Five Boys (18 page)

He began to understand how the landscape fitted together. The hills and streams made their own natural sense. But if he ever found himself following the same circuit of paths and ditches he immediately abandoned it, knowing that sooner or later they would be waiting for him.

He went to ground several times and watched the soldiers passing—could have picked them off with no trouble at all. He managed to evade them so successfully that he began to doubt his own existence and had to whisper a few words out loud, just to reassure himself that he was still there.

It was early summer but always seemed to be raining and the nights could still be bitterly cold. And when it was dark and wet the drowned men were much more likely to surface and then the panic would get hold of him and he’d feel the desperate need to run all over again.

The isolation could sometimes bother him. Sometimes he felt that this was how the world was meant to be. There
were even times when it seemed as if the world might be kind, and that there might be a place for him in it, after all.

On a couple of occasions he’d strayed into civilization—just found himself walking along newly turned furrows or come across a cottage with washing flapping in the breeze. One day he spotted a boy in the next field with half a dozen bullocks crowding around him, like a child Messiah. The boy was pouring the contents of a large brown bottle into a tablespoon and chatting to the bullocks as he fed them. The soldier crept up to the wall and watched for a while—could have happily watched all day, but decided that he should let the boy know that he was there.

“What’s the medicine?” he said.

The words came rattling out of him like broken crockery. The boy almost jumped clean out of his skin, which got all the bullocks jumping and kicking, and for a moment the soldier worried that the boy might get hurt. But after a few seconds they settled down. Then the bullocks and the boy all stood and stared at him.

The soldier pointed to the bottle. “The medicine,” he said.

The boy looked down at the bottle as if it had just appeared in his hand.

“Linseed oil,” he said at last.

The soldier nodded.

“The cattle get red water,” the boy said, “being so close to the river. The linseed clears them out.”

For those first few minutes the conversation had an embarrassed hesitancy to it but once it found its stride the boy seemed only too happy to talk. He explained how he lived in the cottage in the distance and that looking after the bullocks was one of his jobs. As he spoke he slowly
made his way over, and each time he took a step toward the soldier the bullocks followed nervously behind.

He was soon close enough to see what a wretched state the soldier was in. His hands and face were covered in cuts and scratches and his uniform was caked in mud.

“You hurt your head,” said the boy and pointed to a bloody wound above one eye.

The soldier absentmindedly raised a hand to it.

“I must have caught it on something,” he said.

“You want to put some ointment on it,” the boy told him, “or it’ll go septic.”

The soldier nodded and the two of them stood in silence. Then he asked the boy his name.

“Bobby,” he said.

The soldier said it out loud a couple of times, to see if it suited him and as he did so Bobby took the opportunity to look him up and down.

“How come you’re not in France?” said Bobby.

The soldier stared at the ground as he struggled to come up with an answer.

“I stayed behind,” he said.

Lillian and Meredith seemed to take forever to eat their supper and it was dusk before they took their seats by the fire. The moment they started dozing Bobby crept out of the room, let himself out of the back door and headed up the hill, in case he was being followed, then cut down to the woods where he and the stay-behind had arranged to meet.

The dusk had softened the trees and drawn the color from the land. Every sound was dampened down and as he ran down to the woods Bobby was suddenly certain that the stay-behind had been captured or frightened away. He
called out, sure that the woods were empty. Stood in the failing light, more alone than he had felt in months. Then there was a rustling and the stay-behind stepped out of the bushes and Bobby hurried down to him.

He led Bobby through the trees until they came to a clearing. Bobby unbuttoned his jacket and lifted his jumper up. He had a package tucked into his shorts which he pulled out and handed to the stay-behind.

“I almost got you an apple,” Bobby said, “but they know I don’t like them.”

The stay-behind pulled the brown paper open. Found some buttered bread and a slice of cake wrapped up in greaseproof paper, and an old pair of Meredith’s thick socks folded up in one of Lillian’s vests.

He thanked Bobby, then sat and ate. And for a while Bobby just stood and watched him. Then he told the stay-behind about the two old ladies he lived with and their habit of falling asleep by the wireless. He talked about the Five Boys … the Focke Wulf … his scrapbook of newspaper cuttings and how he had come to be evacuated a second time. But as he talked his eyes never left the soldier. He stared at the stubble on his face and the holes in his boots. Watched him bring the bread up to his mouth. And when the stay-behind finally took a break from his eating Bobby reached into his jacket pocket.

“I got you some Germolene,” he said.

He unscrewed the lid and dipped a finger in. Then took a step toward the soldier, who sat there like a scalded child. Bobby reached out his hand with the ointment on it. Thought the stay-behind might flinch, but he didn’t. He just looked at the ground and let Bobby gently rub the
ointment in until the dried mud and blood was smoothed away and Bobby could see the clean skin underneath.

As he ate his supper an hour earlier Bobby had imagined the stay-behind out in the wilderness and all the adventures he must have had. But seeing him sitting there, all hunched and silent, it was clear that any adventures must have been few and far between.

“Why did you stay behind?” said Bobby.

The soldier stared at the ground for a little while longer. Then he asked Bobby if he’d heard of the Royal Observers. Bobby shook his head. The stay-behind said that he used to work in a print shop and just liked the sound of the Observers. But that in the end it didn’t involve much more than him being holed up in a bunker, with a pair of binoculars, looking out for enemy planes.

By the time he was posted, he said, there wasn’t much to see. But when the Americans moved in and started doing their exercises he’d watch the ships maneuvering out in the bay. Every now and again they’d fire off a few shells and on a couple of occasions they’d open up for hours at a time. But something went wrong on one of the exercises. A couple of LSTs got hit. Just sat ablaze out in the middle of the bay. He could see men jumping overboard, but none of the other ships moving in to help.

