More Miracle Than Bird Page 4

  “Oh,” Georgie said. “Do you suppose the ring will be here awhile?”

  “I’ve no idea,” he said. “I shouldn’t say that, though. I should insist you buy it immediately, but really, I’m no businessman. This is Archie’s business. My brother. He’s fighting in France, and I’m back here looking after his shop. I feel like I’m the only man in London not at war.”

  “Is that why you were hiding out the back?”

  “Of course. People are cruel. I’ve had a man come in and lecture me about sacrifice. I had a woman actually spit on the carpet.”

  “I daresay it’s preferable to going to war.”

  “And I daresay it’s not.”

  “Well, at least no one will shoot at you here,” Georgie said. “I suspect sacrifice is more enjoyable in the abstract.”

  He sniffed at her, disappointed, and she turned her attention back to the ring.

  “You needn’t worry,” he said, “hardly anyone ever comes in here. I’m sure it’s safe. If I’m not in the trenches, I can at least save your ring for you. I’ll move it to one of the farthest cabinets, so no one will notice it.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  When she returned to the hospital, the tasks were just as monotonous or disgusting as they had been the day before, the matron was still cold and disapproving, and Major Hammond ignored her as usual. Still, she found that she could perform her role calmly, without overthinking. Although she wouldn’t say she liked the job, it was a relief to know exactly what she should be doing, and she had the feeling that her life was following a logic. When the matron asked if she would take another night shift that evening, she found herself responding as if she were being offered a great prize.

  When the night shift came, although she knew she wasn’t allowed, she permitted herself her one indulgence: to sit down beside Second Lieutenant Pike and look out at the white-sheeted beds. Pike was silent beside her at first. There was something about sitting there that felt safe; she felt she might sit there for hours, listening to the slight snore of a sleeping captain, the soft rumple of woollen blankets, and the muted hooves on the straw-strewn roads outside.

  SIX

  PIKE

  Here again. She was like a fine-boned bird, perched here. He couldn’t help but smile, couldn’t help but think that this alignment of circumstances was some kind of gift. He had earned some kind of gift, hadn’t he? Then again, she wasn’t smiling. She seemed to be looking past him, thinking about something else entirely.

  Lately all of it was unreal to him, as if part of him had died in the car on the way here, with the taste of soil, steady clanking, groans; butter where his feet should be. Part of him had died, smudged on that leather seat, with mud between his fingers, under his nails, mud deep in his cuts, in his ears, and each time he wiped the mud off his face, he wiped more over himself, into himself, dear mud, dear muddy bodies all in a shambles, all in a row. They’d washed him, but only on the outside; inside his skin was lined with mud, it had crept down into his veins, it crouched there now, in puddles mixed with blood.

  “You have a sweetheart, don’t you?” he said to the nurse sitting beside him. He wanted to get this clear. And now she did smile. Her whole face held the light differently; it would be fair to say she beamed.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Who is he?” Pike concentrated on keeping his voice level.

  She had tipped her head towards the window. “A poet,” she said.

  He remembered having this kind of belief in someone. He’d had it in Emma. How could he tell this nurse this, how could he warn her? He’d written to Emma from the infirmary in Gallipoli, declared she shouldn’t wait for him. He was going to lose his feet, and she should be free. It was spring; he imagined there would be dances for her to go to. That was the extent of his letter. It had felt good to write it—he was a man of virtue. He couldn’t bear for Emma Wetherford to become the wife of a half man, one who couldn’t walk, couldn’t take himself to the lavatory. She was pretty, if a little stiff, but boys like that kind of reserve, they like to think they can crack it. They like to think they can break it open. (They can’t, but they don’t know that yet.) And of course, she wrote back to say she would wait for him, that she loved only him—oh, Emma! It gave him the chance for another noble rebuff: I do not want to be unfair to you, he had written as he lay in the infirmary, smelling of piss, his feet rotting under him, and now it seemed to him that as he wrote this he might have sucked the end of the pencil, tasted lead.

