Matron looked around, and her gaze fell on me. Her eyes narrowed, but I shook my head and shrugged in an I’m innocent gesture. I watched her reluctantly conclude that I could only be an innocent bystander. “Very well. Nurse Weekes, please supervise Mr. Yates in the garden. Exercise is not to exceed fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, Matron.”
“You will be timed.”
“Yes, Matron.”
“You are not to go out of sight of the windows. Mr. Vries will be watching. And, Mr. Yates, this case is an exception. In future, if you wish to exercise, please take it at the appointed time of day.”
He thanked her and I followed him toward the French doors to the terrace. Everyone watched us go, and I realized that Matron had unwittingly just approved a display—a very public display—of yet more rules being broken. I watched Jack saunter out through the doors and wondered whether he knew exactly what he was doing. In the space of a few mere spoken sentences and fifteen minutes, he had turned everything on its head, even just for a moment. He was either oblivious, a genius, or utterly psychotic. And I did not think the first option applied.
“What was that?” I hissed at him as we moved away from the doors. “What are you doing?”
He walked across the terrace and leaned on the railing. Chairs were sometimes brought out here for the men on pleasant days, but the area was empty now. “Did you like it?” he said.
“Like it?” I said.
“I did it for you.”
There was no other word for it: I gaped at him.
He shrugged. “In a manner of speaking,” he said. He turned away from me and tapped his fingers lightly on the railing. “The thing is, Kitty, you’ve got me thinking.”
“Thinking?”
“Yes. I don’t much like it, but there it is. You’re brave, and you keep asking questions, and you don’t quit. And the next thing I know, I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
“Well.” He turned to descend the steps from the terrace, and I followed him. I did not walk beside him; I was only supposed to be supervising, not strolling and chatting. But I kept close behind his shoulder as he talked. “At first,” he said, “I thought about what Matron said about clearance to come to my room. That my presence at Portis House is a secret.”
“Something they hadn’t told you,” I said.
“No. It bothered me, as I said, so I joined in the therapy sessions. And I asked for permission to go running alone. Which I’m told has been granted, by the way.”
Thornton must have written Mr. Deighton about it, or perhaps Matron had. Even the owner of Portis House, it seemed, did not want to say no to Jack Yates.
“But still,” Jack continued, “I started thinking about why I’m a secret. And I think the answer must be that England doesn’t want it getting out that Jack Yates lost his marbles, because that would be an embarrassment. Am I correct?”
I said nothing.
“Right,” he said. He turned down one of the paths through the ornamental garden, I at his shoulder. His voice grew rough. “I never told you what happened before I came here, Kitty. But perhaps you already know.”
I bit my lip. “I heard something.”
“I can’t talk about it,” he said tightly. “I can’t explain it. Not yet. Not even to you.”
“No,” I said, looking at the line of his back and thinking about the things I couldn’t talk about, either. “I understand that.”
“Let’s just say,” he said without looking at me, “that I took some sleeping pills, and a neighbor who dropped by unexpectedly found me. That’s all. I woke up and the first thing I felt was disappointment. The second was uneasiness at the thought that maybe something was wrong with me. Very wrong. So I came here.”
There was nothing to say, so I was silent again.
“And I asked,” Jack said, “to be left alone. Completely alone, just for a little while. I hadn’t been alone all through the war, and I hadn’t been alone all the time after. What I’d been through was nobody’s goddamned business. I wanted privacy, but I didn’t ask to be treated like a shameful state secret. And when I think about it, it bothers me.”
“So you left your room and came downstairs tonight,” I said. That was what that display had been, that show of defiance.
“That was part of it, yes. And I would like a gramophone.” We had reached the edge of the garden, and he turned, leaned on the rail of the low iron fence, and faced me. His expression, through the twilight, was tired and a little wry. I glanced back at the terrace windows, which were just visible. I couldn’t see Paulus watching, but I had no idea how much time we had.
“That was just the first thing,” said Jack. “I’ve been thinking about other things, too. Do you see the effect you’ve had?”
“What else?” I said.
“I’ve been thinking about ghosts.” His gaze drifted to Portis House, taking in its dark bulk. “When I came here, I thought the nightmares I was having were my own madness. I saw things . . . I thought it was my own sick mind. But now I’ve been thinking about the Gersbachs, and that you could be right about the others. I’ve been thinking about this place, and the war. And I’ve been thinking about you. What you’ve told me about your life.” His gaze turned back to me, and I felt myself grow hot. “I think you’re running from someone who frightens you.”
The words came automatically, as if I were a windup toy. “That’s none of your business.”
“Ah, that’s the problem with thinking, isn’t it? You think about things you shouldn’t.” But his smile was gentle, and I knew he wasn’t going to push me. “For a long time I wanted to do anything except think. Thinking made me want to die again. And that’s the reason I paid Thornton for those pills.”
I shouldn’t have been shocked, but I was. I thought of Thornton, his self-importance, the doodles in his notebook, and it felt as if someone had punched me in the stomach with a pitchfork. Following on the heels of that was a surprising white-hot anger.
