Pantheon

‘Oh, don’t pretend you don’t remember that. You’d had an almighty row. And you slapped her, clean across the face. Her cheek was stinging. I had to soothe it with cool flannels all evening.’

‘That’s a damned lie!’

‘Don’t shout at me. All I am—’

‘It’s a damned lie and you know it.’ He felt giddy, as if he were about to topple over. It could not be true. It could not. Could it?

Everything else she had said had sounded some distant bell in his head, a distant but undeniable ring of truth. But not this. Yes, he had a temper, that was a fact. But the target of his rages was always himself. It was his own wrist that had been slashed when he punched his fist clean through the French windows onto the garden, his own head that had been bruised when he had rammed it into a bookcase in an eruption of fury. But he had never harmed his wife. No real man would ever do such a thing. His voice quieter now, he said once again, ‘It’s a lie.’

‘So you keep saying. But how can you be sure? Your memory seems a touch unreliable in my book.’

‘And you say she came to you?’

‘Straight away.’ The pride with which this was declared sent the rage surging through him once more, rising like mercury in a thermometer.

‘But she’d never do it. Leave you, I mean. Absurdly loyal, Florence. I hope you appreciate that.’

‘But she’s left me now.’

‘For Harry’s sake. She feared for his safety with you in the house. That was at first. Florence no longer sees you as the biggest threat to her son. Not directly anyway.’

James spoke quietly, more to himself than to her: ‘It’s the war.’

‘Yes. She’s been getting gradually more terrified since the day the war started. The sirens, the air-raid shelters, the gas-masks, that thing you’ve just built in the garden—’

‘The Anderson shelter.’

‘All of it scares her. She feels like it’s getting closer.’

‘They bombed Cardiff last week.’

‘Exactly. She was convinced Oxford would be next.’

A dozen times Florence had expounded her belief that Oxford was a natural target, not only because of the car plant at Cowley now converted into a munitions factory but also because of the university. ‘London is the nerve centre, but Oxford is the brain,’ she had said.

Rosemary was still talking. ‘I explained to her the statistical probabilities. As you know, mathematics is my subject: my specialism is statistics. Actually, you almost certainly don’t know: typical man, you probably think I’m a secretary. Anyway, I explained the probabilities, but it was no use. She kept torturing herself with the thought. “What if, Rosemary? What if?”’

The haze was beginning to clear in James’s mind. It was so obvious he couldn’t fathom how he had been unable to see it, why he had not thought of it till now. Still, if even half of what this woman was telling him were true, there was so much he was not seeing, so much he was forgetting, so much he had – what was the phrase in that book Florence had requested at the library? – blacked out.

Rosemary had not stopped: ‘It made no sense, of course. If I told her once I told her a hundred times, Oxford is not an evacuation area. Children are being sent to Oxford, aren’t they? We were entertaining some of them just yesterday, lively little things from London. A few of the girls from Somerville went out to cheer them up …’

But James was not listening. He was remembering the conversation – the row – he and Florence had had … when was it? A month ago? They had just come home from an evening at the Playhouse, watching a top-drawer play: the West End theatre, like so much else of London, had sought sanctuary in Oxford.

‘I won’t hear of it,’ he had said.

‘What do you mean, you won’t hear of it. You do not have sole authority over our child. We are both Harry’s parents.’

He had tried to get out of the kitchen, walking past her as if to signal the discussion was over. But Florence had stuck her arm out across the doorway, barring his way. ‘You need to listen to me,’ she had said in a low voice, her teeth gritted. ‘I will do whatever it takes to protect him.’

‘It’s a surrender, Florence. You’re asking me to surrender to the fascists.’

‘“Surrender”? We’re not talking about a bridge or a railway line, James. This is not some strategically important piece of land. This is a child.’

‘If people like us run away, Hitler will have won, won’t he?’

‘Don’t ask a two-year-old boy to do your fighting for you, James.’

‘What did you say?’

‘You heard what I said. You want us to be heroes because you can’t be. And it’s not fair.’

He had stepped back from her, not wanting to look her in the face. She had extended her hand, but he had brushed her away. ‘Don’t touch me,’ he had said, spitting out the words.

She tried again, her voice gentler. ‘When are you going to understand that you already did your bit? You made your sacrifice, James. And you were one of the first to do it. You took your stand against fascism when everyone else here was fast asleep. You don’t need to do any more.’

He had looked up at her, his face red with anger. ‘That’s easy for you to say. You’re a woman: no one expects you to fight. But I should be there, killing as many of those bastards as I can. I’m not though, am I?’ She had said nothing, prompting him to repeat his question, this time bellowing it: ‘Am I?’ Once she had sighed and nodded, he went on. ‘This is my frontline – here, this house. And I’ll be damned if anyone will make me retreat from my own bloody home.’

He stared ahead now, all but forgetting that Rosemary was there, and still talking. He now knew why his wife had left – and, much more important, he had an inkling of where she had gone.

