‘Is it your leg? It it hurting?’
He shook his head.
Beth’s room was on the other side of the house, away from the terrible scent of the roses. She had pulled on her blue dressing gown and, when he looked at her, and saw the thick brown hair, which she wore carefully piled up during the day, falling on to her shoulders, she seemed to be younger, the same Beth.
They had not put the light on.
‘You’re dressed?’
‘I went out. I’ve been on to the beach.’
‘What on earth for? It’s three o’clock.’
‘Twenty past three.’
‘Was it your leg?’
‘I walked a long way. The tide’s right out. It’s been so quiet down there.’ He spoke very slowly, pausing for a long time in between phrases.
‘Beth…’
He had not told any of them about the nightmares, but sometimes at breakfast he had seen Beth looking at him and thought that he did not have to tell her, that she knew, as she had always known everything about him.
In her youth, Constance Hilliard had been a great beauty, and she was beautiful still. But Beth had inherited their father’s long bony face, the high, narrow bridge to a nose that, in age, would become beak-like. Her hair grew far back from a very high forehead. Only her eyes, flint-coloured and thickly lashed, made her seem beautiful sometimes, because of their stillness.
He said, ‘You’re twenty-three, Beth.’ It amazed him.
‘Almost twenty-four.’
They sat in silence again, and he thought, then, of all the things that he wanted to tell her, which she did not know after all, had not guessed: the dread of returning to sleep, the faces of men in his nightmares, the voices, the sweet smell. Beth looked stern and, in spite of her hair falling about her face, looked her age, or even older, a woman. So she, too, had changed, though until tonight he had not fully realized it. This was another reason why the weeks at Hawton had not been happy. He had expected to spend time with her, walking about the beach, to laugh with her, explain things, but she had been busy, going out to lunch with their mother, helping twice a week at parties for soldiers on leave, leading a social life.
Hilliard had been to one of the parties, at which men sat along trestle tables lined down the church hall, and ate jellies and egg sandwiches and small, dainty cakes, their faces shocked and pale from the recollection of horrors. They had their photographs taken, looking embarrassed, and the women who served them, women like his mother and Beth and the wife of the Rector, stood by, looking proud and pleased. What do you think you are doing, he had wanted to say, what good is this? What good is this? But they were doing what seemed to them best, they knew nothing better, who was he to tell them the truth?
‘Your leg is better, isn’t it? They have said you’re really all right to go back?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, it’s not my leg, my leg’s nothing. Why do you go on and on about my leg?’
‘Don’t shout so, you’ll wake mother. I was only wanting to know.’
‘You look so prim now.’
At once, her face took on a stubborn cast, but then, as though she were consciously making an effort for him, softened.
‘Are you afraid to go back?’
He stared at her. She had had to ask him that. She was like all the others, understood nothing.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Perhaps it’ll be all right now. You’ve had your wound, so you’re not due for another.’ He thought that she believed it.
‘I don’t think it works like that.’
‘Oh, well… It’s been lovely having you at home.’
He thought she sounded like a hostess speaking to a departing guest.
On the chest of drawers across the room was a small leather photograph frame, standing open. He saw himself, looking foolish and pale and ethereal in his uniform cap. The edges of the picture had been somehow blurred out and made to look cloudy, his eyes were glistening. It had been taken the day before he left for the Training Camp. It was some stranger.
Beth shifted a little in her bed, fidgeted with the quilt, as though she might want to say something, or else to be left to go back to sleep. But the sound reminded him of the nights he had crept into this room and under her bed and gone to sleep there, on the rose-patterned carpet in the stuffy dark, with the hanging fringe of the coverlet, which was like the blankets over the door of the dugout. The creak of the springs as his sister moved was like the sound of the man sleeping above him in the wire-framed bunk.
He had always been forbidden to sleep in his sister’s room. In the mornings she had woken first and, knowing that he was there, leaned down and lifted the cover, whispering to him to go back quickly. He saw her face upside down, hair hanging. Outside, the sound of the martins and swifts that nested in the eaves of Cliff House. He had not minded returning to his room then.
That had gone on for what seemed like most of his childhood, but could only have been perhaps two summers when he was three or four years old. If he could creep under her bed now and lie on his back on the pink-flowered carpet, he would be able to sleep, he would be entirely safe, the nightmares would not come. In the dugout, there were soft voices behind the grey blankets passing messages, warning about careless lights or noises, sudden footsteps stopping abruptly: and the odd silences between, as when a train stopped in the middle of the countryside, and went still, so that through the windows came the calling of birds.
He felt calmer now, his head clear. Perhaps it was over, and he would simply sleep. Beth was watching him. He smiled at her, and she did not smile back. She said, ‘There’s a secret. But I think I could tell you now, you’re going back.’ Her voice was cool, formal as the letters. ‘I may marry Henry Partington.’
Then he knew that his sister had gone completely from him.
‘John?’
For a moment she looked concerned, wanting his approval.
Henry Partington, a lawyer who played golf with their father, who had looked as he looked now for as long as Hilliard could remember, though he must be only forty-five or -six, who had a son, was long widowed, had been to dinner twice in the past three weeks and talked the way they were all talking here. But Hilliard had not guessed, had seen nothing. How could he have seen? Henry Partington
‘He’s a very good man. He’s so kind. I’ve really grown quite fond of him.’
He tried to take in what she was saying but could not do so, even in the light of the realization that his sister had changed, had altogether gone away from him. Until, suddenly, it became clear. For who else was there for her? They were all away, her old friends, all being killed, there were no prospects. Beth was not beautiful, she was almost twenty-four, and had their father and mother to contend with daily.
He stood up.
‘John – I’m sorry I didn’t tell you but… but I haven’t actually said anything to him yet, I haven’t…’
‘You will.’
‘He thinks very highly of you, John. I’ve often talked to him about you.’
How? What had there been to say? She knew nothing about him now.
‘You’re not offended are you? Because I didn’t tell you?’
His hand rested on the cold china of the door knob. Tomorrow, he was going back, it was all right, nothing else could touch him.
He said, ‘Of course not. You’ve every right to your own secrets.’
‘Not a secret, but… Oh, you know.’
‘Yes.’
She was still sitting up, hugging her arms around her knees. If he came home again, this room would be empty. He tried to picture her in a wide bed with Henry Partington, and because she was no longer the same person for him, it was easy, it seemed entirely fitting.