  Because not a month later—hardly three weeks!—he received another letter saying she was dreadfully sorry but she was engaged to marry another fellow. One of the chaps with the sense to stay home, and one with a name her daddy approved of. She wanted Pike to be the first to know, and if he didn’t want her to marry—if he wanted to go back to their being engaged—he should let her know immediately, and she would marry him instead. As if he could write back, with no money, no name, feet rotting away to nothing, and say, Marry me!

  Her letter had tried to seem solemn but somehow managed to announce the full name and rank of her husband-to-be, like she was brimming over with pride at being his fiancée, an admired thing, like a fine thoroughbred or a twirling windmill. Well, to hell with her. To hell with her, and particularly since she had started showing up to the ward, all gussied up as if on parade, forcing him to remember her, to remember everything. They’d had pink champagne for their engagement on the lawn. Pink champagne! Only Emma’s brother Eddie had stepped forward to shake Pike’s hand; her father simply stared at him like he was a child murderer. Fancy a poor student of medicine snapping up his beautiful, clever daughter—when all the time she had snapped him up, really, just as afterwards she’d opened her lovely jaws again and let him drop, so now she could marry a far more worthy gentleman. A huge relief for the family; apart from Eddie, the whole family had sticks so far up their asses probably none of them had ever glimpsed their toes. She had come into the ward the other day, bossing around his lovely nurse and then sitting upright in her impeccable clothes with her impeccable posture. The worst bit was that he found he couldn’t talk to her, could communicate only in brief snatches, couldn’t tell her what he thought of her. She loomed over him, and he couldn’t tell her to leave him be. She never stayed long, retreating like a sleek spider which creeps out from the floor and the wall, only to crawl back into its crevice. There would be no doubt in anyone’s mind she had made the right decision. When the father-in-law shuffled off from this earth, she would be a countess.

  A poet. The nurse was still staring at him with her eyes gleaming with hope so strong you could almost smell it. It was the first thing he didn’t like about her. Not that she had a sweetheart—of course she did, a girl like her—but that the fellow in question was a poet. You couldn’t trust a poet; either he was a fraud, a bad versifier, tapping his scuffed little loafers together while he proudly beat out bad rhymes; or, perhaps worse, he was a real poet, in which case he was self-important, a gentleman surely (no one could make money out of poems), with an enormous oak desk and a pen clasped between his fingers with the worthy expression of someone holding a sword. All that was certain was that a poet was never a serious person.

  Then again, was he himself a serious person? A student. A student of medicine with ruined feet who wasn’t sure he could bear to continue his studies. Who couldn’t properly talk to Emma Wetherford (who wasn’t a Wetherford anymore, of course, although he’d mercifully forgotten what she was now) after she’d spurned him. When he’d arrived at the hospital, he’d found another space for himself—a pressurised, underwater space, where he didn’t need to think, where all his decisions could be suspended. It was like going under with his eyes open in the lake he used to swim in each summer, that green low world, with its stringed lake-weed that would shift in slow motion before him. He might quite comfortably die there. It was only when he came up, kicking, that he found the surface floating with women, like bushy-feathered swans.

  One
afternoon he’d come up to discover a particular creature waiting for him, and for the first time he found he didn’t want to go back down. It didn’t have a beak but a soft human nose. A woman, then, stubborn, with dark hair and a severe, slightly chubby face. She wasn’t really swanlike, or pretty, or especially feminine. She was young but had the seriousness of someone much older, and her face wasn’t impassive but crinkled and irritated, her complexion rather pinker than was attractive, and she had dark half circles slung under her eyes. Still, she was awake, even if she didn’t seem overly delighted to be there. She had a name: Hyde-Lees. Her eyes were always moving, as if she were outraged with the world for not giving her more. This intense gaze was reason enough for him to kick and kick, to stay above the green surface for as long as he could, just to watch, until eventually he realised he had forgotten how to get back to the green space at all. Now this was all the world he had.

  “And what is his name, this poet?”

