Arnold poured them both tea. ‘Have you worked out how you take it?’ he asked.
Jones gave a small smile. ‘Just milk.’
‘Same as me,’ said Arnold, ‘excellent. Now let me tell you about what we’re going to do … ’
He said that their session that morning would be brief, not even an hour. Subsequent ones would be longer, but he didn’t want to exhaust him. ‘I know you must be very, very tired.’
Jones was. Tired was all he could recall being.
‘I’ll do most of the talking today,’ Arnold went on, and was true to his word. He told Jones that all fifty-two men at the King’s 5th were suffering from neurological disorders. Some had lost part of their memory, some – like Jones – all of it; others held on to far too much. ‘I can’t decide which is the lesser of the two evils,’ Arnold said.
‘Perhaps they’re both as bad,’ suggested Jones, who’d shared a room in London with an officer whose mind was locked in France, the trenches. He couldn’t leave and woke screaming, all the time, trying to claw invisible rats from his skin.
‘Yes,’ said Arnold. ‘Maybe I’ll write a book on it one day. However,’ he reached behind him for a leather-bound journal, ‘this one is for you. As I’m sure you’ve been told, we operate gently here. No shock therapy, no intervention, just … care, coaxing for your mind. The pages here,’ he raised the journal, ‘are blank, waiting for your memories.’ He held it out for Jones to take. ‘Anything that comes to you,’ he said, ‘jot it down directly. View your past as a puzzle, one you must slot together. Don’t let any piece slide away.’
‘I don’t have any pieces,’ Jones said.
‘None?’
Jones hesitated.
‘What is it?’ Arnold leant forward, cloudy eyes sparking, the springs in his chair creaking.
‘They’re just dreams,’ said Jones.
‘There’s no such thing as “just dreams”,’ Arnold said. ‘Tell me about them.’
‘It’s hard to describe.’ Jones stared into the fire, reliving the way he’d wake, covered in sweat, more often than not crying or panting with frustration, his mind a kaleidoscope that never came into focus. ‘I don’t see anything that means anything.’
‘What do you see?’
‘I can’t say exactly.’ How to put words to those anonymous voices, the faceless faces?
‘Feel then?’ said Arnold, persisting.
‘Heat,’ Jones said. ‘I think I was somewhere hot.’
Arnold nodded, gaze unwavering. ‘Anything else?’
Another hesitation. Should he say?
Was there any point?
‘Tell me,’ Arnold urged. ‘What can it cost you?’
Jones sighed. What could it cost him?
He’d already lost it all.
‘There was a woman,’ he said at length. ‘I’m sure there was a woman.’
‘Yes,’ said Arnold, and smiled sadly. ‘There generally is.’
He dreamt of her again that night.
He had his own room. He was grateful for that, for the silence. It was warm, carpeted, with a bureau, a reading lamp, and a view over the snowy front lawns. There was a hot water bottle in the bed. He’d been in far worse, these past months.
Dreamt in far worse.
After a silent dinner (‘I’ve squeezed you into the first sitting,’ Sister Lytton told him when she came to collect him, ‘there’s trifle for dessert’), he’d escaped to it, with barely the energy to undress and wash before he fell into his bed. He lost consciousness within seconds. He always did. He didn’t know how long it took for the dream to begin, but soon it was all he knew. He left the ice, the dark, and felt heat beat on his face, his shoulders.
He was in a tight street; buildings hemmed him in on both sides, coloured canopies obscured the sun’s glare. Crowds of people surrounded him. There was a woman, in a lemon dress, a straw hat, buttery waves.
It was her.
He was sure it was her.
He pushed his way towards her. He was trying to run.
She kept walking, faster, faster, disappearing.
He stopped, climbing onto a stone step, chest rising, falling. Then he saw her again. Too far away, a man in front of her, grinning toothlessly. He felt himself open his mouth, fill his lungs. He thought he might be about to call a name, her name …
His eyes snapped open. Awake. Blackness surrounded him; a heartless contrast to the colour of the place he’d just left. He blinked, trying to recollect where he was now. His skin, beneath his sheets, was soaked. His pulse raced. His toe touched the cold hot-water bottle, and he remembered he was at the King’s 5th.
The dream was already retreating, gone as quickly as it had come.
Shakily, he reached for his journal, and noted down the only things he could recall.
Toothless man.
Noise.
A market?
He let the pencil fall from his hand, and sank his head back on his damp pillow.
He didn’t know what any of it could mean.
Chapter Five
Bombay, Spring 1914
Luke Devereaux’s postcard arrived on a Saturday, leaving three days until he’d be waiting for Maddy in that coffee shop. Three days. It seemed at once an age, and terrifyingly, thrillingly close. Maddy couldn’t make herself believe it would truly happen. Even as she planned how to escape the villa without questions from her mother (she decided to say she was meeting Guy for lunch at the Gymkhana Club; Alice would inevitably discover the lie, but Maddy could worry about that then), it seemed too surreal that she’d truly do it. She tried to imagine how it would be: herself walking into the unknown coffee shop and finding Luke Devereaux there; the two of them at a table, breathing the same air, looking one another in the eye, speaking about … what? She didn’t know. A shiver of pure nerves shot through her, every time she thought of it.
She couldn’t settle to anything that endless, baking weekend. With the exception of church at St Thomas’s Cathedral on Sunday morning, she and Alice spent the entire time at home. There wasn’t a polo or cricket match to break things up, no evening drinks nor dinner party to go to. The heat bore down relentlessly from the cloudless sky, scalding the lawn, the palms and jungle beyond, turning the villa’s shuttered rooms into so many ovens: all thick golden light, and floating dust.
Maddy looked for distractions. She took several baths, enjoying the brief respite of the cool water, the freedom from her corset and stockings. She tried to read, but found herself constantly going over the same paragraph, taking none of the sentences in. She started a letter to Aunt Edie – How are you, up there in Scotland? Have there been any signs of spring springing? I hate to think of you so alone. I wish you could come out to stay, that you’d let me at least ask Mama … – but ran out of steam before she finished the first, sweat-smudged page. She began another to Della – When on earth are you coming back? – then gave up on that too. Her eyes strayed to Luke Devereaux’s postcard on her writing desk, the slant of those words.
I shall be there at noon on Tuesday.
Will you?
Did he realise how little he needed to ask?
She drifted from her desk to her closet, where she spent a shameful amount of time agonising over which gown would be best for a coffee shop. (What would Sylvia Pankhurst think?) She took countless walks, fanning herself in the dappled shade of the garden’s trees, and even, on a whim, went back to the kitchen to see if she could help Cook bake his Sunday Victoria sponge.