Solomon's Song (64 page)

‘Tell you what,’ Ben says to the desk clerk, ‘we’ll have it in our suite. In the meantime, will you send up a bottle of good French champagne.’

‘Certainly, sir, dinner in your suite, I shall send you up the menu. Do you have a preference in champagne?’

‘No, what would you choose?’

‘I shall consult the cellarmaster, sir. You may depend on him. Shall I show you to your suite?’

‘Thank you.’

They follow the clerk and Sarah nudges Ben. ‘What’s happening, Ben? Tell me!’

Ben allows the clerk to go further ahead. ‘Well, you know how you got a bit squiffy on champagne last time at the Ritz, well, I thought we’d just stay on and get even squiffier. They say if you can get a girl squiffy enough…?’

‘Ben Teekleman, how dare you!’ Sarah giggles.

Sarah is like a little girl at her first birthday party when they get into their suite where all her shopping has been neatly laid out on the huge bed. Soon the bedroom is in chaos as she once again opens all the boxes. The shop assistant has chosen a beautiful dove-grey silk nightdress with a matching peignoir, and, knowing Sarah’s shoe size, she has chosen an elegant pair of slippers with a charming little heel. Sarah blushes violently when she opens the ribboned box of lingerie. ‘Ben Teekleman, what have you done! Turn around at once.’

Ben turns his back and Sarah takes each neatly folded item out of the box. ‘Darling, they’re positively wicked, I can’t possibly wear these!’

‘Oh well, we’ll take them back in the morning then, I’m sure the nice lady who looked after you won’t mind, we’ll swap them for a dozen each of good sensible spencers and bloomers, shall we?’

‘Don’t you dare! I’ve never seen anything as beautiful in my life.’

In the middle of unpacking her shopping a waiter arrives with the champagne in an ice bucket. ‘Sir, our cellarmaster, Mr Boddington, hopes that you will accept this with his compliments. It is a 1908 Dom Perignon, a particularly good year and the last bottle he has of that vintage. He lost a son at Gallipoli and this is a small tribute to the Australians.’

‘That’s very decent of him,’ Ben says, slightly taken aback. The English are such a curious mixture of aloofness and warmth, a hot and cold people who constantly surprise.

‘May I leave the menu? You may telephone when you are ready for dinner. We ask that you allow half an hour for preparation. Will you choose the wine now so that it may either be chilled or decanted?’

‘Would you give Mr Boddington my sincere thanks and please offer him my commiserations, the English lads fought with pride and determination at Gallipoli. I would be happy to have him select a good bottle of red.’ He calls to Sarah, ‘Red wine all right with you, dear?’

‘Lovely!’ Sarah calls back, though she cannot remember ever having tasted red wine.

After the waiter departs Ben turns to Sarah. ‘That’s twice today I’ve heard of an English lad’s death at Gallipoli. We forget that the English lost nearly twice as many men as we did in the Dardanelles campaign.’

Sarah moves over to Ben and puts her hands about his waist, leaning back and looking into his eyes. ‘Darling, let’s not even think about the war for the next two days. I don’t want to go out again, perhaps Hyde Park tomorrow, there are too many people in uniform on the streets, too many reminders of where we’ve been and where you have to go.’ She stands on tiptoe and kisses him lightly on the nose. ‘I know this is all make-believe, a fairytale. I can’t imagine how you’ve managed to do it and, what’s more, just this once I don’t want to know. I just want to be with you for the next forty-eight hours.’ She smiles. ‘And then if they throw us in gaol, I won’t mind in the least. I love you, Ben, with all my heart. Right now, at this very moment, I am happier than I’ve ever been and you haven’t even made love to me yet.’

Ben takes her in his arms and kisses her deeply and then draws away, still holding her against him. ‘Sarah, I want you so badly and have done so since the moment I saw you on the Orvieto. I confess, I have made love to you in my head a hundred times, no, many more times than that.’ Ben can scarcely contain himself, his hardness pressing against Sarah’s slim body. They kiss for a long moment until Sarah, in turn, gently draws away. Ben can feel his heart pumping, he is nervous, not quite knowing what to do next, waiting for Sarah to encourage him.

‘Ben, let me have a bath, darling. Change into my lovely new things. We’ll have a glass of champagne when I come out? But I don’t want to get too squiffy, I want to love you just the way I am now.’ Ben watches as she goes into the bathroom and closes the door behind her.

