That was true, Henderson had come to realize. And there also, he admitted, was the source of Irene’s potent allure. She was the very antithesis of him. Rather as cannibals are renowned to eat the brains of their enemies to acquire extra intelligence and cunning, so Henderson fancied his association with Irene might allow some of her forthright vigour to strengthen his soul…
He sat up and replumped his pillows. Over the years, as he had first located, analysed and tried to face up to his problem, the suspicion had grown that it in some way wasn’t his own fault, that in some way his country was to blame. Perhaps…
With a great thrashing heave he turned over.
He slid his hand into the cool crevice between sheet and pillow. That was what he needed. He thought of his lamentable day. He needed some of that strength. He itched with residual shame. There was no hope in ringing her up, asking if he could come round. No hope…Besides he didn’t know if he was up to it himself. When he had fallen over his sabre bag he had cut and grazed his right knee rather badly, and ruined his suit.
He looked at his watch. A quarter to four.
He turned on his side, hunched into his pillow and closed his eyes. But his brain’s life bubbled on, like an indefatigable party goer. It was something about bed, something about his body being in repose that seemed to trigger it into hyperactive motion. He ran through his favourite sexual fantasies, duly got an erection, but then found he was thinking about the problems of replacing his American Express card, which had not been uncovered by the diligent search he and his four new friends had carried out.
He wondered if he should take a sleeping pill, but decided not to. They left him more tired the following day than his usual undrugged night on the rack. Once, in a fit of frustration, he had taken three of the particular brand he was prescribed. They made him go to sleep, after a fashion; but what was worse was that he stumbled around like a moron for the next day — heavy-lidded, rubber-lipped, senses all but shut down, barely able to string three words together. At times in any given night he did drift off but never, it seemed, for more than half an hour. It was a source of constant wonder to him how his body survived on such meagre rations. He had read somewhere that eight hours of sleep per day was a mythical requirement. He was living proof of the fallacy — if such a concept were possible. For a while he played around with the words: can you prove a fallacy, disprove a fallacy…
He woke up to a horrible grinding noise punctuated by shouts and clangs. He rubbed his eyes. Wearily, he went to the window and looked out. The back of his apartment block overlooked the rear of a large hotel. In the courtyard behind it two huge green garbage trucks were being filled with rubbish. Eight foot dustbins — the size of a steamer’s smoke-stacks — were rumbled out from the kitchen by gangs of men, attached to an hydraulic arm, and automatically tipped into the truck. Throughout this, the men engaged in constant shouted conversation, competing valiantly with the whining hydraulics, the rumbling cast iron wheels of the dustbins and the surging, churning noise that emanated from the viscera of the garbage trucks.
For the first week that he had lived in the apartment block, Henderson had hung out of his sixth floor window and had vainly issued requests for a little less noise. “Excuse me,” he would call, “is there any chance of you men keeping the noise down?” The men seemed to hear him and shouted back but he couldn’t make out their replies. It had no effect, in any event. The noise lasted for fifteen to twenty minutes and took place between four and five in the morning, every morning. When, outraged, he had raised the matter with other residents of the block they assured him he would get used to it very soon. To a man and a woman, it seemed, they now slept tranquilly through the infernal din.
But they weren’t insomniacs. Henderson turned away from his bedroom window, went through to his modern kitchenette and made himself a cup of tea. He took a sip and thought about his drive South with the charming Bryant. At least it would please Melissa. He thought fondly of her for a moment. She might not be as exciting as Irene but, under the current circumstances, that seemed like a huge asset. Perhaps, he thought, he should wind up the Irene affair. But that idea saddened him. But then perhaps it was already wound up. You could never tell with Irene.
To distract himself he went back into his sitting room and took out pen and paper. He had decided to write to Lance-corporal Drew and urge him to reply promptly with all the information he possessed about Captain Dores’s death.
“Please do not worry about sparing my feelings,” Henderson wrote. “I never knew my father and am consequently deeply concerned to learn as much as I can about him. I know the place and time of his death, but not the manner of it. If you can tell me anything — or provide me with the name and address of anyone who can — I will be eternally grateful.”
He wrote out an envelope addressed to himself and rummaged in the desk drawer for his supply of British stamps. As he did so, he uncovered an unmarked, age-yellowed envelope. He felt his face spontaneously screw up with disappointment and regret. It was a letter from his father, written on his last leave home, before he departed to the Far East, to his unborn child.
Henderson had learnt of its existence only a year and a half previously and it had been responsible for initiating this quest to discover the details of his father’s death in action.
One afternoon, in the middle of a desultory conversation, his mother had referred casually to ‘that old letter of your father’s’. After the incredulous and heated recriminations had died down (“It’s taken forty years for you to deliver it!”) his mother had hurtfully handed it over.
“Read it,” she had said, a hint of tears in her voice. “You’ll understand why I never gave it to you.”
He unfolded it now, a curious taut expression on his face, and spread it carefully on the top.
My Darling Girl,
In case anything should happen to me I want you to keep and treasure this. All I have is at your disposal. My faith in you is as my affection for you and knows no bounds.
With all my love,
Your Old Dad.
Henderson had tears in his eyes as he read this, tears of frustration. Every time he read this letter he had to suppress a monstrous urge to tear it up.
“He was absolutely convinced you were going to be a girl,” his mother had said. “Utterly convinced. Nothing I said would change his mind. ‘Look after my little girl’ were his last words to me. I thought it would only upset you. It has upset you.”
Henderson sat back in his chair. There was a vague tremble running haphazardly through his body. He put the letter away and sat for a while tracing the contours of his nose with thumb and middle finger. The knowledge that letter contained represented his life’s greatest disappointment, all the more bitter because there was nothing he could do about it — could ever have done about it. It seemed absurd to worry about a father’s speculations on the sex of an unborn child in 1943…But if you were that unborn child…? Somehow by being born male he had let his father down, even though the man had never known.