The Blasphemer: A Novel (4 page)

It was Daniel’s turn to frown. ‘Meaning?’

‘Sometimes it’s best not to disturb the past.’

‘Disturb? What are you getting at?’

Philip swallowed. His mouth groped for an answer. ‘I … I don’t
know. My French is not … I think there was a reason your aunt Hillary never had them translated.’

‘How do you know she didn’t?’

‘She told me … When she was dying. She said there was a tin in the garage she wanted me to have. Said she had never read the letters. I feel …’ He searched for the right word. ‘I don’t know … Superstitious about them. Once opened. Once read …’ He repacked the wallet, hip flask, lock of hair and copy of
Punch
in the tin.

‘Dad, you worry too much.’ Daniel’s voice had softened. ‘You should definitely get the letters translated.’

‘So you don’t mind?’

‘Why should I mind?’

‘I have your agreement?’

Daniel’s brow puckered again. ‘Don’t get weird on me, Dad. Of course you … Do whatever you think best.’ He took the letters, slipped them into his jacket and, for a moment, panicked as he felt for the passports. Remembering he had put them in the glove compartment of the car, he said: ‘Anyway, we’d better shift. Thanks for looking after Martha and Kevin. I’ll ring from the airport. Tell you …’ He looked around and lowered his voice: ‘Tell you how it went.’

Kevin trotted in, followed by Martha licking her fingers as she finished a doughnut. When Philip saw her, he clapped his papery hands together and opened them slowly to inspect. ‘Missed,’ he said with mock gloominess. ‘Damn and blast.’

‘Missed what?’ Martha asked.

‘A fairy. Been having trouble with them. They make holes in my clothes.’

Martha laughed indulgently. ‘Fairies don’t exist, Grampy. You’re thinking of moths.’

‘Of course fairies exist. What’s this then?’ He reached in his pocket. Martha’s eyes widened and, despite herself, she walked over for a better look. Philip pulled out his pocket lining and showed Martha a hole in it. ‘See?’ he said.

Martha laughed again and punched her grandfather’s leg.

Daniel shook his head. How could the old bugger be so at ease
with his granddaughter, yet so awkward with his own son? He headed back out into the hall and called through to Nancy, who was talking to Amanda in the kitchen. With her rheumy eyes, soft cheeks and reserved manner, Daniel’s stepmother gave the impression to strangers of being a passive and tolerant person. Nancy knew better. ‘Amanda was telling me that your cousin Thomas is getting married,’ she said pointedly as she emerged from the kitchen. A thin smile was playing on Amanda’s granite lips.

‘Mum,’ Martha said. ‘Grampy was pretending that he had a fairy in his pocket, but I know there aren’t any fairies – Daniel told me.’

‘Call me Daddy.’

Martha took her father’s hand. ‘He told me at the same time he told me there is no God and no Father Christmas.’ Philip, Amanda and Nancy looked at Daniel accusingly.

‘What?’ Daniel said, pointing at himself. ‘
What?
… Well, there isn’t.’ He kissed Martha on the forehead. ‘Bye, darling. Keep Grampy out of trouble.’

‘
Auf Wiedersehen
,’ the nine-year-old said with a grin. This was a game of theirs.

‘
Au revoir
,’ Daniel said.

‘
Arrivederci
.’

‘
Sayonara
.’

‘
Do svidaniya
.’

‘We’ll be back in a couple of hours,’ Nancy interrupted.

The snow had turned to sleet. ‘
¡Chao!
,’ Daniel said in a stage whisper, pulling a guilty face as he turned his collar up, jogged to the car and opened the door. As he was reaching for his seat belt, arthritic knuckles rapped on the window. Daniel wound it down. Philip reached in and tucked a poppy into his son’s buttonhole. It was the one from his own jacket.

‘I have got one somewhere,’ Daniel said, feeling a mixture of annoyance and humiliation.

‘In case they don’t have any at the airport,’ Philip said.

‘Thanks, Dad.’

‘And guess what DVD I’ve rented,’ Philip added in that slightly
loud voice people use when talking to one person for the benefit of another.

‘
Finding Nemo
?’ Martha said from behind him.

‘
Finding Nemo
.’

‘Cool! Thanks, Grampy.’ Martha warmed her hands on the bonnet of the car. ‘Bye, Mum,’ she shouted. ‘Have a nice time.’ She clapped a hand over her mouth as she realized what she had said.

