The Summer Isles (15 page)

There was talk already of Lloyd George’s resignation and of a General Election, although since all the major parties—and most people—had all supported the War, no one had any clear idea of what the campaign would be about. There were more people than usual milling around as I lugged my suitcase through the rainy streets of Louth. Shouts came from the pubs, and no one seemed to be working. Women and children cringed in doorways; fearing, no doubt, the beating they’d get later on. Unattended dogs howled. The posters and the flags that had hung out for most of the War—R
ED
C
ROSS
O
R
I
RON
C
ROSS?
W
HAT
D
ID
Y
OU
D
O
I
N
T
HE
W
AR
D
ADDY?
Y
OUR
C
OUNTRY
N
EEDS
Y
OU.
I
T
I
S
F
AR
B
ETTER
T
O
F
ACE
T
HE
B
ULLETS
T
HAN
B
E
K
ILLED
A
T
H
OME
B
Y
A B
OMB
—suddenly looked sad and faded. But I didn’t see one proper fight, and only one broken window. The English, the
British
Way is to remain polite and say little: to try hard, even in defeat, to be sensible and positive.

I brought one of the few papers that were left at a newsagents and stared at a headline. W
AR
O
VER.
A
LLIES
D
EFEATED
. It was 6 August 1918; a day, it seemed to me, that was too ordinary to bear this indignity, and would never look right in the cold pristine pages of history. Like everyone else, I simply couldn’t believe it.

The Eveleighs were holding a sort of open house that day. The front door—was wide open. It seemed to me a bizarre touch: final confirmation that everything had changed. People were milling. There were clients from the bank, friends from the bridge circle, farmers and neighbours. All were red-faced and talking loudly. I remember that the usually neat rugs were rucked-up, that the tiled floors were swirled with mud. Mr. Eveleigh was moving from group to group, dispensing sherry and port, and Mrs. Eveleigh was sitting in her usual corner, smiling tightly with a glass clenched in her trembling hands. Outside, beyond the misted windows, molehills still dotted the lawn. The rooks still circled and cawed.

Time passed. Voices grew louder, then began to fade. Someone was surreptitiously sick in the scullery sink. One of the maids passing around sausage rolls chose the moment to give her notice. People began to drift unsteadily up the drive as darkness settled.

I had, I suppose, as much reason as anyone to want to drown my sorrows, and I went through the same alcoholic cycle of loud sociability followed by depression. I was tired and I had a headache by the time the remaining maids had cleared things up and I and Mr. and Mrs. Eveleigh found ourselves suddenly alone. Still, Mr. Eveleigh insisted as he always did in talking to me in the chilly firelit parlour whilst Mrs. Eveleigh continued to sip sherry in her corner. He spread a
News Chronicle
map of Belgium and France across the leather-topped table and weighed down each corner with the clumsy patience of the inebriated, then asked me to explain to him exactly who was to blame for this mess.

I did my polite best. I was as surprised as everyone else at the suddenness of our defeat, but even now with our soldiers stuck bootless and weaponless in POW holding camps, I could feel the wisdom of hindsight creeping in. No doubt making less sense than I imagined, I explained to Mr. Eveleigh how the economies of all the nations had been seriously weakened by the War: how, politically, its continued conduct was becoming unsustainable. Something was bound to give. It had already happened in Russia with the Revolution which, much more than losing the War, was every other European leader’s worst nightmare. And the Bolsheviks’ treaty had been a capitulation, allowing the Germans to strengthen their morale as they moved all their forces to the Western Front.

For once, Ludendorff’s plan to attack at Arras where the French and the British forces met was well-conceived. At long last, as even Haig had shown, both sets of commanders had begun to learn from the mistakes of their campaigns. Once a break had been made in the Allied lines, the Germans used flexible tactics of bursting ahead where resistance was weakest, pausing for the artillery, then pushing quickly on again. The American reinforcements, long-promised, much talked-about, were too few, and came too late. Predictably, whilst the British turned towards the Channel Coast, the French retreated towards Paris. With Haig barely on speaking terms with Lloyd George, and smarting at being second-in-command to the French, the Allied crisis soon became absolute.

