Читать книгу My Dear I Wanted to Tell You - Louisa Young - Страница 9

Chapter Four

Flanders, October 1914

‘Where are we, then?’ Purefoy asked Ainsworth, as they clambered off the train.

‘Not a fucking clue, son,’ said Ainsworth. Ainsworth was from Lancashire, not a big man, steady. He was older. He had a wife and kids at home, and if you pressed him, which Purefoy had, once, he’d admit that he’d joined up because it seemed the right thing to do. He didn’t say it in a tough way. He built railway carriages for a living and had been sent to the wrong regiment by clerical error. He didn’t mind. Purefoy liked him. He liked his moustache, his accent, his deep voice, and his imperturbability.

The existence of Ainsworth in some way made up for the unexpected appearance of Johnno the Thief, or Private Burgess, as he was now called. He had caught Purefoy at once with his playful, knowing eyes, and said: ‘Aye aye. What you running away from, then? Upper classes spat you out again, did they?’ His head was thrust forward, as if everything were done on purpose, by his design.

Tall trees lined the road. Grey slates clad the rooves of the town. Horses ambled by. All around them soldiers like themselves were assembling, standing about, clunking through the rain, heading east. The Paddingtons took their turn in the formation, waited, smoked, and finally hitched their packs on to the bus to set off over flat ground, past square-built farms round courtyards full of muddy ducks, houses with their long wet thatched rooves sagging down, as it were, to their knees, like the muddy hems of drooping petticoats. ‘I’m tired already,’ remarked Ainsworth, cheerfully. ‘Don’t know how we’re meant to get through a whole war.’

Several of the men laughed. The sergeant major yelled at them.

Ainsworth started humming a little tune.

Then they were there: Pop. Getting off, the boys clanged softly with kit, and stared. Most hadn’t seen the country before. A boy called Bowells pretended to faint at the lush smell of pigs. Narrow-eyed Couch made – as usual – a point of not being surprised. The others had made a game of his professed cynicism. Only a few of them knew it was because he was under age. His devotion to soldiering was exemplary.

‘Smells like Ferdinand,’ said Bowells. Ferdinand was from Wiltshire. He’d come up on the train to join up in London because – well, he hadn’t told anyone why. There were a few like that in the Paddingtons. ‘Comes of being named after a station,’ Ainsworth had said. ‘You’ll get all sorts.’

‘Oink oink,’ said Ferdinand, who was a bit fat.

Purefoy was happy. His feet felt big and tender in his boots. He liked his pack; the webbing, the gun. He liked the fresh cold air. He liked the blokes.

The fields around the little town were dug and mangled. Flatness rolled out before them: wintry and covered, as far as Purefoy could see, with the activity of men. He saw tents, big ones, many. Tracks and roads, metalled or not. Piles of boxes, piles of planks, piles of coal, piles of trunks, piles of sacks, groups of men, carts and limbers, horses, dogs, field kitchens, latrines behind flapping canvases, earth and sky. Graves.

‘It’s all quite simple,’ Captain Harper told them. ‘The Hun is over there. He’s been racing north to the sea, trying to get past us into France. King Leopold – jolly clever move, this – opened the floodgates up there, so that rather than fight to the sea, he brought twenty miles of sea to the fight, so now we see what brave little Belgium is made of . . . All along the line, each side has dug trenches up as far as the coast. So. We’ve stopped the Hun for the moment. However, he’s taken Antwerp, but we have Nieuport, so now we have retreated to Ypres, the regulars . . .’ the real army, as Riley thought of them ‘. . . have been holding them off since the Hun cavalry took the Messine Ridge . . .’

None of the names meant anything to Purefoy. Captain Harper sketched them a map.

‘So the gate-as-it-were, now it’s slammed shut, has been dug in, and we’re going to hold that line . . .’

It took very little time to be used to it all.

‘When do we fight?’ wondered Purefoy, shovel in blistered hand. The digging was heavy, claggy, but soft. He was getting to see exactly what Belgium was made of.

*

He received a letter.

She wrote:

. . . I dare say it’s rather complicated getting your letters over there, and sending letters out – not as bad as it was for Captain and Lady Scott and the Antarctic explorers, of course, being on the other side of the world plus being frozen in six months at a time; but even so I don’t know where you are or when you’ll get this – so I’ll write and hope for the best. I hope the army is everything a boy could wish – I have to say it sounds like hell to me, but I’m a girl and things seem different to us – no, to be honest I hope they’ve discovered you have terrible flat feet or something and can’t really go. Chin up, old bean – is that the sort of thing to say? Really I haven’t the least idea how to be a soldier’s correspondent. But then I really can’t imagine that you have the slightest idea how to be a soldier. I suppose they teach you – but nobody is going to teach me. So if my letters are all wrong please forgive your dear old friend – Nadine

He put it with the letters he had received at the training camp. The first one read: ‘Golly Riley that was a very sudden absquatulation. What happened? Did your dad disown you? Have you got Sir Alfred’s jewellery under your cloak? When will you come back through London? I had to go to Sir Alfred to find your mother’s address to ask for your address, and your regiment and so on. Imagine you having a regiment! Well at least there’s no hun where you are now, wherever you are . . .’ The next, a picture postcard of the Peter Pan statue, said: ‘Your Park Misses You – sorry is that too facetious? Let me know how you are and if you need anything.’ And so on, in the same vein. Chatty. Sweet.

