The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (32 page)

At the end of the fortnight he finally gets his answer. The weather is clear in the morning and Ashley paces the garden in weaving formations, making figure eights among the shrubs and flower beds. He still limps slightly, favoring his right leg. When he returns to his ward there is a letter on his nightstand. There is no address or stamp on the cover, only his name in the familiar script.

My Darling –

I stand at the reception of your hospital, but they will not allow me in. Only terminal cases are allowed visitors here & they say you are quite well. You cannot imagine how happy this makes me. They say you are being discharged tomorrow, but they will not say where.

Do not be alarmed by my visit – all shall be explained when we meet. I am perfectly well & staying with a M. Louchard, on the eastern edge of Laviéville. Have not been here long – took only a day to find you in this mess.

Is it possible for you to meet me out of hospital tomorrow? Immediately on the eastbound road out of Laviéville you will see a yellow house beside a small copse, the only house in the vicinity. I stay in the cottage at the back, but you may call on M. Louchard first to let him know you have come.

If you cannot come, send word at least.

Your own true

Imogen

Ashley lies motionless in bed the rest of the afternoon. In the evening when the VAD comes to change the dressing on his leg, she does not give her usual cheerful greeting. She pulls back the sheet and looks gravely at his leg, staring at the cotton bandage as though she had never seen it before. She begins unwinding the bandage and speaks in a whisper, not lifting her eyes.

—Your wife was here this morning. You’ve read the note?

—Yes.

—I didn’t see her. The doctor told me about it. She made a terrible row. She seemed to think you were at death’s door. Why on earth is she here?

—I don’t know.

—They had to send her away. We can’t accept visitors, you know. But you ought to have enough time to see her after you’re discharged tomorrow. Is she really your wife?

Ashley hesitates.

—Never mind, the VAD says. I don’t want to know.

The next morning Ashley receives orders to board a military train at 20:20 for Amiens and to proceed by a second train to No. 6 Convalescent Depot, Étaples. He decides to ignore these orders. He has been given two days to go sixty miles on ancient French trains that move at walking speed and halt every half hour. He is sure that if he can find his own transport he can see Imogen and still arrive at the depot early.

Ashley wishes to say good-bye to the VAD and thank her, but she is not on his ward that morning. He changes from the soft hospital clothes into his stiff khaki uniform. At once he feels different in the heavy tunic
and breeches and riding boots. He pulls on his raincoat, the dried blood scraped off but the gabardine stained and shredded in one patch where the shrapnel had struck his leg. Ashley takes a final walk around the hospital. He sees the VAD at the far end of a roped-off corridor where the nurses have their canteen. She is with another nurse but she looks his way and it is a moment before she smiles at him. Perhaps she did recognize him in uniform. The VAD seems almost to wave as she turns into the canteen, the white straps of the apron on her back crossed in a large X.

Ashley is discharged from the hospital and it is afternoon by the time he walks into the town center. At a private garage he buys a V-twin Royal Enfield that some enterprising mechanic has stolen or salvaged from the army, then repaired and repainted in flat black. Ashley haggles for five minutes, then pays double what the motorcycle is worth. The garage owner calls the teenage apprentice into the yard to demonstrate the motorcycle’s engine. The apprentice has spent weeks learning the secrets of the English machine. He seems regretful to part with it.

—Monsieur has ridden this machine before?

—A similar one.

—
Le mécanisme est très facile.
It runs beautifully. I will show you how to start it.

The apprentice moves quickly in his soiled coveralls. He opens the shutoff valve on the fuel tank, pushes the spark advance lever on the left grip, sets the choke and pulls the throttle lever on the right grip. He pulls the compression lever with his left hand, puts his foot on the starter and kicks hard. The engine coughs, hesitates, then roars awake with a cloud of smoke, settling into a throbbing idle.

The apprentice grins, wiping his hands on his coveralls.

—Now Monsieur will try?

Ashley nods and squints up at the sky. It will be dark in an hour.

Long after Mireille has gone to bed, I sit sleepless before the living room fire, studying Ashley’s letters in my notebook. The wood burns down to a heap of dwindling embers, radiant slivers of red and orange. I push my armchair closer to keep warm. The sunset was hours ago, but dawn seems little closer. I read on.

There are footfalls behind me on the staircase. Mireille stands in the door frame with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, blinking wide eyes at me as if unconvinced of my presence at this hour. We are meant to rise early to go to Étaples and I’m embarrassed to still be awake.

—I thought you went to bed.

Mireille drags the other armchair toward the fire and sits down.

—If you’re doing something secret, she says, you don’t have to tell me—

—It’s no secret.

I hand her my copy of
Daily Life in the Trenches
, the passage already marked with a scrap of paper.

—I found this after you went to bed.

Among the mundane duties of the infantry subaltern was the censoring of soldiers’ letters, the responsibility of the day’s orderly officer. In their letters home, front-line soldiers were forbidden from revealing their location, but some used codes to communicate their whereabouts to loved ones. In one common code, the soldier would agree upon a ‘trigger word’ with his wife. When the soldier’s wife read the trigger, she would note the second letter of each following line and thus learn the location of the soldier.

Mireille looks at me. —This code is in the letters?

—Not exactly.

I give Mireille my notebook and she turns the pages slowly, noticing the word I have circled several times.

—Mistletoe, she reads. What does it mean?

