During the months following this landing, I had a great deal of time for thinking, and I thought often of how different the experience of physical pain as an adult was than it had been when I was a boy. When I was eight and broke my wrist, physical pain still contained that singular didactic ability to transform action. So much of life is defined by the acceptance of pain. When I was four I put my hand on a teapot and burned my fingers. The raised red imprints are still seared onto my pinkie and ring fingers, and at the heel of my left palm. I was still learning from pain, conditioned to understand what to touch, what not, how to proceed as a human.
Pain had a single lesson: Some things must be avoided. One kind of pain was the pain you received when you burned your hand; another kind of pain was the pain of bad decisions rued for years to follow. What pain do I feel now, decades later, when I think of that day I left Rotterdam? What pain did I feel when I lay in that hospital bed, trying to imagine Françoise now in life or in death? It was Glynnis I should have been thinking of, but something in the indeterminacy of what I’d left in Rotterdam kept my mind returning to it much as my mind returned to that day I’d gripped the teapot.
This inauguration into the experience of human-being had not yet ended when I was thirteen and traversing Prague with my mother, when the sometimes unbearable sexual desire I’d coupled with my experiences then arose in me. I wonder even now at what point in our development pain becomes something one endures, at times something one comes even to learn to enjoy — if only to test one’s stamina, if only to remember once more that the routine of one’s days has brought about in one the forgetfulness of death. Forgetfulness at the mind meeting each coming moment. Being itself becomes an attempt to skirt pain at all costs — when from the start that experience has been the siren informing us we are interacting with the world in the first place. And isn’t that the experience of new love: knowing that once again it may end in just the pain it ended in the last time? No matter what I’d felt in leaving Françoise, when I saw Glynnis, some part of me was prepared to believe it would end better. Or that I would see Françoise again. Who could predict the line one’s life would follow? Was I the child fearing the reprisal he had experienced when blisters formed on his fingers, or a masochist drawn into the web whose creator awaits with numbing, fatal venom? Surely it was this that tracked me in the moments when I strapped on my safety belt in that plane, tracked me that first night I saw Glynnis Goldring’s pale, beautiful face in the half-light of a tube station, tracked me when I met Françoise and even when I left her. Surely.
3.
I was confined to six months in an army hospital outside London. Clive and my cousins were able to visit on weekend passes from their respective areas of service — Johana and Niny had joined the WAAF, each working the radios at RAF Turnbull. Niny herself had visited three or four times before I’d recovered enough — frankly, before I was weaned from morphine enough to converse coherently — to wonder aloud about the most conspicuous absence of that time: Glynnis’s having failed to come see me.
“Poxl,” Niny said. “Poxl. I’ve been waiting until you were lucid.”
A Luftwaffe bomb had struck Glynnis’s hospital, she said. Just three weeks prior. Papers reported three nurses had died, all of them “very suddenly.”
Glynnis.
The sill of the window by my bed bore no flowers. I was glad. It was the only thing that made me glad. Creeping up at the edges of my mind were those hollyhock blossoms the last moments when I saw Glynnis, the black ant crawling about them. I had told her that day that when I returned from my service I might marry her. I don’t know if I meant it then, and I don’t know what I would have done had she survived the war. Now I was not even well enough to attend her wake.
Niny left me that afternoon. I was alone for days with my thoughts of Glynnis, thoughts of my dreams both of her and of flying a Spitfire dashed. During the night I beckoned the nurse to increase my morphine. Like my mother, Glynnis was gone. Like those women I’d known in Rotterdam, Glynnis was gone. No occasion marked her passing. In the nighttime’s opiated haze, the cold, wet air that lifted off cave walls touched my cheeks again. During the days I did my best to achieve coherence. On one of her many visits, on a day of decreased morphine, Niny brought me my own edition of the Shakespeare plays Mrs. Goldring and I had read aloud to each other on so many occasions, and while the book itself held the same words as Mrs. Goldring’s copy, this version was somehow inferior. Still I read. Now Niny herself took up the parts opposite mine. That seemed appropriate.
What I can tell you from that period is that when I was lucid, each time I watched Hamlet fail to express his love before Ophelia’s horrid act; each time Niny read to me the last lines we hear from Desdemona before Othello’s green-eyed monster overtakes him; even in those moments when Jessica is courted on the periphery as her father is forced to give up his pound of flesh — each time I began to have an image return to me, one that grew stronger at night. In the cobblestones of memory, cobblestones that had been relegated to that part of memory where image cannot gain purchase, swimming images began to return, and chief among them was Françoise’s face. My thoughts were so given over to what I’d lost in Glynnis’s death, it took me some time to realize that when Niny left and the sun settled below the horizon outside and I absconded to the half-life of my morphine drip, it was not only Glynnis Goldring’s face that arose in mind. There was another face that came, too, returned to me with the atavistic pull of a love that won’t leave. Perhaps it seems indiscreet to say that it was not only Glynnis’s face I saw then, in the days just after her death — when I should most have been mourning — or too honest. Cold even.
But nothing bears truth so wholly as the truth love tells. And as Françoise’s face arose in my memory the gravity of my leaving her in Rotterdam began to pull me deep into its grasp. I’d had few moments since I arrived in London to sit with my thoughts. Now that I was confined to a hospital bed, I had nothing but them. Regret, remorse—these are not the right words here. But Glynnis was gone and I’d left Françoise without so much as a good-bye. Gravity is a funny word here, as the gravity of it began to push so hard, it seemed it might grind me to dust as I lay in that bed.
4.
My lungs took a long time to come around. Once they did I was forced to endure a painfully slow convalescence. It would be many months before I could fly. By then, war had advanced under its own ineluctable motion. News of bombing successes came by radio every evening. Soon Bomber Command had entered what would come to be known as the Battle of the Ruhr. RAF bombers opened the western border of Germany in what we all prayed was the prelude to a land invasion. The United States joined the war. I was only half-conscious of this moment when we could begin to feel all that hunkering down in London, living in Underground stations and driving the battered streets seeking survivors, fleeing to the east to live like our ancestors in caves paid proper recompense.
Once I was back on my feet I was posted again to 100 Squadron. Our aerodrome had been relocated to a small town not far to the north of the very port at Grimsby where I first arrived in England. Within my first months of returning to the cockpit I began my training on a four-engine Lancaster. This required me to log months more air time — flying a bomber was very different from piloting a Spitfire. It was a bit unusual, this move from a fighter to a bomber, but the focus of the air campaign had shifted in those months I’d spent in convalescence. Bomber Harris had grown obsessed with a blanket-bombing attack on virtually every German city, and the RAF needed all the bomber pilots it could muster. Soon enough, my initial disappointment at not returning to a fighter was quickly erased by my relief to be flying again.