He would have written back. He would have found a way. He fully meant to.

*

They fought on 11 November. The Prussian Guard, that morning, were taking Hooge, just north of the Menin Road. They’d broken through. The real army was fully occupied already. So everyone else there was – cooks, orderlies, clerks, servants, engineers, Riley – had to go in, kill them, force them back to their own line.

He fought. Hurtling towards each other, undodgeable, across a field. Clumps, scraps of turf, just a dark field under the pale sky, cold air, light rain. As he ran, breathless and terrified, his heart clenched, a big sudden clench, and from it radiated surges of . . . something, something strong, shuddering . . . It is fear, he thought. It is fear, concentric fear. Fear is strength: direct it. He shot. The man spun. He bayoneted him.

He had to pull the bayonet out again, which was strange. And that wasn’t an end: it was just a moment on a long line of moments, and time went on, and they went on. He stepped away in a mist of red, a numbness spread across him, a sense of capacity. He smelt the blood, and took on the mantle of it. He ran on, screaming, till he found himself alongside Ainsworth, and felt safer. Ainsworth’s body was warm during the night, against the rim of a shell-hole, packing an old jam tin with greasy mud and bitter shell fragments. Lid on, make a hole, position fuse. Strike your light on the striker-pad strapped to your wrist . . . light the fuse. Wait, with it fizzing in your hand – wait just long enough so that it won’t land unexploded, allowing Fritz to pick it up and throw it back, but not so long that it blows your hand off. Or your head.

It is not clear how long this wait should be.

Hurl.

They hurled all they had, then things were being hurled at them so they took off.

During First Ypres, as that period came to be known, every second man fighting was killed or wounded, though Purefoy didn’t know that.

*

The first time he was aware of coming back to himself, there was straw beneath him, men around him, barn roof above him, smell of animals – what had happened?

Someone was talking. Johnno the – Burgess.

‘Should’ve been at Mons,’ he was saying. ‘You think this was bad? Mons was bad. Ten days going in the wrong direction, then six thousand French reservists turned up from Paris in six hundred taxis – What? I thought. Taxis? From Paris? If I only talked français I’d hail me one and get a lift back there . . .’ Burgess had been transferred from the remains of another platoon, and liked to be sure that everyone knew.

Purefoy was trying to remember things: arriving in Belgium, long, looping rivers, peasants, farms, steeples, markets, the bus driver when they arrived at Poperinghe saying: ‘All right, boys, this is Pop.’ Flanders meant Drowned Lands in Flemish. Like flounder, he thought. Amsterdam was not so far. Just over there. The other side.

I killed a man.

He had thought killing a man you could look in the face would seem more honourable, but no. He would be happy not to get that red feeling again, those concentric waves from his heart. He hadn’t seen his face anyway.

I knew a German once. Knife-grinder, used to come to the house. And the anarchist. What was his name? Franz.

He stared and started, and sat up again. Just had to get the Hun to go home, then they could go home, let the politicians sort it out. They couldn’t really mean us to be doing this.

In the corner, someone was weeping and shaking, like a Spartan after battle. There was a word for it, he’d read it – what was it? The Shedding. Shedding the fear and the horror of what you have just seen and done. They had it all organised. Captain Harper was patting his shoulder and looking a bit lost.

Some others were playing cards. A Second Lieutenant was writing a letter. He lay down again. Sat up again. What the fuck? What the fucking fuck? What was he doing?

He couldn’t stand the quiet so he went outside: the moon was looking at him and the stars were rolling around. So he went back into the barn. There was snow on his hat.

Burgess was telling Ferdinand he’d met a bloke who’d seen Sir Lancelot on his white horse with his golden hair and armour, leading ghostly troops against the Hun, and the Hun had turned and fled in fear and terror. For a moment Purefoy saw the whole scene, clear in his mind, a huge canvas by Sir Alfred.

Ainsworth said, ‘I heard it was St George.’

‘It was Father Christmas,’ said Burgess.

