Pantheon

As he turned the pages, he caught a slip of white paper, the tiniest bookmark that had been left inside. Instinctively, he held it close to his face, hoping that he might catch a scent of her. But it carried no trace. Instead it marked an article entitled: ‘A survey of British veterans of the Great War’.

Odd. Florence had no particular interest in the last war. If she was not a psychologist, she was certainly not a historian.

He turned to the next book, written by an American scholar affiliated with Harvard Medical School: Studies in Pediatric Trauma. He flicked through the pages again, looking for one of those tiny white slips. He found it and began reading:

‘… sustained exposure of a non-traumatized child to a traumatized adult can result in secondary or passive trauma. Symptoms range from selective dumbness, melancholia, extreme shyness, impaired development, bedwetting …’

Instantly, he thought of Harry: how he had been slower than the other children to control himself at night, how he had still not mastered it. Florence had been anxious, refusing to be placated by James’s insistence that their son would ‘soon get the hang of it’. Until now James had thought nothing more of it.

He picked up the third book. A Compendium of Advice for Mothers. So very unlike Florence, who usually cursed such things. He didn’t need to thumb through the pages. The book opened automatically, the spine already cracked. The chapter heading: Preparing a child for a long journey or separation.

He read the title again and then once more, the dread rising in him. Any hope he had harboured that this might be a stunt, an attempt by Florence to make a point, was fading fast. There it was in black and white. What his wife had planned for was a long journey. Or, worse, a separation.

He went back to the first volume, to the article on former combatants in the last war, reading a paragraph at random:

‘… subjects in the trial revealed a set of behaviors which recurred. Among them were 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.’

He skimmed a few paragraphs ahead:

‘… 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 …’

James slammed the book shut, his heart hammering. He was beginning to feel light-headed. He was hungry. He had barely eaten since last night and he had exerted himself strenuously on the river early this morning. The alcohol would not have helped either. The room was beginning to spin.

He stood up and saw Epstein at the desk, the old man’s bespectacled face appearing to shrink and swell, waxing and waning like the moon. He had to get out, into the fresh air. He mumbled an apology, left the books where they were and stumbled towards the exit.

Outside, he gulped down large draughts of oxygen, clutching the handrail by the entrance. Across the street, the Kings Arms was filling up now with the after-work crowd: not students but academics-turned-civil servants.

He needed to think but his head was throbbing. What had he been expecting? He had assumed something more direct: an atlas, perhaps a road map, maybe a train timetable. But this, what he had just seen … he felt nauseous.

Where the hell was his wife? Where had she gone? It unnerved him to imagine that she was living and breathing somewhere – perhaps arriving at a distant railway station or walking down a street or sipping a cup of tea – that she existed somewhere now, at this very moment, and he had no idea where. He told himself he could survive being apart from her, so long as he knew where she was. But he knew that was not true. Ever since those nights and days in Madrid, holding each other as the bombs fell, he felt that nature itself demanded they be together. As a scientist, he was not meant to believe in fate or destiny, so he could not say what he truly felt. Nor did his education have much tolerance for a word like ‘souls’, but that too was what he felt: that their souls had been joined.

Harry’s arrival had only confirmed it. He loved his son with an intensity that had surprised him. He pictured him now, rarely saying a word to anyone, clinging to his little polar bear. The thought of life apart from his son struck sudden terror into his heart.

The words appeared before him, floating in front of his eyes: a long journey or separation. A black thought raced through his mind, like a virus carried on his bloodstream. Could it be, was it possible …

Suddenly and without any warning even to himself, as if his mouth, chest and lungs had a will of their own, he heard himself screaming at the top of his voice. ‘WHERE ARE YOU?’

The sound of it shocked him. A group of young men drinking on the pavement outside the Kings Arms looked towards him, their faces flushed, their necks taut with aggression. James wondered if these were the veterans of the Dunkirk retreat – or evacuation, as the BBC delicately phrased it – brought here for treatment at the Radcliffe Infirmary. Florence had mentioned them only yesterday, reporting the scandalized reaction of some superannuated don or other who had been outraged by the soldiers’ constant state of drunkenness. James had shrugged, refusing to condemn servicemen for seeking comfort wherever they could find it.

Ignoring them, he crossed the road, retrieved his bike from outside Wadham and cycled away.

He pedalled maniacally, trying to keep his thoughts at bay. And yet they refused to be halted. He could almost feel them in his head, speeding around his cerebral cortex; as soon as he had blocked off one neural pathway, they re-routed and hurtled down another, shouting at him inside his head, forming into words.