The stay-behind winced and stared at his boots. Raked his hair with his fingers. And when he started talking again his voice was tight, as if someone was choking him.

He went down to the water the next day to wash his pots and pans. Saw something bobbing about between the rocks. Couldn’t make any sense of it at first. Then suddenly he understood and jumped in, up to his chest. Tried to turn
them over. Some of their uniforms were burned right off them. Their faces black with oil.

The stay-behind stopped and his hand went up to his forehead—just like Aldred’s did when he was doing his Memory Man. But instead of drawing things out he held his head as if he was trying to keep some terrible pain at bay.

Lillian’s sister, Meredith, could sometimes be a bit grumpy, and was as deaf as a post, but living on a farm out in the middle of nowhere didn’t bother Bobby half as much as he might have expected and once he’d got used to the livestock and their particular smells and noises he found them to be very good company.

The geese had a pen around the back of the outhouses and their welfare, along with that of the bullocks, became Bobby’s responsibility. Within a matter of days the geese had developed an intense attachment to him. So much so that Meredith would sometimes feel obliged to remind Bobby of all the wringing and drawing and trussing which was their fate. Perhaps the geese somehow sensed Bobby’s revulsion—saw in him a potential liberator. Perhaps they just liked having someone around who was closer to their own height and wasn’t shouting all the time. Either way, if they ever caught sight of him they would raise their beaks and call out to him, and whenever he entered their pen or took them for a walk down to the river would flank him like his own gang of feathered thugs.

The stay-behind was Bobby’s first visitor. Aldred was the only one he knew about in advance. One of the Pearces’ sons had a couple of things to do down in Dartmouth and Aldred arranged to hitch a ride. Bobby got a letter on
Thursday telling him when to expect him, along with a map of the route he proposed to take, and by ten o’clock on Saturday morning he was standing on the doorstep, beaming, as if expecting hosannas and hats to be thrown in the air.

The two Miss Minters and the boys had tea and biscuits at the table, where Aldred brought everyone up-to-date with all the village’s gossip. And after he’d downed three cupfuls and smacked his lips after each one Lillian suggested Bobby show him around the farm.

Aldred wasn’t keen on the geese, didn’t much like the chickens and seemed to think that the bullocks were going to bite him, which delighted Bobby no end, having always assumed that anybody raised in the country would have a natural affinity with the animal world. He showed Aldred the vegetable garden, then took him around the boundary of Meredith’s few dozen acres, ending up at the woods where he’d fed the stay-behind.

From the moment he’d received Aldred’s letter he knew that he would tell him about the deserter—couldn’t see how he could avoid it—but as soon as he led Aldred through to the clearing and described how he’d met this bedraggled soldier and sneaked some food out to him he regretted it. And the more animated Aldred became the more Bobby felt he’d made a dreadful betrayal, until he refused to answer any more questions and made Aldred swear not to tell another living soul.

Bobby got to his feet and turned to go but Aldred grabbed him by the sleeve of his jacket.

“Wait,” he said.

He pulled something out of a pocket which Bobby assumed was another one of his booklets or homemade
maps, but took it and found that it was, in fact, an envelope, with Aldred’s mother’s name and address written on the front.

“Read it,” said Aldred.

Bobby wasn’t sure.

“Go on,” Aldred said.

So Bobby pulled out the folded notepaper and started reading. But when he’d got past the date and the “Dear Sylvia” in the top left-hand corner he couldn’t make head or tail of it. The words were in such a hurry to get to the end of the line most of the pages looked like nothing more than indecipherable dots and dashes.

“Is it from your dad?” said Bobby.

Aldred nodded.

“What’s it say?” said Bobby.

Aldred shrugged his shoulders and laughed out loud. “I can’t crack it,” he said.

Bobby looked at the envelope.

“There’s a big pile of them in my mum’s sewing basket,” Aldred said and took the letter from Bobby. “Some haven’t even been opened.”

He leafed through the pages, put his finger on a particular phrase and turned it around to show Bobby.

“What’s that say?” he said.

There were two words in capital letters. The first meant nothing to Bobby but he thought he recognized the other.

“‘Infirmary,’” he said.

Aldred nodded and looked back down at the letter.

“What’s an infirmary?” he said.

“I think it’s like a hospital,” Bobby told him.

“That’s what I thought,” Aldred said. Then he folded up
the sheets of paper, tucked them back in the envelope and put it away.

Bobby was carrying a pan of feed around to the geese the following Wednesday and had almost reached the gate to their pen when he spotted someone coming down the path through the field. He stopped in his tracks, which got the geese gabbling, and the longer Bobby stood with his back to them the more they gabbled and began to rock from foot to foot.

The first thought to enter Bobby’s head was that the woman in the field must be another of Miss Minter’s sisters and he pictured himself in the parlor, surrounded by deaf old ladies dozing in their chairs. But something strange and painful was unraveling in him—something which ran ahead of him—and he was still wondering what to make of it when the woman in the field raised her hand to him.

Bobby dropped the pan and the seed scattered across the cobbles. He stared out over the field. Then suddenly he was climbing the wall and jumping down and running toward her, with the geese all keening madly behind him and his shins whipping through the grass.

As he ran he saw her kneel and spread her arms wide for him. And the rest of the world fell away. And he ran until he reached her and she took him in and locked her arms around him. And he could feel the collar of her coat against his face.

“My boy,” she said. “My lovely boy.”