; the faces otherwise showed degrees of patience or incomprehension.
For perhaps a minute I looked into my father’s eyes. It was as though I had surprised him, caught him in the act—in the act of living. He looked so young.
I handed back the print in silence.
“They were a good bunch of men,” said Pereira.
“Did you take the photograph?”
“No, it was my second-in-command, a man called Waites.”
“They look happy enough.”
“They were touchingly loyal to one another. This wasn’t a Pals unit, where they’d known each other before; they were volunteers who’d been thrown together. After just a few days, he”—Pereira jabbed the photograph with his finger—“gave his life for”—second jab—“him.”
“And the next day he had a new best friend.”
“We tried not to have those. Now, as I’ve told you, I didn’t know your father well. He was independent. Self-contained. I think he developed his own ideas about the war as it dragged on.”
There were other blurred snaps of men who may or may not have been my father: digging a trench, riding a gray horse, warming some rations on a Primus stove. The nature of action meant that there were none in the fire trench; all had been taken in rest or reserve, which gave them a discordant gaiety.
“Most of what I have is really in my diaries,” said Pereira when we went in to dinner. “You’re welcome to look through them. If you like, I’ll ask Paulette to leave a selection in your room. You may come across references to your father that I haven’t found yet.”
Although I was pleased to have seen the photographs, I found little to say and sensed that Pereira was disappointed by my response. Seeing my father as a soldier had not brought me any sense of release or understanding; what it had done, paradoxically, was raise questions about my own experience of war. Memories of incidents I had thought closed began to stir in my mind, like the dim writhing of one of those species that lie too deep in the ocean to have been seen or classified by man.
Feeling Pereira’s eager gaze on me, I felt embarrassed, as though I’d let him down. I’m not one for the social convention where every dish and every glass of wine your host provides must be applauded, every painting in his house must be a masterpiece; but there was a baseline of politeness. The old fellow had after all offered me the run of his house and kitchen.
“It’s odd seeing my father as a soldier,” I said. “It makes me think about my own war.”
“I’m not surprised,” said Pereira. “There were some interesting references to those years embedded in your book.”
“Really? Most people saw that book as an example of the new ‘anti-psychiatry’ that was coming into vogue. They saw it as a polemic, not a memoir.”
“As indeed it is, but one can read between the lines.”
There was a pressure behind my eyes and an odd churning in my stomach.
“Why don’t you tell me about what happened to you?” said Pereira. “In the war?”
“Because—”
“I see nothing to regret in your book, but if you do, then you could see this as a chance to set things straight … in confidence. I will in turn conceal nothing from you, however shaming. No man is a hero to his literary executor. You could repay my trust.”
Out in the darkened garden, the soft wind blew over the grass and shook the branches of the umbrella pines.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you.”
And so I did. The last person to whom I’d told the story had been L, during the war itself, in 1944. Since then, it was something on which I had locked a door. Neither the friends and close colleagues of my career—the fellow doctors who would become important to me, like Judith Wills and Simon Nash—nor the lovers and girlfriends, such as Annalisa, had shown any interest. Yet for the most part it was something that I felt had—to begin with, anyway—reflected well on me.
* * *
THERE HAD BEEN a place on offer at a London teaching hospital when I graduated from university in June, but it was already clear that there were more pressing events in Europe. My degree meant that I was to become an officer. The NC
Os enjoyed humiliating the cadets who nervously lined up on the parade ground of the officer-cadet training unit near Doncaster. There was no answer to their greater age and experience; I concentrated on making myself invisible and taking whatever abuse came my way. Once, when a sergeant mocked my slackness at drill—“You’re like a string puppet, not a fucking soldier”—I heard a snigger from a few places down the line. I thought that as a fellow cadet he should have been on my side, not the sergeant’s. The fine day came at last when the bullies of the parade ground had to call us “sir.” They did it with good grace; they knew there would shortly be other young men to push around.