He smothered them with another idea. It was Thursday, nearly seven o’clock in the evening and it was summer. Ordinarily, this was when Florence would be out with her friend Rosemary for the weekly walk of their rambling club. As far as James could tell, most were communists, all but ideological in their zeal for strenuous exercise in the British countryside.

The group would probably be walking back by now and, if they were sticking with their usual routine, he knew just where to find them.

And so, for the second time that day – though it felt like another era – he was back by the river, cycling along the towpath towards Iffley Lock. And, sure enough, there they were: Rosemary at the front, in sensible shoes, her sensible brown hair in a sensible bob, carrying one handle of a picnic hamper, the other taken by a strapping young female undergraduate. James let his bike slow, then swung one leg off it, so that he was perching on just one pedal, before hopping off, trying to look calm and composed. No red mists now, he told himself.

‘Hello there,’ he called out, giving a wave.

‘Is that you, James?’ she asked, peering through spectacles which, while no match for Magnus Hook’s, consisted of two substantial slabs of glass.

‘Yes, yes it is. I was just—’

‘Don’t worry, I can guess.’ She nodded at the young woman on the other side of the picnic basket who immediately and deferentially yielded her handle to James, falling back to join the chattering group of women a few paces behind. How Florence fitted into this group, James could not imagine, except that it was a pretty safe bet that several would have had a strong ‘pash’ for her. Perhaps Rosemary too. He took the basket in one hand, wheeling his bike in the other, and waited for her to speak first.

‘So, you’re looking for Florence?’

‘I am, as it happens. I don’t suppose you know where she—’

She cut him off, her gaze fixed straight ahead: ‘How long has she been gone?’

‘Since,’ he made a gesture of looking at his watch, ‘this morning, as a matter of fact.’ He was carrying the hamper in his left arm, which was already buckling under the strain. But he was reluctant to say anything, lest he distract Rosemary whose brow was fixed in concentration. But it was she who stopped.

‘Audrey!’ she shouted, turning to address one of the walkers behind. ‘Could you and Violet take the hamper? There’s a love.’

Two of the girls rushed forward to do as they had been told. Rosemary supervised the handover, then waited while the rest of the group overtook them, ensuring that she and James were well out of earshot. ‘Gone since this morning, you say,’ she said at last.

‘Yes.’

‘And you thought she might be with us.’

‘Well, it’s Thursday evening. She never misses her weekly walk, rain or shine.’

‘Ramble, Dr Zennor. We call it a ramble. And, you’re right, Florence is a stalwart. She hated missing the last couple of weeks.’

‘Missing them? She didn’t miss them.’

‘Well, she wasn’t here.’

‘I think you must have that confused. I remember it distinctly, Florence left at five o’clock, walking boots on. Same as always. I can picture her coming home, telling me about it.’

‘Well, I run this rambling club, Dr Zennor, and I’ve never missed a week. Not one. And I can tell you that Florence was absent last Thursday, as she was the week before. She’s not the kind of woman whose presence goes unnoticed.’

James was baffled. ‘Did she give any explanation?’

‘Only that something had come up. Something important. She was very apologetic.’

James was working through the different logical possibilities, trying to rank them in order of probability: that Rosemary was lying; that Florence had joined some other group and lied to her friend in order to spare her feelings; that on both Thursdays Florence had indeed been somewhere else, somewhere important, and had lied to him about it.

Rosemary spoke again. ‘This is very awkward, Dr Zennor. When speaking about the affairs of others, one never knows how much one is meant to know. Or how much the other parties themselves know.’

‘Affairs? What do you mean, “affairs”?’

‘Sorry. That was a very poor choice of word. Sorry about that. When one is speaking about the lives of others, let’s put it that way, one is never quite sure where the boundaries lie.’

‘Look, Miss—’ he ran dry, immediately regretting the attempt at a name.

‘Hyde, it’s Rosemary Hyde. And that rather makes my point, Dr Zennor. I have been your wife’s friend for at least ten years, since we were at school together. I suspect I am her closest confidante. And yet you are not entirely sure of my name.’

‘That’s not true,’ he said, without much conviction. ‘It’s just that I always thought your friendship was … well, I just left you two to get on with it.’ He was still preoccupied by the notion of his wife pretending to have gone out walking the last two Thursdays, putting her boots on, arranging for Mrs Brunson to look after Harry. Why would she have done that? Where would she have gone?

‘It’s not a criticism,’ Rosemary was saying. ‘Rather it might illustrate your problem.’

He could feel the red mist descending. ‘Yes? And what exactly is my “problem”, Miss Hyde? Because as far as I can see my only “problem” is that my wife and child are missing. I have been sent on a wild goose chase to the Bodleian library that proved no use at all and now you want to play games with me – suggesting that my wife has been lying about her recent movements – rather than just spitting out where the hell she is. That’s all I want to know, Miss Hyde. Where is she?’