“You’re not getting them back,” I said after a moment. “I destroyed them.” This was a lie, as the bottle was still wedged under a corner of my mattress. I’d been partly afraid that I’d be in trouble for taking them and would have to produce them again.
For a second he searched my face, as if looking for the truth. “That’s inconvenient,” he said.
“What are they? Morphine? Something else? A mixture?”
“I have no idea. They make me sleep, give me strange and disjointed dreams. And when I take one, the world seems far away, as if I’m watching it from outside one of those glass balls you get at Christmas. I got them by telling Thornton something about migraines.”
“He gave you a whole bottle.”
“Yes. He did.” He rubbed a hand slowly up over his face, his forehead. “It seems strange to you—I can see that. That I’d want to kill myself. Have I told you the story of what happened after the advance at La Bassée?”
He was referring to the famous battle, of course. And of course he hadn’t told me. “I read about it in the papers.”
He nodded. His expression had gone still now, and he looked absently off into the garden. “I was an orphan,” he said.
“I know.” That had been in the papers, too. The Times had featured a drawing of Jack, his plain and undecorated uniform prominently drawn, outsize like a giant, stepping on mouse-size, dark-mustached Huns. Put me in rags, lads, said Giant Jack, and I’ll still win the war!
“I was adopted as a baby,” he said. “I remember only my adoptive parents. They were forty-five when they took me in; I was the child they’d never been able to have. By the time I went to war . . .” He shrugged. “My mother was already sick when I enlisted. She died a few months later. My father died eight months after she did. Of grief, I think, and the pressure of running the farm alone, and of reading the casualty lists, worrying about me. They were all I had.”
I bit my lip, listening.
“I thought we’d die at La Bassée,” he said. “I was sure of it. I thought my plan had no chance of succeeding, none whatsoever. Everyone else was already dead. I’d been watching men die for two years, men I knew, men I liked. We kept going, and we thought we were in for it, but we didn’t die. And when it was over, we were sent to the back of the line, out of the fighting.”
The memory in full motion now, he dropped his hand from his forehead. I was silent, hanging on every word.
“Most of the men were sent to a casualty clearing station,” he said. “We were exhausted and starving. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had water. All I wanted was to lie down, but I was separated from the others and put in the back of a truck. We drove into the countryside and a motorcar met us, and I was put in that and driven some more. The shells were lighting up the sky; we could hear them like constant thunder. Finally I was taken to a house. The family was long gone, of course, and it was a headquarters now. They took me into this pretty house in the country as the shelling continued and there sat a group of men around a dining table, loaded with food, a roast of beef and bread and cheese and bottles of wine. They were all decorated. They said their names but I didn’t absorb a thing. I sat down and I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, and they were lighting candles at their table as if everyone wasn’t dying a few miles away. I sat there, stunned.
“A man with a big, white mustache, the one with the highest rank, began talking to me. He told me he’d heard what I’d done at La Bassée, and that I’d done well. I was going to get a Victoria Cross. I was distracted by the man sitting next to him, who wore a plain coat and a civilian hat. He was the only nonenlisted man in the room, and he was writing in a notebook as the other man talked. I realized the white-mustached man was telling me I was going to be sent home, that the newspapers and newsreels would want to hear about this glorious day, and I was being sent home to tell everyone about it.
“As I said, I hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. Everything felt to me like a crazy dream. He said I was going home, and the first thing out of my mouth was, ‘But, sir, I haven’t had a chance to die yet.’”
The corner of Jack’s mouth turned up. “My words just hung there. The man’s face was like a waxwork. He’d been raising his glass to drink from it and it just stopped in midair. Then he turned to the civilian and said, ‘Don’t write that down.’
“I knew then. The civilian was a reporter. The entire scene—the supper, the candles, all of it—was for his benefit. The touching scene of the weary soldier being told he’s done well and can go home. It was as real as a stage play. Everything wrong with my life started in that moment.”
The last of the sun had gone and Jack was hard to see now, but it didn’t matter. I’d never thought of it before, that he’d lived a life that had been watched, assessed, recorded. I’d never wondered what it would be like to have my own likeness drawn on the front page of the Times. I’d just followed along with everyone else. I, who prided myself on being difficult to fool.
“What really happened, Jack?” I said now. “What is the truth?”
“The truth,” he answered, “is why I wanted to stop thinking. Why I wanted to stop everything.”
The French door opened, and the moment broke. Matron’s voice said, “Nurse Weekes,” her tone like the rap of gunfire. From behind her two voices were rising in argument over the chessboard, and there was still work to be done before curfew. Jack stepped past me, because the patient must always proceed first, followed by the nurse, who must lock the door behind her. He paused in surprise when I grasped his wrist, still in the dark out of sight of Matron, my hand hot on his skin, and pressed Maisey Ravell’s letter into his palm. But he stopped only for a second, then pulled away and walked obediently back toward the light.
I didn’t know why I had done it. It was the wrong thing, the thing that would not help him get any better.
I’ve either started something, I thought, or I’ve finished it. Then I followed him back through the door.