—It’s a plant you kiss under at Christmas. I don’t know what it’s called in French—

—
Le gui
, she says. Why did he use that word?

—I don’t know. But it’s a trigger word, you can see for yourself. He did it a little differently from how they describe it. He used the first letter of each sentence.

Mireille looks down at the notebook and after the word
mistletoe
appears, she writes out the first letter of each following sentence onto a sheet of paper. When she is finished we both look at the word on the sheet:
SOMME
.

—It’s incredible, she says. How did you find this?

—
Mistletoe
isn’t a common word, so I noticed the second or third time it showed up in the letters. Then I read about the code. I tried it the way they described it, and it didn’t work, but then I saw
Somme
. It’s pretty obvious, once you see it.

Mireille flips the pages of the notebook and begins to decode the next location.

—Don’t bother, I tell her. I already know them all—

—I want to do it myself.

Beneath
SOMME
she spells out
COURCELETTE
.

—That’s a village, she says. It’s near Albert.

—I know.

—Is there another one?

I nod. —It’s the last letter in the notebook. The one after she came to the Somme.

19 Dec 1916

My Darling Imogen,

Four days ago I left the convalescent depot & rejoined the battalion. I was pleased enough to go, for the idleness of that depot had begun to feel more sinful than the trenches. And I have rejoined the battalion at the perfect moment—they have just come into the rear for rest.

It is a luxurious respite. I am billeted with a family called Lefèvre, in the upstairs bedroom of a large house – my own four-poster bed and feather duvet, opulence beyond imagination. There is a girl of eleven here, unusually clever, who is keen to learn English. I give her lessons in what spare moments I have. I have tried to teach her the meaning of poetry – the Sphinx you encountered as a girl – but its charms are yet foreign to her, even in her native tongue. Still I persist, that one day she may know the sounds of Shelley half so intimately as the Vickers gun.

Like the neighboring country, the house itself is grim. It lies along the periphery where town gives way to farmland, but there is an old water tower in the Romanesque style, and in spring I suppose the fields might be picturesque. At least I shall be here to see the farm in its gayer moments, the rafters draping Mistletoe – for we stay here through Christmas, they say.

Can I hope for anything in the New Year, the ever-receding
mirage of the war’s end? Any peace without you would be worse than futile. Let the others celebrate Yule and turn their faces from the carnage we have wrought together. Of all my sins this year, those against you seem the mildest, and still they cost me dearly. This life without you is beyond senseless – a mad lieutenant among a lunatic army, separated from the only thing I care for, the one thing that keeps me good & true & loving. The thing I lost to keep the thing I hated. Even a madman knew it was a poor trade, but what would you have me do? Reason could take me only so far. In the deep of night I dream you have come back for me, to meet again at that cottage, but this time we give each other everything. Even that which isn’t ours to give.

I reveal all secrets to you – but only so well as I may.

Imogen, I never meant to ask the impossible of you. When I left England I hadn’t any notion what it meant to care for someone, nor to have someone care for me; nor to wait for something that cannot wait, nor risk the thing we ought never to risk. For what does a man do when all the world pulls him east, with only his instinct tugging west? You know the answer to that & always have. But it’s never been so simple for me.

I don’t offer any excuses, not even the obvious excuse that I have seen & done things here that have left me a stranger even to myself. You needn’t forgive me or accept my choices. Only write to me anyway, that I shall have the slightest reason to greet the dawn tomorrow.

Yours as ever,

Ashley

Mireille has copied the third message onto the sheet:
CALOTTERIE.

—La Calotterie, she says. It’s near the coast, beside the dunes. Not so far away.

—Can you take me there? I want to find the house where he stayed.

—It’s not such a small place, there will be more than one house—

—He said there’s a Romanesque water tower on the farm. There can’t be many of those. And we have the name of the family. Lefèvre.

Mireille shakes her head.

—That was eighty years ago. They will have moved. Or knocked the house down. And what would we do, even if we found this family?

—We’d talk to them. Ashley stayed there for a long time. He was friends with the family, they might know something—

Mireille sighs and hands me back the notebook. She goes to the fire and throws on a fresh log, prodding at it with the iron rod. For a moment there is only the hissing of the wet wood over the coals.

—You can’t change the past. Learning about it doesn’t mean you can change it.

—I know.

Mireille leans the rod against the fireplace, telling me that she’ll speak in French now to be sure of her words. Her voice sounds different in her own language, and though she speaks softly her words are confident and without hesitation.

Mireille says she believes that to be more interested in people because they lived long ago or because they suffered greatly is a mistake. She tells me that people still suffer greatly now, and that in any case one must not admire suffering or loss, because life is brief and time spent dwelling on things that have already passed is surely wasted. She says that even love can sometimes be a mistake, and that perhaps this vanished love of Ashley and Imogen’s had been a wasted one. She asks if a person could truly love someone they had not seen for so long, and for whom they had so little reason to harbor such wild affection.

—
Pendant des années
, she says.
Pas la moindre raison.

Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between love and longing, Mireille says, but they are not at all the same thing, and while one is worth very much, the other is always wasted. I follow Mireille’s gaze into the fire. In the windows behind us the sky is lightening a dim pale blue to the east.

—The past or the future will never be there with you, she says. You’ll only ever have what you have right now. Not any more or any less.
Ni plus ni moins.