I was found, with what I think of now as cruel but faulty aptness, by a pair of lovers, boy and girl. I recall a policeman kneeling on one knee and bending over me, his helmet cradled in the crook of his arm, enquiring politely if I could see him. This struck me as comical. The wet on my face was blood, not rain, as at first I had thought, although plainly it was not raining. The young chap who had found me stepped forward politely and asked the policeman if he and his girl might be on their way, as the girl thought she was going to be sick. My gashed leg was entirely numb, it might have been severed altogemer at the hip for all I could feel of it. Presently an ambulance arrived and I was loaded in and taken away and deposited into a cavernous hospital ward in which all the other beds, twenty or thirty of them, were empty, and sinisterly waiting, their sheets turned down and blankets tucked, their pillows smooth as marble. A harassed little bulldog of a doctor came and examined me, sighing irritably the while. He bandaged my eye, and ordered me to be taken to the operating theatre, where I was inexpertly and partially anaesthetised while he sewed up my leg, and then I was trundled back to the still empty ward and left alone. In the small hours my eye became intolerably painful, but when I shouted for relief no one came. In the morning I was transferred to a private room – Laura had been on the telephone – and at the end of a week I was pronounced strong enough to be driven by ambulance into the country, to a ludicrously picturesque cottage hospital, with rose beds and a weather-vane and ivy around the windows, and white-clad nuns whose elaborate wimples looked to my drugged and pain-racked fancy like the ghosts of giant butterflies. It was here that Laura paid me her first visit.
She put her head around the door, and crept in, wincing and smiling. She was wearing, I noticed, the clinging blue-grey silk costume she had worn the day we met, or one exactly like it; she did have an instinct for the symbolic. She had brought a picnic hamper and a bottle of champagne and a pile of books for me. She looked at the books and at my bandaged eye and pulled a face. "Not very tactful," she said. "I am sorry." She touched a fingertip to the bandage; I could see her struggling to contain her curiosity. "Is it very painful, darling?" She sat on the bed, avoiding the mound of my trussed-up leg under the covers, and set the hamper between us. I opened the champagne. "My big strong man," she said. When I started to fill a glass for her she gave a little squeal and made a show of staying my hand, saying she had been for a week to a frightfully expensive place where they had thoroughly dried her out. She looked at me from under her lashes and grinned, biting her lip. "Oh, all right, then," she said, "but just the one glass, mind." She asked if they were treating me well here, and sighed crossly and said so they should be, considering the money they were charging her. I said I had expected her to come to see me before now. "He speaks!" she cried, clapping her hands together. Then she looked serious, pouting, and began picking at the coverlet. "I would have come, of course," she said, "only you know how squeamish I am." She told me her mother had sent her love, and could not keep from smirking. I smiled too. She took my hand and squeezed it. "You are not so unhappy, then, darling, are you?" she said. "And you have forgiven me? They were not supposed to hurt you, you know, only give you a fright." I asked her who had hired them for her. She shrugged. She had knocked back three glasses of the champagne and her eyes had a faintly frantic light. We were silent for a while. She went back to teasing a thread out of the coverlet, frowning. "You took my money," she said softly, not looking at me. "You sold my things. That was very naughty." A gust of wind smacked its palm against the window, and a cherry tree outside shook its head, shedding a flurry of pink blossoms. She was still holding my hand, and now she lifted it to her lips and kissed it. "Poor love," she said, smiling sadly.
She paid all my hospital bills. I wrote to her mother, mentioning some of Laura's more bizarre bedroom predilections, and how embarrassing it would be if word of them was to find its way into the gossip columns, and a week later I received a generous cheque in the post from Berkshire, accompanied by a remarkably dignified letter of reproach from the Dowager. I redeemed one of Laura's rings from the pawnbroker's and sent it back to her. She acknowledged it with a note, saying I was very sweet, and that she was missing me already. A month later I was on the Atlantic, sailing westwards, in a convoy of ten ships, three of which were torpedoed and sunk off the islands of the Azores. On board I met a man, a Swedish functionary of the Red Cross, who promised to enquire into the whereabouts of my family. A month after my arrival in New York he sent me the news that my father had died of malnutrition in a labour camp in southern Poland, where shortly afterwards my mother, no longer capable of productive work, had been shot. Of my siblings, unfortunately, so said the Swede, no information was available.
So you see, my dear.
THREE
Those were, Cass Cleave considered, the best days of all the days, not many, not very many, that they were to spend together. She had a task, which was to take care of him. Never had she felt so free of herself. All of her energy and attention was directed toward him. She thought at first he would die, he was so listless and turned inward. She could scarcely tell the difference between his good eye and his bad, for they both seemed equally blank, although he was constantly watching her, she could sense it. If he were to die he would die; it would have been ordained. That was the word that came to her: ordained. She had an almost sanctified sense of purpose. She tended him with that equal mixture of solicitude and harshness that she remembered from the nuns who ran the hospitals where she had spent so much of her childhood. She saw herself, like them, in white, moving silently, on silent feet, carrying something. At other times she was a Christian thrown to the lions before whom the lions had knelt down in meekness; she heard the savage clamour all around her of the crowd crying out for her blood, saw the circle of blue sky above, felt the hot dust under her bare feet. And indeed, he was like some big, ailing beast, lying in his lair, panting softly in the heat, the eyelids slowly closing and slowly opening again, the yellowed gaze directed always a little to the side of her but seeing her all the same. He seldom spoke; entire days went past when she did not hear a word from him. It was May. In. ii\e mornings, %tv^ Nvould go down, to \kve \ofcfc›^ AT\d ^«?i\\. YffiSil wo one was looking and gather up the newspapers that were set out on a big table there for the guests to read, armfuls of them, and bring them back to the room and sit on a chair at the bedside reading aloud to him, choosing items at random. Occasionally he would chuckle at a report of some absurdity, some calamity. When he was tired of listening to her he would turn his face aside and lift a hand and bat the air jadedly, waving her away. He developed a grimace, he would screw up his eyes and smack his lips disgustedly, as if he had a foul taste in his moudi. He smelled, too, no matter how thoroughly she washed him. It was a smell she recognised from long ago but could not think from where, sweetish and soft, not entirely unpleasant, a smell as of something that had died under a bush. She learned to stay out of the lavatory for a good quarter of an hour after he had used it. He said his liver must be rotting. None of this she minded.