Human Traces (54 page)

let him know that there was no one else in the house. She took him to the drawing room where the guests had gathered before dinner and put her lips to his before she even had closed the door. He felt her fingers on the front of his trousers, then found his own hands beneath her skirt and in a few moments of undignified fumbling and tearing of clothes she was bending over the arm of the sofa and he had raised her long skirt as she reached her hand back between her legs and he gave himself to her, leaning back on his heels so he could see the detail of the junction where their flesh met. He dreaded that it would be done too soon, before he had seen her face, so pulled back to allow her to stand up. He then laid her gently down on the sofa and moved on top of her; he talked to her as he made love, telling her in the language of the peasant what he was doing, saying the words into her ear so she must hear them. When they were finished, his shame at what he had done and said was mitigated by the fact that she could look him in the eye and tell him, as she did, that she loved him. His remorse became their shared secret, so that instead of bringing him back to normality, as he felt it should have done, it served only to bind him more tightly to her in their conspiracy. For weeks they continued to meet at her house, and Jacques wondered if there was no act he could devise that she would not willingly indulge. She said that she had never done such things, in such a way, and he believed her. Nor had he. He was fascinated by her body, by its folds and textures, its colours and shapes. It was as though he had never examined the female form before, never anatomised, dissected or palpated. Each time he lifted her dress or parted her underclothes it was a revelation and he could sense how much she loved the effect she had on him, the way she could make him lose control. "It is not me," she said again, still mystified. "It is some other girl who does these things." "But it is you who enjoys them." "I think it must be." Her eyes grew narrow when she wanted him again and her lips, filling with blood, grew into a stiff pout. When they had finished making love and he lay tightly against her, there was sometimes a catch in her exhalation which told him that a small knot of desire was still not unravelled; he liked it best when her breath came clear, untroubled, and he knew that for the time being she was complete. "You are so beautiful," he said. "Every little bit of you. And this part especially." "I had never thought of it as possibly being ' "Yes, it is. It is the colour. It is like the colour inside a shell. It is coral. I have never seen anything like it." "You are absurd." "I may be," he said. "But that is what I think." Sometimes on a Thursday morning in the clinic, as his excitement mounted, Jacques wondered if he should not be feeling something more elevated, something more like 'love'; but what he felt was too complex to be given a single name, and the vocabulary for emotion seemed to him in any case ridiculously small. It was like trying to describe the taste of asparagus or egg using only the words sweet or bitter. Perhaps love' was part of the distinctively flavoured compound of a thousand feelings that made up his sense of Roya; perhaps not. He did not care. So long as he could see her again, feel himself rigid and bursting inside her, it did not seem to matter. For three years they met weekly, and the indulgence of his habit only caused the desire to grow. Jacques remembered a sermon Abbe Henri had once given, in which he had warned his parishioners how the revisiting of a vice does not satisfy the craving but intensifies it. Perhaps he had been thinking of avarice or financial dishonesty in his flock, but the principle seemed to hold good for Jacques's sin too. One day, without telling Sonia, he cancelled his clinic so that he could spend the whole day at Roya's house. By the time he left in the evening he had lost count of the number of times he made love to her. Between each one, she changed clothes into outfits he had seen her wear in public on occasions when they had had to maintain a distance and had been left frustrated. He liked to re-enact the occasion, only this time with the fantasy that at the theatre or at the dinner where she had worn this dress he had found a chance, surprisingly, to... He avenged himself on all the days of frustrated longing not just those occasions in the time that he had known Roya, but for all his life in which, as he tried to explain to her, frustration was the condition of being a man. And she insisted that he take her in every room of the house except the marital bedroom where he had in any case no desire to go, the thought of Drobesch's long face and steepled fingers being the only thing he had discovered in three years that was sure to cool his passion; but in the bathroom and the music room, the drawing room and even, since the cook had been given the day off, in the kitchen she took him into herself again and again. Jacques was surprised that he could manage at her merest suggestion to be ready. It was not an area of physiology that he had studied, but folk wisdom had it that after the age of thirty a man needed longer to recover. It was as though each act, exciting as it was, had failed to kill the urge. A brash part of him was secretly proud of his vigour, but he wondered if there was something wrong in their ideas of one another that so much lovemaking seemed not to satisfy them. On the final occasion, he did feel tired; they were both naked in the spare bedroom, sweat-streaked and without shame. He protested that he was done at last, but she would not let him be; she coaxed precarious life from him until to his astonishment he found that once more he was on top of her and from the depths of him she was somehow hauling up one last dying spasm of his great desire. And when she had squeezed it from him, when it was finally over, he lay across the foot of the bed, naked, in a slight warm breeze that came in through the open window from the garden, and he felt at last, for the first and only time in his life, that he was no longer frustrated by the eyes and looks and skin of women, but was drowned, dead and empty. He felt his jaw fall and his arms flop down, like the dead sailor on the raft of Gericault's