The Dutch Wife (5 page)

She saw an early cyclist turning into the driveway. It was the telegram boy.

Refusing to allow herself to think, she made herself go downstairs to the front door. The boy handed her the brown envelope. She tore it open with extreme care and saw the chilling words:

“REGRET TO INFORM . . .”

“Any reply?” she heard the boy ask.

She shook her head. No reply from the Garden of Eden. She fumbled her way back into the house. She felt as if one-half of her being had been excised. All before her was the abyss.

At that moment, and for a long time thereafter, she was certain that it would be preferable not to live any more.

– 2 –

SPRING, AGAIN,
three years later.

A parade was taking place along King Street and Rachel Vanderlinden, free of baby Thomas for the day, sat in the bleachers, along with those other Camberloo women who’d lost family members in the War. They applauded as each of the bands paused before them, playing martial music. After the bands came the veterans themselves, soldiers and sailors. They marched proudly, their hobnailed boots ringing on the pavement. Then came the maimed, who had to be pushed along in wheelchairs. After them came those who could barely walk, wheezing from the mustard gas; others, blinded, their faces still bandaged, leaned on the arms of their comrades; the last group tottered slowly by, some with canes and crutches, others limping badly.

One of these, a thin soldier with a curiously plumpish face, paused a moment to stare at Rachel. Then he hobbled along with the others past the bleachers and along the street.

As the parade went on by, an older woman in a black head-scarf sitting beside Rachel shook her head sadly. “I lost my husband and both my boys,” she said. “Maybe they’re better off dead. They say, ‘
Soldiers go straight to Heaven, for they’ve been in Hell already
.’”

In spite of all her resolutions, Rachel Vanderlinden was deeply touched and couldn’t help crying.

The woman put an arm round her. “There, now,” she said. “You just go ahead and cry. You’ll feel the good of it.”

AFTER THE PARADE,
Rachel Vanderlinden made her way through the crowds on King Street. She was on her way to see a friend, Jeremiah Webber, a doctor at Camberloo General, where she sometimes volunteered.

They’d arranged to meet at the York Inn, a sprawling building with several bars and a little cabaret theatre upstairs. Rachel went into the lobby. There, behind a table, she saw a man selling carvings. He wore a black hat and black clothes and had a wispy grey beard. Rachel went over to have a look at his carvings. They seemed quite traditional: farm scenes, mainly dray horses pulling covered wagons. The man carved while he sat there, wearing a jeweller’s eyepiece in his right eye for close work on the bodies of the horses and the sides of wagons. His left eye was all bloodshot.

Rachel picked up one of the pieces to look at the miraculously fine and minuscule work. She held it up close. Then put it down again quickly. For the horses and wagons were ornamented with an endless, interlinked chain of tiny naked men and women performing sexual activities on each other.

“The show begins soon,” the carver said, looking up at her. His bloodshot eye was glazed and anguished.

Rachel went across the lobby and climbed the stairs.

The theatre, like every other part of the York, smelled of stale beer, and the ceiling light was like a feeble sun behind a haze of cigarette smoke. The seats, a hundred or so of them, were taken mainly by uniformed veterans accompanied by their wives and girlfriends. Rachel looked around but could see no sign of Jeremiah Webber. She was considering leaving and waiting for him outside when the lights lowered and the crowd quieted down, so she stayed and watched.

The curtain opened on a small stage, bare except for an upright glass cylinder, about six feet tall and a foot in diameter. A wooden stepladder stood beside it.

From the wings of the stage, two performers came on. One was a woman in a long blue robe. Her face was painted so heavily it was hard to know her age or what her real face looked like. Her blond hair was tied up in a bun. Her assistant was a man with a black beard who wore a turban and a white cape.

The assistant walked all round the glass tube and dramatically tapped it with his knuckles to show how solid it was. His face was distorted as he stood behind it and encircled it with his arms. Then he invited one of the audience to come up and check. A young soldier climbed onto the stage to the applause of his friends. He too tapped the tube with his knuckles and was satisfied it was made of some kind of thick glass.

