The Blasphemer: A Novel (42 page)

‘Yes. We want him to know.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘You could persuade Daniel to disappear for the next few days. Get out of London.’

‘What about his work?’

‘They’re going to suspend him. He doesn’t know yet.’

‘Wetherby told you this?’

‘The suspension is his idea.’

Philip packed his suitcase, then went online to book two tickets for the Eurotunnel and two hotel rooms in Ypres. After this he rang Daniel’s mobile.

Le Bizet, Belgium. Second Monday of September, 1918

IN HIS CELL, ANDREW LISTENS TO THE SOUND OF A COFFIN BEING
hammered together: as the guard has reminded him, coffins are a luxury not afforded to those killed at the Front. He is being held in the town police station. There is a stained mattress on the floor, two chairs and a bucket. His cell smells of paraffin. When he holds on to the bars of the high window and lifts himself up, he can see two soldiers digging a hole in the yard. He feels curious as he watches them, but not afraid. A sense of calm detachment has settled upon him, anchoring him. With the help of a French dictionary lent to him by the Scottish provost marshal, he begins writing a letter to Adilah and is halfway through it when she is brought in to see him. The APM follows her in and stands by the door. ‘Yous got five minutes, laddie.’ He looks straight ahead of him at the wall. It is the closest they will get to privacy.

‘I am sorry, Andrew,’ Adilah says, unable to meet his eye. ‘I am not any help at the trial, I think.’

‘Having you in there did help.’

‘What is she like, your England wife?’

Andrew reaches for Adilah’s hand.The APM glowers at him, then his expression softens and he shakes his head. ‘I never loved her the way I love you …’ Andrew says this quietly, withdrawing his hand. ‘I do love you. I love you more than I can say.’

‘I love you, also, Andrew.’ A catch in her voice. ‘I am glad we had our together time.’ She dabs at her eyes.

He finds his hands reaching to her belly. ‘If it’s a boy, I’d like him to be called William.’

Adilah nods and sniffs. She holds his hands to the bump before taking his fingers in hers and pressing them to the swell of her breast. He has learned every detail of these breasts, the softness of the skin, the faint blue veins buried just below the surface, the pinkness of the buds.

‘No touching,’ the APM says. But there is kindness in his voice.

‘When William is older will you give him this?’ Andrew backs away and holds up his pocket watch. After a nod from the APM, he presses it into Adilah’s hand, taking the opportunity to brush her skin with his finger as he does so.

Adilah sniffs again.

‘Please don’t. I can’t be strong if you cry.’

‘You have to go now, madame,’ the APM says.

Adilah composes herself and levels her gaze at Andrew. ‘Goodnight,’ she says.

He smiles tensely. ‘
Bonne nuit
.’

Northern France. Present day. Five and a half months after the crash

THE SHADOWS WERE LENGTHENING AS THE TYRES OF PHILIP’S
twelve-year-old Daimler rolled with a metallic clatter down the ramp on to salt-stained French tarmac.There had been a two-hour hold-up on the Eurotunnel – a security alert on the English side – and now there was a further delay as the car was ushered to a siding and security staff asked father and son to step out of it so that they could run a nitroaromatic explosives detector rod over its interior. As Daniel was driving, he was the one asked to open the boot. There was a bucket crammed with rubber gloves, two scrubbing brushes and detergent. Behind their bags were two spades, a pick, an axe, a large red torch and several rolls of bin liners. Nothing to arouse the suspicion of the police then. Thanks, Dad.

As he stood, Philip felt in his waistcoat pocket for his fob watch, pulled it out by its chain and flicked it open with his thumb. He began shifting his weight from one foot to the other. For reasons he would not elaborate upon, he had wanted to cross into Belgium and reach Ypres by 8pm.

‘Don’t forget to put your watch forward an hour,’ Daniel said, winding on his own watch. ‘It’s six thirty, not five thirty.’ He immediately regretted saying this, as his father had clearly not allowed for the time difference. He tried to make light of it:
‘Anyway we’re going back in time, Dad. Isn’t that what this is all about?’ His father made no comment but, when they set off again, he tapped the windscreen and pointed to a sign reminding English drivers to drive on the right. Daniel had forgotten. Touché, he thought.