Ferdinand lay, white, eyes staring. Purefoy gave him a cigarette and he took it wordlessly. Purefoy pressed his mind and thought about Sir Lancelot, Sir Gawaine, and Sir Alfred Pleasant, RA, FSA, of Orme Square, Bayswater Road. He thought of Sir Henry Irving who his dad had seen as Shylock at the Lyceum. He thought of Sir James Barrie, and the knights of olden times, and the knights of peaceful times, painters and writers and reciters of Shakespeare, nibs and brushes, greasepaint and burnt sienna, stage-fighting and struggling with a metaphor, have-at-thee and stains of carmine on a smock and The Childhood of the Arthurian Knights. He thought of Sir James and Sir Alfred strolling in Kensington Gardens, discussing the latest exhibition at the Grafton Gallery. He thought of the Hun in Kensington Gardens. Keep that image, he thought. The Hun bashing into London, bashing his mum, bashing Nadine’s door in. We’ve stopped them for the time being; that’s good. That’s what I’m here for. I’m here for a reason. There is a reason for all of this. That is the reason.

After a while Ainsworth came and sat by him.

His mind would not be quiet. He thought: How come men such as us, kind, humorous Ainsworth, young Ferdinand, who really cares only for food, young Bowells, who only wants to fit in – well, that’s part of it, isn’t it? – how have we slipped so easily, apparently so easily, into this bayoneting, murderous, foul-blooded maelstrom? Burgess was different: Burgess had been born fighting. Purefoy knew many Burgesses on the streets of Paddington: the violent, scurvy blood royal of the British criminal class. Understood them, avoided them, loved them, was them, dreamt of living a life where people didn’t have to be like that. That was, after all, his life’s ambition. Or had been. Not to have to be like that.

But the rest of us?

Just keep a hold. You’ve signed on for the duration. Be as good a soldier as you can and it’ll be over soon.

He lit a cigarette, and sat on his bale with his big hands dangling between his knees. He fell asleep where he sat, and his cigarette rolled away on the damp straw, and set nothing alight.

*

And then it was winter, and Christmas, and it did not seem to be over.

Purefoy sent a card to Nadine. He couldn’t help himself. He knew he had abandoned her, but from the letters she sent she didn’t feel abandoned. He had not known how to reply.

Their normal routine was four days in the front line and four in the reserve, which was quieter in the way of not being shot at or shelled, but no less busy. He had sat, in one or two rare moments of quiet, at a wonky wooden table in the local estaminet, drinking odd Belgian coffee and staring at a small oblong of blank army-issue writing paper, trying to remember what he thought about during the long nights on the fire-step, when he had imaginary conversations with her. But there was no time for mental clarity, to allow him to connect the blank piece of paper with the imaginary conversations and work out a relationship between them, and her, back in London. He could not tell the truth, because it was disgusting. He could not lie, because that was fatal. So he sent her a delicate envelope of silk, with green and pink embroidery, wishing her a peaceful day of joy, 1914, and a quick-scrawled letter: ‘. . . I am beginning to find the star shells beautiful, so long as they don’t land on me. Do you remember the painting Starry Starry Night? In a peculiar way they remind me of that. It seems a long way from home, but we all know we are doing what has to be done and we are glad to be able to do it. The boys are a great lot, cheerful and . . .’

One little Christmas card couldn’t hurt. It would be rude not to.

She sent a card back. ‘So glad you’re having such fun.’

Is she joking?

Is that all she has to say?

All around him sprang the black protective gaiety of the Tommy. He didn’t realise that he, too, was becoming wrapped in it, because knowing it would have stopped it working, and it did work, for a while. Two Austrian aristos get shot, and to sort that out millions of us have to get shot – Fate is playing a brilliant trick on us, and getting away with it: what else do you do but howl with laughter? He sang along, loud and jolly: ‘Tipperary’, Marie Lloyd songs, ‘Hanging On The Old Barbed Wire’. He caroused cheerfully in the communal baths on their days behind the lines. He nicknamed their trench Platform One, and noted how similar a trench was to a grave: you could just pour more mud in and none of us would need a funeral, he’d cracked, or a shell might do it for you. He manned the fire-step gamely; he stood to and stood down and complained about the food; he drank like a fish when it was required; he stared out over no man’s land, listening to the blackbirds in the middle of the night, or the Hun singing ‘Stille Nacht’, which they did beautifully, requiring a harsh chorus of ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here’ to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, to drown them out, lest sentiment rise. He did not let sentiment rise. He was, it turned out, a good soldier: strong, loyal, friendly, brutal.

