The Summer Isles (14 page)

Inner darkness, even when it finally seems to beckon, comes less easily than I’d imagined. Like some plate-spinning acrobat, I struggle from one blazing window of my consciousness to the next, trying hard to pull down all the shutters at once and get away from this place forever. But the shutters keep flying up, and the landscape beyond them is hurrying, roaring as the telegraph lines rise and fall, rise and fall. And there are voices, too. Little
eeeks
of disgust and the clatter of a mop bucket before I am prodded and tugged. I am lifted and dropped. My jaw is parted wide. Something long and thin is pushed past it.

When I finally awake, I discover that a nurse is leaning over me amid high green walls, echoes, and the smell and the cool crinkle of a rubber mattress. She smiles. Her pin-on watch and her EA badge wink in the light from a tall window.

Time passes. My nurse goes and comes again. Her blouse has short sleeves and I notice, as she plumps up my pillows and does painful and unaccountable things to bits of me, the golden wheatfields of down that lie across her arms, and her warm human scent as she leans over me. Smiling, she takes the tube that runs down my throat and gives it a playful wiggle. I’m sure that she truly loves me.

“You’re lucky to come through,” says my nurse as she sits beside me soon after the doctor, who has also assured me how lucky I am, has continued his tour of the wards. “Five years ago, Mr. Brook, there was no hospital here. They’d have had to have taken you all the way down to Stirling or maybe up to Inverness.” She smoothes the pleat of her skirt in the morning light. “I doubt you’d have made it.”

“I’m dying anyway. I have cancer.”

My nurse looks at me. “We don’t talk like that here. Haven’t you ever heard of remission?”

I nod. But no one’s ever said the word to me as if it might actually happen.

“So you were up on your holidays from Oxford, then?”

“I thought it would be a good chance to re-visit some old places… The North Western Highlands. The Summer Isles…Have you heard of the Summer Isles?”

She thinks for a moment as the open window above us brings birdsong and the scents of a garden. “Well, no. I’m not sure I have. But there are so many islands here. Of course, our boys have a lot of them now. For the exercises and the training before they go down to Sussex and Kent.”

“I found the Summer Isles on my old map—the one I brought with me from last time. And then on a poster. But they’re not on the new map I was given from the Automobile Association. It’s just blue sea as if they’d sunk or something. Look…” I struggle to sit up.

Her hand, supple, smelling faintly of baby oil and carbolic, strong as the weight of the sun, presses me down. “I wouldn’t bother yourself with that now, Mr. Brook. Save your energy. Have a rest.” She consults the watch on her pinafore. “For sure, these old maps are useless. There’s new roads now, Mr. Brook. New bridges like the one they’ve just opened across to Skye. Even new places like this one. If I were you, I should look to the future and throw away any old things you might have.”

She places her hands on her knees preparatory to getting up. From down the corridor comes a tinkling and a sigh of wheels.

“That’ll be the tea trolley.”

“Look,” I say quickly. “People were supposed to have been relocated up on those islands. Don’t you remember? Or perhaps you were too young then, still at school. We used to call them undesirables. There were gypsies, Irish expats, homosexuals, Jews…”

Her mouth tightens in a lemony scowl. She looks down at me, disappointed. “Mr. Brook—”

“—And there was a man I spoke to in… Some town. It was on one of the main roads. He told me about lorries like cattle trucks. Lorries with people inside them, they were…” I pause to cough. “Heading…” Another, more vicious this time, wracks me. “North…”

She has the rueful look on her face as I regain my breath that teachers reserve for basically decent but occasionally naughty children.

“As for those trucks, the Summer Isles, those stories of yours,” she says. “I’d put that down to experience if I were you. Here in the Highlands, Mr. Brook, if you go around asking the same question often enough, someone’s going to give you the answer they think you want to hear.” She touches my stubbled chin, ruffles what’s left of my hair. “Don’t you see? It was just a leg-pull…”

She stands up and walks down the ward through the bars of summer sunlight, humming.

