Charles Todd - A Fearsome Doubt

Easy for Fleming to say, sitting in his sparsely furnished surgery surrounded by stacks of folders of the living dead, the men who had come home shattered in body or spirit.

Locked in by the crowd, his body confined on all sides by people oblivious to his sense of suffocation as the claustrophobia gripped him, wanting to break through them to space and air, fighting to draw a full breath, Rutledge struggled with panic. Even Elizabeth, chatting with a neighbor, was pressing against him, her body warm with excitement and the heat of the fire.

The nightmare surrounded him, unending, like torment meted out carefully to make the pain last. He felt like the Guy, a helpless spectacle.

And then the Guy was consumed, the flames began to die back, and the euphoria of the evening seemed to wane as well. Women began to collect reluctant children, and men with rakes and brooms went to brush some of the ashes back toward the still-red coals at the center. Voices could actually be heard over the din and the crowd started to move in different directions, freeing him at last.

Elizabeth, her face pink from laughter, looked up at him and said gratefully, “Thank you for coming, Ian! I couldn’t have faced it on my own. Although it’s time I learned, isn’t it?” She was holding his arm again, her fingers like individual bands of steel gripping him.

And then as swiftly as he had seemed to suffocate, his mind cleared and he was himself again. He put his hand over hers and managed a smile.

As she moved away to speak to someone else, Rutledge scanned the far side of the smoking remains of the fire for a last time, but the face was not there. The man was not there.

Surely he never had been Elizabeth said, turning to look behind her, “Did you see someone you know? Do you want to try to catch him up?”

“No-!” Rutledge answered abruptly, and then added at Hamish’s prompting, “I- A trick of the light, that’s all. I was wrong.”

It was surely something about the night that had disturbed him, and the noise and the acrid smell of the fireworks lingering in the smoky air. There was no one there “He canna’ be,” Hamish reminded Rutledge. “He’s deid. Like me!”

Deid. Like me!

Rutledge hesitated, on the point of asking Hamish what he knew-what he might have seen. Then-or just now.

But before he could frame the words, he stopped himself.

What if this had nothing to do with the war?

After a very fine dinner with Elizabeth and three of her friends at the hotel just along the High Street, Rutledge drove back to London. Introductions and the subsequent settling into chairs as everyone exclaimed over the success of the evening had given Rutledge time to collect himself and present a polite, pleasant facade in spite of his unsettled state of mind.

It was something he was becoming increasingly good at doing, finding the right mask for his terrors.

Caught up in their own excitement, no one at the table noticed his long silences or made anything of his distraction. He was the outsider among them, and they included him from kindness, expecting nothing in return. He overheard one of the women as she leaned toward Elizabeth and murmured, “He’s absolutely charming! Where did you find him?” as if he were a new suitor.

His hostess had replied dryly, “He was Richard’s best man. I’ve known Ian for ages. He’s been a great comfort.”

For Elizabeth’s sake, he was glad to find himself accepted. He couldn’t have borne it if he’d embarrassed her. Yet it could have happened all too easily.

Frances had been wrong-he was not ready to meet old friends and pick up the threads of an old life. There were too many walls that shut him off from people who remembered a very different man called Ian Rutledge.

Still, Elizabeth had not let him go without extracting a promise that he’d be back on 10 November.

“You will ask for leave, I hope,” she said anxiously, a reminder. “And Chief Superintendent Bowles will agree, won’t he?”

“I see no reason why not,” Rutledge responded, bending his head to kiss her cheek. “I’ll be here. If I can.”

What he didn’t tell her was that-with or without leave-he had no intention of being in London on 11 November.

But on the long drive home, watching the headlamps pick out the verges of the road and pierce the heavy shadows of trees and hedgerows, Rutledge had found himself seeing again and again the face he’d carried with him since the bonfire.

It lingered against his will, as if once having surfaced it refused to be stuffed down once more into the bleak depths from which it had risen. And there was no respite, for traffic was too light to distract him. The cloudy, moonless night seemed to be its ally, and even Hamish was silent. By the time Rutledge reached the outskirts of London, the shoulders and chest attached to the face had fleshed themselves out, bit by bit gathering substance like a reluctant ghost. They belonged not in the proper English clothing Rutledge thought he’d glimpsed tonight, but in a torn and bloody uniform.

And Hamish said, as if he’d been waiting for Rutledge to reach this point, “I’d no’ pursue it. There were sae many…”

In the pale morning light, as he made his way to Scotland Yard the next day, Rutledge realized he had arrived at the same conclusion.

It was 9 November. Rutledge was at the Yard, preparing to clear his desk for leave due to begin that afternoon. He was looking forward to returning to Marling, in Kent. Not just as an escape from London to avoid the public commemoration on the eleventh, but as an opportunity to prove to himself that the memories awakened on Guy Fawkes Day were no more than an isolated and unexpected response to the noisy press of people around the bonfire and his own restiveness over the approaching celebration of the Armistice. There had been no recurring episodes. For that he was grateful.

He knew very well that it had become something of an obsession, this celebration. Hamish harped on the date, as did the newspapers, giving him no peace.

For weeks he’d watched the preparation of the temporary structure that London was building to honor the nation’s casualties of war. In fact, seeing every stage had been unavoidable as he came and went at the Yard. The permanent memorial would not be completed until the next year, but much had been made of the eventual design and placement.

A Cenotaph: a monument to the dead buried elsewhere…

And so many, so very many of them were: a sea of white crosses in foreign ground, some with names, some with no more than the bleak word Unknown. But he had known them; he and officers like him had sent them out to die, young and inexperienced and eager, dead before he could recall their names or remember their faces… Dead before he’d had the chance to turn them into real soldiers, with some small hope of survival. Dead and on his conscience, like weighted stones. And no time to mourn Nor did he need a Cenotaph standing close by Whitehall and Downing Street as a focus for his grief and loss. He-like countless others-carried them with him every day. The men he had served with, shared hardship and fear with, bled and suffered with, were as sharp in his memory and his nightmares as they had been before they died. As was the recurring voice that lived in his mind. A reminder in every waking moment of the Scots he’d led and the one Scot he’d been forced to execute during the horrendous bloodbath that had been the Battle of the Somme.

Invading his thoughts, Hamish scolded, “Ye’ve read the same lines three times, man!”

Realizing he’d done just that, Rutledge finished the paragraph and signed the report, setting it aside to be handed to Superintendent Bowles. His mind often grappled with the long nightmare of the trenches, the blighted landscape of northern France, the narrowed focus of trying somehow to protect the men under him, and the black despair of failing. Sometimes these seemed more real than the paperwork in front of him.