Suddenly he is depressed. He tells himself he is simply a bit weary. He’s been up since dawn and taken the 6.15 train from Weymouth to London and then the underground to Horseferry Road. The waiting around, the anxiety of covering up during his final medical examination, where he knows in his heart of hearts he isn’t fully recovered from his wound and the subsequent operation has taken its toll. He tells himself it is mostly the time he’s been off his feet. The strength hasn’t returned, he simply isn’t as fit as he ought to be. His wound still hurts and he wonders if it will always be with him. Then there’s been the excitement of the engagement ring and the shopping and the strain and emotion of finding himself alone at last with Sarah. It is as if he has stretched out his arms to take something more than just the war and has had them suddenly filled with something too heavy for him to carry.

He aches to make love to Sarah but at the same time he keeps bumping into the images of the lads in his platoon. Crow Rigby squinting down the telescopic sights of his Lee-Enfield, Brokenose Brodie reading Dickens, his lips moving all the while, brow furrowed in concentration, Wordy Smith painting his delicate tiny blossoms with a brush that appears to contain no more than two hairs. Cooligan, Numbers Cooligan, being argumentative, making a bet, taking one. Woggy Mustafa defiantly Christian, Muddy Parthe working up a good complaint, Library Spencer quietly correcting a fact, Hornbill, smiling, fixing something or other, always tinkering. It is as if the love he feels for them in death keeps intruding into his life, even into his love for Sarah, as if they are somehow participants in the present, perhaps competitors, equally admiring of Sarah, sharing her with him. He wonders if he can love and live without them, whether they have become so much a part of his personality that Sarah will be taking them to bed with her, in some weird ritual in his imagination he doesn’t fully understand. They will be her lovers forever while he looks on, Sergeant Ben Teekleman, who managed to kill them all and stay alive himself.

Ben pours himself a glass of champagne, watching the bubbles settle in the glass. Outside his window he can hear the starlings settling in for the night. What a racket they make, an urgency to find a place on a branch or twig, a terrible squabbling in the elm trees, life persisting, tiny wings beating the air with a furious energy, a thousand tiny throats demanding their own brief span, resisting death, fighting it for all their worth.

In those moments of silence on Gallipoli, when both sides had had enough, there had been no birdsong, only the occasional mournful caw of a crow feeding on human carrion. ‘Crows. Why is it always the vermin that follow you?’ He can hear Crow Rigby saying it. The urgency of starlings had gone out of the air at Lone Pine, The Nek, the Daisy Patch. The charnel fields stank of death, the soil was soaked in it, drowned in a muddiness of young blood. There was so much death about, it became more natural than being alive. Can he now change back again and feel his need for life returning? Can he wipe death from his mind, replace it, even for forty-eight hours, with the life she brings him, the renewal she promises him with her sweet body? Is this woman, any woman, enough? Ben feels corrupted, guilty, ashamed even to admit such a thought, for he knows he loves Sarah more than his own life. Yet the thoughts of death, of decay, of the past, engulf him.

Ben has his back to the bathroom door, facing the window when Sarah calls out to him. He rises. She is dressed in the silk nightdress and peignoir though her feet remain bare, her toes peeping from under the hem of the dove-grey silk. She has brushed her hair and tied it back with a brown ribbon. Her face is scrubbed clean of any make-up. As Ben draws closer he sees the light scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and the upper part of her cheeks. Her mouth is slightly open and her hazel eyes are filled with love for him as her arms reach out and she starts to unbutton his tunic. ‘Come, darling Ben, come and make love to Sarah.’

*

Ben entrains at Victoria Station for Dover to catch the troopship to Boulogne and from there to the 1st Division base at Etaples, where he is kitted out with a cold-weather uniform and given, in addition, a tin hat and gasmask. He is also required to undergo a further ten days of training which includes the use of the gasmask and a demonstration and lecture on the effects of phosgene gas.

This is the first of several differences from the conditions Ben had experienced in Gallipoli. For a start, there had been few gasmasks at Gallipoli, and those that could be found were used for only one purpose, to give the troops some relief from the stench of rotting corpses. Any platoon able to obtain a single gasmask to share among them treasured it. If there was one thing every soldier who returned from Gallipoli would remember until the day he died, it would be the stench of the charnel fields where the dead on both sides lay unburied and forsaken.