Out of habit, Daniel extended a hand towards where the satellite navigation display would have been on his hybrid – what Nancy and he called the Navigatrix, because of the bossiness of its recorded female voice – but after hovering for a moment the hand returned to the steering wheel. He asked his father about the best route instead, hoping it would distract him. Philip would enjoy unfolding his map and spreading it out over his lap and on the fascia containing the airbag. Some of the road numbers were out of date. Nevertheless, a route was soon worked out that meant they would follow the coastline for half an hour past Dunkirk before turning inland. As they passed fields of oilseed rape and unripened wheat, Daniel helped himself to one of his father’s Mint Imperials and tuned the radio to a French jazz station. John Coltrane was playing ‘A Love Supreme’. He would have liked to listen to it but he retuned to a classical station, knowing this was what his father preferred.

When a sign for Ypres came up, they forked off the motorway and made a south-easterly approach to the town, past a sign to the British and Australian war cemetery at Polygon Wood, and along the Menin Road. When they reached a roundabout, Philip said: ‘This is Hellfire Corner.’

‘I’ve heard of it,’ Daniel said.

‘You should have. Everyone should have. This place is a byword for unrelenting death.’

‘Funny, it doesn’t seem so bad. I mean, obviously the Belgians drive like nutters but …’ Daniel caught his father’s expression and dropped the gag. He always found his father’s seriousness brought out the joker in him, an attempt to dispel dark clouds with breeziness of manner.

They had reached the outskirts of the town.

‘Here,’ Philip said. ‘Pull over.’

Daniel checked his rear-view mirror, indicated and found a parking space on the side of the road. It was a fairly mild evening, but crisp enough for Daniel to reach for his suede jacket to put over his hoody. He grabbed Philip’s wax jacket from the back of the car too and held it up. Philip shook his head and said: ‘No need … but could you pass my stick.’ Father and son slammed the doors of the car behind them in unison and began stretching and rolling their necks. Daniel checked the parking meter. Free after 6pm.

‘This way,’ Philip said, setting off with his walking stick. Ahead of them was the barrel-vaulted archway of the Menin Gate Memorial. When they reached it they were greeted by a powerful smell of flowers wrapped in cellophane and left among the wreaths of artificial poppies. ‘They built it here,’ Philip said, ‘because it was the route every British soldier would have taken on his way to the Front.’

‘Through the gate?’

‘There was no gate. Not even an arch. It was a gap in the ramparts which encircled the town, a bridge across a moat.’ He checked his pocket watch again. ‘Good.We have time.’ They walked up to the memorial and took in its sombre stone-and-brick arch. A crowd of secondary-school children, aged fourteen and fifteen, was gathering underneath it: teenage boys in football shirts and sunglasses; girls wearing tops that didn’t cover their midriffs.

‘They come here by the coachload,’ Philip whispered. ‘Fifty coaches every day. The First World War is on the National Curriculum, you see. The locals get upset because the children don’t know how to behave. They jump over the gravestones, drop litter, swear.’

As Daniel stared up at the single span of stone above him he whistled under his breath. It had a coffered, half-elliptical arch and, at both ends, two flatter arches. Each was flanked in turn by an enormous Doric column and surmounted by an entablature. To the sides of the staircases and inside the loggias on the north and south sides of the memorial were tens of thousands of names engraved on vast panels. Every surface had been carved with chiselled capitals over leagues of white stone. The names on the
outer sections up the steps had weathered, he noticed, having been exposed to the rain.

‘So this is everyone killed along the Ypres Salient during the war?’ Daniel said. ‘Lot of names.’

‘No, these are the ones who have no known grave. More than fifty thousand. And it doesn’t include the thirty-odd thousand who went missing here in the last year of the …’ He trailed off, distracted as he searched the names. Cars were still driving under the arch, over the cobbled stone, and one had to swerve slightly to miss Philip. He had forgotten which direction the traffic would be coming from.

‘Careful, Dad,’ Daniel said, leading him to the side by his arm.

‘You nearly became one of the missing yourself then.’

A broad staircase led from the hall up to the ramparts and the loggias. Daniel read the inscription over its entrance out loud: ‘ “
In maiorem dei gloriam
. Here are recorded names of officers and men who fell in Ypres Salient but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death.” So where is he?’

