The Ghost Road (17 page)

On the way home he saw Owen and Potts ahead of him,
and hurried to catch them up. Owen had found a child's lace-trimmed surplice in
the rubble near the cathedral and wore it as a scarf, the cloth startlingly
white against his sunburnt neck. Potts hugged a toby-jug to his chest, stoutly
refusing to admit it was hideous. They turned off the road and cut through the
back gardens, entering a world that nobody would have guessed at, from the
comparative normality of the road.

A labyrinth of green pathways led from garden to
garden, and they slipped from one to another, over broken walls or through
splintered fences, skirting bramble-filled craters, brushing down paths
overgrown with weeds, with flowers that had seeded themselves and become rank,
with overgrown roses that snagged their sleeves and pulled them back. Snails
crunched under their boots, nettles stung their hands, cuckoo spit flecked a
bare neck, but the secret path wound on. Hundreds of men, billeted as they were
in these ruined houses, had broken down every wall, every fence, forced a
passage through all the hedges, so that they could slip unimpeded from one
patch of ground to the next. The war, fought and refought over strips of muddy
earth, paradoxically gave them the freedom of animals to pass from territory to
territory, unobserved. And something of an animal's alertness too, for just as
Owen pushed aside an elderberry branch at the entrance to their own garden, his
ears caught a slight sound, and he held up his hand.

Hallet was in the garden, undressing. Dappled light
played across his body, lending it the illusion of fragility, the greenish
tinge of ill-health, though he was as hard and sun-tanned as the rest of them.
As they watched, not calling out a greeting as by now they should have done, he
stepped out of his drawers and out of time, standing by the pool edge, thin,
pale, his body where the uniform had hidden it starkly white.
Sharp collar-bones, bluish shadows underneath.
He was going
to lie down in the overgrown goldfish pool with its white lilies and golden
insects fumbling the pale flowers. His toes curled round the mossy edge as he
gingerly lowered himself, gasping as the water hit his balls.

They strolled across the tall grass towards him and
stood looking down. Legs bloated-looking under water, silver bubbles trapped in
his hair, cock slumped on his thigh like a seal hauled out on to the rocks. He
looked up at them lazily, fingers straying through his bush, freeing the
bubbles.

'Enjoying
yourself
?' Prior
asked, nodding at the hand.

Hallet laughed, shielding his eyes with his other
hand
, but didn't move.

'I'd be careful if I were you,' Owen said, in a tight
voice. 'I expect those fish are ravenous.'

And not just the fish, Prior thought.

'Anybody want some wine?' Potts asked, going into the
house.

They drank it on the terrace, Hallet lying in the
pond, till it grew too cold.

'You know they might leave us here,' Owen said,
squinting up into the sun.

'Shut up!' Potts said.

Everybody touched wood, crossed fingers, groped for
lucky charms: all the small, protective devices of men who have no control over
their own fate. No use, Prior thought. Somewhere, outside the range of human
hearing, and yet heard by all of them, a clock had begun to tick.

11 September
1918

I don't think it helps Owen that I'm here. And it
certainly doesn't help
me
that he's here. We're both walking a tightrope and the last
thing either of us wants or needs is to be watched by somebody who knows the
full terror of the fall.

At Craiglockhart we avoided each other. It was easy to
do that there, in spite of the overcrowding. The labyrinth of corridors, so
many turnings, so many alternative routes, you need never meet anybody you
didn't want to meet except, now and then, in Rivers's room or Brock's,
yourself.

Two incidents this week.
We were all in town together and we saw wounded being
rushed through the streets—some of them quite bad. Hallet and Potts stared at
them, and you could see them thinking,

That could be me, in a few days or weeks. Looking at
the bandages, trying to imagine what was underneath.
Trying
not to imagine.
Fear: rational, proportionate,
appropriate
fear. And I glanced at Owen and he was indifferent.
As I was.
I don't mean unsympathetic,
necessarily.
(Though it's
amazing what you leave behind when the pack's heavy.)

The other was at supper last night. Hallet was
cockahoop because he'd found some flypaper on one of those stalls in the
cathedral square. Ever since we arrived we've been plagued by enormous wasps—
Owen thinks they're hornets—and by flies, great, buzzing, drunk, heavy, angry,
dying bluebottles. And Hallet had solved it all. There was this flypaper
buzzing above our heads, revolving first one way, then the other, with its
cargo of dead and dying.
The sound of summer on the Somme.

I stuck it as long as I could, then climbed up on to
the table and took it down, carried it right to the end of the garden and threw
it away as far as I could. A pathetic effort—it described a shallow arc and
fluttered to the ground. Hallet was quite seriously offended, and of course
completely bewildered.

'Don't blame
me
if you all get tummy
upsets,' he said.

Owen started to laugh, and I joined in, and neither of
us could stop. Hallet and Potts looked from one to the other, grinning like
embarrassed
dogs. They obviously thought we'd cracked. The
trouble is neither of us can be sure they aren't right. When I noticed the
absence of red roses, I looked at Owen and saw him noticing that I'd noticed.
It's no use.

My servant,
Longstaffe

I chose him at bayonet practice. He was running in
with blood-curdling yells, stabbing, twisting, withdrawing,
running
on. I thought, My God,
textbook.
Nothing of the sort—I've realized since that what he was actually doing was
once-moreing
unto
the breach at Agincourt.

