After a few minutes, the house came into view: a huge, mid-Victorian building with Italianate towers and turrets and a covering of ivy leaves that stirred as a breeze blew across the lawn. The front garden was set with beds of roses, many of the bushes still with lolling, loose-lipped blooms clinging to the stems. A solitary bee toppled from flower to flower.
Elinor was walking more slowly now. He suspected she was beginning to realize they might simply be turned away. He hoped they would. There was no sound except for their footsteps crunching over the beech mast in the drive. The silence was almost uncanny: it didn’t seem like a hospital at all. Only when they had opened the front door and stepped inside did they hear the sounds of a busy office: typewriters clattering, telephones ringing, the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on black-and-white tiles. A bowl of roses stood on a table by the door, much as it would have done when this was a private house, but the smell of boiled cabbage would not have been tolerated in any well-run home. It smelled like a boys’ school.
A secretary wearing a mannish tweed suit and rimless spectacles strode up to them. Paul explained their business.
‘Visiting’s Mondays at seven in the evening and Thursdays at two in the afternoon.’
‘We’ve come a long way,’ Elinor said.
The woman looked at her. ‘I’ll have to ask.’
She was gone some time, returning eventually with a nurse who rustled and crackled and asked about their relationship to Mr Neville, and when Paul admitted they were merely friends — close friends, Elinor put in — seemed equally unsure.
‘I’ll ask him if he wants to see you,’ she said. ‘Meanwhile you’d better wait in here.’
She opened a door into what might well have been a dentist’s waiting room. A round table covered with copies of Punch occupied the centre of the room. Elinor retreated to an armchair in the far corner; Paul went across to the window and looked out over the rear of the house. Once, all this land must have been set to lawns; now it was covered in row after row of huts. Some had narrow flower beds planted round them, but nothing could soften the brutal reality of raw, hastily erected wooden buildings crammed together in a waste of mud and trampled grass.
At the centre of the grid stood a black-and-white timbered building with a curious octagonal roof, designed, he supposed, to let in the maximum amount of light. As he watched, the doors of this building opened and a trolley emerged, pushed by a porter, with a nurse walking alongside, trying to steady some kind of apparatus that covered the patient’s nose and mouth. The trolley was wheeled rapidly along the covered path and through the doors of the next hut along. The journey had taken less than a minute.
Paul heard the creak of the door opening behind him. When he turned round, he saw that a man, not immediately recognizable as Neville, had come into the room.
‘Tarrant. This is a surprise.’
Something wrong about the voice; something terribly wrong. Pulling himself together, Paul went across and shook hands. ‘Sorry to hear about the …’ He was thinking: Don’t look away. Don’t stare.
‘Oh, there’s a lot worse than this. And let’s face it, Tarrant, I was always an ugly bugger. Your profile — now that would be a loss to mankind.’
His speech was very difficult to follow.
‘Sorry, I know I sound a bit odd. Like farting in soapy water, I’m afraid.’
Paul realized Neville didn’t know Elinor was there. She’d got to her feet and was standing motionless, arms hanging limp by her sides. Neville followed the direction of Paul’s gaze and took an involuntary step back.
Elinor came towards him. ‘Hello, Kit.’
She stretched out her hand. Neville took it as one might grasp a dead and decomposing fish. Then he retreated to an armchair as far away from her as possible and, even then, turned it a little to one side so the wing would cast a shadow over his face.
They sat down, their chairs forming an approximate triangle, and tried to think of things to say. Paul, who knew he had to take the lead, asked about Neville’s treatment.
‘They seem fairly optimistic. Gillies says a lot of damage was done by the surgery I had before I got here. You’re meant to come straight here but I ended up in the wrong hospital and they just stitched the edges together — so, apparently, the first thing is to undo all that. Gillies says it might look a bit worse, initially.’
Neville said this almost apologetically, as if well aware of their incredulity. Could anything be worse?
‘Odd chap, looks a bit like a bloodhound. New Zealander. He calls the patients “honey” and “my dear” and sits on the beds. God knows what the army make of him, but he’s supposed to be the best there is.’
Paul forced himself to ask about the food.
‘Not bad, actually, not bad at all. The hospital’s got its own farm so we get fresh milk, eggs … A lot of the chaps can’t eat solid food, so it’s eggnog, soup … Well, that’s it really. Food’s not as good for the men as it is for officers, of course.’ The red ruin turned in Paul’s direction. ‘Apparently, their delicate systems require more nourishment than ours.’
‘Is that a dig at me?’
‘My dear chap. Wouldn’t dream of it. You’re a temporary gentleman, I’m a temporary non-gentleman. That’s just the way it goes.’
Paul could feel Elinor itching to ask about Toby’s death, but she waited until there was a natural pause in the conversation and then handled it really rather well. No reproach for Neville’s not having written, no suspicion, just a dignified expression of her desire for more information.
‘I think it would help my parents to know a bit more,’ she said. ‘I know it would help me.’
Neville’s expression was unreadable, but then all his expressions were unreadable.
‘Nothing to tell, I’m afraid. Direct hit. His death was instantaneous, completely painless. He was a brave man, a wonderful doctor, everybody who came into contact with him admired and respected him.’ He might have been reading from a script. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’
‘Did you see him die?’
A fractional hesitation? ‘No.’
Elinor quite clearly didn’t believe him — and, rather to his surprise, neither did Paul. He couldn’t think of anything further to say. After a few minutes of strained silence, Elinor stood up. ‘Do you know, I think I might have a walk round the garden.’
‘Are you all right?’ Paul said.
‘Fine, I just need a bit of fresh air. Anyway. I’m sure you two have lots to catch up on.’ She shook hands again with Neville, not looking at him, and turned to Paul. ‘I’ll be outside when you’re ready.’
After she’d gone, Paul said, ‘Sorry about this, we shouldn’t have come.’
‘So why did you?’
‘Because I couldn’t stop her coming, and I thought it would be worse if I wasn’t here.’
Neville shrugged. ‘Well, it’s done now. I suppose I have Tonks to thank?’
‘Not really, no, he told me you were here, but he made it perfectly clear you didn’t want visitors. It’s my fault, I should’ve stood up to her.’
‘You were never good at that.’
Paul was still inclined to hope that Neville might speak more freely — and more honestly — now Elinor was gone. If there was anything more to say about Toby’s death, Neville would tell a man rather than a woman, a serving soldier rather than a civilian — a relative least of all. But instead, he began to talk about old times, before the war, before the trauma. He talked about the years immediately after he left the Slade, his discovery of Futurism, the excitement of scraping away the dead layers of the past. And he talked about girls, the models at the Slade whom he’d painted because he had to, and slept with because he wanted to. He had an old man’s hunger for the past. Paul joined in easily enough, though he knew he’d have to raise the subject of Toby’s death again before he left. He owed Elinor that, at least.