Philip pointed an arthritically crooked finger. ‘There.’ Above them was the panel dedicated to the missing of the Shropshire Fusiliers. Halfway down it were dozens of Kennedys and at the top of them was
KENNEDY A
. The sun was almost below the horizon. Philip took out his pocket watch again and clicked it open. ‘It is time.’

The noise of the traffic ceased abruptly and a muffling stillness descended, as though an invisible eiderdown had been spread over the town. The crowd of people choking the road bowed their heads. Three buglers in starched and colourful uniforms marched under the archway and, after the cathedral bells chimed the hour, played Last Post. A teenage girl near Daniel began rubbing her mother’s back. As the last note faded, a two-minute silence began. Partial silence. The bleeping of cameras could be heard, as well as a baby crying. After twenty seconds a mobile phone began ringing and a young and female English voice could be heard answering it – informing the caller in a loud whisper that she
was at the memorial in Ypres and that she had come with her school. ‘Nah, bit boring really.’ The partial silence over, cars and lorries started up again and the crowd parted to allow them under the arch.

Philip looked disappointed that Daniel wasn’t more moved. ‘Glad we got here in time for that,’ he said.

‘Yeah, it was nice.’

With a stiff-legged walk, Philip led the way up the steps to an area of lawn where a group of schoolchildren were assembling. They were being told to form up in pairs for a head count. A roll call was taken. ‘Is this a re-enactment of the roll calls in the trenches?’ Daniel asked his father. ‘The head count after a big push?’

‘Let’s check into our hotel and then get something to eat,’ Philip said, ignoring his son’s question. ‘There is something I need to tell you, but let’s do it over a drink.’ Philip led the way down the monument steps and back to the car where they collected their overnight bags. He retraced his steps back under the memorial and along a cobbled alley lined with shops selling British Army books and souvenirs. The window of one of them, Tommys Gift Shop – without an apostrophe – was festooned with Union Jacks and poppies. It sold poppy-pattern umbrellas, replica Vickers guns and helmets, mugs and spoons emblazoned with images of British Tommies. The alley led out on to a vast open square, the Grote Markt. Though the sun had not yet set, the floodlighting had come on.

Daniel’s eyes widened as he took in the gothic spire of the Cloth Hall. ‘Beautiful.’

‘A beautiful fake. All this was rubble,’ Philip said with a sweep of his arms. ‘In nineteen eighteen, a man on a horse could see from one end of the town to the other.’

Daniel tried to imagine the ranks of British soldiers marching through the square on their way to the Front. ‘So the Belgians rebuilt it.’

‘The British rebuilt it according to the original medieval plans. The Germans paid for it.’

‘They should have got the Germans to rebuild it.’

Philip shook his head. ‘The British
wanted
to rebuild it, because it meant work for British servicemen who had been demobbed. Better than selling matchboxes on street corners. They came back here where they could be with their old comrades and be paid to use their skills as bricklayers, plumbers and engineers. They found they no longer fitted in at home anyway. They couldn’t talk about what they had been through here, other than to fellow soldiers.’

Daniel nodded. He liked it when his father talked about the army. It was the only subject about which he ever talked at any length.

They found their hotel in the area of the square overlooking the Cloth Hall. It had three flags flying outside it: Canadian, British and Australian. ‘Guess there’s only one reason foreigners visit this town,’ Daniel said.

The hotel was like a museum: paintings of the original Cloth Hall in flames hung from the walls in the gloomy foyer alongside grainy photographs of bedraggled soldiers trailing through the market square with ammunition limbers and horses. Their rooms were next to one another. Daniel dropped his canvas bag on a nylon quilt covering the bed. The walls were papered with woodchip. There was a cupboard made of plywood with the door hanging off its hinges. And the room was dominated by a bulky television hanging on an angle off its wall bracket. The bathroom sink, meanwhile, had two cold taps with blue tops. When Daniel tested them he discovered one ran hot water. When he saw that damp was coming through the polystyrene tiles on the ceiling, he grinned. It was always the same when he left the booking of hotels to his father. He went for the cheapest available.

‘Thought you said this whole town was rebuilt,’ Daniel said after knocking on his father’s door and walking in. ‘I think this hotel might have been one of the few things that survived.’