As the Germans advanced, the lost certainties of trench warfare, despite all the horrors, seemed almost reassuring. After four years of deadlock, the War was suddenly about movement, communications, swiftness of advance. With Paris succumbing because neither side wanted her pounded to rubble, and the British and Colonial Forces clustered chaotically around Cherbourg and Dieppe, there was nothing left to do but admit defeat, and hope that the Germans would be magnanimous in victory.

“I should never have opened those port bottles I laid down,” Mr. Eveleigh said, swaying as he poured me another whisky. “I mean, we can’t leave it like this, can we? Betrayed by the Yanks and the French, beaten by the bloody Germans. There’ll have to be another war. Things aren’t sorted out yet…”

Later, Mrs. Eveleigh showed me up to my room. It was oddly quiet; all the clocks had stopped ticking today because no one had remembered to wind them. But she seemed composed as she lit the gas lantern and then sifted through Francis’s old chest of drawers.

“You might as well have these,” she said, giving me a child’s exercise book with Francis’s name on the cover, then a couple of battered tin toys. “If you want them, that is. Something to remember him by…” She pulled open the long wardrobe, stirring the dark clothes, bringing a wash of stale Francis air. “Will you look at that—just one shoe! How can there be only
one
shoe down there? They don’t go off on their own, do they? Not that I suppose it matters…”

I watched as she did what I had done many times; touching Francis’s old coats and jackets, feeling in the pockets, which contained only gritty dust. I, at my weekends here, had already taken my secret share of bits of Francis-this and Francis-that, the rattier and more used by him the better. An old jumper. That missing shoe.

“Oh, and there’s something else,” she said, closing the wardrobe again, spinning around, her fingers at her mouth in an uncharacteristic state of excitement. I sat and waited as she left the room and returned bearing a thick cardboard box with a War Office stamp on it, and a sticker beneath bearing the words: S
2242
R
IFLEMAN
F
RANCIS
E
VELEIGH,
C C
OMPANY,
8
TH
S
ERVICE
B
ATTALION,
T
HE
R
IFLE
B
RIGADE
. It still felt odd to think of him like that.

She lifted it open, filling the room with some faint other smell. What was it? Mud? Death? It was certainly unpleasant. “Well,” Mrs. Eveleigh gestured at the open box and I noticed that she was breathing rapidly, far closer than I was to tears. “You might as well have a look and see if there’s anything. After all, this is what Francis was when he died. A soldier…”

It proved to be half empty—as if someone had been through it and stolen the best bits already—although I supposed this was because these boxes came in a standard size and there sometimes wasn’t enough to fill them. There was that cheap edition of
News From Nowhere,
the pages splayed with damp, that Francis had been reading up in the Highlands and had probably, Francis being Francis, never got around to finishing. A pair of thick standard issue grey-green military socks, I suppose they must have been a spare; or thrown in to make the emptiness seem more substantial. They felt slickly damp when I touched them, but that was probably from the atmosphere in this house. More odd was the pistol. It seemed well-kept and in working order, although empty of bullets. Mrs. Eveleigh just gazed down at me as I sat on the bed and handled the thing. Clicking back the hammer. I wondered if, as a private, Francis would have been allowed to use it. Weren’t pistols for officers? So perhaps this was a memento of someone else, a friend or a lover who died in some earlier assault…

“Keep that too,” Mrs. Eveleigh said, something harsh in her voice. “I don’t want it.”

She was standing closer now. Like me, and in her own quiet way, I think she had passed into that grey hinterland that lies beyond an excess of drink. The time when everything seems normal again, and yet the world has become foul, and you are weary and filled with self-disgust.

I glanced around at the familiar wallpaper, the twee pictures, expecting her to turn and leave. But she just stood there in front of me, her hands knotting and unknotting across the long line of buttons that ran down her black dress.

“I only feel as though I’ve lost him now,” she said. “Before I knew we’d thrown away this War, it was always as if some part of him might still come back to me.”

I nodded, staring up at her, this twisted image of Francis as a middle-aged woman. Her eyes were lost in shadow; a shade deeper than black.