He laughed with everyone at how Ferdinand’s main aim in trench life turned out to be being present whenever anyone got a tuck parcel from home, just in case, you know, and he noticed how Ainsworth always gave him a handful of the fiendish northern sweets his wife sent him, to which Ferdinand had taken a liking. ‘Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls, they keep you all aglow.’ Ferdinand was young, and cried sometimes at night. ‘You just keep sucking on Uncle Joe’s balls, lad, you’ll be all right,’ Ainsworth said, seemingly in all innocence, and gamely laughed himself silly when he realised, which cheered Ferdinand right up.

Purefoy found the boys tragic. Bowells, for example, fair and scrubbed, desperate to achieve the worn look of the seasoned soldiers, to use the argot, stain up his uniform. Bowells had wept his first five nights, because there was a dog making a noise out there in no man’s land, and he had feared for its safety. Burgess had been going to tell Bowells not to worry about the damn dog, the damn dog was eating corpses, but Ainsworth had kicked him, and made a laconic cut-throat gesture.

Am I tragic like them? Purefoy thought. And if not, why not? I’m as young as them . . . Sometimes when Ainsworth gave him his granite-faced smile with the little twist of the mouth, Purefoy felt that to Ainsworth at least he was less a soldier and more a boy. ‘Courage for the big troubles in life, lad,’ he’d say, ‘and patience for the small. Be of good cheer. God is awake.’

The dog was beautiful: massively furry, big and clever. A Bouvier des Flandres, the girl at the estaminet said. A Flemish cow dog. He wouldn’t mind a dog like that when he got home. A life with a dog. Him and a dog, going on their adventures. He had a sudden memory of Messalina, her heavy head, the beautiful gambolling movements she made when she ran.

Winter was so cold. So cold. And wrong – they weren’t meant to be still there. Flanders had become mud beneath their feet. The trenches they had dug looked to Purefoy like one great long unhealing wound, splitting the land. The railways ran towards it, feeding it with fuel and men and ammunition. The camps and hospitals and tents and tunnels alongside were parasites, and then down the middle lay no man’s land, mined and festooned with barbed wire, a long, suppurating ulcer. The wound, like a perpetual-motion machine, seemed to be taking on a life of its own, and there it was, and there was he, and that was it: a system.

He was sitting one morning early, waiting for the dixie containing breakfast to come down the line, a silvery blueshot dawn, a day that, he realised, would be as limpid as the one a year ago, God, was it a year ago, if you looked up, not out, and just saw the blue sky, and the birds flying across it as if nothing was happening, if you blocked out all the rest . . .

Purefoy kept throwing; kept throwing. He threw for weeks, for months. At some stage he was given proper grenades and a helmet, though they all learnt to piss on a handkerchief to breathe through long before gas masks came around. One night he saw Captain Harper flying across the sky like a whirling starfish before shattering into a flaming shell crater, and he put the sight in that special part of his brain he would never go to again, fed it through the greedy slot in the forever unopenable door. His thoughts jumped like fleas, like drops of water on a hotplate, uncatchable, inexplicable.

The new CO was a Captain Locke, tall and pale with a swooping body, like a heron’s, and a nose like an eagle’s beak. His long thin legs crossed round and round themselves when he sat; Purefoy could tell that out of uniform he would wear tweeds, and they would flap around his long ankles.

With him, in the summer, they were moved along the line, south towards the River Somme. Their new trench system extended out of the cellar of what had been a handsome old stone farmhouse, where beautiful wallpaper hung, sooted and flapping, from the last shards of upright wall. The cellar had been dug out for the officers, and someone had put a piano down there.

‘Anyone play at all?’ asked Locke, hopefully, sticking his head out.

Ainsworth, it turned out, had played the organ at Wigan Parish Church. He hesitantly entered the officers’ glamorous cave, and smiled a little at the sight of the piano. ‘Little rusty,’ he murmured, but when he sat down an air of authority arose from him, and when he sang, a beautiful, manly rendition of an aria from a Bach cantata, silence dropped like blossoms, churchlike. Locke closed his eyes. Riley could only suppose everyone was feeling the same lurch of loss and love and beauty and alienation from everything that they were losing hold of by the very acts of trying to protect it.

‘Ain’t that German?’ said Burgess, when Ainsworth had finished.

‘Well spotted, soldier,’ said Locke. ‘However, it is Bach, and Bach was a citizen of heaven sent down to enlighten and delight men of all nations. The Kaiser has no monopoly on the genius of his country’s sons.’

‘What’s the name of the piece?’ Purefoy asked. ‘“Ich habe genug”,’ said Ainsworth.

Locke barked with laughter. ‘Which means,’ he said cheerfully, ‘“I have had enough.” More or less. Ainsworth, thank you, that was splendid. The rest of you, lads, back to work. Er – you – stay and give me a hand with this . . .’

‘You’ was Purefoy. ‘This’ was Captain Locke’s gramophone, which needed unpacking and setting up.

