He looked up and found Neville watching him. Somehow the shared experience had changed things between them: he felt they could say anything now.
‘So when did you decide to get rid of him?’
Neville stared, reared back in mock astonishment, and burst out laughing. ‘What a taste for melodrama you do have.’
‘It happens.’
‘Does it hell. You’ve been reading too many penny dreadfuls, that’s your trouble.’
‘I’ve heard –’
‘Of course you’ve heard. We’ve all heard. Somebody knew somebody who knew somebody who knew for a fact that such and such … And so on.’
‘But nobody’s going to come right out and say they did it. Are they?’
‘No, because they didn’t. Haven’t.’
Paul stared into the fire. Waited.
‘I knew somebody who said he was virtually certain a platoon in his company had got rid of a junior officer. He was a bit too keen on Death or Glory and they got fed up. One patrol too many, they come back, he doesn’t. I just don’t believe it,’ Neville said. ‘I didn’t then and I don’t now.’
‘I think you’ve made that clear.’
‘Oh, I’m not saying it didn’t occur to me. Actually, it did, for … Oh, I don’t know … about three seconds? No, I’d have been far more likely to kill myself.’ He bent down to throw a log on the fire. ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’
‘Every word. Why would you tell lies when you can just keep quiet? It’s what you’ve done so far.’
Neville raised a hand to his face, pressing hard into his temple, as if the abnormal position of his head was causing him pain. It was the movement of a bewildered animal and it moved Paul so deeply that he had to look away.
‘You must’ve realized by now there’s nothing good to be said.’
‘I thought perhaps he’d …’
‘Go on. What?’
‘I thought he’d lost his nerve.’
Neville made an ugly barking sound. ‘Brooke? He didn’t have any bloody nerves.’
‘What, then?’
‘Promise you won’t tell Elinor?’
Paul shook his head.
‘Well, that’s up to you.’
The silence went on so long Paul began to think Neville had decided to say no more, but then, staring down into his glass, seeming to talk as much to himself as Paul, he went on.
‘Once we were out of the line there wasn’t a lot to do. Sick parade every morning, one or two patients in sick bay, not many, and I started to notice how often Brooke slipped away. We all did. He used to ride a lot, all day sometimes, and it became a bit of a standing joke, you know: Doc’s in love with his horse. And then one night, we had a patient with pneumonia – it wasn’t looking too good – and Brooke told me to come and get him if he took a turn for the worse. Well, he did. Brooke wasn’t in his bunk, so I went looking for him, and I found him in the stables with one of the stable boys. Lad called Duke. Big, fair-haired, raw-boned carthorse of a lad, straight out of the shires, and … Well, I won’t spell it out. I must have made a sound because Brooke looked straight at me.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Backed off, of course. I could see it wasn’t the right time for a chat.’
‘No, I mean, later. What did you do?’
‘I didn’t know what to do, I –’
‘Did you tell anybody?’
Neville’s voice hardened. ‘We’re talking about a man exploiting his inferiors. Brooke was an officer. That lad couldn’t have said no even if he’d wanted to.’
Paul was silent for a moment. ‘Are you sure it was exploitation? I mean, if Brooke was just looking for … well, for relief – there’d be far safer ways of getting it than that. He must’ve felt something for him …’
‘Oh, so it’s a love story now, is it? Tarrant …’
‘How do you know it wasn’t?’
‘I knew the boy. Total idiot, face like a pig’s arse.’
Was that jealousy? No, it couldn’t be. ‘So you reported him?’
‘It was the right thing to do.’
‘Who did you tell?’
‘The Padre.’
‘Who couldn’t stand Brooke, anyway … I remember you said, didn’t you, they’d had that row about venereal disease?’
‘It’s no use idealizing that kind of thing. It’s not Greek love, you know, it’s just another form of bullying. I hated it at school and I hate it now.’
That was certainly true. Neville had an extreme hatred of what he described as ‘effeminacy’ or ‘degeneracy’, whether in life or in art.
‘You knew what would happen to him though, didn’t you? Court martial, ten years’ hard labour, struck off the medical register …’
‘God, yes, total waste. Tragedy. And all because he couldn’t keep his dick inside his breeches. But, you know, that was his decision, not mine.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Nothing. That was the awful thing. Brooke didn’t say anything. I mean, what could he say? I started to think the Padre must’ve kept it to himself, though that didn’t seem likely, but then Brooke was summoned to see the CO. He came back looking pretty grim. Still didn’t say anything. I thought he’d be arrested. But he wasn’t, and a day or two later we went back into the line. And right into the thick of it, this time. The Casualty Clearing Station was the best equipped I’ve ever seen – electric light, for God’s sake – virtually shellproof. But no, typical Brooke, he insisted on going forward.’ He drank the last of his whisky in one gulp. ‘It was, I think, the worst I’ve ever experienced. A lot of it’s a blur. At one point there was a flood of German prisoners coming in, a lot of them wounded, and among them there was a German doctor and he volunteered to help – I’ll always remember this – Brooke was on one side of the table, the German MO was on the other, both of them covered in blood, you couldn’t tell one uniform from the other, and they were laughing their heads off. Shells dropping everywhere, the wounded screaming, and there they were, stitching up what their respective armies had blown apart. If you ever want a picture of the complete bloody insanity of the whole thing that was it. Brooke was wounded, just a gash on the side of his face, but deep, he could’ve gone back, nobody would have blamed him, but he didn’t, of course, he went on operating. He’d have got the VC if it hadn’t been for the other thing.
