The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (40 page)

Everything was going wrong, why was everything going wrong? He hadn't meant to fly off the handle like that, it just happened, ghosts had emotions too, he wasn't perfect. And now he had spoiled everything, everything.

He took once more to roaming the house without aim, borne down by the weight of his solitude and grief. When even movement proved beyond him, he would retire to a dusty corner of the attic or huddle in a foetal ball in the grate of an unlit fireplace, roasting in the cold ashes of self-pity and self-hate. How could he now enjoy watching over her through the night when aware that she might awake at any moment, denouncing him for dream crimes he had had no part in? How could he even enter her room when afraid that the icy draught he bore in his train might alert her to his presence, set into irresistible motion the whole familiar histrionic routine?

Slouched one evening before the television set, watching a
daft late-night horror movie with Angela's parents, he heard them talking about him.

‘Poltergeist! So the place is haunted, is that it? Bloody ridiculous! What's he want us to do, get in a priest to exorcize it?'

‘Please, darling, try and stay calm, I'm just telling you what he said, that's all. Apparently it's got nothing to do with ghosts, it's quite a common phenomenon, especially among young girls. Some sort of release of psychic energy or something. They can break things, start fires, you know, cause a lot of damage.'

‘But Christ, Shirl, you saw that room. That wasn't just breaking things. She must have done that physically, with her hands. But why, why?'

‘I know, I know, I'm just telling you what he said, that's all.'

How endearing the living were with their obstinate refusal to countenance any but the most grossly physical of explanations in their commerce with the spirit, how they feared the intangible, the unknown. Sometimes it seemed to him that for all the arid lunar emptiness of his own existence, the real tragedy was theirs. He at least knew how things stood, he had had time – so much time! – to adjust, while they still had to live through the monstrous metamorphosis of death, still had to suffer the pain of that fatal wrench. How differently they would treat their bodies, how they would glory and exult in the flesh, how plunder its pleasures, if they knew the hollow ache of facing eternity without it. How they will miss that heavenly machine when it gasps up its infernal ghost.

Things had come to a head, they couldn't go on as they were. It was clear their relationship was fractured beyond repair. It was equally clear that he couldn't continue indefinitely in his present condition, slinking and skulking round the house, wilting under the burden of an oppressive guilt. He must appear before her one final time, explain what had happened, quietly, without rancour, obtain her forgiveness, then vanish for ever in the penetralia of the house till nature made them equal again.

He selected for his day of valediction one sultry Sunday afternoon when both parents were in the garden sunbathing; prostrate, beach-clad, toning up their cancerous tans. It was too hot for Angela, who lay on her bed by an open window,
listlessly turning the pages of a well-thumbed comic, sipping a glass of orange squash through two thin coloured straws.

The main thing was not to frighten her. He materialized inside the wardrobe – less alarming, he thought, than suddenly appearing unannounced in the middle of the room – and pushed the door gently open with a sly forewarning creak. So innocent and incorruptible she looked, lying there in her red (what was it called?) jumpsuit on the bed. As cherubic as her name. He coughed to signal his presence and assumed a simpering, as he thought disarming, smile.

Instantly she was up on the bed and backing away from him. Her lips parted, breaking not in a cry but in a thin gasp and bubble of saliva like one of the speech-bubbles in the comic she'd been reading.

‘It's all right, Angela, it's all right, I've come to say goodbye, don't be frightened, please.'

She had retreated dangerously close to the open window. In a single movement she turned on her heels, thrust her torso over the sill and split the air with a spirit-curdling scream. ‘Mummee-ee!'

Her body was extended so far across the sill he was afraid the slightest movement would topple her, send her tumbling, plummeting to the patio below. He rushed towards her to prevent her fall, grab her ankles, hold her down, but even as his ghostly fingers grazed the fabric of her trouser-leg he knew he was too late, she had gone, overbalanced, was already somersaulting through the air like one of her own dolls, swooping to embrace the geometric grid of flagstones flying up to meet her. He could only look on with her parents in mute helpless horror as the implacable laws of gravity were fatally confirmed.

He didn't wait to see if she was dead. Dead or alive, what was the difference? Either way he had to leave. If alive, she would never want to see him again. If dead, he would be haunted by the ghost of her memory, by the permanent presence of her absence from the family where she belonged. The thought of all those unlived years, those untasted experiences, would pursue him like a life sentence, a death sentence, through eternity. Besides, how should he explain himself to her newly arrived
spirit, how convince her of his thoughtless good intentions, how justify what he had done? No, the crime was clear, parole would be revoked, and escape was the only option. Shimmering through the open window and passing silently over the huddled scene of grief being played out below, he drifted sluggishly towards the whispering fens, then slowly up, up, up, like a child's gas-filled balloon, on his way to heaven knows where.