‘You know what Comrade Lenin says, sir?’ said Purefoy, as they attached the horn.

‘Comrade Lenin!’ exclaimed Locke. ‘Good Lord, man, what do you know about Lenin?’

‘Not a lot, sir,’ said Purefoy, mildly.

‘Are you a Communist, Private?’

‘Would I tell you if I was, sir?’ said Purefoy. It popped out. Locke gave him a look. It struck Purefoy because it was a human look in a military world, and it was those looks, those flashes of the other reality, which kept him alive even as they made him want to weep. He desperately wanted them, but he had to avoid them. Bowells, for example. He couldn’t look Bowells in the eye any more. It was too naked and pathetic.

‘So, what does Lenin say?’ asked Locke.

Purefoy grinned. ‘Along the lines of music softens the heart and brain, sir, and disinclines a man from his purpose . . .’ Robert Waveney had quoted this to his wife one afternoon, playing her a recording of a new Russian pianist.

‘Just lay off the Chopin, Private.’

‘Don’t know any Chopin, sir,’ Purefoy lied. He’d been along to the Albert Hall often enough to rehearsals with Nadine, a world away, a world ago.

‘Well, don’t learn any, then.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Purefoy.

Captain Locke did, one afternoon, play some Chopin on his gramophone. Purefoy recognised it, all right, and as he passed, the melody clutching at him with soft little tearing claws, he caught sight of Locke, inside, listening. The look on Locke’s face was so very lonely that Purefoy called out to him: ‘Now, now, sir, we agreed no Chopin!’ Locke looked up, shocked, startled – pleased.

Purefoy scurried on, away from the captain’s look. I really don’t know my place, do I? But – Oh, yes, I was going to improve myself, wasn’t I? The thought burnt up like all the others, in the grimy, unpleasant duties of the day.

*

Captain Locke was a pure man, with pure and pleasurable tastes. As a boy he had liked to follow the gardener around the old greenhouses at Locke Hill, to smell the earth and help pick the grapes. Latin verse had amused him. When he played cricket he had reminded his cousin Rose of an actual cricket, with his terribly long legs and his cheerful disposition. Even playing his cello, plaintively and not very well, he had looked like a soulful insect, all elbows and knees.

He had noticed a surviving patch of gooseberry bushes on the parados, remnant of some long-gone Frenchman’s garden, and one evening crawled under them, froglike, on his back, to prune them. The new leaves were a golden, melting, greenish colour, and the sun shining through them put him in mind of a chandelier he had come to know during his honeymoon: burnt-sugar Murano glass, eighteenth century. He had seen it often, lying on his back in the big white bed at the Cipriani, while his beautiful soft creamy-rosy-marble wife Julia lay in his arms, or crawled across him, wrapped around him, delighting and enchanting him, as they came to realise that there was really nobody there – no parents, no schoolmasters, no vicars – to tell them they couldn’t or shouldn’t just take off all their clothes in that paid-for foreign room and do anything they wanted. And they did. Things neither of them had ever thought of; things that made them blush. Her beautiful, beautiful flesh, and her sweetness, her kindness to him, and the lovely way she always seemed to be on his side, even when he was being a bit of a twerp, not knowing things about what a woman wants . . . Well, how could he? Sisterless, a schoolboy, a university man . . . Apart from Rose, he hardly knew any woman at all. Rose had a phrase about English public schoolboys: physically over-developed, intellectually semi-developed, emotionally not developed at all. Good old Rose . . .

He and Julia had begun, in their Venetian privacy, to develop that emotional side. When his father had died so suddenly, Julia had been everything a man could wish for. When he was obliged to take over Locke Hill, she had glided into her role as chatelaine with the grace of a woman twice her age. She knew how to talk to servants. She took care. On their return to Locke Hill, after Mother had moved out – said she’d much rather be in the little flat in Chester Square – Julia had made Locke Hill, with its warm red bricks and polished wood and slanting sunshine, into a kind of heaven. She knew how to choose the colours to paint things; she needlepointed charming cushions, her lovely mouth instructed Millie how to plump and place them just so, and called Max the red setter in from the frosty lawn. He quite fell in love again with the crook of her fragrant elbow holding the trug, as she took the lavender from the stone-flagged terrace to the piles of smooth-ironed sheets in the big linen press. Every night he had raced home from Locke and Locke (he’d been promoted – a married man now) to try to get her pregnant.

He hadn’t, during the honeymoon, paid much attention to the chandelier, but the colour, the melting light, had stayed in his mind. Now it was a brutal little shaft of memory, pricking and stalling him, and when thus stalled and sabotaged he had to stop a moment to put the memory away.

