"The Lost Angel"

As the day remained sunny and not entirely unsummery, I got off the 76 around Southgate Road and began the walk back home. I was eager to read the Rutledge manuscript, but if my inner six-year-old would sit still a lot longer if I tired her out a bit first. Like a true New Englander, I could feel rain in the wind, which would mean confinement to a fug-filled bus full of damp and grumpy Londoners, so I decided to enjoy the open air as long as possible.

My cell phone began buzzing in my backpack, rattling against my keys and causing a racket loud enough to make a passing jogger turn and regard me warily as I swung the bag over my shoulder and fumbled to extract the phone.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?”

“Nearly home. You?”

“Just finishing up here.”

“Where is here?”

“Covent Garden.” The blare of a truck horn bellowed down the line and I heard Mitch’s muttered curse before he continued. “Some American family gave me fifteen pounds!”

I giggled. “Someone didn’t read the exchange rate properly, me thinks.”

“I’m not complaining, but I don’t want to be around when they figure it out for themselves. Anyway, you want burritos for dinner?’

“Have I mentioned to you lately that I think you are wonderful?”

I could hear him snicker. “Not in the past few hours, ungrateful thing that you are.”

“How about I let you pick the movie, then?”

Neither of our families had seen it as worthwhile to pay for a TV license in a house in which they were no longer residing, and the two of us decided we’d be damned—or starving—if we forked over it. So we watched one hell of a lot of movies. And ate a great many burritos from this new place in Islington that had given out free food the day it opened and got us both hooked. In the seven or eight weeks we’d been—co-habitating, I guess is the best word—Mitch and I had watched nearly a hundred movies and I’m sure the mail-rental company was kicking themselves that we were getting charged a flat monthly rate to rob them blind.

“Whatever came in today is fine. Chicken for you?”

“Yuppers. No beans, extra cheese.”

“Sounds good. I’ll probably be back by seven—ok?”

“Perfect.”

“I think I’m about to be hit by a bus.”

And he hung up.

Thanks, Mitch.

I pushed open the door to the house and gathered up the mail that had accumulated on the floor, adding it to the trash bag hanging behind the kitchen door, tossing the next delivery of DVDs on the living room coffee table, and put the kettle on for tea. Ten minutes later saw me in my ratty black sweatpants and an enormous t-shirt I had inherited at some point in my wanderings, curled up on the sofa beside a large mug of tea and tucking into the photocopies of what looked to be Barnaby Rutledge’s last manuscript.

I should have known I was in for something strange as soon I read the author’s note on the second page:

Author’s Note:

These stories, like so many of the others, are all true, for there is no story written that is not in some way the confession of a truth. The face of the confessor is unimportant, for in revealing his tale, he ceases to become unique and instead joins the procession of human smoke that rises from the ashes of history and disappears without trace. It is only I, who am watching you now, as ever, who remains.

BR.

“Holy hell,” I muttered, laying the sheet face down on the coffee table before looking down at the one beneath it.

Dedication:

For the one who has never left me.

I pulled the blanket on the back of the couch over my legs and shimmied down beneath it, as if hiding.

The stories were all set in a ward in a national hospital somewhere in London. A nurse on the night watch was walking from bed to bed and checking on the men who slept—or didn’t—on each. As she looked at them, another story began, whether of their childhood, their wartime experience, or whatever specific memory defined them and defined the cause of their madness.

They were beautifully well-written, with long, elegant sentences that made you feel like there was someone, tall and thin and wasted, who was curled up beside you and whispering in your ear. And because it was so graceful, it was all the more frightening. The beauty of it transfixed you, and by the time you realized what this crazed man had done to his characters—or what they had done to him, since it seemed that it was their combined madness that had sent him to this imaginary hall lunacy—it was too late to look away. Despite the residual heat of the day, I was curled up under the blanket and the fringes of it were dusting my face by the time I was a third of the way through the stories.

The one that stuck with me the most was the one in the middle, a kind of intermission in this insane literary circus. It was the story of the nurse herself, who looked in at each of the men in the ward. Rutledge described her as “too tall for delicacy and eyes just a little too wide-set and wide for beauty, with a tide of dark hair curling behind her ears and small, childlike hands. Standing in the doorway, a man might be fooled into believing her an angel of mercy in that hall of tormented spirits. But one look at those eyes showed that she was nothing more than a ghost herself, a soul, like all the others, frozen in another time and forced forever to hide in the darkness of memory.”