Ben’s headquarters are near the village of Armentieres where he is to report to his battalion commander Lieutenant-Colonel Le Maistre who has replaced Colonel Wanliss, who was wounded at Gallipoli. The battalion commander, much to Ben’s extreme embarrassment, welcomes him to his dugout some eight hundred yards behind the lines with, ‘Well, well, here cometh the axeman!’ Ben thinks for a moment that Le Maistre may be chaffing him, but realises almost immediately that the words are spoken in genuine admiration.

Le Maistre points to an ammunition box. ‘Sit, please, Sergeant-Major, I’ve been through your papers and you’re just the sort of chap we need. Though, of course, you’ll be short of experience in this sort of trench warfare, but then we all are. Different. Quite different to Gallipoli and you’ll find it will take quite some getting used to. Thank God, the weather is being kind at the moment. Except for the deeper bomb craters which never seem to entirely dry up, as you can see it is rather dusty. One big shower, though, and we’re all back up to our knees in the infernal mud.’ He briefly ruffles the papers on the small table at which he is seated. The table and the hard, straight-backed wooden chair with it, appear to have been appropriated from a farmhouse kitchen. Then Le Maistre looks over at Ben. ‘Now, much as we’d like to have you here, brigade headquarters thinks differently, that’s the problem coming in with a reputation, you can’t slip in quietly, as I’m sure you’d rather do, eh?’

‘Sir, I am not an experienced sergeant-major, in fact I’m new to the job, I’ll be happy to be the dogsbody around the place, earn my crown.’

‘No, no, you’ll be given your own company just as soon as you return, you’re far too experienced a soldier not to be leading men in combat. It’s just that brigade headquarters want you to join a special training group, in the 27th Battalion, being conducted by the 7th Brigade. They’re a West Australian outfit, damn fine, too. The Joan of Arc Company.’

‘Joan of Arc? That’s a new one, sir.’

Le Maistre grins. ‘I said that deliberately, Sergeant-Major, hoped you might pick up on it. The battalion has, it seems, a great many members of a West Australian family named Leane. They’re all enlisted in the same company, so that the CO., two of the subalterns, several N.C.O.s and God knows how many enlisted men are all Leanes. In other words, the company is,’ he pauses and then continues, ‘made of all Leanes, Maid of Orleans, hence the Joan of Arc Company.’

‘Very clever, sir. Can you tell me what I am to do in the 7th?’

‘Yes, you’ll be with selected members of the 27th and 28th Battalions to be trained as scouts and as a raiding party. I’m not quite sure what this entails. It seems you are to be instructed in a raiding technique perfected by the Canadians near Messines, last November. Two officers,’ Le Maistre glances at his notes, ‘yes, here it is, Lieutenants Conners and Kent of the 1st Canadian Division have been seconded to assist as training instructors.’ Ben’s commanding officer looks up at him. ‘I’m sure it will prove to be very useful stuff when you return to us, Sergeant-Major.’

‘When will that be?’ Ben now asks.

‘Haven’t the foggiest, old chap. Rather sooner than later I hope, the 5th are in a big offensive planned for some time in July and I want all the experienced men I can find. I have an inexperienced C.O. in D Company, decent sort of chap but he has spent most of his war in ordnance, we’re thinking of putting you in with him.’ He brings the papers in front of him together. ‘Thank you, that will be all, Sergeant-Major Teekleman, report to the Provost Sergeant, who’ll give you your clearance and papers for the 27th Battalion part of the 7th Brigade. You’re to report to Captain Foss.’

Ben rises and, coming to attention, salutes. Le Maistre grins suddenly and looks up from the table where he is seated. ‘Oh, I almost forgot, you’re supposed to have volunteered for this assignment, Sergeant-Major, so take extra good care of yourself. Remember, you belong to the 5th Battalion.’

Ben finds himself in a special unit, which simply becomes known as ‘the raiding party’ and consists of some sixty men and six officers. It is divided into two sections, one responsible for the left half of the attack, the other for the right. As the unit isn’t much bigger than a standard platoon, each half is allocated a sergeant, and though Ben is of a higher rank he is asked if he’ll act in the lower capacity for one of the teams.

Captain Foss, a big, ebullient man, nearly six foot four inches in height and a good two hundred and eighty pounds in weight, looks and acts naturally as a leader, or, put into the colloquial language of the men under him, ‘he doesn’t carry on with any bullshit’. He introduces Ben to the West Australian volunteers.