‘Gooseberries, lovely gooseberries,’ he said, out loud, but softly. ‘Someone might be grateful, in a few months, if they survive. Not much chance of a mackerel to go with it, I suppose, but a gooseberry is always a lovely thing.’

Purefoy was touched by Locke’s apparent belief that some kind of future, the time it took for a gooseberry to ripen, was a possibility. He found Locke a decent bloke.

*

The new trench had been in French hands before, and quite a hotspot. Rebuilding the communication lines after a hit, the Paddingtons found corpses in the walls, scraps of uniform, the smell, a hand. When a shell hit, thundering your head and splitting your eyes, it was not only fresh limbs and organs that showered you. There was a French lad under the floor of the trench too: he appeared between the duckboards. They had been walking on him. They dug him up and buried him again, and Purefoy got sick: puking and crapping like a dog, too weak to walk. Burgess dragged him along to the MO’s dugout, which was in itself unusual, for Burgess never did anything helpful.

He murmured to Purefoy as they went, confidentially, under the arm slung over his shoulder for support: ‘We could do each other a favour, you know, Riley . . .’

Purefoy heaved, his stomach wrenching.

‘Make it worth your while,’ Burgess was saying. ‘It’d be no trouble to you . . .’ He eyed Purefoy sideways. Honest Riley. Worth a punt, for old times’ sake. Too good an opportunity, really. ‘Give us some of your puke, Riley, and I’ll make us both rich. There’s knackered men round here who’d pay good money for a couple of days in hospital.’

Purefoy turned his hanging head to look at him, and Burgess gave a little I-didn’t-invent-the-system shrug, and a straight look back. ‘You can’t say they don’t deserve a rest,’ he said meekly.

Purefoy’s stomach heaved; he puked on Burgess. Burgess laughed, his dimples pitting his cheeks. ‘Thanks, old pal,’ he said.

The MO sent Purefoy to a field hospital towards Amiens for two days’ rest and anti-laxatives. Over the next few days seven men from the Paddingtons turned up with the same condition. But, then, it was the kind of bug that got around, and most of them had been digging alongside Purefoy and the dead French boy.

*

When Purefoy returned, Captain Locke called him in. Purefoy thought Locke didn’t look that well either.

‘Purefoy,’ Locke said, shuffling papers. ‘Er. Yes. You’re to be promoted.’

What?

‘Experience, courage, attitude on the field and in the trenches – hasn’t gone unnoticed. Some concern that you aren’t quite a gentleman, but – well – beggars and choosers, rather, no reflection on you. You’re a fine soldier. The men respect you.’

Purefoy, who had seen braver men and better attitudes, Ainsworth for example, said so, in the accent his mother disliked, which he couldn’t help using in the company of the class he’d learnt it from, the accent that had made it possible for him to be promoted from the ranks. ‘And I can’t afford it,’ he said.

‘You won’t have to keep a horse,’ Locke said. ‘And the regiment’s had some donations. One from – someone who knows you.’

A silence.

Another silence, of a slightly different quality.

‘Sir Alfred,’ Purefoy said. He glanced at the floor. ‘I shall be sorry to have to disappoint him.’

‘Your name was on the list before Sir Alfred made his donation. It’s coincidence, Purefoy.’

It’s bribery.

‘Well, then, Fate is conspiring to benefit me, sir,’ said Purefoy, ‘but I can’t possibly accept it. I cannot have the regiment . . . um . . . for my advancement.’

‘The regiment requires your obedience, Purefoy. The regiment is promoting you, the financial circumstances allow. You have no choice.’

Was it bribery? He didn’t think Locke was lying about the coincidence.

‘Is that an order, sir?’

‘It can be. I’d rather it didn’t have to be. Listen – perhaps your benefactor thought you wouldn’t accept if he offered to support you directly. But the idea of this promotion came from the regiment, as it should, and it impugns the regiment’s honour to suggest otherwise. Do you want to impugn the regiment’s honour, Purefoy?’

Purefoy did not want to impugn the regiment’s honour.

‘No, I didn’t think so. So stop making me do a moral dance for you, Purefoy. Accept your good fortune, and don’t be so surprised,’ said Locke. ‘Seems to me the men like someone leading them who has an idea what they’ve been through. If the top brass have finally noticed that, then good.’

‘Isn’t that a bit, ah, Communist, sir?’ asked Purefoy, and Locke said, ‘Watch it. You’re still a private for now.’

‘I just don’t see why me, sir,’ said Purefoy.

‘Don’t be disingenuous, Purefoy,’ said Locke, and Purefoy raised an eyebrow. ‘Exactly. How many of the men know what disingenuous means? The army needs your type.’

I’ve heard of Chopin, I’ve got a vocabulary, therefore I’m fit to lead, he thought. Oh, God, you want me to lead them.