The other stories told of violence, of angry death or shouted curses that had chased these men into this ward. The Nurse’s story (we never learn her name. She is only referred to as “The Nurse”, or “The Lost Angel”, which is also the title of the story) was different. She had grown up nearly mute, speaking only when there was no other way of communicating, and no one was nearby to speak for her. It wasn’t that she was afraid or unable to speak, it was that “words held no power over her”, which seemed utterly contradictory to me. That a woman created with words could refuse the power of them made her somehow disturbing, and yet, infinitely more real than the other characters. It was as if she had managed to break free of the author’s control and was wandering around the book of her own free will. Anyway, she was loved by a man (who also had no name) who had written her a tune on the piano, since she refused to hear any spoken declaration of his feelings for her. They had been engaged when the war broke out, and had both enlisted, he as a Captain and she as a nurse. He was lost in “the great fire of 1917”, which I could only assume was 3rd Ypres, more commonly known as the Battle of Passchendale.

The man who loved her had written her several letters from the battle, telling her of the horrors of the trenches and of the lunatic beauty of shells exploding at night and the “exquisite horror of treading the circles of the damned”. In truth, he sounded like the maddest of them all. When she had opened the letter, she had begun to hear his song playing on the air, and assumed him to be dead. When no telegram arrived, and no news of his injury or capture was forthcoming, she had burned the letter. The music had sounded from the flames. Now, wherever she went, “she was followed by the cadence of a melody she knew better than her own soul”. The reason she was in the ward, peering in at all these men, was in the hopes of finding her fiancé among them. But there was no recognition in any of the dull eyes before her. She never spoke—indeed, it was assumed by most of the men that she was unable to speak.

“But what use were words,” Rutledge asked at the end of the story, “crude, useless words that could speak only of mud and of death and of pain, when in her head played endlessly the promise of paradise and the lost wonder of eternity?”

It was melodramatic, yes, and perhaps a little more dated than the others because of the nature of its subject matter, but I was shivering when I had finished reading it. The room seemed filled with ghosts and with ghostly music and try as I might, I couldn’t help but hear the footsteps of that silent, haunted nurse, forever treading the halls, searching for something she would never…

“Do you want to eat in here or in the kitchen?”

I let out a yelp and tumbled off the couch.

“What the—are you alright?”

“When the hell did you come in?”

“Like, five minutes ago—didn’t you hear me say “Hi Kip, I have dinner?”

The smell of spiced chicken and peppers began to waft across the room and I sat up, disentangling myself from the blanket and blinking at Mitch.

“No, actually. Jesus, you scared me.”

“Sorry. What are you reading, then?”

I held up the book and gave him a brief explanation of the stories while we carried plates and glasses into the living room. I tucked Mr. Rutledge back into his folder, slid him back into my bag, and settled back down on the couch with Mitch’s laptop on the coffee table between us.

“My, my. Sounds like a charming subject matter. So—what’s come in, then?” He asked, tucking into his burrito with gusto.

“Umm…” I giggled. “My Fair Lady and The Green Mile. What the hell?”

“Mmm…My Fair Lady. Audrey Hepburn’s better looking than Tom Hanks.”

“Fair enough.”

We sat, chewing and singing along at intervals, and I expressed the wish that all lower-middle class workers in England really did burst into song at every opportunity. The group dances would make economic history much more interesting. Mitch snorted and turned up the volume to drown out my ruminations.

Do you know the scene where Higgins brings Eliza to the races and she goes on and on about how her aunt died of influenza—“fairly blue with it, she was”? If you do, take a look at the way Freddie looks at her while she’s giving that little speech. That, I realized belatedly, was the same way Ned had been looking at me while I was rambling on earlier that afternoon. And I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it, even as I felt a furious blush rising to my cheeks.

“So tell me,” Mitch said, as the ‘intermission’ played, “how did you manage to find this mad Mr. Rutledge?”

“I met a guy in one of my classes who is working on his as part of his dissertation. He said he’d loan me some, but we had this at the museum and I figured I’d—“

“Wait, wait, wait. You ‘met a guy’?” I thought Mitch’s eyebrows were going to raise themselves right off his forehead. “As in ‘met a guy’?”

“What?”

“You know what I mean!” He poked one absurdly strong finger into my arm.

“Ow, you maniac! No—I mean…well, we did go out for coffee.”

“Alright, do you want me to alert the media, or just your mother?”

I swatted at him. “It’s nothing! Just—“ and he burst out laughing.

“Whatever you say, Miss Philby.” The ‘intermission’ scene faded and Rex Harrison began stalking across the screen once more.

“Funny,” Mitch mumbled through the last few bites of burrito. “I would have assumed poetry or something to get a nice girl to notice you, not a bunch of awful madmen in a war hospital.” He sniggered. “This bloke must have you down to a tee.”