She didn’t know any prayers, not real ones like they said. At her school, there was Meeting every morning, a quarter of an hour when they sat waiting on the Light. Sometimes people stood up and spoke, trembling with the Spirit. When a person had troubles, you Held them in the Light, which meant you imagined them surrounded by rays, like when you opened your eyes after sleeping in the sunshine. Here in their chapel they spoke to God the Almighty and Everlasting. There was no place for silence, no time for waiting.
Her mother’s letter arrived Monday morning. It filled two sides and chatted of characters in the hospital, but the handwriting faltered, more like Grandmama Drayton’s had been than the script that filled her mother’s letters for the starving German children. But writing in the hospital must be slapdash at best. Hospitals weren’t peaceful, and they were never silent.
Mrs. Kneesworth had been visiting every day, but now that she’d gone on holiday, there was no one to check or ask or soothe. No one to hear if he had come home, if he’d written, if he was asking for her. No one to open his letters if her mother wouldn’t, to coax her into hearing, to tell him where she was.
They called their God the author of peace and lover of concord. Could it be so wrong to speak to him, even if she had to kneel like a slave?
The throat looked normal, the fever faded, but Riding still couldn’t speak. Kardleigh didn’t think he was shamming exactly, but his sneezes revealed a voice. Patient’s demeanor obedient but withdrawn. Liked wireless, declined reading, the last abnormal for a constitutional bookworm.
The boy’s friend had gone home, and his Housemaster did not visit. While ordinarily Kardleigh would not expect a Housemaster to slog to the Tower over someone’s sore throat, given the melodrama surrounding Riding and Mainwaring and given Grieves’s demonstrated concern, Kardleigh kept expecting to hear the man’s shuffle on the stairs. But the only visitor was Moss, Grieves’s Prefect of Chapel, who stopped by Sunday night. Riding was asleep (or pretending to be), so Moss left the paperback he had brought. There was a bizarre coda in which Moss returned with a handkerchief full of boiled sweets, which he claimed he’d forgotten to leave before, sent by a friend of Riding’s, which one, he couldn’t recall. When Kardleigh asked Moss point-blank what was going on in his House, Moss flushed down to the collar and declared himself ignorant of any goings-on. The House, like the rest of the school, had seen its gating lifted after tea that evening. The search of McKay’s barn had proved unremarkable, or so the four JCRs had been told by Burton-Lee, who’d overseen the expedition that snowy afternoon. Kardleigh confessed it hard to imagine Burton-Lee stomping through snowdrifts, but Moss reported that Fardley had driven all four Housemasters to the site and waited while they trekked, alpine fashion (though possibly without ropes and axes), on their errand. In any case, the matter had officially been closed, and the school had turned its attention to hourlies, due to afflict them in three days’ time.
The patient showed no interest in the paperback. Whether from illness or perversity, he left the sweets uneaten.
She knelt but didn’t know what to say. The chapel was dark except for the colors through the windows. Off in a corner, a candle flickered in a red glass. She wanted to picture her mother surrounded by light, but who could do it in this crypt?
Her yes-no-sorry boy had grown up here, with his round face and his eyes full of play. This cold, smoky wreck of a school, he called home. And Uncle John! She’d always thought of their home as his, his holidays with them as his true life and the leaving an interruption. But in reality he spent more months here than he spent with them and his maiden aunts combined. He had no piles of papers in Saffron Walden, only a few items of clothing and some books. Perhaps most shocking, now that she realized, he had no friends there besides them, whereas here every person knew him. They called him nicknames and spoke of his habits as if he were part of their family. He swept through these corridors snapping and cajoling. He looked at home.
The light she was seeing around her mother turned to rust. She opened her eyes and left the pew. The red candle taunted her from behind the wrought-iron gate, but she faced it down. There was no call for it to pulse like an unsteady heart or to splash its lurid color across the stone column and the painting there of a man. He sat before a background of gold, his face looking forward but his eyes to the side, as if he’d been called by someone just behind her. Her scalp prickled and her eyes prickled. Sometimes people looked to the side when they wanted to tell you something awful.