SEVEN

James cycled home, the energy coursing through his veins and into his legs. He was full of determination, a plan forming in his mind. Back at the house, he rushed into his study to find his atlas of the British Isles.

Rosemary had forced him to remember what he had forgotten, that Florence had indeed been in a state of high anxiety about the war and what she felt was its creeping proximity to their own lives. It was natural that Florence would want to get out into the countryside, with her parents’ estate in Norfolk the obvious destination. But she was not there.

Now that it had proved a dead end, he could see it was always going to be an incomplete explanation. For one thing, it could not account for the mystery of the last two Thursday evenings – the elaborate lengths his wife had taken to deceive him, apparently withholding the truth even from her best friend. No, she must have made an alternative arrangement, joining the rest of the hundreds of thousands of British people who had left their homes in cities for rural safety. It made no sense to him: Oxford was hardly an urban metropolis; a quick cycle ride and you were in the countryside. But Florence, unlike almost every other mother in England, had seen the aftermath of a bombing with her own eyes. He remembered his wife crouching by that little girl in Madrid, still and lifeless. Florence had been so calm; she had not sobbed or become hysterical. But clearly it had left its mark.

He found the page for Oxfordshire. This was what he would do. He would get on his bicycle and keep going until he had found them, cycling to every village if he had to. Start at Botley, then Wytham, then Wolvercote, Old Marston, Marston – ringing the city in concentric circles until he had covered the whole county. And after that the next county and the next and the next.

He looked out of the window. The summer light had at last faded. There was no chance of going now, whatever fantasy he had spun as he had raced back here from the river. It would mean cycling in the dark, no lights allowed in the blackout. He was confident he could navigate sufficiently well, even without road signs, but what would he do once he arrived in, say, Botley? He could hardly start walking the country lanes, calling out their names – though he imagined himself now doing exactly that, hearing the echo of it in his head: ‘Florence! Harry!’ He would have to wait till morning.

He reached for the whisky bottle beside the chair. Despite the spillage caused by Virginia Grey’s arrival, there was still some left. He raised it to his lips and, without opening his eyes, knocked it back.

As the liquid ran down his throat and he felt the alcohol travel through his veins, he thought of what the insufferable Rosemary had told him. That he had been sleepwalking, shouting in the night, waking Florence and Harry with his screaming. He wanted to deny it, but it sounded true. And the boiling kettle? If he forced himself, he could picture it: Harry on his high-chair, the steam rising inches from his face. How he, in a fit of absent-mindedness, had put the kettle down on the child’s table … But slapping Florence? Hitting his own wife? He had no memory of that whatsoever.

He saw her as she had been in Madrid, during their first weeks together as husband and wife: her floodlit smile, her body bursting with energy, vitality, sex. And then he imagined her in the Bodleian, her brow furrowed, poring over dry journal articles, detailing the symptoms of a kind of delayed shellshock in veterans of the Great War. Was that what she believed was wrong with him? Was she right?

He saw again the page as he had read it. Whatever else had gone wrong with him, his memory for printed words had retained its near-photographic ability. He could read the lines as if they were still there, recalling their precise position on the page: acute insomnia, including difficulty both falling and staying asleep; excess anger and temper; poor concentration. Others reported a heightened state of awareness, as if in constant expectation of danger.

With his mind clarified by the whisky and the serial shocks of this day, he could recognize himself in that list.

And then he thought of the second book in that pile the old Jewish librarian had handed him: Studies in Pediatric Trauma. That was what she feared most, he could see. She worried that he was passing on some of his own troubles to his son. Symptoms range from selective dumbness, melancholia, extreme shyness, impaired development, bedwetting …

It was true that Harry had not yet mastered staying dry at night, but James had put that down to his age: he did not know when boys were meant to learn that particular trick. But impaired development? Everyone had always joked that, with his parents’ combined IQ, Harry would be on course for a double first before his tenth birthday. He had started speaking early and could deliver neatly composed, relatively complex sentences. But in recent months he had become shy. Did that amount to selective dumbness? Surely not. Though, try as he might, James could not recall the last time he had heard his son speak at length.

His headache was returning. He could see the bright lights again, miniature explosions inside his brain. Now he could hear Florence’s voice, pleading with him: ‘James, you’re supposed to be the expert in how the mind works. You’re so clever about “the human brain”. But why can’t you understand yourself?’

Eyes closed, he attempted to formulate an answer. But the words would not come. Instead, he heard a voice repeating the sentence in the book Florence had been studying. The voice, he realized as it became more distant, belonged to Epstein, the refugee professor. He was lecturing, in that calm, patient German accent, as if he were Sigmund Freud himself: ‘… several of those interviewed displayed an extreme reluctance to speak of their wartime experiences, flinching from even indirect reminders. Perhaps paradoxically, many of these same people complained of unwanted memories of the event, “flashbacks”, as it were. The most common complaint, experienced by some sixty-eight per cent of those surveyed, was of distressing dreams, often violent …’