“What’s so bad?”
“Ever slept on uneven ground?”
It was a simple question, but one that took me some time to answer.
“No,” I said.
“For a time you might settle into it,” Mrs. Goldring said.
My eyes had adjusted to the dark now. Deep creases drew down from the prim line of Mrs. Goldring’s white mouth. She wasn’t looking at me — she looked up at the ceiling, off at the sleeping men behind her. She didn’t look me in the eyes.
“Without fail, every night, I jump upright, gripping the sides of my mattress. Even the slightest tilt, the slightest dip to one side or the other, and there’s no way but to feel you’re falling off the ends of the earth. As if the whole world has tipped, invested in shaking you from it.”
I didn’t know what to say. More than anything it was nice to hear someone complaining about something so mundane. For so long it had been the stiff upper lip of the Britons — and only that stiff upper lip. How good it could feel to hear someone complain. I asked Mrs. Goldring if she didn’t find some entertainment here. Had she made friends? She looked at me a bit oddly and then with no small fanfare pulled out from beside her pallet a large book. It was wrapped in oilskin, and so had no water damage from that damp floor.
“I read at a play each night, and that keeps me going,” Mrs. Goldring said. In her hands she held a complete edition of Shakespeare, a portable edition in soft cover she’d brought with her. We’d been assigned a German translation of Romeo and Juliet in the gymnasium back in Leitmeritz, but if I’d paid any attention, not a word or character or idea had stuck.
Now something stirred in Mrs. Goldring — and in me. I don’t know if it was the plays, or the company, or the simple fact of our having a respite from the Blitz, but I focused completely on listening to Glynnis’s mother. Where in the moments before — and in so many of the days to come — Mrs. Goldring’s oncoming dementia had brought her from complaint to compliance, from cohesion to chaos, when she began to speak of the madness of Lear, suddenly precise thoughts coalesced. She told me much about these characters I’d never heard of. Her favorite, Mrs. Goldring explained, was Cordelia. The love for a father should always be so strong and clear, she said, and she could only hope that her Glynnis loved her quite so much. When I told her I didn’t know this play, for the first time Mrs. Goldring stood.
“Don’t know the greatest achievement of Western culture, Mr. Weisberg!” she said. “Only one way to remedy such a grave offense.”
She opened the volume to King Lear. Before I knew it, we were taking turns, she as Cordelia and I as Lear, she as Goneril and I as Edmund. There we were in a cave in the countryside east of London, dividing up ancient England over the mistaken response of a daughter who loved her father. We felt as if France and Albany were standing in the nooks of our cave, listening in as we unwisely divided the kingdom; our anger at Goneril and Regan was as great in those moments as it was for the Messerschmitt pilots over London. The pages of that edition were all very clean, not a mark on any one of them.
A near the end of act 2, Glynnis returned to us. She told her mother we would be back, that we’d come see her when we had a leave.
“We,” she said.
“Poxl and me,” Glynnis said.
“Upon your return, we will find our way into act 3, my boy,” Mrs. Goldring said.
Kerosene light danced on the ceiling ten yards above our heads, about the deep-lined face of Glynnis’s mother. She looked right at me for the first time.
“I could do with that,” Mrs. Goldring said.
On our long walk back to the train, Glynnis asked what had allowed her mother to seem so lucid at some moments after weeks and months of decrepitude. I told her I didn’t know. I’d only just met this woman and wouldn’t purport to know.
“But we read King Lear together the whole time you were gone,” I said.
I suspected there might eventually be more to say on the matter, but I left it at that.
12.
In the months ahead, when we were granted weekend leave, Glynnis and I went to see her mother. While Glynnis went off to procure whatever her mother needed, I stayed and read. First we read Lear, and then the rest, from Timon of Athens to Titus Andronicus, from All’s Well That Ends Well all the way to The Merchant of Venice, where we paused as Shylock asks, so pained, If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
When Glynnis grew tired and returned, I would survey the cave myself, while Glynnis and her mother talked, or read from the plays as well, though having grown up with them, Glynnis surely didn’t have the same patience for her mother’s proclivities that I did. I wouldn’t say I came to know its every recess, but the cave itself came to be a kind of holiday home for us.
And without our quite knowing when it had happened so fully, Glynnis and I had taken to each other. We made love quietly on weeknights when we could. While her face bore that constellation of freckles, when her shirt came off, I found that every inch of her skin not touched by the sun was wholly white. I liked to turn on a lamp in the corner of her small room near the hospital when we undressed. In the quiet after we’d disentangled I heard about her childhood. She’d grown up on a dairy farm, her family one of modest means. After watching her parents’ husbandry of their cattle—“I’d seen more pink bleating calves pulled from their mothers by the age of ten than one should see in a lifetime,” Glynnis said — she came to decide that medicine attracted her. Not just medicine but also the birthing process. She began her training as a midwife soon after leaving her parents’ home. But then the war threatened, and now she was a handful of years into working as a nurse.
“It’s a funny transition, innit?” Glynnis said. I told her I didn’t follow her meaning. “I wanted to be in a hospital helping to bring new life into the world. Here were are in London watching it taken.”
“You’re doing exactly what you should be doing now,” I said. “The war will end one day, and you’ll go back to it.”
“I suppose. And you, Poxl West? What will you do when the war you’re so certain will end does end?”
I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t know, so I gave her an answer somewhere in between.
“Before this war is over, Glynnis Goldring, I will fly for the RAF.” It wasn’t the first she’d heard of this desire, but I suppose it was the most clearly she’d heard it.
“And what will become of me while you’re off flying?” she said.
“The same thing that becomes of you now. Or you’ll come with me, come work for the Women’s Auxiliary.”
“I don’t want to leave here,” Glynnis said. And for a time we left it at that. We stopped speaking and held each other tight. After hours on Mrs. Goldring’s pallet there was something almost too ordered about Glynnis’s bed — there was no sense of being thrown off by the gravity of the shifting world, no feeling of the disruption that a dim cave can bring.
So more often than not we found ourselves back in that cave on every weekend pass we could procure. I liked to carry a lamp with us on those weekends when we went to see Mrs. Goldring and observe every cave room there was. I learned after the war that as many as eight thousand Britons had set up camp there, and by springtime they’d moved beyond a dining room and sleeping areas. Deep in the paths water had borne through the rock over many thousands of years, through a passageway so tight one felt one might be stuck until one starved to death, a ballroom had been constructed. Some boy small enough to pass through the crevice along with a small chandelier had brought tools as well, and near the top of the cave ceiling, he had installed that glimmering glass. An old Victrola was powered by a hand crank in a far corner of the room.