‘It’s hard,’ she said to her friends in wine bars, ‘but some men, you know, they’re nice in bed, they’re good to you, but they’re just an absence when it comes to it. Poor Charlie. He just wants to be with the tented people.’ And now she stroked his head and called him darling. This woman who would float for ever through his mind in summer dresses.
‘We tried to save the left leg. The other one was off when you arrived. But we had to amputate, old boy. It’s too bad. It’s just too bad, but you’ll recover.’
Scullion lifted a hand, bending one of three remaining fingers. ‘Yes,’ said Colonel Pettifer, the chief surgeon. ‘Both legs, old boy. You’ve lost an eye and your mouth is damaged, but we’ll fix that. And the fingers, obviously. But I wouldn’t worry too much about that.’
The heavy sedation wiped Scullion’s questions. For weeks he roamed in a field of floating reds, before he saw white carnations. A week later it was lines from ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldiers knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
He spoke the words to his own face in County Westmeath, the clear eyes of his boyhood, and he knew the boy’s wonder would
only awaken to grief. He’d never given himself good advice and it was too late. Was that Madeleine holding the blunderer’s hand, counting the days, saying all would be well now between them?
‘Patience,’ the surgeon said.
‘The wounds are healing and it’s all about …’
‘… commitment to getting … that’s …’
‘And then you won’t know yourself.’
The tubes came out. One day: the theatre. A journey under lights and the operation on the mouth. The nurse said mud and dirt had been embedded in his gums, causing infection. Pettifer picked out the material with a silver tool and then he bent over to show him the grains on a swab. ‘Grass from an Afghan field.’ All the while Madeleine spoke about the good eye. He was in England now and many patients walk again.
A day came when his mouth had healed enough for him to try getting out a few words. He took his time. It was slow. And the first words he spoke were not curses or woes, not instant requests or questions about the legs. He simply said enough to make it clear that Madeleine should leave. He was sitting up and he could see the outline of her blonde hair, her white blouse, and he imagined her looking at the stumps of his legs and seeing that the whole man she disliked was gone.
Two weeks later he could say much more to the nurse. ‘No sentimentality. You can write it on the end of the bed.’
‘Like “Nil by mouth”?’ she said.
‘That’s right. Nil by sentiment.’
‘You’re back with us. Good-oh. Sentiment? I think you’ll find that sort of thing’s in short supply round here, Major. Shame about the lady, though. She was here for weeks.’
‘She comes from money,’ Scullion said. ‘Or they pretend they
have money. What they really have is debt. Those people live with so many lies they forget the money thing is false, too. And one day you just have to get away from them.’
‘Too much information,’ the nurse said.
The day he dismissed her, Madeleine went back to the family quarters and phoned her sister in County Clare. She was crying. ‘The thing Charlie will never understand’, she said, ‘is that he’ll always be all right because he’ll always have himself. He’ll never see it, but there’s a sort of complete selfishness in him.’
‘You did your best,’ her sister said.
‘He doesn’t have it in him to be pitied.’
THE TOLLYGUNGE CLUB
One day he smelt food. It was coming from the corridor and it marked the return of routine. ‘This is how it works,’ Pettifer said. ‘You’ll be going off to the High-Dependency Burns Unit. You’ll need skin grafts and a cataract operation to improve your good eye. After that, the real work begins — the legs. We’re going to seal them and then you’ll be off to Headley Court in Surrey. You’re not old, Major, but you’re not in the first flush. The training is hard work, let me tell you. It’s six months before you’re off the stubbies and walking on prosthetics.’
‘Prosthetics, really?’
‘Yes.’
‘We had better get a move on, Colonel,’ said Scullion. ‘It would be lovely to be able to walk to my own disciplinary hearing, don’t you think?’
Pettifer just smiled the way people smile when they don’t want
to get involved. ‘Keep fighting,’ he said. Scullion wasn’t sure if blushing was actually an option any more, but the words embarrassed him and he wished he could go to sleep.
He spent the long afternoons thinking about a new life in India. He thought he could just about bear it in Calcutta, the slow, fading intensity, playing billiards at the Tollygunge Club with the gardeners, eating mangoes, reading Saki and drinking gin and tonic. He could see it so clearly he almost believed in it, a life of displaced authority in warm weather, a life of impotence. He was only two days in the Burns Unit when he asked for paper and started trying to write out the logistics. There was money from his parents’ old pub in Mullingar: he could pay for nurses. He could talk to strangers or start a charity or write a book. With his childish legs in front of him under the blanket, Scullion knew that his great companion had always been his imagination. He asked the welfare officer if she could bring him
The Jungle Book
He could see himself sitting under the twisted boughs of a banyan tree, hidden from the sun, recalling the Great Game, a blanket like this over his poor legs and a drink in his hand, the mind alive, his eyes scanning the horizon for elephants.
‘Hello, Charlie,’ he said. It was Luke standing in the doorway with a bottle of Talisker and a bag of cakes. He had walked all the way from Birmingham New Street thinking of what to say.
‘Is it yourself, Captain Campbell?’
‘It is.’
‘Well, fuck me with a flute band,’ Scullion said. Luke smiled and walked over to the bed. He thought better of shaking the major’s hand so he clapped his shoulder.
‘I’ll pass that request on to the regiment. I’m sure we could arrange for the old Western band to march up your hole while
playing “Amazing Grace”, if that’s what you really want. I mean, it’s quite a strange order but look at the fucken state of you. You can have anything you want.’
That was well done. Well managed, thought Scullion. He laughed and pulled himself up on the pillows. Luke was pleased to see he could still laugh and he realised, watching him struggle, how much he had always been intimidated by the major. He began speaking hospital small talk while Luke considered him, realising, while he listened, that he was now in a position of power over Scullion. Nobody else but Luke had fully witnessed the major’s meltdown. Nobody else knew how reckless he had been in making them go to that village or how his judgement had collapsed before the mortar attack. Scullion had abandoned the boys to danger more than once, they both knew it, and the facts of the matter told against them both. The facts ridiculed them as soldiers and mocked the legend of Scullion’s war. At that stage it hadn’t gone beyond blame into a collective sadness; indeed, it lay heavy on Scullion’s own head, on his features, his scarred mouth, twisted now as he stared from the bed and tried to talk.