Field Service (29 page)

She spun the album to face her and then turned a few pages, stopping at a photograph of two women standing together with their arms linked at the elbow. She pushed the picture back to face Reid.

‘It's you,' he said, recognizing the taller of the two women.

‘And my closest friend. Charlotte. That was taken at the field station at Puisieux. We'd been there together for almost a year. I was there when I received the news of my husband's death.'

‘Is she among … I mean …'

‘Sadly, no. She left Puisieux on a routine run delivering the more seriously wounded to Calais. We sent them once a week when they were considered well enough to travel. We usually set off in the late evening and returned the next day, mid-morning. Except she never did.' She looked hard at the woman's face as she said all this.

‘What happened?'

‘We heard nothing for a few days and then were told that the ambulances had been caught in a barrage on their way back to us. I spent all those days praying that Charlotte had been ordered to stay on the hospital boat with her charges – it happened sometimes, especially if the journey had made things worse for any of the men.'

‘But she'd been killed?'

‘Four nurses and two drivers. She's already buried, at Étaples. I go occasionally to watch everything that's taking place around her. I wrote to Colonel Wheeler six months ago to ask if she and the others couldn't be brought here. I thought the notion of all the women being buried together might appeal, especially to a man like him. But he insisted that it was hard enough for him to allocate space to the bodies he didn't yet know about, without special provision being made for those already buried elsewhere.'

‘Perhaps in the years to come,' Reid said. ‘When
everyone
has finally been gathered in. The whole of this country for fifty miles in any direction is little more than one giant burial ground.'

Outside, the torrential rain slackened briefly, but then, after almost ten minutes of silence, the thunder and lightning resumed, and a second storm gathered and flowed across Morlancourt.

‘I think the worst has passed,' Caroline said absently. She took back the album and looked at the photograph of herself and the dead nurse.

‘Were you very close?' Reid asked her.

‘I loved her,' she said. ‘I have no sisters or brothers, and Charlotte was like a sister to me.' She paused. ‘The pity of it is, I was the one who allocated the nurses and auxiliaries to the Calais convoys. It was always looked on as something of a break for the girls. The ambulances sometimes waited at the coast for a night or two longer than was absolutely necessary – there were always medical supplies to be brought back to us – and knowing this, I always used to allocate the work to those women most in need of some time away from the hospitals. I'd known for weeks that Charlotte was becoming exhausted. She was from Nuneaton, and I remembered her telling me that before coming to France, she'd only ever seen the sea on two previous occasions, both family holidays. There was a nursing depot in Calais so there was always somewhere for the girls to stay and to eat.'

‘Did you go on the trips yourself?'

‘Rarely. I was always more useful at Puisieux, or wherever else I happened to be. Besides, I was hardly in a position to go myself and leave someone else behind. Even Charlotte took herself off several rotas until I finally insisted on her going. When we heard what had happened to the four girls—' She turned away from Reid to look over the street below.

‘I know,' Reid said.

Neither of them spoke for several minutes. Instead, they sat together and watched the distant storm move slowly away from them. In the west, the already clearing sky revealed the light of the day's setting sun and the promise of better weather tomorrow.

‘Will you imagine her among them?' Reid said eventually.

Caroline closed her eyes and nodded. ‘Of course.'

‘It's an easy thing to do,' he said.

‘I know.' She finally closed the album.

When Reid next looked at her he saw that she was crying. The tears ran in lines over her cheeks and dripped from her chin on to the backs of her outspread hands.

ONLY LATER, ALONE
in his room, did Reid finally understand how impossible it was for him to do anything to help Alexander Lucas. There were a few people he might telephone – men he and Lucas had known in either Albert or Amiens – but it was unlikely that any of them would know any more than he did about Lucas's disappearance or his whereabouts now.