  Hyde-Lees looked at him before she uttered the familiar name of a man twice her age, an ungainly, pretentious Protestant Anglo-Irishman who, it could be conceded, was a reasonable poet (if you went in for faeries and dream-dimmed eyes), but could under no circumstances be called a gentleman, or remotely right for this charming girl of no more than twenty-five. For a moment, he was disgusted. Why? Why was she so weak to fall for such a man?

  But looking at her face, half in shadow, he recalibrated. If she were weak enough to fall for the poet, did this not mean she might be weak enough to fall for him? And wasn’t the poet a pathetic enough object that the girl’s affection for him could be broken down, diverted? He would get closer to her, he promised himself. He would start immediately.

  SEVEN

  SUMMER 1914

  It had been the last of the Shakespears’ soirées before the war broke out. The usual crowd was there, and Dorothy and Ezra, newly married, would not stop gazing at one another. There was something vague about them; Dorothy could only half kiss Georgie hello, and Ezra smiled and ruffled her hair as though she were twelve years old instead of twenty-one. Georgie asked them about W. B., and Ezra managed to say that he had been feeling unwell and had left early.

  To fend off boredom, Georgie drank too much wine and eventually found herself in that easy, dizzy state where her words were coming to her fluidly, and everything was imbued with a heightened sense, as if each word or movement contained great promise. She noticed, around Dorothy’s neck, a silver chain with a hanging butterfly, which quivered at her throat when she laughed. Georgie’s knees felt loose, as if the bones had gone soft, and no one seemed to notice when she wandered away from the group and stepped into the cool, dark hallway. There was a light on in the library, and she walked in.

  “Oh, hello,” a voice said. W. B. was under a lamp, sitting on a narrow wooden bench with a book on his lap, and when he saw her come in, he pressed a finger on a particular passage. He was about to rejoin the party, he said, but he was checking something for a moment. Even though his accent was almost English, he had that lovely Irish turn to his consonants—she’d thought it was all in his vowels, but really it was his consonants. She came in and leaned over his shoulder to see what he was reading.

  He looked up. “Didn’t Harkin say something about Taylor?” Dr. Harkin was the leader of the Order.

  “Not that Taylor,” she said. “The translator of Plotinus. Thomas Taylor.”

  “Oh,” he said, resting the book back down on his lap. “You’re right, of course. You’ve read him already, I suppose.”

  “Of course,” she said. They smiled. Her thoroughness was a kind of joke between them. She sat down beside him; the wooden bench was rather high, and she swung her legs back and forth, thanking the wine for the ease she felt. She liked sitting close to him, being alone in the room with him.

  “Are you quite well?” she thought to say. “Ezra said you were ill.”

  He hesitated, and it was only when she saw his lips twitch and noticed the handkerchief between his fingers that she realised he wasn’t ill at all—he was upset. He must have come in here to get away from everyone. The book had been a ruse; he had shut himself in here for some privacy, and she had come in oblivious, with her wine-soaked boldness, and not only interrupted him but corrected him, and gone ahead and sat right down beside him. Embarrassed, she began to get up.

  “Oh—I’m sorry—”

  “No,” he said. “Stay if you like. I’ve been—you’re far too young to understand this, but I’ve been fussing about being too old. Regrets. You’re too young for regrets.” He was pushing the handkerchief back in his pocket.

  “Like what?”

  “I should have married.”

  She sat back down and slowly returned to swinging her legs, as if to insist on the lightness of the conversation. “Don’t be silly. You’re not too old for that.” He was twice her age, but he was still attractive enough. He had been involved with Olivia at some point, and she knew there had been others too.

  “Do you mean that?” He was looking at her.

  “Of course.” She looked back at him and stopped swinging her legs. What was he asking, exactly? She looked away.