Medusa. In the same summer, speaking from his palace at St. Petersburg, the Czar threatened that if the Slav cause was betrayed he would use Russia's military power in the Balkans. In the following spring, the English newspapers noted that Britain had by far the smallest standing army of any European power, while Germany and Austria-Hungary were multiplying their arms to match the Russians. Thomas told Kitty they should make plans to leave. "It seems so unreasonable," she said, 'that the quarrels of Bosnia should bring the whole continent to war." "I think there is a desire to fight," said Thomas. "The desire is looking for a pretext. We will not be well placed here, my love, on our mountain top. You could plead your German nationality ' "Or my British." "Yes. But I have no choice. I never saw a need to change and I felt a loyalty in any case. It is the same for Sonia. And Daniel." "Oh my God. Daniel." "Yes, indeed. France and Britain are still at some remove from the argument, but there seems... Some sense of the inevitable." "We cannot just leave our sanatorium and our patients." "We could in fact, quite easily. Franz is a partner in the business. We could promote Peter Andritsch. I don't think either of them would be required to fight if it came to it. And they could take on two more doctors for the duration." "It is dreadfully sad," said Kitty. "To give up your life's work." "We can return. When the war is over. It may not take long. And the girls would have a good education in England. We could be happy in London. Or I could take up my brother's offer of the farmhouse." "What about Sonia and Jacques?" "Their need to leave would be just as pressing more so. I suppose they would go to Paris." "Could we not persuade them to come to England with us?" "I do not think Jacques would want to. Sonia might, but not Jacques. I think he would welcome the chance to start again elsewhere." Kitty went over and took Thomas's hands in her own. "Perhaps it will be all right," she said. "No one can really want a war." "I think they can." "I am so sorry for you, Thomas. The schloss, the Wilhelmskogel. I know what they have meant to you. Your whole life." "It is over, Kitty," said Thomas, standing up and walking towards the door. "In truth, it has been over for some time." While Thomas spoke, Jacques was lying beside Roya, stroking back a strand of hair from her face. "Why must you go to St. Petersburg?" he said. "My father is ill. He has no one else. And he says a war is coming. He is scared." "Will you come back?" "Of course." "Do you expect him to die?" "I think so. That is why I must be there." Jacques ran his hand over the skin of her back, over her haunches down to the thigh. "Sometimes," he said, "I have the feeling that you are not real." "What do you mean?" "You are not real in the way that I am. Or my wife. Or my colleagues. You came from nowhere. Now you vanish." She laughed. "I promise you that I am real enough. Touch me." He smiled. "I am not convinced." "All right," she said, leaning up on her elbow. "What is the most real thing you can think of?" Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer smiling, he said, "Memory." "Very well, then," said Roya. "I am as real as memory' With Roya gonejacques became biddable in the question of moving. Like Thomas, he felt that their joint venture had ended some time ago, and while he had become fond enough of the Wilhelmskogel, he did not wish to spend the rest of his life there. The thought of going back to Paris was attractive to him and he reminded Sonia of how much she had liked the city. "May I spend the summers in England?" she said. "Of course, my love. You can travel to England as often as you choose." So it was agreed that Franz Bernthaler and Peter Andritsch would take over the running of the clinic and would have financial control, with a right to hire and dismiss staff, for a period of twelve months, to be renewed at yearly intervals. If neither Thomas nor Jacques resumed his partnership within five years, they could be bought out and the entire business would be made over to Bernthaler and Andritsch. In December, Sonia began to pack up their belongings. She told Daniel, who was just eighteen, that he would not be able to complete his last year at school but could finish his studies in Paris. "Then you should go to the university at Cambridge, like your uncle Thomas." "Would they take me?" "Of course they would. If nothing else, you could study languages. You already speak three four if you count Italian. And so long as your father can take enough' money out to pay the fees I am sure there would be no difficulty." Jacques heard nothing from St. Petersburg. Perhaps Roya could not write for fear of Sonia seeing the Russian postmark, though she could always have sent it to him at the hospital; maybe she thought that even there some suspicious nurse or porter would see the stamp and start to gossip. Drobesch held no more dinner parties; the Modern World Colloquium for 1914 was postponed sine die and it was said that he planned to travel to Russia, to be with his wife. Jacques called at the house to wish him bon voyage, but found him gone. The butler told him that the house was up for sale and that he had been instructed to show it to prospective purchasers. "Does he intend to stay in Russia? Why on earth would he want to be there?" "I imagine he wants to be wherever Frau Drobesch is, sir." Jacques thought he detected something facetious or suggestive in the man's tone, but he did not care. He walked away up the cobbled street and he knew that he would never see her again. The Christmas festivities were a burden to him, with their social visiting and arduous bonhomie. He once more lost the ability to sleep and spent the days in a nervous coma of wakefulness. She had gone, she had never been his; she was vanished like a torn-off page in a book of hours. He felt the whole shape of himself collapse and fold inward, shrunken and desiccated; he could barely push his footsteps through the air. He longed to move, to be anywhere else. Then in February, at the lowest time of the year, there came a cable to the hospital, addressed to him. The words were typed and pasted in strips on the flimsy paper from the regional post office: 'cannot return, p'burg home indefinite, d here, i love you always, beyond time and place. r."