Nancy hadn’t noticed. She spent the short journey to Heathrow examining her nails. The windscreen wipers were on full speed. As the traffic slowed and thickened, Daniel wondered if he and Martha had left anything out of the packing they had done on Nancy’s behalf. He was sure he had packed everything they would need, yet still he felt edgy. Was it something he’d forgotten? Phone numbers? No, he’d left them. He hadn’t taken the pill he always took to counter his anxiety about flying. That must be it. He would take it once he had parked, once he had told Nancy what was really happening.

At Terminal 5, when he mounted the ramp marked
DEPARTURES
, Nancy waved her hands out in front of her, limp at the wrists, used her tongue to push out the flesh below her mouth and made a
Nnnugh!
sound.

‘Bugger,’ Daniel said, ‘we need to go to arrivals, don’t we?’ Nancy slapped her forehead in reply.

‘Do you think I can park in this disabled bay while you check what time their plane lands?’

‘Why not? I’m sure mental disability counts.’

Daniel pulled over to one side of the slipway and cut the engine. ‘The airline details are in the glove compartment.’

When the two passports fell out of the envelope, Nancy stared at them blankly. She pulled out two plane tickets to Quito and looked at Daniel with confusion in her eyes. Next came a small guidebook to the Galápagos Islands. She blinked and looked up at Daniel again. He was holding his iPhone up, pointing its camera lens at her. He was about to say ‘Happy anniversary,’ when he became distracted by a blue van parking ahead of them. The hitchhiker he had seen earlier was getting out of it, his shape blurred by the slush
on the windscreen. The man waved his thanks and strode off towards the revolving entrance door of the terminal. The only sound was the soft percussion of icy rain on the roof of the car.

Ypres Salient. Last Monday of July, 1917

PRIVATE ANDREW KENNEDY CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY THE MEN
marching ahead of him have stopped singing mid-song. There is something in the ditch – a carcass. Its lips are pulled back as if baring its teeth and its bloated belly is moving, making one of its hind legs shudder. It looks as if it is rising from the dead. As the soldier draws alongside he can see it is not the horse moving but the rats feeding inside it. One emerges from a leathery slit and stares impassively back at the column.

Half a mile farther on, the 11th Battalion, Shropshire Fusiliers, get their first sight of Dickebusch – ‘Dickie Bush’ – camp: smoke rising from dozens of fires, hundreds of tethered horses and mules, a long scaffold from which straw-filled sandbags dangle on ropes like executed prisoners, crates of chickens, a confusion of chugging, honking, backfiring trucks, motorbikes and staff cars, and soldiers – thousands and thousands of soldiers assembling for roll calls, eating from mess tins, arm-wrestling, digging latrines, dealing cards, shining boots, lying on their backs, playing leapfrog, writing letters, smoking pipes. As the column approaches, the noises and smells intensify. A small steam train clatters into a makeshift junction, followed by dozens of open cattle trucks packed with yet more troops. They look precarious as they jostle each other and hang over the sides. For the benefit of a newsreel cameraman whose
hand is turning a crank at an unvarying pace, they cheer and raise their helmets. In the fields beyond them are row upon row of white, well-guyed bell-tents, arranged as symmetrically as gravestones in a military cemetery.

There are some tents waiting for the battalion, but not enough. Around a hundred men have to lie in the open, finding space wherever they can. Andrew and a few others from his platoon opt for a ruined barn. Despite their exhaustion from the march, sleep does not come easily. The pockmarked walls dance with faint colours: red and green flares being fired on the horizon. Also, they are sharing the barn with rats. Andrew feels, or imagines he feels, the straw moving beneath him.

Some members of the platoon regard the ubiquitous rats as companions in adversity, others as mere targets for bayonet practice. One private amused himself by baiting the end of his bayonet with a piece of bacon and shooting the first rat that came to eat it. But only one. He found himself on a charge for wasting ammunition. And bacon.

Andrew’s attitude is different. He is not so complacent. In the three weeks he has been away from England, he has developed a morbid loathing of rats. It is to do with the bluntness of their muzzles and the glassy lifelessness of their eyes. It is also to do with the way they move, either trotting with purpose in a straight line, their hindquarters and long tails raised, or scurrying for cover – fat shadows in his peripheral vision.

