Hero by Paul Butler Page A

mentioned either a job or a lack of one.
    I had been distracted by the men in overalls painting the bandstand. It had all seemed so cheerful—me with the ice creams, the red and blue paint shining under the late June sun—until the reason for these labours suddenly occurred to me. A cool breeze made me shiver, and I turned to see that Lucy had parked herself on the park bench beside the man with crutches. One of her hands was besmirched with grime and I had to wipe it away vigorously before letting her have her cone. I fell into conversation with the veteran, small talk that was interrupted suddenly when I saw Lucy had picked up one of his crutches in her small hand and was using it to try and trip up passersby. I snapped it back and, turning to apologize, met a smile that seemed rueful rather than embittered.
    When Lucy asked why he needed the crutches, Mr. Smith told her plainly, without shame and without a hint of self-pity. Stirred by some indefinable guilt, I blushed and mumbled to Lucy something about the great sacrifice made during the war by “the gentleman,” and by her Uncle Charles.
    Rolling a cigarette, Mr. Smith questioned the word, his calm speech enveloping me, but miraculously evading Lucy, who had already begun to gaze off at the ducks. “Sacrifice implies both willingness and foreknowledge,” he said. His voice, though gentle, carried the vibration of distant cannon fire. He has actually been there, I thought. He has lived through the horror that robbed the world of my brothers, that robbed me of Jack. Every murmur carried a quiet, irrefutable authority. He didn’t need to say any more. With one swift sentence he had wiped the word “sacrifice” from my lexicon of war. It was an untruth, a politician’s word, one among many that floated in the atmosphere and crouched upon the newspaper page. We were allies already.
    Mr. Smith knew who Lucy was, and told me he had served with Mr. Jenson. My imagination, or presumption, did the rest. Was it the scent of stale tobacco that hung about his clothes that made me think of hunger, boarding houses, long days that unemployment renders absent of meaning? Regret stirs in me now. Perhaps I have served both Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jenson poorly by trying to force the issue over tea. Maybe I have merely risked wounding the pride of Mr. Smith—though hopefully he may never know of it—and have burdened my employer, my sister in adversity, to no purpose.
    We are both missionaries, Mrs. Jenson and I, as surely as if we carried tambourines and marched through the street. We focus our energies on the charity of healing—Mrs. Jenson through her marriage, me through whatever potential for “good works” crosses my path—but find ourselves most often merely picking at the scabs of war. When my own neurosis can find no immediate outlet, I feed hers instead.
    This is what happened in the Beehive, I realize. As I leaned over the table urging a solution to a problem that might or might not exist, I felt a warning tug inside me. Who was I to interfere? As poor Mrs. Jenson babbled of institutions, the murmur of voices in the Beehive receded, and I thought I caught the fragment of an exchange behind me.
    â€œWould that impress you?” a man’s voice murmured. “Of course it would,” came the reply, voluptuous in feminine compassion.
    I felt a warning, a swirl of unease. I noticed the woman’s hand reaching to cover her beautiful beetle-shaped brooch, and I pitied her, who seemed to regard the idea of wealth in our age as tasteless.
    When we first met in the haughty tea room at Selfridges, I kept looking over her shoulder, waiting for the real Mrs. Jenson to turn up. Though handsome in her faded way, with her reddish hair and fine-boned face, she was not how I expected a rich woman to look. Her dress and cardigan, though delicately stitched, were coloured neutrally as though their wearer desired nothing better