Twenty-two

Daniel was nineteen years old when he started as an undergraduate at the college next door to his uncle's at Cambridge in the Michaelmas term of 1915, but the place was already starting to seem empty. By the spring of the following year the undergraduate population had fallen from more than four thousand to less than six hundred, most of whom were either medical students or were unfit for service. The west court of Daniel's college had been taken over by the military, and on the lawns that adjoined the Fellows' rose garden, sheep had been put out to graze. Daniel wrote to his parents in Paris to tell them what was going on, but Sonia, who had heard the German guns on the Marne and seen the Gare de lEst teeming with the maimed and wounded, replied that he should devote himself to his studies. It was a French war, she said, and Daniel was English. "Papa may disagree," she wrote, 'but in my view, nationality, like religion, comes through the mother. Anyway, Herr Frage, you are as much Carinthian as French, so which side would you choose to fight for? Put your nose back in your books and do not listen to bloodthirsty boys who tell you otherwise." In the summer, Daniel read of the British attack on the Somme and he saw the strained faces of his fellow-students and their teachers, who were missing brothers, pupils, friends; it seemed that a layer had been excised from British life. Young men who only months before had been a sixth form or a football team were now black-bordered notices in the columns of The Times, the subject of prayers and averted eyes, their college doors locked, their books unopened. In the small back streets of the town, with their toylike cottages in tight brick terraces, Daniel sensed the loss in every family, in almost every face he passed. It was difficult to return to France in the summer, since all transport was required for troops; and in London, on a visit to his cousins, he was so moved by the sight of English soldiers at Victoria station pushing to be let on to the trains for France, that he went to the first recruiting station he could find, which was in Battersea, and volunteered. He did not at first write to tell his parents, fearing they might somehow contrive to have him discharged, but once he had passed the medical and been sent for training, he wrote, from deep within the protective walls of discipline and censorship, to break the news. "I had thought I was bilingual, but I could not at first understand anything the men were saying. The Londoners speak, so far as is possible, without consonants; and there are also men from Glasgow and Durham and Belfast, as I suppose you would expect in a capital city. My section is Alton, Jeavons, Kemp, Reader, Scott and Turney. My mess mates or muckers (there are many odd words in the army) are Billy Reader (who cannot read; I have to do it for him), Jack Turney and Harry Scott. "Harry is known as "Mac" because he comes from Scotland. He is about thirty-five, I think, and has worked in shipyards for most of his life. He is married to a woman called Ellen, of whom he speaks very fondly, and they have two children, Dougal and Ailsa, whose photographs I have been shown many times. He is extremely strong and rather bad-tempered. His idea of the war is to save up his pay in a cushy billet and make sure that on no account does he get promoted. He assured me that whatever the casualty figures suggest, we are unlikely ever to have to go "over the top" and that half the army is "transport", a general term just meaning support and backup. He eats prodigious amounts of food in preparation for leaner times ahead. His favourite expression is, "Sailor Vee, pal." You can probably work out what this means, though it took me several days. "Billy Reader and Jack Turney are about twenty-eight, but they seem much older. Both were unemployed, though Billy had worked as a sign writer and Jack in the docks. Billy looks like a ferret, with a sharp face and greasy brown hair. He has a surprisingly good singing voice and is a good artist, as you might expect he does nice little sketches of the sergeant (of whom more below). He is only interested in one thing, and that is girls. He and Jack talk about almost nothing else and between them seem to have seduced (not their word) every female between the ages of fourteen and forty "from Hainault to Epping" as Billy puts it. All of these ladies seem to have been extremely grateful for his services and he clearly feels that he has done them a tremendous favour. "Jack Turney, who is short and bald, has a son from a liaison with a woman in Milwall, though he appears not to be married to her. Of the three, Jack is the most openly patriotic and believes it is our duty to "shut the Hun back in his **** sty and bolt the door". He believes the Germans have raped a lot of women in Belgium and northern France, though seems slightly resentful that they got there before he did. (I apologise, Ma, if some of this seems awfully