Locke drummed his long fingers on the tea chest and gave Purefoy a frank look. ‘Purefoy, old man,’ he said, ‘I would much rather have you than a nineteen-year-old direct from the school OTC.’

And Purefoy thought, Well, you’ll have to promote me now – you can’t say incendiary things like that to a man in the ranks.

*

‘Where you off to, then?’ said Burgess, darning his socks on a tree stump, not looking up, as Purefoy rattled past with his kitbag.

‘I’m going to Amiens,’ said Purefoy. ‘To be trained in natural superiority and talking posh. And not taking care of my own kit, eating well and sending other men to their deaths. Do you want to come?’

Burgess looked up then. ‘Oh, are you,’ he said. ‘Are you. Well, good luck, Private Purefoy. Don’t forget us. We won’t forget you.’

‘It’s all the same when a shell lands on you,’ said Purefoy.

‘Ah, but a shell doesn’t land you, does it?’ said Burgess. ‘Because you’re in a nice little dugout, listening to opera. Aren’t you?’

Purefoy paused a moment. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You’re right. No officer has ever been killed in this or any other war.’ Captain Harper’s shining body flew again across his mind.

Burgess waggled his fingers. ‘Bye-bye!’ he said, in a singsong voice.

‘Piss off, Johnno,’ said Purefoy, as he shouldered his bag, and went.

*

As the train taking him away clanked and shuddered into movement, Purefoy felt a sharp stomach-tug of a harsh and guilty joy. Clanking and shuddering away from death, away from corpses, away from damp, away from mud, away from groans, away from rats, away from the miasma of pure and constant fear . . . For several weeks he would not have to kill anyone, and no one would try to kill him. Thank you, Sir Alfred, thank you thank you thank you thank you.

He prayed that officer training would teach him to hate the Hun individually. He had been having trouble maintaining the idea that the boys the other side of no man’s land were in themselves any different from the boys over this side, and the faces of the old knife-grinder and the anarchist popped up in his mind with disconcerting regularity. The gas wasn’t their choice. Kaiser Bill was Queen Victoria’s grandson. Franz Dahrendorf! That was his name. The anarchist.

The land now outside the window was green. Oh, God, it does all still exist. Sheep. Leaves.

You will, at some stage, if you live, have to go back, Purefoy, where there are sheep and leaves and Sunday lunches. You will have to go back into it and not be brutal.

Can you bear that in mind? Is there any room for that?

When he reached his billet in Amiens, the stairs confused him, and the sheets on the bed seemed alien. He wrote a letter to Sir Alfred: short, and to the point. Then he lay down on top of the alien sheets, carefully, his boots still on, and stared up at the ceiling, following the line of its moulding round and round.

*

It seemed the rush of enthusiasm that had rendered Purefoy a Second Lieutenant had been premature. Recruitment had not, after all, declined quite as had been feared, and there was, after all, no shortage of young men of education who could be called Second Lieutenants and released to the Western Front. Also, someone, somewhere, had decided that in the interests of social stability officers promoted from the ranks should not go back to the men they had served alongside. ‘In other words,’ he wrote to his parents, ‘they don’t know what to do with me.’ So he was given leave.

Second Lieutenant Purefoy sat on a single bed in a room above a pub in Dover. He was going to London. He would visit his mother and father and his sisters . . . God, his sweet little sisters. He wanted to send them a picture postcard right now, a funny dog in a tartan costume, with a monocle, or something, but then they’d know he was in Blighty . . . oh, I can’t go home . . . but I’ve got to . . . and I’ll see Sir Alfred and Mrs Briggs. For a split second, before memory caught up and kicked him, he found himself thinking that he might visit Terence.

He tried to picture his family and friends in London. He assumed they still existed. After all, here was a single bed in a room above a pub in Dover.

What the fuck could he say to any of them?

Well, there’ll be none of that swearing for a start.

He went down to the bar. Drinking would be one way of dealing with this detachment, this disbelief. He stared at the bottles, the beer barrels, the little taps: crimson wine, black and ivory stout, oily invisible gin. He stared at the drunken soldiers around him, and the blowsy girls. Sex. He recalled the feeling of the curve of a hip under his hand. Would any hip feel like that? Send the frisson, the glow, the shot of warmth and possibility up his veins, under his skin, to his heart and his belly and the back of his eyes?

Now was the time to change the mood. How was he to do it?

He went upstairs, and finally wrote his will, on the pages labelled for the purpose in the back of his Soldier’s Small Book (paybook, military service record, instructions on how to avoid bad feet – rub soap into socks). He left everything to his mother. He’d get the train as soon as he had worked out what to say.

