This silence was Guy’s private possession, all his own work.
There were exterior sounds in plenty, a wireless down the corridor, another wireless in the block beyond the window, the constant jingle of trolleys, footsteps, voices; that day as each preceding day people came into Guy’s room and spoke to him. He heard them and understood and was as little tempted to answer as to join in the conversation of actors on a stage; there was an orchestra pit, footlights, a draped proscenium, between him and all these people. He lay like an explorer in his lamp-lit tent while in the darkness outside the anthropophagi peered and jostled.
There had been a silent woman in Guy’s childhood named Mrs Barnet. He was often taken to visit her by his mother. She lay in the single upper room of a cottage which smelled of paraffin and geraniums and of Mrs Barnet. Her niece, a woman of great age by Guy’s standards, stood and answered his mother’s inquiries. His mother sat on the only chair by the bedside and Guy stood beside her, watching them all and the pious plaster statues which clustered everywhere round Mrs Barnet’s bed. It was the niece who said thank you for the provisions Guy’s mother brought and said, when they left: ‘Auntie does so appreciate your coming, ma’am.’
The old woman never spoke. She lay with her hands on the patchwork quilt and gazed at the lamp-stained paper on the ceiling, a paper which, where the light struck it, revealed a sheen of pattern like the starched cloth on the dining-room table at home. Her head lay still but she moved her eyes to follow the movements in her room. Her hands turned and twitched, ceaselessly but very slightly. The stairs were precipitous and enclosed top and bottom by thin, grained doors. The old niece followed them down into the parlour and into the village street, thanking them for their visit.
‘Mummy, why do we visit Mrs Barnet?’
‘Oh, we have to. She’s been like that ever since I came to Broome.’
‘But does she know us, Mummy?’
‘I’m sure she’d miss it, if we didn’t come.’
His brother Ivo had been silent, too, Guy remembered, in the time before he went away, sitting all day sometimes in the long gallery doing nothing, sitting aloof at the table while others were talking, quite alert and quite speechless.
In the nursery Guy had had his own periods of silence. ‘Swallowed your tongue, have you?’ Nannie would ask. It was in similar tones that the Sister addressed him, coming in four or five times in the day with a cheerful rallying challenge. ‘Nothing to say to us today?’
The lame Hussar who brought round the whisky-and-soda at sundown lost patience sooner. At first he had tried to be friendly. ‘Tommy Blackhouse is two doors down asking for you. I’ve known Tommy for years. Wish I could have joined his outfit. Rotten show their all getting put in the bag … I caught my little packet at Tobruk …’ and so on. But when Guy lay mute, he gave it up and now stood equally silent with his tray of glasses waiting while Guy drank.
Once the Chaplain had come.
‘I’ve got you listed as Catholic – is that right?’
Guy did not answer.
‘I’m sorry to hear you aren’t feeling too good. Anything you want? Anything I can do? Well, I’m always about. You’ve only to ask for me.’ Still Guy did not answer. ‘I’ll just leave this with you,’ said the priest, putting a rosary into his hands, and that was relevant to Guy’s thoughts for the last thing he remembered was praying. They had all prayed in the boat in the days of extremity, some offering to do a deal: ‘Get me out of here, God, and I’ll live different. Honest I will,’ others repeating lines of hymns remembered from childhood; all save Ludovic, godless at the helm.
There was one clear moment of revelation between great voids when Guy discovered himself holding in his hand, not, as he supposed, Gervase’s medal, but the red identity disc of an unknown soldier, and heard himself saying preposterously: ‘Saint Roger of Waybroke defend us in the day of battle and be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil…’
After that all was silence.
Guy lay with his hands on the cotton sheet rehearsing his experiences.
Could there be experience without memory? Could there be memory where fact and fancy were indistinguishable, where time was fragmentary and elastic, made up of minutes that seemed like days, of days like minutes? He could talk if he wished to. He must guard that secret from them. Once he spoke he would re-enter their world, he would be back in the picture.
There had been an afternoon in the boat, in the early days of anxiety and calculation, when they had all sung ‘God save the King’. That was in thanksgiving. An aeroplane with RAF markings had come out of the sky, had changed course, circled and hurtled over their heads, twice. They had all waved and the machine had soared away to the south towards Africa. Deliverance seemed certain then. The sapper ordered watches; all next day they kept a look-out for the boat which must be on its way, which never came. That night hope died and soon the pain of privation gave place to inertia. The sapper who had been so brisk and busy lapsed into a daze. Fuel had given out. They had hoisted the sail. It needed little management. Sometimes it hung slack, sometimes it filled to the breeze. The men sprawled comatose, muttering and snoring. Suddenly the sapper shouted frantically. ‘I know what you’re up to.’ No one answered him. He turned to Ludovic and cried, ‘You thought I was asleep, but I heard you. I heard everything.’
Ludovic gazed palely and silently. The sapper said with intense malevolence:
‘Understand this. If I go, you go with me.’
Then, exhausted, he sank his head on his blistered knees. Guy between dozing and waking, prayed.
Later – that day? the next? the day after? – the sapper moved to a place beside Guy and whispered: ‘I want your pistol, please.’
‘Why?’
‘I threw mine away before I found this boat. I’m skipper here. I’m the only man entitled to arms.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Are you in this too?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘No, that’s right, isn’t it? You were asleep. But I heard them, while you were asleep. I know their plans, his plan,’ he said, nodding towards Ludovic. ‘So, you see, don’t you, I must have your pistol, please.’
Guy looked into the wild eyes and took the pistol from his holster.
‘If you fall asleep again he’ll get hold of it. That’s his plan. I’m the only man who can stay awake. I’ve got to keep awake. If I go to sleep, he’s got us all.’ The mad eyes were full of pleading. ‘So you see, please, I must have the pistol.’
Guy said: ‘That’s the best place for it,’ and dropped the weapon I over the side of the boat.
‘Oh, you fool, you bloody fool. He’s got us now.’
‘Lie down,’ said Guy.’ Keep quiet. You’ll make yourself ill.’
‘One against the lot of you,’ said the sapper. ‘All alone.’
And that night between moonset and sunrise he disappeared. At dawn the sail hung limp. There was no fixed point anywhere on the horizon to tell them whether they were motionless or drifting with the current and there was no sign of the sapper.
What else was real? The bugs. They were a surprise at first. Guy had always thought of the sea as specially clean. But all the old timbers of the boat were full of bugs. At night they swarmed every, where, stabbing and stinking. By day they crawled into the shady places of the body, behind the knees, on the back of the neck, on the under cheek. They were real. But what of the whales? There was an hour of moonlight quite clear in Guy’s mind when he had awoken to hear all the surrounding water singing with a single low resonant note and to see all round them huge shining humps of meat heaving and wallowing. Had they been real? Had the fog been real that descended and enclosed them and vanished again as swiftly as it came? And the turtles? That night or another, after the moon had set, Guy saw the calm plain fill with myriads of cats’ eyes. There was some life still, which Guy was husbanding, in the battery of his torch. He cast a dim beam outward and saw the
whole surface of the water encrusted with carapaces gently bobbing one against the other and numberless ageless lizard-faces gaping at him as far as his light reached.
Guy still cogitated these dubious episodes while his health waxed as though the sap were rising vernally in a dry twig. They had tended him carefully. At first while he was still dazed with morphia, they suspended ajar of salts above him and ran a rubber tube from it into the vein of his arm just as gardeners fatten vegetable marrows for the Flower Show, and his horrible tongue had become small and red and wet once more as the liquid surged through him. They had oiled him like a cricket-bat and his old, wrinkled skin grew smooth. Very soon the hollow eyes that glared so fiercely from the shaving-glass had resumed their habitual soft melancholy. The wild illusions of his mind had given place to intermittent sleep and vague, calm consciousness.
In his first days he had gratefully drunk the fragrant cups of malty beverages and the tepid rice-water. Appetite lagged behind his physical advance. They put him on ‘light diet’, boiled fish and sago, and he ate nothing. They promoted him to tinned herrings, bully beef and great boiled potatoes, blue and yellow, and cheese.
‘How’s he eating?’ the inspecting Colonel always asked.
‘Only fair,’the Sister reported.
Guy was a nuisance to this stout, kindly and rather breathless officer. He knew it and was sorry.
The Colonel tried many forms of appeal from the peremptory, ‘Come along, Crouchback. Snap out of it,’ to the solicitous: ‘What you need is sick leave. You could go anywhere – Palestine if you liked. Feed yourself up. Just make the effort.’ The Colonel sent a psychiatrist to him, a neurotic whom Guy easily baffled by his unbroken silence. At last the Colonel said: ‘Crouchback, I have to tell you that your papers have come through. Your temporary appointment ceased on the day of the capitulation in Crete. As from the first of this month you revert to Lieutenant. Can’t you understand, man,’ he cried in exasperation; ‘you’re losing money lying there?’
There was real urgency in the appeal. Guy would have liked to reassure him, but by now he had lost the knack, just as once on a visit to England before the war, when he was very tired, he had unaccountably found himself impotent to tie his bow tie. He had repeated what seemed to be the habitual movements; each time the knot either fell apart or else produced a bow that stood rigidly perpendicular. For ten minutes he had struggled at his glass before ringing for help. Next evening and on all subsequent evenings he had performed the little feat of dexterity without difficulty. So now, moved by the earnestness of the senior medical officer, he wished to speak and could not.
The senior medical officer examined the charts on which were recorded Guy’s normal temperature, his steady pulse and the regular motions of his body.
The senior officer handed the charts to a Sister in a red cape, who handed them to a Sister in a striped cape, and the procession left him alone.
Outside the door he spoke anxiously and reluctantly about moving Guy to an ‘observation ward’.
But mad or sane, Guy offered no scope for an observer. He lay like Mrs Barnet with his hands on the cotton sheet, scarcely moving.
When release came it was not through official channels.
Quite suddenly one morning a new clear voice called Guy irresistibly to order.
‘C’e scappato il Capitano.’
Mrs Stitch, a radiant contrast to the starched and hooded nurses who had been Guy’s only visitants, stood at his door. Without effort or deliberation Guy replied: ‘No Capitano oggi, signora, Tenente.’
She came and sat on the bed and immediately plunged into the saga of a watch which the King of Egypt had given her and how Algie Stitch had doubted whether she should accept it and how the Ambassador had been in no doubts at all and what the Commander-in-Chief’s sister had said. ‘I can’t help it, I like the King.’ And she produced the watch from her bag – not the basket today, something fresh and neat from New York – and set it to do its tricks. It was a weighty, elaborately hideous mechanism of the Second Empire, jewelled and enamelled and embellished with cupids which clumsily gavotted as the hours struck, and Guy found himself answering easily.
Presently Mrs Stitch said: ‘I’ve just been talking to Tommy Blackhouse. He’s down the passage with his leg strung up to the roof. I wanted to take him home with me but they won’t let him move. He sent you all sorts of messages. He wants your help writing to next-of-kin of his Commando. That was an awful business.’
‘Yes, Tommy was lucky to be out of it.’
‘Eddie and Bertie – all one’s friends.’
‘And Ivor.’
Guy had thought long of Ivor in his silent days, that young prince of Athens sent as sacrifice to the Cretan labyrinth.
‘Oh, Ivor’s all right,’ said Mrs Stitch. ‘Never better. He’s just been staying with me.’
‘All right? How? In a boat like me?’
‘Well, not quite like you. More comfortable. Trust Ivor for that.’
Like the saline solution which had dripped through the rubber tube into his punctured arm, this news of Ivor oozed through Guy, healing and quickening.
‘That’s lovely,’ he said. ‘That’s really delightful. It’s the best thing that’s happened.’
‘Well, of course I think so,’ said Mrs Stitch. ‘I’m on Ivor’s side always.’
Guy did not notice any qualification in her tone. He was too much exhilarated by the thought of his friend’s escape. ‘Is he about? Make him come and see me.’
‘He’s not about. He left yesterday, in fact, for India.’
‘Why India?’
‘He was sent for. The Viceroy is a sort of cousin. He claimed him.’
‘I can’t imagine Ivor being made to do anything he didn’t want.’
‘I think he wanted to go, all right – after all, it’s about the only place left where there’s plenty of horses.’
At that moment the Sister brought in the tray.
‘I say, is that what they give you to eat? It looks revolting.’
‘It is.’
Mrs Stitch took a spoon and sampled the luncheon. ‘You can’t eat this.’
‘Not very well. Tell me about Ivor. When did he get out?’
‘More than a week ago. With all the others.’
‘What others? Did any of Hookforce get away?’
‘I think so. Tommy told me there were some signallers and a Staff Captain.’
‘But X Commando?’
‘No. I don’t think there were actually any others of them.’
‘But I don’t quite understand. What was Ivor doing?’
‘It’s a saga. I can’t embark on it now.’ She rang a chime on her watch and set the cupids dancing. ‘I’ll come back. It’s lovely seeing you so well. They gave me quite a different account of you.’
‘I was with Ivor the last evening in Crete.’
‘Were you, Guy?’
‘We had a long gloomy talk about the surrender. I can’t understand what happened after that.’
‘I imagine everything was pretty complete chaos.’
‘Yes.’
‘And everyone too tired and hungry to remember anything.’
‘More or less everyone.’
‘No one making much sense.’
‘Not many.’
‘No one with much reason to be proud of themselves.’
‘Not a great many.’
‘Exactly what I’ve said all along,’ said Mrs Stitch triumphantly. ‘Obviously, by the end there weren’t any orders.’
It was Guy’s first conversation since his return to consciousness. He was a little dizzy, but it came to him, nevertheless, that an attempt was being made at – to put it in its sweetest form – cajolery.
‘There were orders, all right,’ he said, ‘perfectly clear ones.’
‘Were there, Guy? Are you sure?’
‘Quite sure.’
Mrs Stitch seemed to have lost her impatience to leave. She sat very still, with the funny
watch in her hands. ‘Guy,’ she said,’I think I’d better tell you, there are a lot of beastly people about at the moment. They aren’t all being awfully nice about Ivor. As you remember them, there wasn’t anything in those orders to give the impression Ivor was meant to stay behind and be taken prisoner, was there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh … I don’t suppose you remember them very well.’
‘I’ve got them written down.’
Her splendid eyes travelled over the poor little room and came to rest on the locker which held all Guy’s possessions.
‘In there?’
‘Presumably. I haven’t looked.’
‘I suppose they were countermanded.’
‘I don’t know who by. The General had left.’
‘What happened,’ said Julia as though at repetition in the schoolroom, ‘was an order from the beach for Hookforce to embark immediately. Ivor was sent down to verify it. He met the naval officer in charge who told him that guides had been sent back and that Hookforce was already on its way. His ship was just leaving. There was another staying for Hookforce. He ordered him into the boat straight away. Until Ivor reached Alexandria he thought the rest of Hookforce was in the other cruiser. When he found it wasn’t, he was in rather a jam. That’s what happened. So you see no one can blame Ivor, can they?’
‘Is that his story?’
‘It’s our story.’
‘Why did he run off to India?’
‘That was my idea. It seemed just the ticket. He had to go somewhere. Tommy’s Commando doesn’t exist any more. Ivor’s regiment’s not here. He couldn’t spend the rest of the war in the Mohamed Ali Club, I mean. It was seeing him so much about, made people gossip. Of course,’ she added, ‘there was no reason then to expect anyone from Hookforce to turn up until after the war. What are you going to do with those notes of yours?’
‘I suppose someone will want to see them.’
‘Not Tommy.’
She was right in that. After she left, Guy walked down the passage to Tommy’s room. He passed the Sister on the way.