came to see me every day and took me out in the wheelchair and tried to get me walking and talking again. But, though I did start walking, I remained universally, unalterably, dismally morose and mute. Pretty girls were the last thing I wanted to see: what earthly use could I be to a woman, pretty or otherwise?
The only woman I wanted to see, the only woman I could be any use to, was Isobel, my sister. She still adored me, the more so now that I had a war wound, which to her made me a genuine war hero. She wrote me a couple of letters from London before she could get away for a visit. “Poor you,” she said in one of them, resolutely refusing to hide from my problem, as others were apt to do. “But I’ve been reading this new book by a doctor, a head doctor—Sigmund someone, a German of all people, or an Austrian, one of the enemy anyway—and he says that people who can’t have full sex often channel it into other areas, intellectual, or sporting, or social. That’s what you can do— become some big shot at the War Office. You speak fluent German and you have a war wound. Soon as you are up and walking—well, up and limping—they’ll have to do something for you.”
Sisters can get away with that sort of crack and I looked forward to her letters. They, more than anything, helped me over my depression. And when, eventually, she came to see me, toward the end of May, she worked her magic even more. She was dressed in her nurse’s uniform—pale blue—and looked very fetching, my little sister now all grown up and Miss Efficiency herself. First, she refused to take me out in the wheelchair, saying, “No, you can walk the whole way, come on.”
“Do they teach you cruelty in that hospital?”
“Come on!” And she marched off down the corridor.
I followed.
That afternoon we toured the whole grounds, the first time I had done so on foot. I told her as much. “Good,” she said. “Great. But you’ve got to get better quickly anyway—they need your bed for people who are worse off.”
Worse off. She was right. Feeling sorry for myself, turning my back on the war, wallowing six miles down, I had never stopped to think of the people who had had rather more than their prostate destroyed. I had almost forgotten the people I had buried. Izzy’s sibling “cruelty” shook me back to the real world.
But what finally caused me to shake myself free of Sedgeberrow was when Isobel screwed up her courage that day and said, “Hal, can I ask you something really, really personal?”
Oh dear. She sounded like our father on the day when he told me about my paternal prospects. Now what? Was Izzy pregnant? Was she secretly married to someone our parents thought undesirable? Did she want me to intervene, to soften the blow?
“You can ask, Izzy,” I replied. “I’m not promising to answer, if it’s too personal, but fire away. I’ve never been a spy, if that’s what you’re going to ask.”
“No, no, nothing like that,” she said. “If you were a spy, I shouldn’t expect you to tell me, unless it was in a note, to be opened only after your death.”
I couldn’t help but grin. My sister always had a gruesome and romantic imagination, which for her were pretty much the same thing.
“Go on, then, what’s your question?”
I remember that we were sitting on a bench, near the ducks, which—I had decided—commuted between some distant patch of water and the garden vegetables that grew on the hospital grounds.
“Now, you’re not to get angry—promise?”
“How can I—?” Promise!
“All right, all right. I promise.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Here goes.” She took my hand in hers. “I couldn’t say this sort of thing to Ma and Pa—they would die—but… well, you’ve been in Munich and Berlin, and war… Are you, are you… you’ve had this depression, I know, so it’s unlikely, but—”
“Say it, Izzy, say it. Am I what?”
“I mean…” It came out in a rush: “You’re not homosexual, are you?”
“Good grief, Izzy!” I jerked my hand away from hers and groaned. “Of course I’m not queer. You’ve seen how depressed I’ve been, and you know why. What on earth makes you think I’m queer?” I groaned again. “Jee-sus!”
“Well, I know it’s silly,” she said, giggling out of relief, I think, that it was now all out in the open. “You could