Her mind returned to the single occasion he had told her of a different experience, more harrowing than that of war. How, a long time ago, his village was attacked, how his father was axed to death, and his mother dragged away. How he had fled into the forest. Matteous had wept soundlessly, clutching Kate’s arm with a shaking hand – not for long, just a few halting sentences. He had not spoken of it again.
London had been under bombardment for months, with German aircraft flying over the city centre at the most unexpected times. During the previous fortnight, however, all had been quiet. The air-raid sirens had fallen silent – almost eerily silent, for her mind was programmed to hear them. Barkston Gardens had been spared until now. Her neighbourhood apparently held little appeal: no factories, no government offices, no harbour, no prominent buildings. It was like living in a village. One or two pubs and restaurants, some shops, a school, small gardens, a chemist, a church. Children played in the street – how wonderful, playing in the eye of the storm, how superior of them! The only incursions on normality were the air-raid sirens. And the mandatory blackout.
Should she offer to put him up at her flat? Her heart said yes, but her head said no. Matteous would quite likely be returning to the Congo, although she could not imagine what sort of life awaited him there. The daily hour in his company, the wary rapprochement and the struggle to find words, the sounds of the ward and the intermittent voices and laughter from the courtyard, all these things gave her an unprecedented sense of kinship with a stranger. She could not speak to Oscar or Emma about this, nor did she wish to: they would not understand. Oscar and Emma lived in a different world.
She would find lodgings for him in the neighbourhood, not too close and not too far.
A black beacon in a surf of beds. She saw him at once when she entered the vast ward, which for the past weeks had served as his bivouac. It was indeed a bivouac, a foxhole into which he had dug himself. But today Matteous was up and dressed in an old, shabby uniform. Hardly anyone spoke, and he kept quiet himself. A few nurses were attending to him; their manner was brisk, though not without kindness. He stared at them as though they were apparitions drifting by. Clouds over a battlefield.
Kate stood in the doorway, waving to him. He took a step forward, stiffly like an old man. The men lying in the beds on either side nodded towards him as he came past, one raised a hand in greeting, all in silence. A salute to a soldier, a solo parade reviewed by a small army of patients brought in from all over, bandaged and splinted and patched up. Matteous, soldier, made his way across Africa and was never the same again. Now he made his way across the ward, to the door where Kate stood waiting. She took his luggage: a wicker basket. A basket with a lid. He turned around one last time with a shy, near-rueful glance, as though taking flight from an enemy that had already been defeated. He raised his hand to an imaginary cap, and went through the door which Kate held open for him.
On their way to the exit they paused in the courtyard overlooked by his cubicle, from where he used to hear the nurses’ voices. He smelled the jasmine Kate had told him about, the hedges and the flowers: fragrances of a foreign continent.
She led him gently past the garden, through the reception hall, to the street outside. They went to catch the bus Kate always took to the city centre. Matteous seemed half asleep, she thought, or rather, as if he were dreaming. His movements were unsure, everything about him seemed dumbfounded. She realised that London was unlike anything he had ever before seen. And that the ease with which she walked down the street with him was unsettling.
Kate had found him a bedsit on Earls Court Road, ten minutes away from her flat. She had not yet told Matteous about this, and was unsure about his reaction. She explained when they were sitting side by side in the bus. Did he understand, did he know what she meant? He stared motionless out of the window, incredulity in his eyes at the city he found himself in. He had spoken of Élisabethville a few times, but to her it had sounded more like a sprawling village.
She sensed his bewilderment, and repeated her news about the room she had rented for him. He replied with a quick fist to his heart, and gazed out of the window again. The route travelled by the bus was not exactly cheering. At the Richmond Royal Hospital all was clear-cut and regulated, but outside all was devastation. The whole bus route was a miracle, as Kate reminded herself daily. Despite the danger and disruption, London Transport kept daily life moving. Buses had to run, and they did. Stops might be bombed beyond recognition, depots shattered, roads impassable, but somewhere, in some magician’s den, new routes were contrived, new bus stops organised, broken vehicles replaced.