It came out as more of a plea than he had intended, his voice desperate and imploring. That much was apparent from the change in Rosemary’s expression. Her features had softened into a look unnervingly close to pity.

‘I don’t know where Florence is,’ she said quietly. ‘That is the truth.’ She resumed walking. ‘But I am not surprised she’s gone. I expected it.’

‘You expected it?’

‘Didn’t you? If you’re honest. Given everything that’s been going on?’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I really don’t, Miss Hyde. And I’m getting pretty damned irritated with people speaking to me about events I know nothing about.’

‘These are not “events”, Dr Zennor. This is about day-to-day life. At home. You and Florence and Harry.’

‘Our day-to-day life is fine, thank you very much. We’re a very good family. I love my wife and I love my son.’ His eyes widened in sudden understanding. ‘Oh, so that’s why you spoke about “affairs”. Well, let me tell you, I have always been faithful to Florence, from the very first moment—’

‘Nothing like that,’ she said, looking at her feet. She lifted her eyes and met his gaze directly. ‘Tell me, how well do you sleep?’

‘I don’t see this is any business of—’

‘It’s no business of mine at all. But your wife needed someone to talk to and that turned out to be me. So: how well do you sleep?’

‘And if I answer you, is that going to help me find my wife?’

‘It might.’

‘I go to bed late and I get up early, and I sometimes wake in the night. There, I’ve told you. Now, what can you tell me?’

‘Florence told me that you often wake up in the dead of night, shouting and screaming.’

‘I know the incident you’re referring to. It was—’

‘Incident? Florence said it happens all the time. You’re in a sweat, sitting bolt upright, bellowing out—’

‘I really don’t see …’

Rosemary ignored the interruption. ‘Night after night. And that would set Harry off. He’d be crying so hard, he couldn’t be settled. And if he did fall asleep, he’d only wet the bed an hour later. Then there was the time she found you sleepwalking.’

‘I don’t remember any—’

‘She found you in the kitchen, holding a knife. She said you just stood there, your eyes staring, frozen still with a knife in your hand. She was scared half to death.’

‘You’re making this up!’ he roared suddenly.

Rosemary turned and faced him, her teeth clenched tight. ‘And this is what she said was making life utterly impossible. Your constant pretence that nothing had happened. And your aggression. “Is he lying, Rosemary – or does he just not remember?” That’s what she would say to me. And she didn’t know what was worse: the thought that you would deny what she had seen with her own eyes or that you were so ill you couldn’t remember your own actions.’

‘Ill? I’m not ill.’

‘I know about this too. Your refusal to see a doctor. She’s been begging you to see—’

‘Oh, for heaven’s—’ He struggled to get to the end of the sentence; the bright light in his head was becoming unbearable … but he couldn’t stop her. Not if she knew something he needed to know. He tried to speak calmly. ‘I did see someone. About the insomnia.’

‘Yes, but you didn’t tell him the truth, did you? You just said you had “the odd bad night”. You said—’

‘How the hell do you know all this?’

‘Because your wife had no one else to turn to. She didn’t dare speak to her parents. She knew how much you resented them for—’

‘Resented them?’

‘—for the help they had given you.’ His puzzled expression prompted her to be more explicit. ‘Resented the money they had given you.’

‘Look,’ he said, his voice firm and steady. ‘All I want is to know what information you have. You need to tell me that. Now.’

She paused, looking out over the river unwinding ahead, gazing at the top of Christ Church Cathedral in the middle distance. ‘All right,’ she began. ‘The important thing is Harry. Florence wanted to protect him.’

‘From what?’

‘From you, of course. Initially.’

He was about to object, but the throbbing in his head was getting too insistent. It was easier to be quiet, to walk and to listen.

‘She said she had almost got used to you being angry all the time. After the—’ she glanced at his shoulder. ‘After the, um, accident. But once Harry was born, it began to worry her. The truth is, she was frightened.’

‘Of me,’ he said quietly.

‘Yes, James. Of you. Of what you might do. She was worried that you might hurt Harry.’

At this, his heart seemed to cave in, a physical sensation, felt in the muscle and blood. He could say nothing.

‘You once left him by a boiling kettle. Do you remember that, James?’

He shook his head, unsure.

‘Well, you did. You’d left the boy on his own, in the kitchen. You’d put the kettle—’

‘That’s enough,’ he said softly.

‘That’s what I said,’ Rosemary said, sardonically. ‘I told her it was enough. That she should leave you. Several times. Especially after you hit her.’

‘After I did what?’

‘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.