Mourning Ruby (27 page)

You need sleep so much. He would never have thought he would need to sleep so much. Twelve hours isn’t near enough. He sees that same desire in all the faces around him. They want to be in the black, as he does. Pinned down by heavy clothes, by coats.

For the next few hours he knows he won’t die. Out of habit, he has begun a letter to his wife, and it lies beside his bed.

I hope you are…

What does he hope she is?

In the tent the light is green. Outside, the grass is thick and deep by the hedges. Will has walked through it, waded thigh-deep in it, watched its pollen brush off onto him. Where one of the tents has been moved recently, there’s a long yellow oblong with new green shoots among the etiolated grass. There are scuff marks where the entry was.

Cow-parsley, buttercup and wild garlic are flowering, wood-pigeons roll the sound of summer over and over inside their throats. It’s idyllic. There’s a stream, a little bridge, a farmhouse. There’s even a rumour that someone’s got hold of a cow and there’s going to be fresh milk in the Mess.

You can stroll about in the fresh air and the sunshine. You don’t have to zigzag or keep your head down.

Each pilot and observer and mechanic has made a tour of the front line. You need to know what it’s all about and what you’re here for. There is the artillery. Aerial photography and Morse information will give those guns their fixes. There are the men, sunburned, troglodytic, who will look to you for protection against hostiles flying low during troop movements, machine-gunning the infantry just as you will machine-gun the enemy infantry. They watch you warily, as if you’re another species, which you are. There is the close-up, intimate, permanent chaos of the line, from which those men can’t escape, and into which you can’t enter.

From above, Will knows the front line as the men will never know it. It is unsheeted for him on these pure blue mornings. No one has seen a war like this before. His plane swoops over it in a second. Our lines. Hunland.

Even if all you can see is smoke, the camera sees more. Keep on taking photographs. They will show more than you can see.

Will thinks about coming down in Hunland, and being taken prisoner.

‘Might as well put your toothbrush in, sir,’ says Spit Quinn, his mechanic. ‘There’s plenty do. I heard of a man once, went up in a BE2 with the
Complete Works of Shakespeare
. But don’t let the squadron leader see you packing your pyjamas. He reckons it’s defeatist.’

Will carries chocolate in his breast pocket. He pictures himself offering it to French children who will, in return, hide him in the outhouse of their conveniently nearby
cottages. Better to picture the unwrapping of chocolate than the long living fall from seven thousand feet, arms and legs whirling. Or a flamer.

Are you conscious all the way down?

Will hates his own ignorance. All his life Will has fought for knowledge. It’s his brains that have got him where he is. Otherwise he would be where those others are, trench fodder, hunkered in mud that won’t go away even when it’s summer. He would be itching in a khaki uniform that fitted roughly and bore the sweetish smell of lice.

Who would have thought that a scholarship boy would even enter death on a different plane? He’s at the top of the ladder here. He’s so high up the ladder that he’s not even on it any more. He’s in the clouds. And when he’s not flying he comes down onto green fields beyond the range of guns and shells. He sleeps in a bed, he eats at a table, and lights a cigarette without cupping it in his hands to conceal its glow when he inhales.

‘When you get a blockage, this is where it’ll most likely be,’ says Spit, tapping the barrel of the Lewis gun. Will Hazell nods, but in a perfunctory way that makes Spit glance at him again. Is he taking all this in? Does he understand what Spit’s trying to do: pack survival into his new pilot?

What Spit doesn’t yet know is that Will’s nod means that the knowledge is safely in, and Spit can go on.

‘Get a blockage you can’t deal with, you’re unprotected,’ warns Spit.

Spit and Will have more in common than the Nieuport. Spit would know his way blindfold around the household
Will Hazell comes from. He would recognize the food on the plates, and the knit of worry and satisfaction on Will’s mother’s face as she watches her children eat so fast their plates are empty in five minutes. He’d know those washday Mondays: cold bacon clapped between two hunks of bread, and don’t come back till your sister fetches you. Back-breaking, short-tempered washday Mondays. At the end of them Will’s mother sits at the front door, luxuriating in a cup of tea while her clean laundry cracks in the wind.

