Peter Robinson - Before the poison

Ernest wouldn’t have listened to her. He would have dismissed her as a foolish romantic woman, told her she didn’t understand the necessities of modern life, that sometimes you had to do things that were unpleasant. For your country. For a way of life you believe in. He would have said she was an idealist, a dreamer. Well, perhaps she was, she argued back, but it was better than being a monster. Ernest had scolded her for taking the letter. Grace had realised that all her protests were falling on deaf ears, and in the meantime, Billy went off to fight the Mau Mau, unaware of the storm he had unleashed back at Kilnsgate.

My main course arrived shortly after I had finished the half-dozen excellent Namibian oysters, the springbok perfectly pink and tender to the knife. I poured a glass of red and started to eat, gazing around. A young couple, on their honeymoon by the looks of them, sat to my left. Opposite was an elderly colonial type, complete with brick-red complexion and white handlebar moustache, who was probably complaining to his stout wife about the natives. One rather noisy group was celebrating a birthday or anniversary at the far end, and the only other person within my field of vision was another lone diner, like myself, reading a book on his iPad.

Perhaps Grace had poisoned her husband. I had to accept that I may have been wrong about that. I was certainly way off beam with my paedophile theory. Everything she had experienced and had been told to forget had no doubt burst back into her consciousness after her talk with Billy and her discovery of the letter offering a job at Porton Down. She couldn’t be party to any of that. She was a nurse, Ernest was a doctor; they were supposed to save lives, not take them. Besides, she would have remembered the sinister Meers and his thuggish corporals; rightly or wrongly, they were the kind of people she associated with Porton Down.

In a way, if Grace had been responsible for her husband’s death, that made us birds of a feather. Perhaps I had wanted to prove her innocent because I wanted, in some odd, vicarious way, to partake of that innocence myself? But it had turned out all wrong. My plan had backfired on me.

Oh, there were plenty of differences, certainly. Ernest probably had a few good years left in him, despite his dicky heart, whereas Laura wasn’t dying quickly enough, and her agony increased with every moment. Grace had done humanity a favour; I had done Laura a favour. She had begged me and begged me, and every time I refused, my heart broke a little more. In the end, I could stand neither her pain nor my own any longer. A little extra morphine wasn’t such a difficult thing to manage at home, and if our doctor suspected, as he probably did, then he clearly thought it as much of a mercy as I did. I held her hand and watched her die, looked into her eyes and saw the life go out of them, took her in my arms, felt the spirit depart, leaving in its wake something like the silence at the end of a magnificent symphony. The only difference was, you could play the music again and again; a life plays only once.

I told myself that I had done Laura a favour, and I knew in my heart that it was true, but I had still killed her. Did that make me a murderer? Did it make me a monster? Grace, too? I don’t know. Sometimes I think so. Sometimes I feel that the guilty knowledge of what I have done, my shabby, heartbreaking secret, separates me from the rest of humanity, from the others there in the dining room that night. Maybe that is why I sought such solitude at Kilnsgate. But there I met Grace Fox, and if I had ever wondered why on earth I became obsessed with her, as I had many times on my quest, then I knew now.

Taking another look around the room, I finished my glass of wine and carried the rest of the bottle back up to my room, where I sat outside and drank on the balcony in the warm African night, listening to the cables thrum in the marina and the breeze rustling the palms below until the birds began to sing and the sun began to rise and its tentative rays silhouetted Signal Hill and Table Mountain.

Extract from the journal of Grace Elizabeth Fox (ed. Louise King), October, 1945. Indian Ocean