“And I wonder, even now, if he ever knew a woman.”

She took a step closer so that our knees touched. I was looking right up at her now, the rapid rise and fall of her breasts, the apertures of her nostrils, the lines of flesh under her chin. Beneath the sour dusty odour of her clothes, she even smelled a little like Francis: Francis if he’d been eating pickles, drinking sherry and gin.

“I never knew what he was like,” she said.

“He was…” I tensed my hands, feeling enclosed, threatened. But something snapped within me. All these evasions, the dishonesty. It finally broke. “I loved him, Mrs. Eveleigh. I just loved him…”

She took a step back and nodded severely. I had truly thought for a moment—had wanted, even—that she would kiss me: that we could somehow share our Francislessness together. But, instead, I covered my face in my hands and heard the sigh of her dress as she left the room, and the soft clunk of the door closing.

I crept out from the house early next morning, long before anyone was awake. I trudged through the darkness to the unlit station and sat waiting for the milk train.

The Eveleighs never wrote to me after that.

I never saw them again.

I
TAKE THE LONG
journey back to Oxford after my days of hospitalisation. Several demijohns of bloody jelly have been sucked out of my chest; the infection and the fever have passed entirely. Although I’m still dying, I feel almost well again.

One of the many advantages of leading a privileged life in Modernist Greater Britain is that I don’t have to trouble myself with fresh travel arrangements. By the turning of a well-oiled machine, new tickets are booked, new passes are issued, my abandoned Ladybird is returned to the Forge Garage at Ballachulish, my medical records are checked and updated. Even the odd discrepancy in my name between the various official records is easily absorbed. A comfortable ambulance takes me to the station, where a whole empty First Class compartment is pre-booked. The ticket collectors and the stewards have been appraised of my arrival: elderly gent; Oxford don; taken unwell on holiday; not exactly EA top brass or even a member, but connections with the Great Man. All I have to do is stretch my legs beneath my pre-warmed blanket and stare out of the train window.

Finally leaving Scotland one train later and in an even plusher compartment, the smugness of being well cared-for and not quite ill finally breaks into a sense of loss. What, after all, have I discovered? Just a few rumours, a scrappy poster on an empty moor. Already, I can feel the obligations and disappointments of Oxford looming. Cumbernald and this science-and-history business with Bracken, moderating exams, the need to do something with my life before there’s nothing left of it. The concept of my book,
The Fingers Of History
(stupid name) seems inherently flawed, and quite beyond my abilities. Those who can’t make history write about it. I suppose that those who can’t write about it write nothing at all.

Scenery flashes by. I am brought coffee and newspapers, offered an ear attachment that you can plug into a socket and listen to the BBC Light Programme. Carlisle. Penrith. Manchester. I gaze listlessly at the newspapers. They are full of John Arthur’s closing speech at the London Olympics. Magnanimously, he congratulates the many foreigners who have won medals. The Russians, in particular, are singled out for praise. Their scientific training methods are acknowledged; their clean, almost Nordic looks are photographically portrayed in pull-out supplements showing T
HE
L
OSERS
A
ND
T
HE
W
INNERS
. Reading all this, I get that faintly vertiginous sensation that is part of Modernist life. Can these be the same bloodthirsty Russians—Communists, although the word is scarcely mentioned now—that the Empire Alliance was supposed to be a bulwark against? Since last year’s pact with Stalin, everything has changed.

I flip back towards the S
ITS
V
AC
, where a Decent Widow is looking for a Clean Anglo Saxon Couple to take care of her and her Nice Surrey House. In the Classified columns, various Modernist and EA self-education courses and camps are on offer, along with supposedly War Office-endorsed photographs of the Mons Archers, framed or unframed—or as a package with
The Illuminated Quotes of John Arthur.
And there are innumerable busts and photographs of the man. One advertiser, in a ploy that I suspect won’t be used twice, even dares to suggest that he drinks their Effervescent Tonic and Pick-Me-Up each morning. Still, I can see John Arthur smiling ruefully at that if he saw it. The price of what we still call a free press…