She didn’t run, but she walked quickly away. Outside, icicles dripped from the roof. The air was warmer than it had been in there.
—I treated a man at the end of the war, Kardleigh said apropos of nothing.
He had brought Gray a cooked breakfast, Sunday meal for a Tuesday, and now he was drawing a chair to the bedside and fetching his own teacup.
—He’d been released from a German prison camp at the Armistice, fit enough if hungry, but he wound up in hospital some weeks later after a collapse in Oxford Circus.
Gray cut the white away and lifted the yolk onto a piece of toast. He would eat this slice only and leave the rest. Tea he would limit to one cup.
The man, Kardleigh continued, was known to him. He’d treated him earlier in the war for gas, but this collapse, Kardleigh determined, had been brought on by hard living and a species of shell shock.
—It wasn’t noise that set this fellow off, but crowds. The crush of Christmas shopping made him feel he was drowning in gas.
As Gray dipped a sausage into the yolk, Kardleigh told of the man’s slow recovery. Restoring the body was straightforward enough, particularly as it was all in one piece. The mind took longer.
—This was Ashurst. After the war, we were being absorbed into Littlemore, and our patients, those who couldn’t be discharged, were having their records transferred to the asylum.
The black pudding was salty, the marmalade bitter.
—This man had recovered by all measures. He no longer suffered tremors. He ate well, slept well, even became something of a legend at croquet, but when the time came to leave, he refused. He insisted that he was not cured and called for papers to have himself committed.
—That’s mad.
—Quite. Though not in a technical sense. I managed to stall the papers and somehow got the man to agree to an outing. I promised him a picnic by the river, but it was a bank holiday, the weather fine, and all of Oxford turned out with the same idea in mind.
Kardleigh refilled their cups.
—Did he have a fit?
—Not exactly, Kardleigh said. At first I thought we’d had a breakthrough. He ate the sandwiches, drank the lemonade, even picked a handful of flowers for one of the nurses. I was packing up the basket, thinking about the conversation we might have on the walk back, when I heard a commotion behind me. He’d fallen into an argument with a man some years his senior, the volume rose, and the next thing I knew, my patient was pummeling the man on the riverbank.
Kardleigh described the man’s wife and children bursting into tears. It had taken two passersby to remove Kardleigh’s patient from the scene. Back at the hospital, Kardleigh received a blistering tick-off from his superior officer. He was to provide his patient commitment papers that evening and omit from his report the slightest whiff of unauthorized outings.
—Finished?
The tray was empty. Kardleigh took it away. A slab of snow slid off the roof and landed with a splat in the courtyard. Protest erupted from the birds in the gutter, as though one of their number had been swept to its death. The ward was empty. Gray felt suddenly ashamed.
A faucet ran and stopped, and Kardleigh returned, drying his hands on a tea towel. There was the dreadful feeling of having ruined things through inattention. Kardleigh sat down again, opened a pocket watch, and took hold of his wrist with cold fingers.
—Did you do it? Gray asked.
—Do what?
—Give him papers for the asylum.
—I meant to. I had to obey my CO, of course, but as I was preparing the papers, a kind of obstinacy came over me.
He let go of Gray’s wrist.
—I went to the man’s room—he had gone to bed—opened the windows, and tore off the blankets. Then, to my surprise as much as his, I sat down on the floor, my head even with his. He was well, I said, in body and in mind. He was not afraid that the world would be like the front, but that life would carry on. After everything he’d seen, everything he’d suffered and done, he now had to face the ultimate obscenity, that the world had not ended.
Kardleigh crossed his legs:
—Life was obscene, I told him, and I knew why he wanted nothing to do with it. But I told him he was needed, to stand in its face. If not us, then who?
—Us?
—I told him I wasn’t leaving, his room or the floor, until he dressed, packed his case, and took up arms beside me.
—He went back to the army?
—He went to university.
—And then he joined the army?
—He joined the revolution.
—What revolution?
—Oh, said Kardleigh lightly, you know the one I mean.