We were told we were off to France and were kitted out with full uniforms that included a magnificent overcoat as well as a gas cape and backpack, to the webbing of which were attached the requisite tin helmet, pistol, binoculars, compass, haversack for rations, and a water bottle. Once over the Channel, we were sent to a village near Lille, where we were to join the second battalion.
In our billet I first met the officer commanding B Company, a regular called Richard Varian. His moustache was of military cut, but to me it also suggested a French novelist of the belle époque; he carried several books of a nonmilitary nature—poems, biographies—which he arranged on a portable shelf in his room. I had no idea what a commanding officer was supposed to look like. Richard Varian had eyes of such deep brown that they were almost black; he hardly ever seemed to blink. I thought I saw kindness there as well as intelligence, but it was too soon to be sure.
“You’ll be taking over Four Platoon from Bill Shenton,” he said. “He’s been platoon sergeant major for two years. He served with me in India.”
Varian explained that in peacetime there had been a shortage of officers and no need for each platoon to have a subaltern in charge; so many had been commanded by NCOs, such as Shenton, who had been temporarily promoted. I felt uneasy about replacing a regular when I had never seen action.
“It’s your first challenge as an officer,” said Varian, putting a cigarette into his holder. “I expect there’ll be others.”
I found Bill Shenton playing cards in a small scullery that served as a sergeants’ mess. I told him I would like to have a word with him.
“Yes, sir.”
We stood facing one another in the narrow passageway outside, with Shenton standing to attention. He was about ten years older and four inches taller than I was; his face was lined from years of exposure to hot suns. I had met his physical type before on the farms of my childhood but had never seen a man quite this self-possessed.
“Stand easy,” I said.
I could feel him taking in my youthful, indoor looks. I blushed and lost track of what I was saying in my determination not to break eye contact. I explained that the new arrangement was not my choice but that I would appreciate his advice from time to time, when I asked for it.
As I brought my fumbling speech to an end, I wondered whether Shenton would burst out laughing or punch me in the jaw.
“I understand, sir.” His face showed no twitch of amusement or anger. He was too loyal to the regiment.
“Thank you, Sergeant Major. You can get back to your game now.”
As he saluted me and turned to leave, it occurred to me that he had probably been told by Varian what was coming or that he would have deduced it himself from the large intake of young officers. I felt that these two regulars had taken advantage of my inexperience; they had wanted to see me go through the motions. On the other hand, for a commanding officer and an NCO, respectively, they were promising material.
The men I was commanding were all regulars or reservists. Our job in France was to wait and see what the Germans did; we were not allowed to march into Belgium for fear it might provoke Hitler to invade. As junior officer, I was in charge of the mess and went to discuss food with the cook, Private Dobson, another regular who had come back from India, where he had served in Horse Transport. He told me he had no experience of kitchen work, though he said he’d once helped make a horse curry.
When the Germans, unprovoked, invaded Belgium and the Low Countries in May, we were free to advance at last. Richard Varian issued orders, and I was happy to get moving and have a chance to prove myself to the men. Varian took his orders from the battalion commander, who was told what to do by the brigadier. Some said the hierarchy was like Russian dolls; it was more as I imagined a boarding school: the platoon was the class, the company the house, and the school itself the battalion. Three battalions, usually from different regiments and counties (say, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Kent), made a brigade, though the brigade, oddly, did not inspire the same sense of belonging as the next larger unit, the division.
My little platoon seemed happy enough, provided they were well fed; and, as we advanced, the Belgians offered cheese, bread, and wine as well as cigarettes and water to augment our rations. The young women were thrillingly grateful, and I began to feel that soldiering was in my blood, especially when I went out one night to check on the sentries and was accosted by a girl who can’t have been more than nineteen. Something about the invasion of her country and the sight of sweating infantry had excited a strong desire in her; we had scarcely been through the pleasantries in broken French before she was kissing me on the lips. Her parents would be away the next day, she said, so if I cared to come by her house, the last one on the left down there … I said I thought it would be difficult to get away but that I would try. What do women want? I asked myself as I returned to my billet. To be kissed in the dark by a soldier. Could that be the answer?