Francis wrote me the occasional letter at first after he volunteered.
Griff, you’d hardly know me now
… I could almost see him trying on his new soldierly identity. The letters were filled at first with catalogues of acquaintances and military stupidities as he was posted around various training camps and temporary barracks in southern England. They grew shorter and blander once he reached France and the rapidly solidifying Western Front. I was like the millions of puzzled relatives and loved ones who were the recipients of such letters. I put his terseness down to shortage of time, and then to the military censors. But soon, by early 1915, Francis stopped writing to me altogether.

The War in Britain was a strange affair, like a fever. People were more sociable, strangers would talk to each other, and even I went out more often; to the theatre or to the music hall, or to one of the new cinematographs where we all laughed at Chaplin, wept for Lorna Doone and then sang along afterwards with the
cartunes
as a little ball of light danced across the screen. At school, I taught my lads about the many historic acts of German aggression, and had them compose outraged letters to the Kaiser about the Zeppelin bombings of Great Yarmouth.

Two years passed. I only learned about Francis by chance while I waited at Lichfield station to take the train to the Municipal Reference Library in Birmingham. Queuing for a copy of the
Post
from the John Menzies bookstall on Platform 1, already planning the research for my book, I suddenly thought I heard Francis’s name being spoken as the elderly lady in front purchased her packet of Brown’s Patent Cough Sweets. The staff here had changed many times since he’d left, and I was sure I was suffering from an auditory hallucination—the whispers of ghosts. But still, I found myself asking if there had been any word about Francis Eveleigh, who used to work here, as I handed over a penny for my paper.

I knew, then, what the woman at the counter was going to tell me. I knew from the change that came over her expression. It was a fainter echo of what I’d seen many times before since the War had started on the faces of teachers and mothers at school, and people you passed in the street and suddenly knew, knew without their saying, that you could no longer ask about their son, their husband, their brother. Francis had died in the Somme Offensive.

Pushed numbly into action, prodding and probing at the true facts of Francis Eveleigh’s life in a way that I had resisted before, I was able to track down his real home without too much difficulty. There was his old landlady. There was a postman who knew about a redirection order for his mail. Thus, on a winter evening late in 1916, following the directions that the station porter had given me down small antique streets that opened out into puddled fields, I met Francis’s father and mother.

The Eveleighs lived in a large house at the end of a long drive set in arable countryside just outside Louth in Lincolnshire. Standing on that cold day in my muddy shoes as quizzical light fanned from their hall, I introduced myself to the maid as a friend of his from Lichfield, and was ushered into the drawing room where Mr. and Mrs. Eveleigh stood still as china figures on either side of the unlit fire. It seemed as if they had been motionless for a long time, waiting there for me as the light greyed and their days swept by. Despite the seemingly tenuous connection, our association lasted until the end of the War. The hallway of their house always smelled of dog and galoshes—not that they ever
had
a dog—and whichever room you were in, you could always hear the panicky beat of several clocks. Mr. Eveleigh managed a bank; in those days it was still considered a gentleman’s profession. His wife (Francis’s eyes and pale skin, his full dark hair that she always tied back in a bun) oscillated between various groups and societies. They were so solid, so dependable, and I was flattered and charmed that they were prepared to have anything to do with me. Of course, Francis had refused all their offers since leaving home, although they knew that he had been living in some ghastly little room above a butcher’s in Lichfield. He had even refused, or so I was told, help with getting an officer’s commission when they heard that he had enlisted. From what little that the Eveleighs knew about their son’s life in Lichfield, I think that I, being a schoolteacher, older, a householder, and reasonably well-spoken, came as a reassurance. There was no hint, of course, that Francis and I had been lovers—or even that he’d had any kind of sexual life. But there was always a sense, somewhere amid all the weekends I was invited to the Eveleighs’ house, of a shared deeper fondness.

Whatever else happens in this century, better historians than I will use the War as a line to draw between what came before and what came after. Contrast and examine, if you will, the golden decadent evenings of the Edwardian Era (which I somehow seemed to miss) and the grimness and depression of the pre-Modernist Twenties (which I certainly didn’t). For me, though, the process was more insidious and gradual. The coursing anger which John Arthur rose upon and now attempts to control was already there long before the War ended. It was in me, and it was in Mr. and Mrs. Eveleigh.