In all the months he had known Alexander Lucas, Reid realized, Lucas had spoken of none of these other men except in connection with his work in the Retrieval unit. Besides, any enquiries would have to be put through the Army Exchange in Saint-Quentin, and in all likelihood the operator there would have already been instructed to report any call made by Lucas or his friends. A call in the middle of the day might have gone unnoticed, but certainly not one at almost midnight. Whatever he attempted, Reid would only make things worse for Lucas.

He tried to remember the names of the men he had met in Lucas's company – his labourers at Prezière, for instance – but could not. Besides, Lucas's team there had already moved on or been disbanded.

His best hope, he realized, was if Lucas contacted him. But that, too, was unlikely. Perhaps detaching himself this completely had been Lucas's intention all along, at least since either making his application to Muir or receiving word of his wife's death. And perhaps it had already occurred to both Wheeler and Muir to keep a close eye on Reid himself in the hope that he might lead them to Lucas.

An hour later, the storm had moved beyond the barely perceptible horizon, and though the far distant clouds were lit occasionally by a sudden flicker of lightning, there was no longer any thunder to be heard. The rain had long since lessened and then slowly ceased, but water still ran in the street outside and dripped from the roof of every building.

Unable to sleep, Reid sat at his window and looked out into the darkness. There was a vague brightness in the sky to the east, which never fully darkened through those summer nights, but closer to Morlancourt it was difficult to distinguish where the buildings and ruins of the place now stood. It was as though the world all around him had no true form or structure in the night, and as though, despite the dim light across the horizon, there was now no end to this shapeless world and the darkness in which it lay.

A solitary lantern shone in the window of a building further along the street, and Reid recognized this as the bar he had visited in the company of both Caroline and Lucas. He watched the light for a few minutes, but there was no movement around it – no shadows of late drinkers coming and going from the place, no sudden silhouette cast fleetingly on a wall – and so Reid came away from the window and sat at his small table.

Despite the storm, the night was humid, and where the heavy rain had fallen against his window and the wall around it, dark patches had appeared on the plasterwork. He touched his palms to these stains and felt the dampness against his fingers. He understood then, in that instant, that living through a long and deteriorating autumn and then an even longer winter in Morlancourt would be a different thing entirely to the summer he had just spent there, and he felt a sudden and unexpected sense of relief at the realization that he would know nothing of the place during these other, harsher seasons.

Eventually, exhausted after his long and unexpected day's work, Reid fell asleep where he sat at his table.

He slept fitfully for several hours and then woke when some movement almost tipped him from his chair.

The room around him lay in complete darkness.

He pulled off his jacket and his shirt, kicked off his boots and lay on the bed. He fell back to sleep, and this time he lay undisturbed until the early dawn, when he woke again and heard the usual muted cacophony of the town all around him. He opened his eyes and then lay without moving, gathering his thoughts and considering everything that had just happened and everything that was about to take place in the day ahead.

AN HOUR LATER
, the sky was again blue and cloudless, and at nine in the morning, as Reid made his way to the station, the air was already warm. Gutters still dripped with the night's rain, and the dykes along the roadside were filled with debris and flowing water. A light mist floated above the distant canal, and deep puddles lay along the lower reaches of the lane where it approached the railway. Following the storm, the verges seemed much greener than usual, and the exposed soil of the fields beyond much darker.

Arriving at the station, Reid saw Caroline Mortimer already waiting there, sitting on a bench beside Benoît.

Benoît rose at Reid's approach. ‘She was here when I arrived,' he said. ‘We've been talking, but mostly just sitting.' He turned back to Caroline, bowed, took her hand and kissed it.

‘I'm keeping you from your work,' she said to him.

Benoît shrugged and said he would return to her soon.

Reid sat beside her.

‘I couldn't sleep,' she said. She cupped an ear to listen to the birdsong in the trees beyond the depot. ‘Look,' she said. She indicated the pots of flowers that Benoît had set out along the platform. Small sprays were fastened to the depot door. ‘I think I surprised him,' she said. ‘I must have looked like a ghost sitting here in the half-light.'

