Chapter Forty-Five
Half-filled cardboard boxes stood around the living room. Clothes lay draped over chairs. Piled in twos and threes, drawers containing the letters, jewellery, diaries and bric-a-brac that one collects over nearly forty years were stacked in the middle of the floor. Lisa sat cross-legged in front of the fire sifting through her mother’s things, deciding what should go to Oxfam and what should be consigned to the cardboard boxes.
The house was haunted by memories, and these were the last tangible reminders; mother-of-pearl hair clasps with strands of her hair still caught between the teeth; a pile of scratched Elvis Presley singles; a box of black and white photographs of her mother as a child during the war years. These were all that remained of an unremarkable and unhappy life. A sad and meaningless legacy, to be wrapped in newspaper and packed away in boxes, as her mother had packed away all memories of her husband in an attic trunk.
Lisa heard the sound of hammering from the front garden. She crossed to the window. A young man from the estate agent was knocking a FOR SALE sign on a pole into soft earth on the garden side of the wall. A light drizzle blurred the glass. She turned from the window and winced a little as the pain in her ribs reminded her of things she would rather forget. She was comforted by the thought that this memory, too, would fade with the pain.
She picked her way across the floor and sat at the table. Before her, spread out on the cloth, were all the cuttings of the court-martial, and her parents’ wedding photographs. She had read and reread every word, examined every detail of every picture. She looked again at the press photographs of her father, and traced the line of the scar on his cheek lightly with her fingers, smearing the newsprint.
However hard she tried, she found she could not recall with any clarity the features of the woman who had died for her in Bangkok in the damp basement of a dockland warehouse. Even the face of her mother had receded to the backwaters of her memory. There were, she supposed, always photographs to remind her, but these she could hide away in boxes in the attic. It was her father’s face that remained etched on her memory. It was his face she saw when she closed her eyes at night, though she had glimpsed him only once, sheltering beneath a tree at her mother’s funeral.
Bangkok was a million miles away. It belonged to another existence, to a person she had been only briefly. Soon London, too, would be just a memory, along with the house. It was possible to put everything away, or behind you. It was possible to be someone else, the sum total of all those people you had been, but different from any one of them. It was possible to start again, to build a new life. If only...
Her gaze rested again on the photograph of the young man in dress uniform grinning shyly by her mother’s side on the church steps. She wished she could hate him for what he had done to her. She wished she could have met him, if only to dislike him. She wished at least she had got somewhere near the truth. Perhaps then she could have forgotten.
She sat for a long time gazing into the flames of the gas fire, before reaching a decision. She drew the phone towards her and dialled for a taxi.
Blair led her through to the room at the back, and the view over the river. ‘I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,’ he said. It had been less than a week since the doctor had declared her fit enough to return home. He took her coat.
‘I didn’t mean to disturb you. I needed to talk.’ She touched the back of the chair she had sat in for so many hours, talking, listening, learning to trust again, and feeling scar tissue grow over mental wounds. ‘May I?’
‘Of course.’ He waved her into the seat. ‘I’d have thought we’d done enough talking to last a lifetime.’ He settled back into his armchair and lit his pipe. It was true, he thought. They had talked a great deal. Mostly about her father, feeding her longing for detail — about his life, where he had been, what he had done. But his instinct told him that she had returned now to ask the questions he had hoped she never would. ‘What have you been up to?’ Perhaps he hoped he could deflect her.
She shrugged. ‘I’ve put the house up for sale, and I’ve applied for a job. In Edinburgh.’
‘Nice city. Doing what?’
‘Secretarial. A lawyer’s office.’
‘Seems a bit of a waste. I thought you were going back to college.’
She toyed with the buckle on her belt, avoiding his eyes. ‘I changed my mind. It just seemed like a step back. Anyway, I don’t think I was cut out to be a journalist.’
He watched her for a few moments, until the silence forced her to look up. ‘Know anyone there? In Edinburgh?’ She shook her head. He nodded. ‘Running away, then.’
She was stung to defend herself. ‘I’ve got nothing to run away from.’
‘Except the past.’ He tamped down the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe. ‘Only you can never do that. You carry your past with you always. Wherever you run, you’ll only find yourself, waiting there for you when you arrive, like an old friend — or enemy — you can’t get rid of.’
‘You always have all the answers, don’t you, Sam?’
‘If I’d had all the answers at your age, I wouldn’t be where I am now. I suppose you’ve got to find your own answers.’
She tutted with irritation. ‘Maybe when I’m your age I’ll be as smug as you.’
He grinned. ‘Coffee?’
‘No thank you.’ She was still annoyed.
‘Well, I’m making some anyway. If you change your mind give me a holler.’ He eased himself out of his chair.
‘I want to know about the massacre in Aden.’
He hesitated for only a moment. ‘I already told you about that. A long time ago. Milk, no sugar, isn’t it?’ He headed for the kitchen.
‘You told me a version of it,’ she called after him. ‘I want to know the truth.’
He stopped and turned, sudden anger in his eyes. ‘Do you? Why? So you can hate him? Consign him to the past, like another bad memory? No, no, that would be too easy, Lisa. It’s far easier to hate than it is to love. If you’re going to feel anything for him it should be pity. And you should carry that pity around with you for the rest of your life, and maybe one day you’ll be able to forgive him!’
Tears sprang to her eyes. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t have wanted me to pity him.’
‘No, he wouldn’t. He’d have hated it. And he’d have rather you’d hated him. You’re just like him, you know. He always wanted the easy way out, too.’ He put his hand to his forehead. ‘No, that’s not true. I’m being unfair to him. He took it all on himself. All the responsibility, all the guilt. But his way of coping with that was by shutting everything and everyone else out. He just died inside, emotionally.’
He turned and stared out across the river. ‘We all died a little.’ His laugh was without humour. ‘They talk about the innocent victims of war. But sometimes the real victims are the ones who survive.
‘Oh, yes, we walked into that village and killed all those people. It was no accident, and I’m not going to try and excuse it. We lost control. A moment of madness. It happens. But, you see, what happened, happened as much to us as it did to them. They died, but we had to live with it, and I think dying was the easier of the two.’
A small boat drifted by, a young couple in winter coats and scarves laughing at some shared intimacy.
Blair turned towards Lisa. ‘What I told you before, about what happened — it was our defence at the court martial. It’s what we told our wives and our girlfriends and our parents. It’s what we wanted the world to believe, what we wanted to believe ourselves. How could you tell anyone, or even admit to yourself, what it was you’d found inside? Something dark and evil that you’d never even suspected was there. Something so rotten you can’t ever wash the taste of it from your mouth. Like coming face to face with the devil, only to realize you’ve seen the face before, looking back at you from the mirror when you shave in the morning.’