But in moments of self-awareness, the soldier recognizes his hatred is varnished with cold, premonitory fear. He has heard how the rats at the Front are quite unlike the beach rats at the Étaples ‘Bull Ring’. Here they grow to the size of footballs, bloated on the flesh of dead men. They usually go for the eyes first and then burrow their way right inside the corpse. When Andrew closes his eyes to sleep he can imagine the rank of rats heading with a steady, determined trot towards him, their coarse fur matted in the rain, their dark eyes fixing him, sizing him up.

He has encountered rats before. As a plumber in Market Drayton before the war he was sometimes obliged to inspect sewage pipes.
But the rats he had seen then never bothered him. They were more frightened than he was, apart from anything else. And now, as he lies awake gazing at the stars through the rafters of the barn, the Market Drayton rats are a world away. When was he last in his home town? Five months? Five years? A lifetime ago. He recalls the day he and another young man from his firm, William Macintyre, answered Kitchener’s call for volunteers. As they cycled together to the recruiting office, a room in the town hall, they teased each other: about how one wouldn’t be able to shoot straight; about how the other wouldn’t know the difference between a stopcock and a Mills bomb. They were staggered to find a long queue of straw boaters and cloth caps snaking out of the hall and into the street. They parked their cycles and joined the end of it, playfully pushing each other out of the way.

Andrew allows himself a smile at this memory and turns his head to see Macintyre has managed to fall asleep. They have known each other since school. Took up their apprenticeships together, having both turned fourteen in the same week. The money wasn’t bad but they knew that plumbing was a temporary calling, a means to an end. Their joint aspiration was to form a music-hall double act. In their tea breaks at work, they had experimented with vaudeville songs and comedy turns.

In the semi-darkness, Andrew tries to remember some of their routines but they remain out of reach, his mind too numb to summon them. Instead he reaches across to find his friend’s hand. Macintyre grips it as a reflex without waking up. They had both found it funny when the medical officer had tapped their knees at the recruiting office. The memory prompts another smile. Although they had both recently turned twenty, the MO was suspicious they were under age. Andrew’s tendency to blink excessively when talking didn’t help, nor did his slight build and rounded shoulders. He nevertheless passed his examination and was issued with a uniform a size too big for him. Three months of basic training at Aldershot, followed by another two of hanging around the depot before his name appeared on a typed list outside the orderly room, had not given him an air of maturity, as it had certain other men. Even the
‘Ole Bill’ moustache he has since grown is too fine and pale to count as manly. As he lies in the dark, his head pillowed on his balled-up cape, he strokes his whiskers and tenses the sinews in his back whenever he feels, or imagines he feels, a movement beneath him.

It is still dark when reveille is sounded. Andrew has again not slept. He washes, shaves and eats his porridge in a trance before Colour Sergeant Major Davies, a thick-necked man with a dozen years of regular service to his name, orders the platoon to fall in. Though his nickname is the Creeping Barrage, on account of the way his voice starts quietly and builds to a roar, his voice this morning remains subdued and is all the more terrifying for this. He tells them what they have guessed, what they have feared and longed for at the same time, that they are going up the line in preparation for the Big Push – the breakout from the Ypres Salient that has been many months in the planning.

As he marches in step with his comrades across the reclaimed marshland of West Flanders, he feels as if he is daydreaming. Something about the percussion of studded boots and the hollow clink of bayonets against mess tins hypnotizes him. His legs and arms alone are doing the marching, without any conscious effort on his part. He also feels as if he is being carried along on a human river, his own marrow subsumed into that of the body of men moving inexorably forward together with momentum, strength and purpose.

The raucous singing starts again – ‘Three German officers crossed the line. Parlez-vous’ – and Andrew sings as lustily as any of the men he is with. He welcomes the distraction and enjoys the novelty of using vulgar, barrack-room vocabulary. ‘Three German officers crossed the line. Parlez-vous.’ Though sweat is running down his face and stinging his eyes, it is the sweat of exertion and heat, not fear. Andrew feels no fear as he marches. ‘Three German officers crossed the line, fucked the women and drank the wine. With an inky-pinky parlez-vous. ’Though the skies are overcast, the weather is humid and this means that the column needs regular breaks. When they stop alongside a destroyed railway track,
Andrew’s thoughts return immediately to the CSM’s icy words: ‘Right, lads, we’re going up the line.’ For Andrew the fear is nebulous, no more than a vague tightening of the gut, but it is fear all the same. He is, and knows he is, a frightened man.