Sentimental Journey (25 page)

He took the stairs two at a time, then pushed open a door that led into a corridor busy with hospital staff and doctors. He passed three wards until he reached the one with the number three painted on the hall wall. There was a nurse coming out of the doors and she blocked him.

“I’m looking for Mrs. Inskip. I’m George Inskip.”

Her face was kind but serious. “She’s in the fourth bed on the right. Still unconscious. We cannot get any response from her, but perhaps hearing your voice will help. Come.” She pushed open the door.

He followed her inside to a long, narrow, and sterile room that smelled of alcohol, camphor, and soot, then followed the nurse over to a bed, his heart hammering like machine gun fire.

She stopped at a bed and moved out of his line of sight.

“Greer?” He took a step towards the bed, then froze. He stood there as though in some kind of strange nightmare. It wasn’t his wife’s lovely blond hair he saw, but black hair. It was his mother.

He turned without a word to the nurse and left the room, shoving open the door with a straight arm, and then he stood there in the hallway, disoriented, somehow lost. His mother. He hadn’t once thought about his mother. He had forgotten her. The floor seemed to swell up towards him. He stepped back to the wall for support. Greer? His mother?

The nurse came out. She placed her arm on his. “Perhaps it’s a good thing that she is still unconscious. Such injuries are difficult to see in someone you love.”

Injuries?

He hadn’t even noticed anything about his mother but the shock of seeing her familiar black hair. He’d seen that it wasn’t Greer’s, and he’d left.

“My wife . . . ” he explained quietly. “I thought she was my wife. She’s my mother. I never thought to ask about my mother. They were together.” He looked back at the ward door.

“She’s unconscious. I have a duplicate set of lists over at the nurses’ desk. Come. We’ll find your wife.”

He followed her blindly. He was numb all over.

“Mrs. Inskip? Is that correct?”

He nodded. “Yes, Inskip.”

She looked down the list.

Greer. Greer. . . .
He reached out to the nurse and touched her arm. “Mrs. George A. Inskip. Of
Berkeley Court
.”

She nodded and went back to the list.

It felt as if a month had passed by as she turned the last page. Then she picked up another clipboard and flipped through it. She stopped reading. “Her name is here.”

“Where? Which ward?”

She held out the clipboard.

The heading at the top of the page read: “Morgue.” He vaguely heard the nurse say, “I’m sorry.” All the names blurred into a jumble of letters. All the names but one:

“Mrs. G.A. Inskip. Berkeley Ct. Time of death—
3:50 P.M.
”

“I’LL NEVER SMILE AGAIN”

It’s been said that the essence of real human love is the one shared between mother and child, where a mother feels the presence of her child even inside the grown man. A basic human instinct? All she knew was that her son was in the hospital room.

“George?” Odd that her voice sounded like someone else’s. They had taken the breathing tube from her mouth that very morning. Deep inside her throat it burned when she tried to make a sound; her words came out charred around the edges.

“I’m here, Mother.”

A metal chair scraped across the floor; then she felt the touch of his hand on her arm, the one with the tube stuck into her vein. In her mind’s eye she could see her son’s hands: the flat nails, the tanned skin, the strength in them.

Almost a quarter of a century ago in the bedroom at Keighley, after hours and hours of labor during which she thought she was going to die, she looked down at her newborn son for the very first time, counted his fingers and toes, and saw a small version of his father.

“I knew it was you. You were in the doorway only a few moments ago. It wasn’t the first time. Weren’t you here before? Yesterday? Last night?”

He said nothing.

“Am I wrong? Perhaps it was the medication and I dreamed it.”

“Are you in much pain?” He grasped her hand.

“Sometimes it feels tight. My arm hurts.” She searched for the words and thoughts to describe what she was feeling and came up empty-handed. “I must look a fright.”

He did not reply.

“I don’t suppose it matters, since I cannot see.”

“Mother . . . ”

“I always did so despise all those huge bloody mirrors at Keighley. Every room you walked into. I used to tell your father that he must have been descended from Narcissus. There are even mirrors hung about the library, for God’s sake, as if someone would want to look at themselves as they were reading. Now I shan’t be bothered by them any longer.”

“You don’t have to do this for me.”

“Do what?”

“Pretend.”

“Don’t.” She held up the hand with the tube taped to it and winced. “If you love me at all, don’t say anything. I want to revel in my pity for a few days.” She tried to sound flip, but failed even to her own ears.

There was nothing from him, no words for the longest time. “She’s dead,” he said quietly. “The baby’s dead.”

“George . . . ” she whispered his name. His hand was clammy and felt cold.
Oh, he’s so young for this.

“Why?”

“I tried to keep her from going back upstairs.”

“She went upstairs?” The chair creaked as he stiffened in it.

“She said something; then she stood up and ran from the cellar room.”