‘There was so much confusion, nobody knew where the line was any more, the whole area was being shelled by both sides. It took us all night to get in the wounded, but we did, every single one of them. And then, just before dawn, Brooke looked through the periscope and said he could see something moving. I looked. I couldn’t see anything. But Brooke insisted, there was somebody still out there. Alive. He took me out with him. Just me this time.
‘The sun was still below the horizon but the sky was getting lighter by the minute. Absolute bloody suicide, but he was determined to go, and of course I had no choice, I had to go. And he was right, there was something moving. It was just a strip of cloth caught on the wire, but it was very strange, because every time the wind blew it seemed to be beckoning. As if it were waving us to come closer. When we finally got there, it was an empty sleeve. I think he’d known all along.
‘It was getting lighter all the time, I could see his face quite clearly now and there was … Oh, I don’t know, a kind of glitter about him. And it suddenly dawned on me he wasn’t just taking chances, not this time. He wasn’t going back, he couldn’t, and I think he’d made up his mind to take me with him.
‘We crouched in this bloody shell-hole and … He said the CO had offered him the chance of an honourable way out and he’d decided to take it, he knew what was waiting for him, he couldn’t bear the idea of putting his family through it. Then he got a revolver out – he didn’t normally carry one, some of the MOs did, but not Brooke – and as soon as I saw it I thought: He’s going to kill me. He was pointing it straight at me, he wanted to see me shitting myself, I know he did. But then he lo
wered it and … he just stood up. I remember the first sunlight falling on his head and shoulders. And then he turned to face the German lines and started firing shots into the air. Nothing happened. Honest to God, the hell we’d been through, day and night. Where’s the bloody Hun when you need him? And then I thought it was going to be all right, I thought he’d take cover, we’d wait and when it was dark we’d crawl back and … I don’t know what I thought was going to happen then. But it was never a possibility. He just looked down at me and shrugged. Then he put the revolver in his mouth and blew the back of his head off.’
Neville was struggling to go on. At last he wiped his hand across his mouth and said, ‘I had to go on lying there, I daren’t move. And then it got dark and it was so strange, you know, his dead face looking up at the stars, not seeing them, and rain falling into his eyes. I tried to make myself close them, but I couldn’t bear to touch him.’
‘How long were you there?’
‘A whole day, half the following night. Then I managed to crawl back, only just in time too, because the bombardment started up again and the whole area was pounded.’
‘Did they look for him?’
‘No point. Nothing would have been left.’
‘Wait a minute. If you saw him die, why was he posted “Missing”?’
‘Because I didn’t tell anybody. I said he left me in a crater and went on alone.’
They carried on sitting in the firelight, as motionless as flies in amber, until the crash of a collapsing log jolted Paul into speech. ‘Why couldn’t you tell Elinor that?’
‘The disgrace.’
‘I doubt if she’d see it like that.’
‘No, but her parents would, their friends would. Let’s face it, Tarrant, everybody would – except for a few nancy boys in bloody Bloomsbury. I thought it was right to spare his family and I still think it’s right. He blew his brains out to save them from it, so what do you think gives me the right to come back to London and start blabbing?’
There were hollows in the fire now. As Paul watched, a ridge of coals fell and Neville’s face was plunged into shadow.
‘You could have made something up.’
‘Lies, you mean?’
‘If need be.’
‘You don’t lie to people you respect.’
‘You could’ve told Elinor the truth.’
‘Are you going to tell her?’
‘I don’t know. Probably.’
‘Well, you know her better than I do.’ After a few seconds, he went on: ‘I can’t make any sense of him, you know. He was one of the most compassionate – no, not “one of” – the most compassionate man I’ve ever known. And he was also completely inhumane.’
‘I suspect some of the saints were a bit like that.’
‘Didn’t go in for buggering boys in stables though, did they?’ He took another swig from his glass. ‘Or, anyway, if they did it’s not recorded.’
Paul waited for more but Neville seemed to be sinking into a semi-comatose state. It was late, the dead of night, and, though the shutters continued to bump, he thought the wind might be dying down. ‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll turn in.’
‘No, you go on up. I won’t be long.’
As he left the room, Neville was leaning forward to throw another log on the fire.
Paul went to bed and tossed and turned for an hour before finally slipping into a threadbare sleep. He dreamt of a desolate landscape in which nothing moved except for a black shape on the horizon, which rose and fell, rose and fell like an arm beckoning, while a bloated sun swelled to fill half the sky.
When he woke it was light. He went across to the window, pulled the blackout curtains to one side, and looked out. Sunlight and clear, cold air on his face. The lifeboat wasn’t back, but the storm was over. The sea threw up huge sullen swells that petered out in little runnels and ripples of foam before they reached the first ridge of shingle.