We didn’t get far into Belgium before, to our astonishment, we were ordered to withdraw. Six days later, we were marching back through the same village, and when we passed the churchyard I turned my head away in case my girl was there, jeering. Although the German air force attacked our column, we were never forced back by their infantry, and I could sense Varian’s reluctance to comply with successive orders to withdraw. There was talk of an exposed flank—something I knew from infantry lectures in Doncaster to be a disaster. It turned out to be yet worse, as I discovered one night when I was told to lead a patrol to make contact with the troops on our right. After several confusing hours in a wood, many compass readings and miles of walking, I returned to company headquarters to tell Major Varian that there were no troops on our right. The French, we later heard, had been overrun by German panzer groups to the south, while to the north, Holland had capitulated and the Belgians were in full retreat. So it turned out we had both flanks exposed and were ripe to be cut off and killed, like the Romans at Cannae, as I remembered from the schoolroom.
When we passed through Brussels for the second time, I expected to be pelted with rotten vegetables, but the people were forgiving, as they assured us we would be back before long. Third time lucky, maybe. From Lille we marched to Armentières on the bed of a railway, which was difficult, as the sleepers were irregularly placed and the shale slippery. Fortunately, the sky was lit with fire on all sides as we pushed on to Poperinghe.
The names were familiar: these were the lowlands of Flanders, where only twenty-five years earlier our fathers had first shaken hands with the twentieth century. And here we were again, under the same faintly absurd name, the British Expeditionary Force.
After marching, there came digging. After digging there came sleep, sometimes, but always more marching. The days had a dreamlike quality. Sometimes when I awoke, I expected to find it had not been real, that I had moved back into a saner existence, like a train switched from a siding to the main line. One night I lay in the open, with my face turned to the moon, and hoped that a German fighter-bomber would see this pale oval and take pity.
The Germans were certainly indiscriminate. Their planes swept over the mingled columns of soldiers and refugees, machine guns rattling. Wounded infantry lay on the road beside bleeding children. We had now lost touch with B Echelon, the fancy name for the unit whose job was to carry supplies, water, blankets, and officers’ valises; I neve
r saw my service dress or new overcoat again. Having no more than the small haversacks and the clothes we stood up in, we collapsed in a wood. Drops of rain soon turned to a pitiless downpour. The men grumbled, but I told them—only guessing and hoping—that the mud would stop the German infantry from advancing and surrounding us.
The battalion received orders to make for the beaches at Dunkirk. With so many refugees on the road, it was impossible to maintain marching order, and before we reached the port the men divided into smaller units. I had not seen Richard Varian for two days, and the company had become divided; when my platoon arrived at the beach we were told there were no more boats that night, so the men dug holes in the sand to provide cover against the German shelling and bombing. It was a full day later that we scrambled into waiting craft that took us out to a ship. I calculated that B Company had walked a hundred miles in three days. I lay down on the metal deck and woke up in England.
FIVE
After Dunkirk, we had the task of protecting the British coastline against invasion. My battalion was stationed between Exeter and Lyme Regis, and I spent many evenings in the pubs of Seaton, Whimple, and Ottery St. Mary. We had taken on volunteers, so for the first time I was commanding some men younger than myself and this gave a small lift to my confidence; I felt that even the shambles of Dunkirk now counted as “action” of a kind. Other subalterns had joined us, and to my delight one of them was Donald Sidwell, who had applied to my regiment despite his mother begging him to join the navy.
There were two others I became friends with at once. John Passmore was a New Zealander who had been brought up in London and become a schoolmaster. He had narrow eyes and dark hair and was extremely left-handed. He was a clever, capable man, rather reserved (I think he liked the formality of the classroom) but, as we discovered, a fine sportsman. The other was a fair-haired giant called Roland Swann, known as “Vesta,” who worked for his family’s jute import business in London and was in his late twenties. He had spent some time with a territorial outfit and was very keen to see action; he was always talking about what fun it would be “when the balloon goes up.” Where Passmore was composed and well dressed, Swann always had a button missing. Although a bachelor himself, he gave matrimonial advice to the men and dictated letters to troublesome wives.