The light was always grey at the Eveleigh’s house, and a chill came to whatever part of your body was turned from the fire. I must have been there several times in summer, yet in my memories the fields are shining brown, the skies are always filled with weepy clouds. Even when it wasn’t raining, I would come back sodden from my solitary walks across the low wet hills and between the dripping hedgerows. The clocks ticked and the cold fire spat as we sat in the dining room for meals of boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes and boiled bacon. It wasn’t hard to see why Francis had run away.

Being aspirantly middle class, which meant something more exclusive in those days, I found it easy enough to fit in. And there was always the pleasure of being able to sleep in Francis’s own childhood bed which still bore the imprint of his body, to slide open drawers that contained the starched uniforms of the various cheap public schools he had been forced to attend and bury my face in their folds. I was introduced to supposed childhood playmates as
dear Francis’s best friend.
No one blamed me for the fact that he had left them, and died as an ordinary Tommy. I was an honourary member of the Eveleigh family.

Striding out with me across the soggy lawns at the back of the house, prodding his walking stick angrily at mole hills as the rooks cawed and circled the misty oaks, Mr. Eveleigh would talk endlessly about the War.

“Tell me, as a historian, Brooke,” he’d begin—a phrase which would get anyone on my good side—and then he’d ask whether I thought tanks or airships or aeroplanes or some new kind of poison gas or bullet would finally bring about victory. His biggest fear was that it would all fizzle out as suddenly as it had began; with everyone saving face in some meaningless treaty. Even though Francis was seldom mentioned, the sub-text of all of this was that Mr. Eveleigh wanted the War to have a proper conclusion that would make sense of his son’s death.

Mr. Eveleigh asked me about the Jews; whether I didn’t think they were involved in a conspiracy to set one half of Europe against the other. I think he may have even mentioned
dumping the buggers on some remote Scottish island and leaving them to get on with it.
He explored the possibility that the feeble French Army had dragged us into the Somme Offensive. He asked me if I agreed that the average working man was fundamentally lazy, and probably no better at getting the job done in the battlefield than he was in the factory—hence the damnably long time this whole business was taking. He wondered, now that crime and conspiracy were clearly so rife, if it wasn’t time for the Home Secretary to introduce much harsher measures. He mused upon the loyalties and motives of the nation’s young women, the dreadful, unfeminine clothes they’d taken to wearing. He doubted whether democracy was really the best way of running the country now that every Tom, Dick and Harry had been given the vote, and asked me if I agreed with him that Lloyd George, for all his bluster, was probably just a Welsh windbag—and that what this country really needed was a true, strong leader…

In fact, Mr. Eveleigh said the kind of things that we British had always been saying. I’d heard them often enough before from old ladies on the backs of trams and prim couples at school parents’ evenings, and I’d read them in editorials in the
Mirror
and the
Express.
So I generally found myself agreeing with Mr. Eveleigh to save the bother of arguing. He was one of those people, anyway, who imagine that everyone shares their values. On the few occasions that I attempted to argue as we strode about that soggy lawn, he didn’t really notice.

Mrs. Eveleigh, of course, held no political opinions, other than that the Germans routinely raped nuns. She kept herself to herself, and by mid-evening smelled sweetly of sherry.

The last time I saw them both was after the French Capitulation, when the initial cease-fire treaty had been signed in Paris. I remember that my train journey up through Peterborough and Lincoln took place in an atmosphere that was as feverish as it had been four years before—but also very different. Strangers were talking to strangers again, but their voices were confused, their faces were hard and angry. Someone tried to start a fight with me as I went down the corridor to the buffet carriage, tapping my shoulder and pressing me against the condensation-streaked glass as he yelled obscenities in my face. Through the benefit of my almost frictionless life, I looked young enough at 36 to have volunteered. Indeed, I could have sacrificed my reserved occupation during the War’s later stages and done so.