I had a word with him. He knew why, of course, and he
wanted the job. Not a bad life, officer's servant, if you have to be here at
all. He told me he'd been a gentleman's gentleman before the war and that
clinched it. Later, when we were waiting for the train to Amiens, he owned up.
He was an actor. The nearest he'd ever got to being a gentleman's gentleman was
playing a butler at the Alhambra, Bradford. A larger part than it sounded, he
was anxious to point out, because in this particular production the butler did
it—a departure from convention that so little pleased the inhabitants of
Bradford that the play had to be taken off after seventeen days.

Perhaps he was sure of me by then. Actually I found
all that even more irresistible. Phoney gentleman's gentleman, but then I'm a
fairly phoney gentleman myself.

An ironing board of a body, totally flat.
Interesting gestures, though.
He's the only
man
I've ever known to open doors with his hips.
Perfectly plain, nondescript features.
No Wanted poster
would ever find
him
, but also this curious feeling that his face could be
anything he wanted it to be, even beautiful, if the part required it.
And burningly ambitious.
Knows tracts of
Shakespeare off by heart.
A curious, old-fashioned romantic patriot,
though I don't know why I say that, there's plenty of them about.
Hallet, for instance.
But then they don't all quote, '
We
few, we happy few, we band of brothers,' as he did, quite
without embarrassment, the other night while I was getting ready for bed. I
said very sourly indeed that a more appropriate quotation for this stage of the
war might be: 'I am in blood steeped in so far that should I wade no more...'
His leap across the room was rather remarkable. He'd slapped a hand across my
mouth, and we were staring at each other, dumbstruck, before either of us had
time to think, his face chalk-white and I suspect mine as well, each trying to
remember what the penalty is for smacking an officer in the gob.
Quite possibly death.

Since then we've both gone very quiet, retreating
behind the barriers of rank, which are as necessary to his protection as to
mine, though not retreating quickly enough. Like the French lines at Agincourt,
the barriers have been thoroughly breached.

Friday, the
13th September (No bloody comment)

We're not going to join the battalion. The battalion's
coming here to join
us.
I suppose this explains this curious out-of-time holiday
we've been having.
Ended today, anyway.
Rode round inspecting billets.

Weather also changed, which makes the other changes
somehow more tolerable.
Wind and rain, lowering grey clouds.

Saturday, 14
September

Watched the Manchesters march in, streaming rain, wet
capes.
Shattered faces, bloodshot eyes.
Been
having a bad time.
One or two faces I recognized
from last year.
Before that?
I don't think so. Nobody talks about the
losses. What they moaned about, sitting on bales of straw, peeling socks off
bloody feet, was the absence of fags. They'd been rolling their own in bits of
paper, torn-up envelopes, anything, no tobacco of course, had to smoke weeds
they picked by the side of the road and dried by tying them to their packs
whenever the sun shone. I've written to Mam and Sarah and everybody else I can
think of, begging for Woodbines.

Sunday, 15
September

Joined
battalion.
Adjutant a
nice worried-looking man who suggested I might be battalion Gas Officer (which
reveals a sense of humour not otherwise apparent). Marshall-of-the-Ten-Wounds
was
there, striding up and down, talking loudly. Everything
about him—skin, gestures, expression, posture, voice—bold, free, coarse.
Unscrupulous?
Perhaps, I don't know, at any rate he doesn't
care.
Enjoys life, I think.
By
temperament and training a warrior.
Bold, cunning, ruthless, resolute,
quick of decision, amazingly brave—and if that's a human being then a human
being isn't what I am. He's spent his entire adult life gravitating towards
fighting—impossible to imagine him leading any other sort of life.

Last night, our last night in Amiens, there was a
great storm, flashes of sheet lightning, wind buffeting and slogging the house.

I'd just got to bed when I heard a strange rumbling
from above. Hallet appeared in the doorway, white-faced and staring. Only starlight
to see by and the whole house with its broken windows so draughty the candle
kept being blown out. We got an oil-lamp from the kitchen. Hallet said, 'Is it
the guns?' I said, 'Of course it bloody isn't, it's coming from upstairs.'

The stairway leading to the upper floor and the
nursery is narrow. We got to the nursery door, paused, looked at each other.
Hallet's face illuminated from below had bulges under the eyes like a second
lid. I pushed the door open and a blast of cold wind from the broken window hit
me. All I saw at first was movement at the far end of the room and then I
started to laugh because it was just the rocking-horse rocking. The wind was
strong enough to have got it going, I can't think of any other explanation, and
its rockers were grinding away on the bare wooden floor.

It ought to have been an anti-climax, and at first I
thought it was. We moved the thing away from the window, out of the draught,
and went downstairs still laughing, telling Potts, who peered round the door of
his room, there was nothing to worry about, go back to sleep, but in my own
room with the lamp out I lay awake and all night long that rumbling went on in
my head.

CHAPTER
TEN

They didn't have to wait long for their proper death.

Ngea was a strong, vigorous man, the most powerful
chief on the island after Rembo. Everything to live for, apparently, and yet,
as one saw so often in Melanesia, he was not putting up a fight. He lay in his
hall, watching the scare ghost turn and turn in the draught, and his life lay,
it seemed to Rivers, like a dandelion clock on the palm of his open hand.

His condition was so bad that, at one point, Emele,
his wife, and the other women began to wail, the long, drawn out, throbbing,
musical wail of the women, but then the sick man rallied slightly and the
wailing was abandoned.

Rivers said goodbye to him, promised to see him again
tomorrow, though he knew he wouldn't, and walked back to the tent. It was dark
by the time he got back, and the green canvas of the tent glowed with the light
of the lamp inside it. Hocart's shadow, sharply black and elongated, reached
hugely over the roof. Rivers pushed a heavy weight of damp washing aside and
went in.