“In the name of God,
what
could have possibly been that important?” His tone was icy hard, his voice was hoarse, as if he had been screaming at God and Heaven and the world.

“The bombs were so loud this time. They were closer than ever before. Then it was the oddest thing. The bombing had stopped with an eerie kind of suddenness. We were sitting there in the silence. I believe she thought she was safe. The candles were burning. She was talking about you and a promise she’d made you. She had been reading one of your letters aloud; then she stood and bolted for the stairs. I followed her, calling out for her to wait for the all-clear siren. But by the time I was up into foyer she was already up the staircase to the second floor. I followed her. I tried to stop her.” What was left of her voice disappeared momentarily, as if she had swallowed it along with the bitter pill of war and reality. She saw the image of her son’s lovely, animated wife rushing into the kitchen just before everything suddenly disappeared in a ball of hot light.

Now she began to cry. It went on for a long time, and the worst of it was crying didn’t make her feel one whit better. It made her feel weak and out of control. And it hurt her face.

“I know, Mother. I know,” was all he said. His grip on her hand did not change. He was sitting so still.

She wanted to see his face, but the doctor had told her that very morning that her eyes were burned, along with half of her face. They could not guarantee she would ever see again. She laughed without any humor. “My eyes can still cry these foolish tears, but they cannot see a thing. I cannot even open them.”

“You will, Mother. The doctor said they have to heal before you can open them again.”

“What good will that do me?” She did not want to cry. She was not a weak woman.

She turned towards the sound of his breathing. “I’m sorry.” For just a moment she asked herself if she truly did want to see again, to see what losing Greer and their unborn child had done to her son.

“I stayed in the house last night.” His tone sounded distracted, surreal, as if he had left his soul somewhere far, far away.

Sometimes there were grand loves in the world, the kind that were apparent to anyone who had even half a heart and half a brain. She knew this because her marriage had not been a great love affair. It had been comfortable, tender, secure, like two parallel lines moving side by side.

But it had not been profound and unassailable, not the kind of love that George and Greer had, one that was a complete circle rolling through life in one single continuous perfectly formed shape—a shape that protected what was within that circle: George and Greer, Greer and George, two hearts, two souls, one love.

On a summer day almost fifteen years ago, a ten-year-old boy with a quiet intelligence and a gentle heart met a golden-haired girl who had wit and charm and was his other, more spirited half. And that was it.

“I slept in the front bedroom.” The sound of his voice came from above her. He was standing by the bed. “It looked unchanged, not a window broken, not a sign that anything had happened at all. Nothing even out of place. How could that be when the third floor and the entire back of the house is gone, Mother? How could that be?”

“I don’t know. I ran after her,” she whispered. George was speaking, but she didn’t really hear him. She was reliving the scene in her memory. Running up the staircase. The sound of her feet on the carpet. Down the hallway.

Greer! Greer! A slip of a floral dress disappearing around the edge of the kitchen doorway.

Then came that terrifying whistling from overhead, that ominous shriek of a noise that made her stop and listen, made breathing and thinking impossible; it kept her frozen to the sound when she knew she should run away.

So many times they had heard the whistle, then breathed a relieved sigh when the blast that followed was not near them.

Odd, wasn’t it, how you never heard the blast when you were the target.

Her son was talking. “ . . . when I walked inside, the foyer was intact, everything perfect, except for the sparrows that had flown in from the open roof above. They were sitting on the coat rack, and a lark was perched on that dragon table, singing when there was nothing to sing about.”

She could hear him breathing, hear his breath catch a bit.

He sat down hard in the chair. “God . . . but she loved that table.”

What can I say to him? I can’t make it go away. This isn’t like some scraped knee or a lost ball. All I can do is tell him what happened.

“What was it? What was worth her life and our child’s?”

“I don’t know. She ran in the kitchen. When I came around the corner, she was standing in front of the open icebox.”

“The icebox? The icebox? Oh, God . . . ” He lay his head on the bed next to her. A second later he was sobbing. It was an awful sound—the kind of crying that came from the deepest, darkest part of you, the kind of crying you heard with your heart, the kind of crying that broke it.

“I’m sorry, so sorry.” She stroked his hair. The bed was shaking with his sobs, and he was saying something, but she couldn’t understand him because his head was buried in his arms.

“Let it all go, my son. Let it go. I know it’s such a waste.” “A waste?” he said bitterly, raising his head. Then he gave a hopeless laugh that sounded like glass breaking. “A
waste?
She died for the bloody fucking eggs.”

“ITS A
BLUE
WORLD”

It was little more than a week later that Skip was on the train back to Wellingham. He looked out the open window, above the dark blue blackout paint at a few inches of flashing colors: overcast sky, the dark green treetops and pitched roofs that melted together—the world flying past him in a blur. It was an odd thing how in a time of war, life itself, the hours and minutes and days, all of it seemed to move at odd speeds, as if the world were in a nosedive spinning out of control.