  He had turned his attention to the desk, and as she watched him search for something in a drawer, flicking through the contents with his long fingers, she considered those fingers, that familiar mass of dark, greying hair. All the younger men she knew were unoriginal, fickle, and—despite Dorothy’s newly married status—still too busy pining after Dorothy. Willy Yeats turned his attention back to her and produced a rectangular box. He flipped a clasp, she heard a click, and the box sprang open. Inside was a pack of cards, the backs dark blue drizzled with silver. He tipped the pack into his hands and tucked the box back into the drawer. He shuffled the cards and splayed them out in his hands, face down, offering them to her.

  “Pick one,” he said.

  She reached forward and brushed her fingers over the cards. She paused her index finger on one, then another, then finally pulled a third one away from the pack. She turned it over so they could both see it. It showed a handsome young blond man, strolling jauntily towards the edge of a cliff. The black text said THE FOOL.

  “The beginning of a journey,” he said, and he leaned back and smiled. “I had wondered, hadn’t you? What do you think?”

  She stared back at him. They seemed to be sitting very close together, and she could feel sweat tingling at the base of her spine. He reached his hand out to her.

  She looked at it.

  William Butler Yeats, the poet, the occultist, the scholar, the Irishman, this man, sitting next to her, asking her—she couldn’t quite believe it. After a moment—after all, why not?—she took his hand.

  There was a knock on the door and Georgie dropped his hand just as Olivia came in to call them back into the party. The whole room seemed to vibrate with a violent pulse she knew must be her own.

  As Olivia explained who was leaving and who was yet to arrive, Georgie glanced down at the card on the table. The cliff’s edge at the man’s feet was sheer.

  She looked up and managed to tell Willy and Olivia that actually she had to go, that Nelly would be wondering where she was. But before she left, Willy followed her out to the coatrack and helped her with her coat, and he kissed her cheek close to her mouth. Georgie’s lips prickled and went numb, as if they were no longer hers.

  That feeling of a not-quite-uttered agreement had hung between them ever since, as if someone had cleared all the dust from the air and they were seeing each other for the first time. Each time they met, he kissed her cheek near her mouth, and sometimes they alluded to their journey. On the outside, not much had changed; they had not been properly intimate, or spoken of an engagement. They still attended the monthly meetings of the Order together, and shared discussions about the thin layer between this world and the next. But on the inside, everything felt different. The future was there to be leapt into, whenever they chose. It was unspoken, but it was clear.

  EIGHTr />
  WINTER 1916

  After another night shift, Georgie forced herself to get up in the early afternoon and go to the reading room at the British Museum. Because of her work at the hospital, she had fallen behind on her studies for the Order.

  She’d had a note from Willy that morning. He had already gone down to Sussex, to the small cottage he rented for the winter with the Pounds, and he would regretfully miss the next Order meeting. He had signed the note, Yours faithfully, W. B. Yeats, and the formality of this seemed strange to her. At least, she supposed, he had let her know. Perhaps in his next note, he would invite her down to Stone Cottage to visit.

  As she walked from the dormitory, she thought of being outside the city, out where the world thinned out, dirt disturbed itself, light flashed out the corner of your eye. It was outside the city she seemed closest to the anima mundi, that great mass of all human memory, which was the object of their research. She had glimpsed it only once, when she had been on a ferry in the Bay of Naples, not long after her father had died—she had been exhausted then too, sleepless, and desperate to get away from Nelly and the cousins. She had gone up to the top deck to watch the sea restlessly push past, and the foam gather along the boat’s edge like rough lace, while black smoke gushed from the steamer—and standing alone on the deck there, looking out at the lazy black flank of Vesuvius, she had felt something grip inside her skull. Something had forced itself into her brain, a map of another human’s thinking, trying to crack her own open. It was a shock—to have someone else’s voice driving her own out; to have another’s eyes looking down at her new navy leather shoes. Cielo, the mind had said, traveling over her suddenly tasteless clothing—e le scarpe, che malgusto! Her eyes travelled over her own body, her ankles, her legs, her torso, her breasts, her hands, half predatory, half disgusted. The mind seemed unaware of an audience—her—and had simply taken her over, made her silent.