A granite tin-miner’s cottage for Will, with five children, two adults and a skinny black dog sharing four rooms and a kitchen. A red-brick terrace in Manchester for Spit Quinn.

Will’s father was quick, too, but no scholarships came his way. He worked far out under the sea. The sea boomed overhead, waiting its chance. One day it would get into the tunnelwork. That was always the sea’s intention, as sure as it was blind. Joseph Hazell had the instincts of an engineer. He understood the materials that surrounded him, the balance of pressure and counter-pressure, water and stone, the moley tunnels feeling their way out, braced and buttressed and infinitely vulnerable. He picked up the minute signs of stress that meant the balance was out of true. A creak, a crack, a pooling of water where no water was before, a candle that blew out and stubbornly wouldn’t relight. Warning signs.

If Joe Hazell says it’s time to get out, you drop your pick, get out and don’t wait for nothing. It’s the sea you’ve got on top of you.

The Atlantic of Will’s childhood. He didn’t know it was called the Atlantic, not till he grew older and learned what the world was and where he was in it. The schoolmaster had an old wreck map he brought in and unrolled to show. In those days the edge of the map was drawn so it looked as if you were falling off the edge of the world.

He knew the sea long before he knew what it was. Green and turquoise, a cold glove prickling all over his body as he went in naked with the other boys. They dived off rocks, skinned their knees and elbows scrambling out of the sea, watched the thin blood trail and coil in the clear rock pools. They clapped a hand over their privates to protect them from the razor-sharp mussels as they scrambled over the rocks.

The sea was alive with rips. Will got caught in the rip once, when he was ten. He knew what to do but it still shocked him. The rip took hold of him like the arm of a strong man hauling him off for mischief. It was colder than the rest of the sea, and it knew exactly what it wanted to do with him. It wanted to take him and drown him.

He looked at the land and it was moving in the wrong direction. Will knew he had to swim on the cross, until he was out of the rip. He knew not to fight it. Fighting made you weak, and then the sea did for you. He knew boys who had fought – well, he didn’t know them, but they were part of the story he grew up with, their drowned selves bobbing in, swollen, on the tide, their fingertips and their soft eyes eaten out by crabs.

As the rip seized him he knew those boys were close. He twisted sideways and pushed down the panic that
rose in his throat and wanted to stop him from swimming and breathing. The sea was running rough now. It hadn’t been rough before. It was the rip getting hold of him.

He didn’t fight. He turned on his stomach, kicked out, steadied himself into the strong breaststroke that could take him a mile or more. He swam on the cross. He was ten years old, skinny and strong. He was caught in the rip. He was not going to die yet.

It was very cold. He wondered where the others were. They’d come up on shore and he’d gone off across the rocks and hadn’t said where he was going. He hadn’t told them he was going to swim out.

He swam on, bubbling and gasping. He seemed to be low down in the water, or else the water was up on top of him. The rip pulled at his naked body, wanting it. He couldn’t feel all of himself any more. Bright water slapped in his eyes. He saw pieces of sky. He was swimming into deeper water, out of the bay. It was the only way to get out of the rip. No one from shore would see the smallness of his head in the bouncing of the waves. No one would help him or look for him until it was too late.

Suddenly a thought rose in him which he had never thought before. His father was under the sea, beneath him. He was down there, in his tunnel, burrowing out under the sea. He had a lamp and he was dry, or only wet with sweat. If Will reached down, through the water, the sand, the rock, he would touch his father’s hand.

He swam out of the rip. It came all at once. The fringes of it made a last pull for him, but they were weak. The rip slid off him and he was out into clean deep water. The swell pushed him and the waves pushed him, but there was no rip any more.

He was very cold, and far out. Not as far as he’d ever been, but far enough. He trod water and raised his head as high as he could, to see where he should come in. If he got caught again he would drown, but he wouldn’t get caught. There was the place he would aim, where there was an apron of sand between the rocks. He would come in there and he would be safe.