coarse to you; believe me, I am keeping out the worst!) Jack is also aggrieved that we are having to help out "the ***** French" and is anxious about how he will manage to "parley" with the local women. "We are all drilled into the ground by Sergeant Duncan, a small man with no chin but an unpleasant and aggressive attitude. He claims to have fought in Sudan with the regular army, but there is some scepticism about this. He seems a most bitter and vindictive person. "What that man needs," says Billy about five times a day, "is a good..." But I am sure you can imagine what Billy's prescription is. "There is one other thing that Jack and Billy will talk about and that is football. This does not always go well because they support different teams, and it is almost a relief to hear them get back to whether short girls are "more willing" than tall ones. "The barracks (I am in Surrey, but cannot say where) are not too bad. We have beds and blankets, which is good because it is already quite cold. The food is not as good as the food in college, but no worse than that in the average eating house. Stews, beans, jam, bacon, doughy bread, sweet tea; but there is enough and I don't mind. We are issued with as many cigarettes as you can smoke. In addition to drill, kit inspection, marching up and down and scrubbing the floor, there is a fair amount of bayonet practice. We have been taught how to clean the rifle, but very little about how to fire it; and of course there is far too little ammunition for live practice. I have a very nice soft khaki cap, tin helmet (recent addition, I gather) and a uniform which fits well with a very smart regimental badge (a species of Goat Rampant very suitable, as Mac drily pointed out to Billy). Shirt and undergarments are just picked out of a pile and a lot of swapping has to go on later. Mess tin, ground sheet, field dressings etc. etc. and something called a "hussif", an all-in-one tool to open tins and "make yourself useful" as Sgt Duncan puts it. When I am posted, you can send me other things, such as scarves. I am hoping to be issued with a leather waistcoat before winter. "And what do they make of me? I am sorry to say that they think I am a bit of a joke. Most of them have a nickname "Barmy" Jeavons, "Gunner" Kemp and so on and I am "Frenchie" because of my surname. They can't understand why I am not in the French army. I have explained everything but they can't seem to follow, while my being a student makes them very suspicious. At first they thought I might be some sort of spy or "MP" (military policeman), but now they accept that I am just an ordinary volunteer like them. English graduates become officers almost at once, and even at the age of eighteen welleducated boys can find themselves commanding a platoon of men twice their age. But I am only an undergraduate, they have no record of my schooling and I seem to have slipped through that net. I am very happy with this, as I would be hopeless at telling people what to do since I have no idea what to do myself. Also, I have become fond of Jack and Billy and Mac. Well, not "fond" perhaps; but I can get on with them all right. I just wish they would not tease me quite so much about being "sixteen" and inexperienced with women etc." etc. I think that Jack thinks it is worth keeping in with me, so that when the time comes I can translate for him to the local French girls; though whether they will be much interested in his assessment of his local team's centre forward, I am not so sure. "My dear Ma and Pa, I know all this is a shock to you. But almost every family in Europe is going through this. I could not stand aside and watch every other French and English man go off to fight. And believe me, the best are already dead. We are already down to the second- and third-rate, men like Jack and Billy and your son; the next stop will be conscription predicted for Christmas. I would be ashamed to wait till I was forced. And although I volunteered on impulse, I have read the newspapers carefully and have lived, as you know, on a mountain from which I had the best view in Europe of the quarrelling nations. I have no doubt whatever that Germany must be stopped. Thank God your respective native countries are allies! What must it be like for Aunt Kitty though I know she is only half-German? I hope Charlotte and Martha are not being teased or persecuted. I saw them only for a moment when I was passing through. Here is a photograph done in a little studio in Epsom High Street. Don't I look smart?" The first thing they had to do, once they had cleared out the bodies from the concrete pillbox they had captured, was put sandbags up the opening, because what had been a back door to the Germans was at the front for them, and invited a rude entry of explosive from the unmoved enemy guns. The brief telephone message from the support line told them that if they wanted sandbags they would have to come and get them. "Me and Frenchie'll go, sir," said Billy