Now the performance was ready to begin.

The woman let her blue robe fall to the floor, silencing everyone for a moment. She was wearing only a pink bodysuit that was so tight-fitting Rachel at first thought she was naked. Some of the men in the audience whistled but were hushed by others. On stage, the assistant gestured to the woman to approach the tube. He took a firm grip on the wooden step ladder, steadying it while she slowly climbed it till she was level with the top of the tube. She placed her hands on either side of the rim and inserted one leg into the tube, then the other.

Rachel, watching intently, suspected what was about to happen but thought it must be quite impossible.

Everything went very quickly. The woman, still holding onto the rim, allowed herself to slide slowly down into the tube. Even by the time she’d reached her thighs, it was hard to tell she had two separate legs. The flesh seemed to have melted together, like candle wax.

The theatre was completely silent.

Now, the upper part of the woman’s thighs and buttocks were sliding down. Then, after a brief pause, all of her upper body followed till she reached the shoulders and was propped up only by her elbows on the rim.

Because of the paint on her face, she seemed quite impassive.

All at once, she lifted her arms in the air above her head and began, spontaneously, to slide farther down, till her head, bracketed by her arms, was inside the tube. She slid down the last inches, till her feet touched bottom and only her hands protruded, her fingers waving like the tentacles of some flesh-coloured sea creature.

The entire tube was now a column of pink marble.

Along with the rest of the audience, Rachel applauded. But even while they were applauding, they could see the colour of the woman’s arms and legs slowly changing from pink to purple.

Her assistant now grasped the sides of the tube like a roll of carpet and tilted it, leaning it on his shoulder. The shapeless flesh slowly began oozing out of the bottom, filling out the bodysuit as it emerged, till the woman’s entire length lay on the stage floor.

The applause continued and became louder as the assistant extended his hand to the woman and helped her to her feet. He held out the blue robe for her and she put it on. The two of them bowed to the audience.

As the applause died down, one of the veterans, who’d been drinking too much, wanted to be involved. “It’s just a trick! How do you do it?” he shouted.

A woman near the back of the theatre had an answer. “How do you think you came out of your mother, eh?” she shouted at him.

Another woman joined in. “That’s right! The men just stand watching!” she shouted.

Everyone laughed at that and applauded even more loudly as the performers left the stage.

Rachel, at the back of the theatre, was astonished. She wondered how any woman could be so malleable and still be able to breathe.

– 3 –

RACHEL VANDERLINDEN FELT SHE’D WAITED
long enough for Webber, who must have been delayed at the hospital. She left the theatre and was going down the stairs when she almost bumped into a soldier carrying a tankard of beer. She stepped aside but he didn’t pass her by.

“Mrs. Vanderlinden?” he said, taking off his cap.

“Yes,” she said. He was vaguely familiar. He had a plump, shiny face—perhaps a benevolent face—but his green eyes were shrewd. He seemed to be about thirty, though the war had aged these men so much it was hard to tell.

“I saw you at the parade today,” he said. “You were pointed out to me.”

Ah! She remembered now. This was the soldier who’d stared at her as the parade went past the bleachers.

“Could I talk to you for a few minutes?” he said.

She was apprehensive. But what possible harm could there be in talking to a hero? “Of course,” she said.

So the soldier, carrying his half-empty tankard, led her into a quiet part of the inn. He limped noticeably and she saw that his left boot was wrinkled and worn, his right highly polished and unwrinkled. He was breathing heavily as he sat down at a corner table. He sipped at his beer, licked the foam from his lips. Then he stuck out his hand across the table and shook hers. He had a loose, damp grip. “I was in the Highlanders—with Rowland,” he said.

She was surprised; she should have been delighted. But instead she was full of dread. What should she expect from this man with his plump face and shrewd eyes? Was he nice or nasty?