The food was bloody brilliant. Oxtail, dumplings, steamed pudding for dinner. Fish and chips and chocolate for tea. He bought a box of twenty-four bars of Fry’s Chocolate Cream, and ate them sitting on the narrow bed. He bought two more boxes, made a parcel and sent one to Ferdinand with a note: ‘You’re to eat all of these yourself: NO SHARING’, and the other to Ainsworth: ‘PLEASE HAND THESE OUT TO DESERVING CASES.’

He had a second bath some nights, and had to pay extra for the hot water. He noticed he had given himself a little pot belly with all the food.

He couldn’t go and not talk to them. He couldn’t talk to them.

He lay on his back with his new officer shoes off and one by one ran through the people he might talk to, and what he could or couldn’t say to them. Everything he had to say: I love you, it’s hell, I walk on corpses and breathe death, it’s only a matter of time before I prove a coward, and I don’t want to be a coward, but I don’t understand, either I kill people, or I’m a coward, that’s the choice, someone somewhere set it up and I get no vote, I can’t say, ‘I don’t accept that’ – and I have accepted it, for a year I’ve accepted it, this is the situation but I don’t understand how I got here, how it is just going on and on, and nobody mentions it, and if you don’t like it they think you’re mad, and you get shot, for cowardice, desertion . . . and your own men, your companions, your brothers, have to shoot you . . . and I’m so fucking scared out there every day, every night—

and now they’ve made me a fucking officer—

STOP IT.

You’re a soldier, Riley, a good soldier and a decent bloke. For a bleak second he desperately wanted to go back to the front, where there was no time or space in a man’s mind to think about anything beyond good soldier, decent bloke. No – officer. It’s different. I will have responsibility.

Yes, but no actual authority.

They were proud he was an officer now. That was the kind of thing people at home wanted to hear.

He didn’t want to think of Nadine as ‘people at home’. He wanted Nadine to know and share every single damn thing he ever knew or did on this earth, and to understand, and to share hers too . . . and he would rather get a shell tonight than have Nadine even hear of the possibility of the things he had known in this past year . . . and how do you get round that one?

And you’re leaving her alone, remember? He hadn’t answered her letter in response to his Christmas card.

Yes, but I . . .

He looked out at the sea. Many nights he could hear the guns. On the seafront, some philanthropist had put up an iron sign on an iron leg, pointing out what was where across the sea: Calais, Dieppe, Dunkirk . . . Rome, Amsterdam, Moscow. He held his hand out in front of his face, like a divider. This side, to the right, ours. That side, to the left, theirs. Down the middle in the sump, us lot.

Amsterdam, where she wanted to go, was on the other side. Van Eyck and Rembrandt and Franz Hals and . . . a furry peach, a silver-bloomed plum, striped roses and streaked tulips, vanilla and raspberry, arched stems and green beetles gleaming and one little worm-hole . . . bright sunflowers whirling . . . a branch of almond blossom.

What a pompous, self-important, sententious, over-imaginative young man I was. What a thoughtless, useless, unkind . . . to leave without seeing Mum. To make all those decisions about what people were and what that meant – that Sir Alfred was a queer, and would not forgive me for staying out the night, that the Waveneys would never let me marry Nadine, that because Terence did a queer’s thing to me I had to . . . Well, I didn’t know, did I, what I was going into.

So now, now that that world was so distant, and that attitude even more so, how could he pop back into it for tea and a chat? How could he write to that world, saying: ‘I hope this finds you in the pink as I am . . . It’s all pretty quiet here . . . Please send any kind of tobacco, and socks.’

He went back to his room, went back to bed. Turned his pillow over.

He slept all right, though. Dreams, obviously. Not very nice ones. But nothing compared to some of the lads.

*

Captain Locke had said, in that charming way of his, ‘If you pass through Sidcup on your way to town, pop in and see Mrs Locke, would you? It’s not far from the town. Tell her I’m all right? You won’t have time, of course, but . . .’

Purefoy was reminded of how the posher someone was, the less they seemed to care about class – those educated, wealthy, dreaming men who don’t have a simple clue what is not possible when you are poor. He both loved and hated them for their genuine ignorance. How marvellous, how ridiculous, that it should be possible. He allowed himself to wonder what Mrs Captain Locke would think of him, Purefoy, turning up. The trenches were in some ways a leveller, to those who took it that way. But the advances Purefoy had craved were only cultural and matrimonial, wherein the Flanders mud had offered no progress, other than the odd burst from Captain Locke’s gramophone, and the occasional expression in Captain Locke’s amiable blue eye that showed he, too, knew of the existence of Better.

But Private – whoops – Second Lieutenant Purefoy calling on Mrs Captain Locke of Locke Hill? Dear God, no.