But for a moment he stayed out in the deep water, sculling with his hands and treading with his feet. He was intensely aware of the veiny passages beneath him, where his father was. His father might look up and think of the world above him as he worked. He would never think of Will being there too, almost within grasp.

Will is alive. He’ll do what the other pilots do. Sometimes, on the way back from a show, they play in and out of the clouds. When the pursuit is over and death has packed up his bags for the day.

They run their machines down the seams of a cloud. They hide in caves no one has ever seen before. Inside the shine of the sky there are these caves, the colour of irises. They bare their teeth for joy at the beauty of it, these fighting men in their tattered aeroplanes. They reach out to touch it, like corporals in muddied, bloody khaki who can’t see any reason not to pluck a dog-rose from the hedges as they march.

I hope you are… I hope you will be…

5

Sweet Dreams

No, Rebecca, I’m not going to tell you about Will’s wife.

Not yet. I’m not even going to tell you her name. This is the

story of Will and Florence.

Will dreams. His body twitches. He throws up his right arm to ward off a blow.

There’s a fight going on. Two figures, knotted together. Both of them are naked, so close that he can’t see if they are both men or not. But they must be. Only men would fight with that deadly poisonous intent. One of them is trying to force the other down onto a bed. There are grunts and groans, but neither cries out. The bed is a camp bed like his own.
It won’t take your weight
, he wants to warn them.
It’ll collapse, can’t you see that?

And then he sees something else they don’t see. The beds are not beds at all. Really they are planes, frail with struts and wires. They will never take that pressure.

‘
She’s spinning
,’ a voice says, very quietly.

‘
Look out, old chaps
,’ says someone else in a lazy drawl, as if the whole thing is a gigantic joke.

They are right. The pilot has lost control. The bed that was a plane spins faster and faster, into its own vortex. In the blind heart of it the two men are still fighting. They do not know what is going on.

Will’s lungs ache with agony and terror. He tries to cry out, but his voice is crushed down into his lungs. There is no air where he is.

Watch out for the rip! Watch out for the rip!

He wakes struggling. There is Frizell standing by his camp bed, looking down. He’s in flying-kit, with his goggles pushed up above his brow.

‘What time is it?’ asks Will quickly.

‘Five,’ says Frizell. ‘You all right, old man?’

He is carrying his gauntlets, tapping them against his thigh. The skin of his hands is golden brown. Will swings his legs off the bed, stands, pushes his way towards the flap of daylight.

It is still the same afternoon. Warmish, but more clouded now. At the far end of the field a man runs up to bowl against a single batsman and a single fielder, as if the stutter of an incoming Pup engine has nothing to do with them. Frizell looks up, shades his eyes, scans the sky.

‘That’ll be O’Hagan back again. Yes, it’s him. Good-oh.’

Will swallows the ugly metal taste in his mouth. His heart is still hammering. He watches, until the hedge hides it, another man enjoy the best moment of all: landing safe back at your own aerodrome, with your machine more or less intact, yourself and observer (if you have one) more or less unscathed.

‘You didn’t look as if you were having sweet dreams,’ says Frizell, offering Will a cigarette. Will takes one, they both light up, but Frizell forgets to smoke his. He stares at the cigarette in his hand as if wondering what it is.

‘I’d be a fool if I was,’ says Will.

‘What?’

‘Having sweet dreams.’

‘Too true,’ says Frizell, his face clearing. For a moment he looks his real age, which Will knows is two months short of twenty.

‘Where’re you going?’ he asks.

‘Taking Dutton on his familiarization. They’re sending us pilots who haven’t even completed their gunnery course. What the hell kind of chance have they got? Then when we complain about the lack of training, they say it’s impossible to train anyone for what they’ll find out here, anyway. Which of course is true. And then Trenchard can’t deny the Army anything. Well, he can’t, you’ve done your conducted tour of the trenches, you can see that he can’t. If the Army asks, we say yes.’

Will nods. Frizell is pitched and tense, still thrumming somewhere with the dangerous elation that made him burst out about the saving hand of God.

‘You play the piano, don’t you?’ asks Frizell.

‘I do.’

‘That’s awfully handy.’