There were three postcards, the last he had sent. The earlier ones had been divided up, lost perhaps, but she had the last of them, his final evidence. On the day itself, she would unknot the bag and trace her eyes over the jerky pencilled address, the formal signature (initials and surname only), the obedient crossings-out. For many years she had ached at what the cards did not say; but nowadays she found something in their official impassivity which seemed proper, even if not consoling.

Of course she did not need actually to look at them, any more than she needed the photograph to recall his dark eyes, sticky-out ears, and the jaunty smile which agreed that the fun would be all over by Christmas. At any moment she could bring the three pieces of buff field-service card
¹
exactly to mind. The dates: Dec 24, Jan 11, Jan 17, written in his own hand, and confirmed by the postmark which added the years: 16, 17, 17. ‘
NOTHING
is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. Sentences not required may be erased.
If anything else is added the postcard will be destroyed
.' And then the brutal choices.

He was quite well on each occasion. He had never been admitted into hospital. He was not being sent down to the base. He had received a letter of a certain date. A letter would follow at the first opportunity. He had not received no letter. All done with thick pencilled crossing-out and a single date. Then, beside the instruction
Signature only
, the last signal from her brother. S. Moss. A large looping S with a circling full stop after it. Then Moss, written without lifting from the card what she always imagined as a stub of pencil-end studiously licked.

On the other side, their mother's name – Mrs Moss, with a grand M and a short stabbing line beneath the
rs
–then the address. Another warning down the edge, this time in smaller letters. ‘The address only to be written on this side. If anything else is added, the postcard will be destroyed.' But across the top of her second card, Sammy had written something, and it had not been destroyed. A neat line of ink without the rough loopiness of his pencilled signature: ‘
50 yds
from the Germans. Posted from Trench.' In fifty years, one for each underlined yard, she had not come up with the answer. Why had he written it, why in ink, why had they allowed it? Sam was a cautious and responsible boy, especially towards their mother, and he would not have risked a worrying silence. But he had undeniably written these words. And in ink, too. Was it code for something else? A premonition of death? Except that Sam was not the sort to have premonitions. Perhaps it was simply excitement,
a desire to impress. Look how close we are. 50 YDS from the Germans. Posted from Trench.

She was glad he was at Cabaret Rouge, with his own headstone. Found and identified. Given known and honoured burial. She had a horror of Thiepval,
²
one which failed to diminish in spite of her dutiful yearly visits. Thiepval's lost souls. You had to make the right preparation for them, for their lostness. So she always began elsewhere, at Caterpillar Valley, Thistle Dump, Quarry, Blighty Valley, Ulster Tower,
³
Herbêcourt.

Each year she wondered if this would be her last visit. Her life no longer offered up to her the confident plausibility of two decades more, one decade, five years. Instead, it was now renewed on an annual basis, like her driving licence. Every April Dr Holling had to certify her fit for another twelve months behind the wheel. Perhaps she and the Morris would go kaput on the same day.

Before, it had been the boat train, the express to Amiens, a local stopper, a bus or two. Since she had acquired the Morris, she had in theory become freer; and yet her routine remained almost immutable. She would drive to Dover and take a night ferry, riding the Channel in the blackout alongside burly lorry-drivers. It saved money, and meant she was always in France for daybreak. No Morning Dawns… He must have seen each daybreak and wondered if that was the date they would put on his stone… Then she would follow the N
₄₃
to St-Omer, to Aire and Lillers, where she usually took a croissant and
thé à l'anglaise
. From Lillers the N 43 continued to Béthune, but she flinched from it: south of Béthune was the D 937 to Arras, and there, on a straight stretch where the road did a reminding elbow, was Brigadier Sir Frank Higginson's domed portico.
⁵
You should not drive past it, even if you intended to return. She had done that once, early in her ownership of the Morris, skirted Cabaret Rouge in second gear, and it had seemed the grossest discourtesy to Sammy and those who lay beside him: no, it's not your turn yet, just you wait and we'll be along. No, that was what the other motorists did.

So instead she would cut south from Lillers and come into Arras with the D
₃₄₁
. From there, in that thinned triangle whose southern points were Albert and Pêronne, she would begin her solemn and necessary tour of the woods and fields in which, so many decades before, the British Army had counter-attacked to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun. That had been the start of it, anyway. No doubt scholars were by now having second thoughts, but that was what they were for; she herself no longer had arguments to deploy or positions to hold. She valued only what she had experienced at the time: an outline of strategy, the conviction of gallantry, and the facts of mourning.

At first, back then, the commonality of grief had helped: wives, mothers, comrades, an array of brass hats, and a bugler amid gassy morning mist which the feeble November sun had failed to burn away. Later, remembering Sam had changed: it became work, continuity; instead of anguish and glory, there was fierce unreasonableness, both about his death and her commemoration of it. During this period, she was hungry for the
solitude and the voluptuous selfishness of grief: her Sam, her loss, her mourning, and nobody else's similar. She admitted as much: there was no shame to it. But now, after half a century, her feelings had simply become part of her. Her grief was a calliper, necessary and supporting; she could not imagine walking without it.

