Susan Hill
STRANGE MEETING
For John and Myfanwy Piper
Part One
He was afraid to go to sleep. For three weeks, he had been afraid of going to sleep.
But then, because of some old, familiar sound or smell, suddenly recalled, in this room of his overlooking the rose garden, he recalled also the trick he had used as a child, to keep himself awake.
He wanted to stay awake.
In the hospital, it had been different. Because of the pain in his leg, and because he could not bear the noises of the ward at night, the sounds of hoarse breathing and death, and the crying of the Field-Gunner in the next bed, he had only wanted to sleep. He had asked them to give him something, had tried and failed to get whisky or rum. He had even tried to bribe Crawford.
Crawford…
He remembered Crawford’s eyes, and his soft jowls, folding inwards towards the small nose, and mouth and chin. Crawford, standing at the foot of his bed. It had not surprised him, their meeting there. Nothing like that was surprising now. Though, at first, Crawford had been busy with the Field-Gunner, had not come near Hilliard until the following day. Then, as always, in the past, their pointless, mutual dislike.
‘Hello, Hilliard. Got it through the calf, did you?’
‘Thigh.’
‘Left?’
‘Yes.’
‘Bullet?’
‘No, shrapnel.’
Crawford nodded. The flesh over his cheeks was carefully razored. But there were dark smears beneath his eyes, as though he, too, did not sleep.
‘Good for a month back home, then. You always were a clever devil, Hilliard.’
When they were boys, they had both been sent to a dancing class, held on Saturdays at eleven, in the Methodist Hall.
‘If you are going to do a thing, do it properly,’ Constance Hilliard had said. ‘There is nothing to be ashamed of in learning dancing.’ He had not supposed that there was. His sister went, too. ‘Dancing will be a great asset to you later on, you will have me to thank for having taken you to proper lessons. I like a young man who knows how to dance.’ For she hoped that he would cut as good a figure as his father, would look so fine and be so accomplished, at the Waltz and the Lancers.
Saturday mornings in the Methodist Hall, and the smell of dust between the grain of the floorboards, the squeak of chalk where the steps were marked out, and, over the echoing piano, the voice of Miss Marchment.
‘The Crawfords are taking their boy,’ his mother had said, though she scarcely knew the Crawfords. Hilliard was three years younger.
He had not been embarrassed by the dancing class, only disliked it because he was no good, had no rhythm, could not convert her instructions into the right, patterned movements of his own feet.
‘You are to try, you are to stick to it. It will suddenly go “click” one morning, everything will fall into place, and then you will be like your father, you will be a beautiful dancer.’
He knew that he would not, but he did not care, either, only went, each Saturday and was bored – and sat out, much of the time, because Miss Marchment became impatient.
‘You have no control, John Hilliard, no co-ordination.’
Around the Methodist Hall, fat hot-water pipes ran like intestines, the lead-colour showing through in patches where the paint had worn away. He sat on the pipes and felt the secret movement of the water beneath him. They were warm pipes, though they did not give much of their warmth out to the hall. He sat, unworried, watching the others, watching Crawford. Crawford was good at dancing.
They had scarcely spoken to one another, then or later, the edges of their lives scarcely overlapped. They went away to different Prep schools, a hundred miles apart. In the years that followed, they met sometimes, at other people’s parties. Once, they passed in different punts, on the Backs at Cambridge.
But they had scarcely spoken to one another. There was only this dislike. Now, he saw that it had been because of something in Crawford’s expression, a smugness about the loose, soft cheeks, and the smallness of nose and mouth. But he was worried, this time, that someone he scarcely knew should have been, throughout his life, so consistently disliked. There ought to be no time, now, for that, no place for it. He was being petty.
Since going to the front in April, he had found out so many things, came up against traits like this, which he could not accept. He had thought, before April, that he knew himself. He was wounded during the second week of the offensive, in July. Came home again. Was twenty-two, then. Knew everything. Nothing.
And there had been Crawford, in a white coat, standing at the foot of his hospital bed. A familiar face. He had joined up straight from medical school, that first August.
‘Been out there long?’
‘April.’
‘And got yourself a blighty in July. I said you were a clever devil, Hilliard.’
Why? What do you know about me? You know nothing. I dislike you, Crawford.
But why that, either? Bloody silly. Childish. They were not children now. Crawford was Crawford. He had done nothing. Only that there was still the smugness of face, the fold of the jowls, the slight smile, as though he remembered that he had been good at dancing.
Dancing…
On the third night, he had tried to bribe him.
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Hilliard.’
‘Look…’
‘Pack you off home on Wednesday. We need the beds, God knows. Nice casualty train, calm sea if you’re lucky. Month in Hawton. You’ll be all right.’
‘Crawford…’
‘How’s your sister?’
‘I can’t sleep.’
No. Only see the pale, moving lights, hear the screens drawn, metal scissors dropped into enamel bowls, hear the Field-Gunner with the bandaged face, crying.
‘Think yourself lucky you got off a bit early. It’s no picnic now.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve seen what’s coming in here, and there’ll be more. Something’s still boiling up. We hear things, you know.’
But have you been there, Crawford, have you been?
Well, does that matter? He has to be here, doesn’t he, somebody has to be here when they bring in the Field-Gunner, blinded.
Non-Combatant Forces. Crawford.
He wanted to sleep, shut out the noises. Why had it been so easy up there, to sleep on a firestep, on a table in a cellar, to fall asleep on horseback going up the road to Bapaume, to sleep through the noise of the guns? Not now.
‘I’ve got to sleep.’
Crawford had gone away.
Yet now, in the room above the rose-garden, he was trying the old trick of staying awake, keeping his head above the green-black water of nightmares. Outside, it was still, except, in the distance, the faint wash of the sea.
The trick was, to order yourself to be dead asleep by the time you counted ten, or twenty. Then, you couldn’t do it, you stayed awake, for as long as you wanted. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. ‘Go to sleep!’ Though perhaps, when he was a child, in this room, he had never, in fact, wanted it to be so very long, only wanted time enough to see the guests who were coming to dinner, or hear the owl begin to hoot in the trees at the bottom of the drive. Once, he stayed awake for the arrival of his mother’s cousin, who was a missionary in Africa (and who had been, after all, an ordinary woman in a dull green dress, who had been nothing, seen from two floors above through the stairwell, who bore no traces of Africa).
Now, he wanted to stay awake. There was nothing to hear, for the owls had moved away some years ago, there were no visitors to see, he was no longer a child excluded from secrets. Now, there were no secrets. His leg was better, that would not keep him awake. It only ached slightly when he had been walking, or in the cold. But it was not cold, it was late August, it had been hot all the weeks at Hawton. Hot in France, too.