She wore a pale tan coat, white gloves and a hat with voile folded over its rim.

Reid himself had put on his smartest uniform, and had polished its buttons and belt and straps.

‘Have you heard if the cemetery suffered at all in the storm?' she asked him.

‘Not so far.'

Drake and his men would inspect the site before coming to the station, and any work which needed doing would be completed before the arrival there of the cortège.

‘The place is still full of newspapermen,' she said. ‘Some were already up and about as I made my way here.'

Reid had passed several of the men on his own short journey to the station.

He took out a cigarette and offered her one, which she accepted.

‘I daresay Guthrie will be coming with Wheeler and the others on the train,' he said. Unusually, he felt awkward, constrained, in her company. The day ahead weighed on them both.

He looked along the track. A faint vapour rose from the warming gravel and the sleepers.

‘What will happen afterwards, I wonder?' Caroline said.

‘Afterwards?' For a moment, he was uncertain what she was asking him.

‘After the ceremony,' she said. ‘Will Colonel Wheeler come back here, to Morlancourt, do you think, or return immediately to Amiens?'

But Reid, too, had little clear idea of the day's proceedings beyond what was about to happen at the station. ‘I daresay everything will become apparent,' he said. ‘The day will run its course and we'll all play our own small parts within it.'

‘Of course,' she said.

Several minutes later, a convoy of lorries and cars drew up on the lane beyond Benoît's office, and a group of Reid's men climbed down and congregated there.

‘I ought to go to them,' Reid said, rising.

‘Of course.'

It seemed to him she was relieved to be left alone.

He met Drake coming through the empty depot and saw that he too had cleaned up his uniform. The men beyond him were also in full dress.

‘They made the effort,' Drake said.

‘Meaning you gave the order. I appreciate it.'

‘I went to the cemetery,' Drake said.

‘And?'

‘The stream overflowed and the holes along the perimeter have filled up again.'

‘And the nurses' graves?'

‘They're fine. The boys from Saint-Quentin have been brushing everything dry. The marquee and seating are fine.'

It was a relief to Reid to hear this. He told Drake to go back to the men and to turn the lorries in readiness for the journey to the cemetery.

‘We've got three new cars from Amiens,' Drake said. ‘Arrived a couple of hours ago. For the dignitaries and Commission members.'

It was something Reid had not considered. ‘Tell the drivers to go slowly,' he said. ‘I'll go on ahead in the first lorry, set the pace.'

Drake went back to the waiting men and Reid returned to the platform and Caroline.

Shortly before the train was due, Benoît came back out to them and said that there had been a delay, but the engine would be there in fifteen minutes. He stood beside them for a while before being called away.

‘I appreciate the flowers,' Caroline said to him as he went.

Benoît looked at the pots and the door. ‘It's little enough,' he said. ‘Considering.' He walked briskly back to his office.

‘They're closing the station in a few months,' Reid told her.

‘I heard. I daresay a great deal will change.'

Reid had not yet approached Wheeler with the suggestion that Benoît be put in charge of the upkeep of the finished cemetery.

‘I don't suppose …' Caroline said hesitantly.

‘Alexander Lucas? No, nothing.'

‘Perhaps Colonel Wheeler will have some news.'

‘If he does, it won't be good.'

‘No.' After a pause, she said, ‘One of the newspapermen I spoke to referred to the cost of all this gravedigging and memorial-building as a “butcher's bill to the nation”.'

Reid had heard the remark before. He listened to the sound of the lorries being turned in the narrow lane.

‘And you?' Caroline asked him.

‘Me, what?' He knew exactly what she was asking him.

‘After today. After Morlancourt.'

‘Wherever I'm sent, I suppose.' He'd already told her about Wheeler's proposal concerning his future posting. ‘You?'

‘Home, I imagine,' she said. ‘A few more days here while arrangements are made. I shall want to come back and say a proper farewell to my women. Alone. After that …'