But 1914 rolled on and one night his brother came to visit him at the college. They had plans to dine in town but Tom suggested a walk first on the meadow. It was summer and warm, and the light lingered, and Tom became nostalgic, talking rapidly about the past, their childhood, so that Leonard knew at once that something was afoot. Then, as they sat down at the restaurant table: ‘I’ve enlisted.’
With those two words, the war that had been brewing in the mastheads of newspapers was suddenly in the room with them.
Leonard hadn’t wanted to go. Unlike Tom, he didn’t seek adventure; not of that kind. He’d had to struggle to feel even a tickle of duty. What business was it of his if a trigger-happy madman in Sarajevo took a disliking to an Austrian archduke in a feathered hat? Leonard had resisted saying as much to anyone, not least his mother and father, who were tearfully proud of Tom’s new uniform, but he couldn’t help but think it was a terrible inconvenience that war should start right when he’d discovered his passion.
But.
He figured.
How long could it last?
It would be a brief interruption, a new experience that would only feed his ability to perceive the world from different standpoints; he would be able to study mechanisation and modernity up close …
No point dwelling on the hows and wherefores. Tom was going to France and Leonard had gone, too.
Five years later, he returned to a country and a world that he no longer knew.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
London after the war had been a shock. History had the last laugh and Leonard was confronted with change and progress on a scale he could never have anticipated. Not just the world, but also the people in it. Large-faced people he didn’t recognise loomed, all of them eager to dance and to celebrate, to laugh like goats, to shed their long hair and old-fashioned ways, and anything else that might tie them to the past and the long misery of war.
Leonard took a bedsit at the top of a building near the Holloway Road. There was a pig in the small back garden and a train tunnel deep in the bowels of the earth beneath. He’d spotted the pig when he made his inspection, but hadn’t known about the trains until after he’d paid his first month in full and was sitting with a glass of ale and a cigarette at the small wooden desk beside his bed. It was right on dusk – always a fidgety time for Leonard, when even the light could not be trusted – and he’d thought the place was being shelled, that there’d been a terrible mistake and the war wasn’t over at all; but it had only been the train. In his panic, he’d knocked his beer off the desk and earned a sharp rap of the broom end against his floor from the woman in the room beneath.
Leonard had tried to move with the times, but rather than being footloose and fancy-free he’d found himself merely unrooted. Everyone was drinking too much, but where others were made merry, Leonard became maudlin. He would be invited to a club at night and arrive with the best of intentions: he’d wear a new suit and school himself to stay upbeat, to listen and to nod, even to smile sometimes. Invariably, though, at some point in the evening, having allowed himself to be drawn into conversation, Leonard would hear himself speaking of the friends he’d lost, the way they still came to him in the stillness of the bedsit, or in the mirror when he was shaving, sometimes even in the half-light of the evening street, where he’d hear the tread of their boots behind him.
In the clatter of the club, he would find the other people at his table staring at him askance when he spoke like that, turning their backs in wounded delicacy, as if they couldn’t understand why he’d set out to ruin their fun. Even when he wasn’t speaking of his lost friends, Leonard lacked the silvery flint of frivolous conversation. He was too earnest. Too straight. The world was a bubble now, thin and glistening, and everyone else had found their way inside. But Leonard was too heavy for the bubble. He was a man out of time: too old to be one of the spirited young people and too young to fit in with the hopeless drunkards who lined the river. He felt a connection to nothing and to nobody.
One afternoon, standing on the Charing Cross Bridge as the boats and the people went back and forth, he had a chance encounter with his old professor, who was on his way to the National Gallery. Professor Harris had invited Leonard to join him and then spoken amiably about art and life and people they had both once known, as Leonard listened and nodded, turning the anecdotes over in his mind like vaguely diverting relics. When they rounded the corner into the Renaissance rooms, and the professor suggested that Leonard might think about resuming his studies, the words were as a foreign language. Even if Leonard could have seen his way back to the disconcertingly beautiful buildings of Oxford, modernism was dead: Boccioni had been killed in 1916 and French critics were agitating now for a ‘return to order’. All of the youth and vitality of the movement had ebbed away with Leonard’s own, and lay buried now amidst the bones and mud.
But he needed to do something. London was too fast and too loud, and an urgency grew within Leonard to escape. He felt it building like the pressure before a thunderstorm: his eardrums hurt with it; his legs became restless. He woke at night in a sweat, as the night trains shuddered his bedhead and the thin painted woman in the room below slammed her door after a rowdy customer. The fine black wings of panic enwrapped his throat and he prayed that they would squeeze harder and finish the job. He found himself tracing the paths in his mind that he had taken as a child – that he and Tom had taken together, over the brick wall at the bottom of the garden, through the shrubbery, along the lane that dwindled to nothing as it crossed the meadow towards the woods. ‘Run with me, Lenny.’ He heard it more and more often, but when he turned he saw only old men in bars, and young boys on street corners, and mean, skinny alley cats that followed him with their glass eyes.
Before his lease was ended, he slipped two months’ rent into the glass on the desk and left his bedsit, left London on one of the trains that rattled past the little windows of other people’s lives. His own family’s house was smaller than he remembered, more down at heel, but it smelled the same and that was no bad thing. His mother reopened his boyhood bedroom, but she didn’t do anything about the empty bed on the far wall. Countless conversations hung in the corners, silent by day but loud at night, so that Leonard sat bolt upright sometimes and turned on the lamp, certain that he’d catch his brother grinning at him from the other bed. He could hear the springs beneath its mattress creaking in the dark as the memory of his brother shifted in sleep.
Their old toys and books were still on the shelf – the set of wooden soldiers, the spinning top, the well-worn box of Snakes and Ladders; and Leonard reread H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. It had been his favourite story when he was thirteen; Tom’s, too. Their dreams had all been of the future then, the two of them fantasising about climbing through time to see what wonders lay ahead. Now, though, Leonard found himself always looking backwards. Sometimes he simply sat with the book in his hands, marvelling at its solidity and shape. What a dignified object was a book, almost noble in its purpose.