Another World by Pat Barker Read Free Book Online Page B

the corner of the bathroom where he kept his shaving things. Whenever Nick asked, Geordie took it down and let him look into it, but the reflection that peered back at him was blurry, swollen, distorted by the irregularities in the metal, never the clear reflection you got in glass. Only it didn’t break. Grandad dropped it on the floor once, to show that it didn’t break.
    The mirror had gone with him through France, but it couldn’t have been sentiment that bound him to it, for he avoided everything else to do with the war. Never spoke of it. Would walk a mile out of his way to avoid passing the war memorial. And yet every morning of his life he shaved using that mirror, the same he’d propped up against sandbags in France, had brought back across the Channel when he was wounded and taken out with him again. He would watch Nick looking at himself. ‘It’s funny, Grandad,’ Nick would say, pulling faces to distort his reflection still further. Geordie said nothing, just waited patiently, and then when Nick had finished hung the mirror back on the hook.
    He said very little. With Nick’s father he was deferential in that curiously English way, though Nick sensed that beneath the surface respect there was a certain degree of contempt. ‘A man among boys, a boy among men.’ Whether Geordie knew the phrase or not, that had been his verdict. Though at the same time he was pleased that his Mollie, by marrying a schoolmaster, had taken several crucial steps up in the world. He was careful to mind his p’s and q’s whenever his son-in-law was around. Literally. He was uncomfortable with his own way of speaking, the local accent, the stammer, his inability to articulate. The stammer was bad in those years. There were times when he seemed to be hoiking up words like phlegm, raking them out of his gut.
    But the silence went deeper than that. His body, stripped off in the garden – the wound in his side – suggested questions. Why? How? What happened? Nick would ask, but there were no answers. The past was hidden, veiled in silence, like his grandfather’s head behind its screen of cigarette smoke.
    ‘You know it’s cancer?’
    ‘Yes. Dr Morton told me.’
    Neil Shepherd’s in his early fifties. His face is grey in the grey light falling through the tall windows to the right of his desk. The growling and gurgling from the pipes that run along the wall behind him suggest ominous possibilities, but not as ominous as the state of Geordie’s intestines.
    ‘I’m afraid it’s spread beyond the stomach. It wouldn’t be operable even in a much younger man. I’m sorry.’
    ‘Yes,’ Nick says. ‘That’s more or less what I expected.’
    A pause. ‘How would you describe his state of mind?’
    ‘Seems fairly cheerful.’
    ‘Clear, mentally?’
    ‘Why do you ask?’
    ‘He said something the other day that seemed to imply he thought the pain was coming from his bayonet wound.’
    ‘He’s said that to me too.’
    ‘But he must know it isn’t true.’
    Nick hesitates. ‘When he came back from the war they had a memorial service for his brother, who was killed. And as they were leaving the church his mother, my great-grandmother, turned to him and said, “It should have been you.”’ He sees Shepherd wince. ‘I think he needs to believe it’s the bayonet wound that’s killing him. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I don’t think it’s just confusion or ignorance. He wants to believe it.’
    ‘Even after all this time?’
    Nick pulls a face. ‘He seems to be getting closer to it, if anything. The nightmares are back.’
    ‘Yes, he’s very restless at night. Are you sure Mrs – I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten her name.’
    ‘Mrs Wilson. His daughter. My aunt.’
    ‘Do you think she can cope?’
    ‘Well, she won’t be coping on her own. I don’t think there’s any question of putting him in a home.’ He pauses. ‘How long do –’
    Shepherd’s already shaking his head. ‘It really is