So I can’t say for certain what happened. Sometimes I thought I could remember a stranger coming and going, talking gobbledegook. But then most of that, before I finally realized I was in a hospital bed, came to me in bits and really I didn’t know what was real and what I’d been told and what I just imagined.
There was the sun, burning, taking up the whole sky, falling fit to crush me and I thought I was poor Prometheus, who I’d learned about back at the Institute, from the old professor who told us all about the ancient Greeks. Pinned on a rock and every day his liver pecked out by a great bird, and every day it grew back, every hour more agony and he could not die. Nora was that bird. Water. I was that hot and my mouth shriveled up. Scraping through the earth. Couldn’t lie, couldn’t sit. Peck, peck, peck. The bird never left me. Trying to get to the river. Isaac says it’s close. Waterbirds, he says.
Was I in a boat, or was that on the Serpentine, before, with Connie and Nancy?
Somehow, there was always Nora and if I held her close, the pain went, and if I let her fall, the pain shot through me.
One strange thing haunts me. When I was better, when I was in the hospital in Blighty, they gave me my belongings, not that they were many or serviceable, but among them was a handkerchief, officers’ quality. It was one of ours, from Duke Street, that is, with our tiny label, our hand-rolled edges and of the very best kind.
Sometimes I saw that German rising up behind the spoil at the edge of a crater like through a trapdoor in a music-hall stage and both of us staring like we were each other’s nightmare. Him pointing his rifle, but Nora had trapped mine. Do I remember turning my back so the bullets would hit her first? Was that just a dream? Did Nora, who’d done nothing but drag me down ever since I left England, save my life? And what happened then? The medics said it was blast from a shell that blew Nora and me together, as it were. For a while, I was Mr. Longfellow’s iron centaur.
After a day or so, I showed Dad my scars. It’s like a miracle, says he, gazing at the lines across my back; it’s like a resurrection. I looked at him sharpish because he wasn’t a great one for God, but his eyes were fixed on the dark little crater in my side and his hand hovered as if he did and didn’t want to touch it. I tucked my shirt in quick.
That deep injury was the one that had nearly done for me, caused by a brake bar piercing me under my ribs like a blunt bayonet, tearing through muscle and sliding past my liver. The fine lines were spokes that had slid in as easily as giant needles. But on my other side was a greater wonder: the big scar there was in the recognizable shape of the pivot of the BSA Folding Machine. If you knew one well, of course. Bits of Nora were still embedded within me as well as leaving the pivot scar. The Army surgeons said as how they might start finding their way out and not to be unnerved if I felt hard lumps of metal emerging here and there. Poor Nora. Along with that French soldier boy, a deserter, they thought, and the vanishing Higgs, she probably saved my life and all of them left to rust in France.
Dad had tears in his eyes, but I thought that he would soon have me down the pub, lifting up my vest to all and sundry for the price of a beer if he had a chance.
It was hopeless from the start: a waste of machines and a waste of riders.
In the whole time I was a soldier, I bore Nora ten times farther than she bore me. It was an offense to abandon equipment, of course; but although I was tempted, I would never really have left her, not for Fritz to have her.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Frank, Devon, 1919
I WANTED TO LEAVE DEVON but didn’t know how I might live in London again. So I lingered on with Dad. I had wanted to emerge as a different man, but the man I was now was no good any more for heavy work, nor for standing serving in a shop.
The months went by and the war seemed to be drawing to an end, and I seemed to be slipping back into the mire of the life I’d been so proud to leave years ago. Nobody was interested in my time in London or what I had learned. Most seemed to think I was as lucky to have escaped the big city as to return alive from France, both being, in their eyes, places where the enemy lurked. I gave a hand to Dad, trying the fine work on the coffins. The heavy stuff was too much for me now, and we had a strong lad in for that. Jim. He hadn’t got any kind of eye, just brawn, and I’d have to hold my tongue when he heaved in the wrong wood or ruined a beautiful bit of timber by not thinking before he went charging in at it with his chisel. I wasn’t unhappy all the time, but I longed for London like some man might long for a girl, and what I wanted most was not what you’d expect, not the great domes and spires and galleries, nor even the amusement parks and Sunday bands and music halls, but the ordinary things: the smell of gas in the Institute, the rush of people crossing Westminster Bridge so sure of the city that they didn’t even look at it. I missed the tang of smoke and the noise of hansoms and drays and cars. The bells, the shouts, the rattle and roar of coal down the chute. You’d think after France I’d want the peace of Devon, but I longed for noise.