Wednesday, 10th October, 1945 The dolphins play alongside us nearly every day now. We are in that still, hot, humid world where the ocean is a blue mirror and everything seems to move slowly, as if through thickened air. I am going home again. I am still not clear why I volunteered to travel out to Singapore again, except perhaps that I needed some sense of coming full circle, of finding some sort of peace with myself. And for all these years, no matter what, I have never been able to get rid of the feeling that it should have been me who died out on that raft, not Brenda. I have carried the guilt of survival around with me through France and Belgium, through a defeated Germany, among the mass graves, the unbearable stench of the huts, and the walking shadows of Belsen, a ruined Berlin full of liberating Russians. Hell on earth. I still have my guilt, and I have not yet found peace. Now I sit on deck after midnight, smoking, and strands of my hair stick to the sweat on my brow and cheeks and neck. Was it a mistake to come back here on the hospital ship after we had won the war in Europe? I don’t think so. Deep inside, I knew it was always Singapore where I really came of age, where I lost what innocence I had. Not to men. I do not mean that kind of innocence. Despite Stephen’s kiss, it was remarkably easy to remain the faithful, responsible married woman while all around me lost their hearts for a night, or a week. I would be lying if I did not admit there were times when I would have liked to shed my inhibitions and everything else and join in, and I came close to that with Stephen. The innocence I lost was of a different sort. Everyone on this hospital ship is from the ‘liberated’ Japanese prison camps on Sumatra, or from Changi, in Singapore, or Stanley, in Hong Kong. Some were among the hordes who arrived after us at Padang, when there were no more ships. They could do nothing but wait there until the Japanese came and took them prisoner. Others had simply been found wandering in the jungle, abandoned by their defeated guards after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered. Nobody knew what camps they were from. They have all been nursed and given nutrition in local hospitals and are now on their way home. There are no battlefield wounds, no missing limbs, but there are infections. Luckily, we have penicillin. Most are men, but there are also many civilian women and children, and sisters. Most evenings I spend with Kathleen. She never smiles now and does not speak – I suspect as much as anything else that she must be embarrassed by the change in her voice the missing teeth have caused. I should also imagine that her surprising laugh is all but gone now. Our former statuesque beauty is a string bean, weighing only six stone, legs like matchsticks, knees like cricket balls. Her beautiful blonde hair is stringy and lustreless, torn away in patches, her scalp raw. At first, I did not recognise her, nor she me. It took one of the other sisters who had seen how inseparable we were on our first journey all those years ago to reintroduce us. It is hard. Kathleen does not remember very much. She has no passion for life. At night she has frightening dreams – they all do – and she cries out a lot. In the daytime heat she is listless and inert. She has no interest in anything. I try to talk to her about ordinary daily matters, the routine, who is causing trouble, where we are, the dolphins, but it means nothing to her. Kathleen is broken. She hums rambling melodies to herself a lot. I managed to learn from the other sister, whose name is Mary, that Doris died of dysentery in the Stanley camp. She need not have died, but the Japanese withheld all medicines the Red Cross sent, so she could not be treated. Kathleen nursed her until the end. Mary also told me what happened at the hospital in Hong Kong on Christmas Day, 1941. We had heard rumours before, back in Singapore, but the reality was even worse, the sisters subjected to the most vile degradations, then killed, and the men, doctors and patients alike, bayoneted. Stories had also started making the rounds about the Banka Island massacre. Some Australian nurses I had known and watched sail out of Singapore just before us on the Vyner Brooke were bombed and shipwrecked, as we were, but managed to get to Banka Island, where they tried to surrender to the Japanese. When the Japanese patrol came to the beach, they first took all the men around the headland and shot them, then they forced the women to walk out into the sea and machine-gunned them all. One Australian nurse survived – the bullet went straight through her leg without causing any major damage – played dead, and eventually went on to survive a prison camp and tell her story. I asked a number of the officers about Stephen Fawley, but they knew nothing. One thought he had probably been killed in the fighting. Either way, nobody had seen him later, in the camps. But for the few patients who can, and do, talk, the rest are like Kathleen. They have lost their will to live. They are frightened of their own shadows, frightened of what is to come; they live in a perpetual state of fear. Though they have been half starved, they can hardly eat, as their digestive systems have weakened and suffered permanent damage from starvation at the hands of their captors. We feed them as best we can, but for the nightmares we can do nothing at all. Even as I sit here now, in the sultry beauty of the tropical night, feeling the peaceful motion of the ship, the gentle slapping of water against the sides, I cannot fail to be aware of the sound rising up from the depths of the ship’s wards. It is a sound like no other I have ever heard on earth, made up of a thousand nightmares, the dying boys calling for their mothers, the endless wailing from the completely unhinged, and hovering around it all, the terrible silence of those who have lost everything – their voices, even themselves.