He sipped his beer once more, then began talking about his time at the Front, and in particular about three days of September rain. Each of those days, he said, the Highlanders had attempted to advance, in vain, suffered heavy casualties and had stumbled back to their own trenches. They were sprawled everywhere, exhausted from lack of sleep, their uniforms filthy with grey muck. A faint miasma of mustard gas hung in the air, so they had to be ready to pull on their gas masks at any time. Flies as big as barrage-balloons, heavy with blood, buzzed around them. Most of the men were numb, some were shell-shocked. The injured lay around, staring at their awful wounds, their innards exposed to the daylight. Some cowered in corners, whimpering or muttering to themselves; some swatted wildly even when the flies were not near them, while others ignored the real flies that buzzed at their eyes. All of the soldiers were by now used to the stink of the corpses lying around them. Maggots had almost come to seem a development of human life rather than a corruption.

Rachel pictured these horrors.

Then the plump-faced soldier with the shrewd eyes began to talk about a certain man—he looked at her knowingly as he said that—who volunteered to carry a message across a dangerous stretch of no-man’s-land to some stranded gunners. He told how the volunteer climbed the ladder in the dusk. How he paused for a moment at the top of the trench to peer ahead, then slithered over the edge and began to crawl forward. How he reached the rolls of barbed wire and got up into a low crouch and began to run. How he hurdled the barbed wire and the scattering of corpses and skirted round the deep shell craters. How he was only fifty yards from the gunners in their dug-out when a flare exploded in the sky overhead and a sniper’s shot rang out. How he stumbled and fell. How he lay still for a moment, then began crawling forward. How he had to rise to his feet to cross the final rolls of barbed wire. How a machine gun began to chatter. How he slumped over the barbed wire, his body jerked this way and that as though being worried by a large, invisible dog, till the chattering stopped.

– 4 –

IN THE YORK INN,
Rachel Vanderlinden knew what was coming.

“The man who died,” said the plump-faced soldier, “was Rowland.”

She couldn’t think of anything to say.

“We weren’t able to get to the body for weeks,” he said. “It just lay there among all the others and rotted.” The shrewd eyes narrowed and he said:
“He died for you.”

That jolted words out of her. “What?” she said. “I don’t understand.”

“He got into a fight with a man called McGraw. Floyd McGraw. He’s the man responsible for Rowland’s death. Rowland always treated him like a friend and told him things you only tell a friend.” He said this slowly and emphatically.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“You know what I mean,” the plump-faced soldier said. “Including the fact that Rowland wasn’t his real name.” He watched her over the rim of his tankard as he took another drink. “So then, that day, after the advance failed, the two of them got into an argument. They were exhausted and hungry and their minds weren’t working properly. McGraw started needling him.”

She sat silent, waiting for the blow.

“McGraw said a woman who’d done what you’d done was a whore,” he said.

She tried to disguise from those astute eyes how shocked she was at that word.

“He called you a whore,” the soldier said again. “That’s what they were fighting about. And the officer came along and separated them. He said he wouldn’t charge them if one of them would take the message out to the engineers in no-man’s-land. McGraw was afraid, but Rowland volunteered.”

Rachel Vanderlinden sat stunned, stricken with guilt. She’d survived the past three years by convincing herself that at least he had died for a glorious cause. And now, this.

“I didn’t tell you this to make you feel bad,” the plump-faced soldier said. “Isn’t it a thousand times better for a man to die for the woman he loves than for a cause nobody even understands?” His eyes were burning. “I came to tell you this because I think he might have wanted you to know. He died in a little private war over you, he loved you so much.”

She refused to accept that. “He would be alive, but for me,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

The soldier shook his head. “Maybe and maybe not,” he said. “Nearly everybody in that trench was killed anyway. And those who survived are worse than dead.” He swung his legs out from the table and tapped his right leg, the one with the shiny boot. “Do you know how I got this?” he said bitterly. “They’d order us out into no-man’s land at night to go through the pockets of the enemy dead and look for useful information. All I ever found were their letters from home and family photographs. One night I stepped on a mine.” Again he tapped the leg with the shiny shoe. “When I got home, my girl didn’t want anything to do with me. She loves dancing.”

Rachel Vanderlinden was silent.

The soldier now looked at her fiercely. “I hope you’ve been faithful,” he said. “Have you been faithful?”