Reader. "If you wants to keep Private Turney for company, sir." "All right, Reader," said Captain Denniston. "Good luck, and see if you can get any cigarettes from the chaps back there. And Reader?" "Yes, sir?" "How long have you been in Belgium?" "Come here first in November last year, after training at Etaples, then we was moved to the Salient before the attack on Passchendaele Ridge, sir, a few weeks ago, which ' I don't want the story of your life, man. I just wondered if you were going to take your helmet." "Oh, yes. Thank you, sir." "Honestly, I don't know how you have survived." "Rabbit's foot, sir. Old lady give me it at Folkestone. Though more likely need a fucking rubber ring out there ' "Get out." Daniel followed Billy out of the pillbox into the twilight. It was raining, though they did not notice the rain any more. Daniel shone his torch on to the duckboards which made a path across the liquid mud. They would have to make about three hundred yards back to the forward supply dump where they could load mules with the sandbags and bring them up to the pillbox. Daniel looked about to see if there were any aids to navigation, but the sky was clouded and the landscape had no features. The trees in the plain had been brought down or splintered; the knolls and hillocks had been flattened by weeks of artillery fire; the grass and earth had long been turned over, so that the greyish-brown mud stretched unrelieved by any change of shade or contour until it met the greyish-brown horizon. Even the shell holes some of them twenty yards in diameter, quite soon lost definition in the rain, as their rims subsided and they joined hands with one another, first as craters in a planetary landscape, then mere dips in a quagmire whose marsh-gas came from yellow lurking phosgene and in whose liquid slime the only solid mass was the disconnected limbs of horses and men. "Why did you volunteer for this?" said Daniel, starting off with careful steps. "Two-to-one on says I was going to get told to anyway, mate. Also, I can't stand the smell in that fucking pillbox. Like half the Hun army's used it as their private latrine." At night the Engineers came out to mend the duckboard paths the German guns tore up by day, but the weeks of Passchendaele had thinned the sapper numbers, and gaps had started to appear in the walkways. Daniel was valued as someone with good balance and a steady nerve. "A level head," as Denniston had put it, 'in both senses. Shame you have no initiative, Rebière, or we could have made an officer of you." Daniel heard the rain dripping on the ground sheet he wore as a cape across his shoulders. A late German shell exploded some two hundred yards or so to his left, but he did not quiver at the sound; in fact he found it helpful in orientating himself in the darkness. He felt his leading foot slip for a second on the slimy wood. At moments such as these he often thought of Charlotte and Martha, because the world they came from was so different in all its lineaments from the one that he inhabited; yet they wrote to him and he knew they cared; they seemed to represent to him everything that was worth fighting for. It was extraordinary, he thought, how insulated you could be from your surroundings; if there was one part of you that remained dry, as his torso still was for the time being, you could exist within a private cocoon; while you fumbled with your respirator as the stench of gas rose in the evening mist and seemed to seep into your skin and lungs, you could be holding the thought of two girls in a foreign capital far away, hanging up streamers for Christmas. "We 'alfway yet, Frenchie?" A British flare shone a brief yellow light in the gloom ahead of them and Daniel thought he could make out the section of reserve line where the supply dump was identifiable by the remains of a dry stone wall, which in the summer had been part of a trench system. The rain and the artillery, however, had obliterated all the trenches, so that the men in the line now lived like reptiles in the mud. Daniel had overheard Denniston saying to a fellow-officer that staff estimates put the British casualty figure in the battle so far at 300,000. "Not much of a loss, most of them," Denniston continued. "Conscripts. Men with rickets and short sight. A lot of them have just drowned." They came to a section of better duck boarding and scrambled up the incline to the heap of white stones and down the other side. Behind it was a dug-out made of timber and corrugated iron with a double gas curtain; it looked almost fussily correct, built by the book, in a landscape where nothing was solid any more. Inside were a sergeant and two signallers who were trying to breathe life into a broken telephone system. Daniel explained what he and Reader had come for and after initial reluctance owing to his lack of paperwork, the sergeant told him to take what he wanted. "And if you can get them mules back where you've come from you should be in Barnum