Had to get up, get out of bed, get free. And he managed it, he did, he stood up, he flexed his fingers and the next minute he was walking down the heaving corridor and climbing the stairs on to the deck.
Cold air on his face. The stars formed clusters like apple blossom. He stood at the rail and opened his mouth to catch the salt spray: he seemed to be drinking stars. The ship was travelling without lights. Half a mile away, lean, predatory, grey destroyers loped along, almost invisible except where starlight caught the white foam of their wakes. Gradually, the wind off the sea cooled his hot flesh. He couldn’t go back down there, with the smells of engine oil and wet rubber and sweaty bodies; he’d find somewhere out of sight and stay on deck all night.
Crouching in the shadow of a lifeboat, he felt sufficiently safe to drift off to sleep, though women’s voices kept snagging him awake.
I don’t think he’ll need any more tonight, do you?
No, he’s out for the count.
Women on board? There must be a group of nurses going out. He rolled up his coat to form a pillow and slipped into a deeper sleep, from which he woke, jolted half out of his wits, because some blithering idiot had fallen over him.
‘Look where you’re going, you —’ Too late he registered the peaked cap. ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Good God, it’s Neville, isn’t it?’
Didn’t know the bloke from Adam. But then he took off the cap and there, impossibly, in army uniform with the caduceus badge of the RAMC on her chest, stood Elinor Brooke.
Of course it bloody wasn’t. Fighting off the last vestiges of sleep, he said, ‘Captain Brooke, sir.’
Brooke sat down on the deck beside him and offered him a cigarette. In civilian life, this would not have been remarkable — they did, after all, know each other through Elinor, though not very well — but here, where men were not supposed to address officers except in the presence of an NCO, it was unusual, to say the least. All Kit’s ambivalent feelings about not being an officer rose to the surface; he compensated by boasting about the extent of his experience with the Belgian Red Cross. He’d been in France in 1914, well before anybody else got there. French medical services on the verge of collapse, wounded sleeping on pissy straw, half a dozen orderlies to five hundred men, no supplies, that was the situation he’d found, and only three months later he’d been a dresser in a properly run hospital. And, though he said it as shouldn’t, a bloody good one too.
Brooke nodded, asked questions, taking it all in. What an extraordinary coincidence, Elinor wrote, when he told her he was serving with her brother. Wasn’t a bloody coincidence at all. He asked for me. Oh, he didn’t flatter himself for a minute that Brooke had any particular interest in him personally, he just wanted an experienced dresser for his team and he made bloody certain he got one.
And slowly, with the bitterness of that realization, the hut took shape around him. While he slept, they’d moved him from his cubicle on to the main ward. In the next bed, Trotter was struggling to ingest the regulation amount of gruel. The nurse who was feeding him looked across at Kit. ‘You’re awake, then.’
People’s willingness to state the absolutely bleeding obvious never ceased to amaze him. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s nice.’
Mousey brown hair; eyes like currants stuck in dough. Good pair of tits on her, though. It humiliated him: this melancholy, all-pervading lust.
‘You going to the concert?’
‘Not allowed out of bed.’
‘Oh, what a shame. I always think it breaks up the day.’
The day was feeling pretty bloody broken, yes. He turned on his side to indicate that the conversation was over, but the sounds of Trotter being fed went on and on. Couldn’t screen them out. He knew every stage of the process that produced these chokings and gurglings and regurgitations, the oohings and aahings and cooings, the ‘just one more mouthful now, there’s a good boy’. If he stayed in this place much longer he really would go mad.
Somehow or other the morning passed. Just before lunch, Gillies, attended by Sister Lang-widge! and surrounded by white-coated acolytes, appeared at the foot of his bed. They stared at him. He stared back. Gillies examined the trunk, which he appeared to think was a very good sort of trunk, and then they all retreated to the foot of the bed and began talking to each other in low voices. Mouths opening and shutting, drooling strings of words. It was a relief when they moved on. He was feeling drowsy; he wanted to sleep, though he knew the moment he closed his eyes he’d find Brooke waiting for him on the inside of the lids.
For God’s sake. He was tired, so tired. Bloody well bugger off, can’t you, and leave me alone.
Seventeen
When Elinor met her father in his favourite restaurant on George Street she was shocked by the change in his appearance. Toby’s death had aged him ten years, though he greeted her cheerfully. An elderly waiter doddered across to their table and Father addressed him by name. He loved this place, mainly, she suspected, because it served exactly the same kind of food he ate in his club. They ordered Brown Windsor soup and steak-and-kidney pie: God alone knew what would be in it, probably neither steak nor kidney. She watched him lovingly as he chased globules of grease around his soup. ‘So how have you been keeping?’ he said.
‘Not too bad, I’m spending more time in London now, staying with Catherine. You remember Catherine?’
‘Yes, of course.’
It was quite clear he didn’t.
‘What about you?’ she asked.
‘Oh, you know, work. And more work.’
‘I don’t really know whether it’s worth my getting a flat in London, I still spend quite a bit of time at home.’
He pushed his plate away. ‘That’s really what I want to talk to you about.’
But he didn’t talk. He simply sat, staring down at his hands. She could feel tension gathering behind the silence and it made her nervous. ‘Yes?’
‘The thing is, I don’t think your mother’s going back. She seems very settled at Rachel’s.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s a bit soon.’
‘No, I don’t think she’s ever going back.’
‘Has she said so?’
He nodded.
‘I think that’s a mistake. And she shouldn’t be taking a big decision like that anyway. It’s too soon.’
‘But she has.’
‘What does Rachel think? I mean, I know they get on really well, but …’
‘There’s a cottage in the village. Only half a mile away, she could see the children every day. Alex, you know, he’s the spit of Toby at that age.’
Elinor didn’t know what more to say. She thought it was a mistake, but in the end it was her mother’s decision. How different people were. She’d clung to the house and the memories it contained; her mother, apparently, couldn’t wait to see the back of them.
‘The thing is …’ Father was toying with his knife, not looking at her. ‘She’s made up her mind.’
‘What does Rachel say?’
‘She thinks it’s a good idea.’
‘A good idea for Mother to buy the cottage or a good idea for Mother to get out of her house?’
‘Elinor —’
‘Oh, I know. I’m not being nasty, really I’m not. Rachel’s borne the brunt of all this, I haven’t done anything.’
‘Well, the answer’s a bit of both, I think. I know she finds your mother … Well, the word she used was “draining”. And you can hardly blame her. Those two boys are absolute little tearaways, and there’s another on the way.’