When she had finished with Herbêcourt and Devonshire, Thistle Dump and Caterpillar Valley, she would come, always with trepidation, to the great red-brick memorial at Thiepval. An arch of triumph, yes, but of what kind, she wondered: the triumph over death, or the triumph
of
death? ‘Here are recorded names of officers and men of the British armies who fell on the Somme battlefields July 1915–February 1918 but to whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death.' Thiepval Ridge, Pozieàres Wood, Albert, Morval, Ginchy, Guillemont, Ancre, Ancre Heights, High Wood, Delville Wood, Bapaume, Bazentin Ridge, Miraumont, Transloy Ridges, Flers-Courcelette. Battle after battle, each accorded its stone laurel wreath, its section of wall: name after name after name, the Missing of the Somme, the official graffiti of death. This monument by Sir Edwin Lutyens
⁶
revolted her, it always had. She could not bear the thought of these lost men, exploded into unrecognizable pieces, engulfed in the mud-fields, one moment fully there with pack and gaiters, baccy and rations, with their memories and their hopes, their past and their future crammed into them, and the next moment only a shred of khaki or a sliver of shin-bone to prove they had ever existed. Or worse: some of these names had first been given known and honoured burial, their allotment of ground with their name above it, only for some new battle with its heedless artillery to tear up the temporary graveyard and bring a second, final extermination. Yet each of those scraps of uniform and flesh – whether newly killed or richly decomposed – had been brought back here and reorganized, conscripted into the eternal regiment of the missing, kitted out and made to dress by the right. Something about the way they had vanished and the way they were now reclaimed was more than she could bear: as if an army which had thrown them away so lightly now chose to
own them again so gravely. She was not sure whether this was the case. She claimed no understanding of military matters. All she claimed was an understanding of grief.

Her wariness of Thiepval always made her read it with a sceptical, a proof-reader's eye. She noticed, for instance, that the French translation of the English inscription listed – as the English one did not – the exact number of the Missing. 73,367. That was another reason she did not care to be here, standing in the middle of the arch looking down over the puny Anglo-French cemetery (French crosses to the left, British stones to the right) while the wind drew tears from an averting eye. 73,367: beyond a certain point, the numbers became uncountable and diminishing in effect. The more dead, the less proportionate the pain. 73,367: even she, with all her expertise in grief, could not imagine that.

Perhaps the British realized that the number of the Missing might continue to grow through the years, that no fixed total could be true; perhaps it was not shame, but a kind of sensible poetry which made them decline to specify a figure. And they were right: the numbers had indeed changed. The arch was inaugurated in 1932 by the Prince of Wales, and all the names of all the Missing had been carved upon its surfaces, but still, here and there, out of their proper place, hauled back tardily from oblivion, were a few soldiers enlisted only under the heading of Addenda. She knew all their names by now: Dodds T., Northumberland Fusiliers; Malcolm H. W., The Cameronians; Lennox F. J., Royal Irish Rifles; Lovell F. H. B., Royal Warwickshire Regiment; Orr R., Royal Inniskillins; Forbes R., Cameron Highlanders; Roberts J., Middlesex Regiment; Moxham A., Wiltshire Regiment; Humphries F. J., Middlesex Regiment; Hughes H. W., Worcestershire Regiment; Bateman W. T., Northamptonshire Regiment; Tarling E., The Cameronians; Richards W., Royal Field Artillery; Rollins S., East Lancashire Regiment; Byrne L., Royal Irish Rifles; Gale E. O., East Yorkshire Regiment; Walters J., Royal Fusiliers; Argar D., Royal Field Artillery. No Morning Dawns, No Night Returns…

She felt closest to Rollins S., since he was an East Lancashire;
she would always smile at the initials inflicted upon Private Lovell; but it was Malcolm H. W. who used to intrigue her most. Malcolm H. W., or, to give him his full inscription: ‘Malcolm H. W. The Cameronians (Sco. Rif.) served as Wilson H.' An addendum and a corrigendum all in one. When she had first discovered him, it had pleased her to imagine his story. Was he under age? Did he falsify his name to escape home, to run away from some girl? Was he wanted for a crime, like those fellows who joined the French Foreign Legion? She did not really want an answer, but she liked to dream a little about this man who had first been deprived of his identity and then of his life. These accumulations of loss seemed to exalt him; for a while, faceless and iconic, he had threatened to rival Sammy and Denis as an emblem of the war. In later years she turned against such fancifulness. There was no mystery really. Private H. W. Malcolm becomes H. Wilson. No doubt he was in truth H. Wilson Malcolm, and when he volunteered they wrote the wrong name in the wrong column; then they were unable to change it. That would make sense: man is only a clerical error corrected by death.

She had never cared for the main inscription over the central arch: