Everyone Brave Is Forgiven(42)

“Heath?” he said.

“Doctor.”

“Be seated. Nothing the matter, I hope?”

“Nothing,” said Alistair.

“No aches, pains, unscheduled loss of limbs?”

“I find I don’t much care for seafood.”

“Good man,” said the doctor, inking his rubber stamp.

Holding it poised over Alistair’s paper, he looked up for the first time. “And how’s morale?”

“Mine, or the men’s?”

“Isn’t it the same thing?”

“Morale is fine,” said Alistair.

“France, wasn’t it, and then back across from Dunkirk?”

“Awful little town. Not one fish-and-chip shop.”

“No inflections of mood, no irritability, no anxiety?”

“No.”

“Any shell shock, jellification of the spine, malingering hottentottery?”

“Hardly.”

The doctor thumped down his stamp and slid the paper over. “First class. Give this to the C/O when you get back to barracks. I daresay you’ll be posted soon?”

“Looks that way.’

“Good luck. Take quinine if it’s Cairo, take salt if it’s the desert, take precautions if it’s a local girl. Avoid gin unless good tonic is available, smoke no more than one pack, and keep anything made of metal on the outside of your skin. Dismiss.”

“Thank you,” said Alistair, standing.

“Very good.”

Alistair hesitated in the doorway. “There is one thing.”

“Yes?’ The doctor was fanning the papers on his desk, looking for the next fellow’s.

“A few of the chaps I was friendly with . . . well, they didn’t make it back from France. And now . . . well, I do seem to keep myself to myself, rather.”

“Quite right,” said the doctor. “Take it steady until you feel brighter.”

But Alistair still hesitated, wondering if there was a better way to put it. The men were good at calling the war a bastard and laughing at the mess it made of one’s nerves. But it didn’t do to be familiar with the men, and with his brother officers he could not trust himself to keep within bounds. He would find himself coming to, as if from a trance, to hear himself saying something like, “. . . and I didn’t see him after that.” Which imposed on the others the burden of restoring the talk to a more pleasant level. People were good-humored and patient but of course one hated to be a weight, and so he tended to take himself away.

But now he was making a fuss. It was hardly a medical condition, was it? One could live with a little loneliness. Men lived with ruptured gonads, with missing limbs. Men lived with their mothers-in-law, for pity’s sake. He laughed, which was better.

The doctor glanced up at him and sighed. “Look, old man, it’s war. There isn’t a pill. Find a sweet girl and forget it.”

“Thanks,” said Alistair, and went down into the street rather pleased with his prescription. He really ought to pay more attention to the whole business of courting. Even in war you were still more likely to be struck by a woman than by a bullet.

It was noon, which meant he was already late to meet Tom for lunch. He headed for Hyde Park and found that he was hurrying, which was surely a good sign. He hoped he would seem his old self to Tom—that they could pick it up where they had left off. And he was intrigued to finally meet Mary, and this friend Hilda with whom he was to be set up.

Entering Hyde Park, he entertained himself by forming a mental picture of Mary. It was rather sweet that Tom had got himself a girl. She must be steady enough for both of them, and probably thoroughly sensible. Not a head-girl type, though—he couldn’t see a woman setting her sights on Tom if she were popular enough in that way. Tom was a fine catch, of course, but perhaps for a nice girl who was herself sometimes overlooked.

No, Mary would be a practical girl with the motivation to wage what must have been a patient campaign against Tom’s tendency to overthink. She would be pretty when she smiled, although perhaps less of a looker than his besotted friend painted her in his letters. She would be round-faced with round glasses, a little solid of leg, perhaps, and with a propensity for woolens and earnestness. Mary would be a terrific girl: game, good company, the daughter of a mother who also taught and a father who worked thirty minutes a day longer than his terms of employment strictly required. She would be as poor as Tom was, and all four of them would have a jolly lunch at the modest eatery Tom had proposed in his letter. Putting off the Ritz was how Tom had phrased it.

After lunch they would all go their separate ways: Tom and Mary to an eventual marriage, Hilda to her own future, and Alistair to a rendezvous with the massed armor of the Wehrmacht.

Thinking about his imminent deployment, everything about London now moved him as never before. These mannered planes of grass in the park, those calm stone facades that rose above the bordering oaks, the ironed creases in the uniform trousers of the policeman who stood at Hyde Park Corner directing the traffic with his immaculate white armbands. All these timeless things could be seen more clearly when one had so little time oneself. In twenty-two hours he would board the train and be gone.

Back at barracks he would oversee the packing of his regiment. Every item would be documented and boxed and cataloged by the quartermaster, from the greatest artillery piece to the smallest dress-shirt stud. Then there would be the troopship: Biscay and Gibraltar, deck quoits for the officers and physical jerks for the men. Then it would all begin again: the war, with its fantastic shocks that knocked London out of a man and left him as he found himself now, with no immunity to the wonder of it.