He wanted to get out into the sunshine, forget the darkness of the previous evening. As he was getting dressed, it occurred to him that he hadn’t heard Neville come upstairs last night. Well, that wasn’t surprising, he’d probably stayed up drinking, Paul would have been asleep by the time he finally came to bed. All the same …
Before going downstairs he stood outside Neville’s bedroom door and listened, but there was no sound. For a second he wondered if he should push the door open and check on him, but no, he was being ridiculous. Neville would quite rightly resent the intrusion.
Downstairs, he opened the living-room door. The room told its own story. Lamp left on, bottle empty, a glass overturned beside Neville’s chair. The kitchen showed no sign that anybody had been there since the previous night. Neville was having a lie-in, and no wonder. Paul tried to remember how much had been left in the bottle when he’d gone to bed. Too much.
He buttered a slice of stale bread, took a slightly wizened russet apple from a bowl on the sideboard, and wandered out on to the path. The lifeboat was being winched up the beach. He stopped to watch and then went back into the house, increasingly concerned about Neville, who was ill, after all. When the doctors let him out to convalesce, they hadn’t had drinking sessions like last night’s in mind.
His bed hadn’t been slept in. That left his studio, which would be, presumably, on the second floor. Paul pushed doors open till he found it. Neville wasn’t there either. Paul was about to withdraw, but then his eye was caught by the painting on the easel. Normally he wouldn’t have dreamt of looking at somebody else’s unfinished work, but from the glimpse he’d had of this, he knew he had to see more.
No wonder Neville had seemed so preoccupied with what the censor would allow, because he’d been painting the moment of death, the only subject more strongly discouraged than corpses. The figure at the centre of the composition was being blown backwards by the force of an unseen explosion, while behind him on the horizon a grotesquely fat sun, a goblin of a sun, was eating up the sky.
Paul knew he was looking at the moment of Toby Brooke’s death, though not exactly as Neville had related it. There was no revolver here. Well, fair enough, Neville was under no obligation to stick to the facts. Whatever ‘the facts’ were. Now that he was better rested and able to think more clearly, Paul wasn’t sure how much of Neville’s story he believed. Oh, Neville had set out to tell the truth – he didn’t doubt that for a moment – but was it possible that, in the end, he’d ducked out of revealing something too dreadful to be told?
Paul backed out of the room and closed the door quietly behind him. There came a time when you simply had to let it go and accept an approximation of the truth, and he’d reached that moment now. Two men set out into No Man’s Land; one man came back. That was all anybody else knew, or would ever know.
Downstairs, the front door opened. Neville was back.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Paul said.
‘The doctor’s. You said you’d seen him, I thought I ought to go and say how sorry I was about Ian.’
Paul leaned over the banisters. Neville was standing in the hall, holding a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk. He looked surprisingly fresh. Invigorated, almost. Suddenly, Paul felt that any anxiety about this man was not merely unnecessary but stupid. Look at him; just look at him. Whoever else went under, Kit Neville would survive.
Twenty-eight
Paul arrived at the station early in a cold drizzle and sat down to wait for the train from Sidcup. When it drew in he got to his feet and searched for Elinor among the grey-black hurrying figures. She was wearing a lavender-coloured hat; it cheered him to see her bobbing along, though the face she turned up to him was sharp, hungry for information.
All that day he’d been thinking about what Neville had said, only a few minutes before Paul had left for London.
‘For God’s sake, man. Brooke blew his brains out so his family didn’t have to know. Do you really think he’d want you to tell Elinor? No, he made his choice, and the least you can do is respect it.’ br />
Paul wouldn’t have dreamt of telling Brooke’s parents, or his older sister, for that matter. Knowing how he’d died would only cause them additional pain and they’d already had to endure so much. But then, couldn’t the same be said of Elinor? He didn’t know. He took her in his arms, put his lips to her cold, damp cheek, and still he didn’t know.
‘We can go next door, to the hotel,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘No, I’ve been stuck in a hut all day, I could do with some fresh air.’
They began walking down Villiers Street towards the river. A dank stench came off the water, mingling with the sulphurous smell of the fog that had been thickening since morning.
He asked how her day had been.
‘Oh, not bad. I enjoy it, you know. I never thought I would, but I do …’
They turned left on to Victoria Embankment.
‘I’ve said I’ll do another day. Tonks is going to France at the end of January, so they want me to do a bit more.’
‘Yes, he told me he was going. Doesn’t seem to be looking forward to it very much. Fact, he said he’d seen enough horrors to last him the rest of his life.’
‘I’ll miss him. I couldn’t have done it without him.’
Ahead of them Waterloo Bridge loomed out of the mist. The water underneath the nearest arch broke into V-shaped ripples as a boat passed through. There were flecks of crimson on the surface of the river, where the setting sun had briefly managed to free itself from a bank of cloud, but they were fading even as he watched. From the far side, almost invisible in the mist, came shouts and splashes and then, one after another, factory whistles began to blow for the start of another shift. London in winter.
‘Doesn’t it make you want to paint it?’ she asked.