Wake: A Novel (11 page)

“And your regiment?”

“Seventeenth Middlesex.”

She writes this down. “And which years did you serve?”

“1916 until 1917.”

“And 1917 is when you were invalided out?”

“Yes.”

“And what was your injury?”

He hesitates. “My arm.”

“I can see that.” She waits for him to elaborate. “You can’t use it?”

“No.”

Again, he doesn’t say any more. She feels a small flicker of irritation. “And your captain?”

“Yes.”

“What was your captain’s name?”

His face twitches. “It was Montfort,” he says.

At first she thinks she has misheard.

“Captain Montfort.” He leans forward, waiting for her to write.

She looks down, to where her pen is held in her hand, pressing into the paper. The ink is running unevenly into the little gray marbled troughs and valleys. She lifts away the nib. “Captain Montfort?”

He nods.

“Well, I’m sorry.” She sits back. “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.”

“What? Why?”

“We only deal with pensions here. Pensions and benefits. We are not a missing persons bureau.” She takes a slip from the pile beside her, turns it onto the blank side, takes out a small, leather-bound book, opens it, and copies out an address. She does everything slowly and carefully, keeping her pen as steady as she can. “I imagine the best thing to do would be to contact the army directly. All of the information is here.”

He looks at the piece of paper in her hand as if the letters are from a foreign alphabet. “But”—he looks up at her—“you said you could do it. You just said you could help.”

“I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

He is studying her fixedly. He knows she is lying, she thinks. She holds his gaze. His head starts to jerk.

“Mr. Hind?”

The jerks are rising in intensity, passing through his body, until he is moving like a jack-in-the-box and his face is contorted, horrible. But she has seen these fits before. However awful, you can do nothing but wait. She digs her nails into her palms and looks away at the stained brown-carpeted floor at her feet.

“All right, old thing?”

She looks up to see that Robin is standing directly in front of her, his hand on Rowan’s shoulder. For a second she thinks he is speaking to her. Then, “There, there.” He speaks quietly, as though calming an animal, his hand moving slowly up and down the smaller man’s back. “There.” He looks enormous beside Rowan, rooted as an oak. “There we are. That’s it. There.”

Slowly Rowan’s fitting stops, and he regains his self-control, breathing hard. Robin moves a little way away from him, allowing him space, creating a triangle between Rowan, Evelyn, and himself. He thrusts his hands into his pockets. “All right there, old chap?”

Rowan nods, his eyes on the ground. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” says Robin quietly. He looks at Evelyn. “Everything all right?”

“We’re fine,” she says, curtly. “Thank you.”

“That’s good, then.” He gives her a quick look, then walks back to his desk. She watches him go, blood raging; they all try it, at one time or another. Telling her what to do. She hates nothing more. She has been here for two years; she is the longest-serving member of the staff. She turns back to see that Rowan is staring right at her.

“You,” he says. He speaks slowly, as though pushing the words before him through something thicker than air. “You looked just like him, just then.”

“And who is that?”

“The man,” he says. “The man I want to see.”

“Well,” she says, passing the piece of paper over the desk toward him. “These are the people who will be able to tell you if—the man you’re looking for is still alive.”

The coffin is loaded into military ambulance number 63638. Alongside it are six barrels of earth, from six different battlefields, one hundred sacks in all. The ambulance sets off on the long straight road that leads north to the coast. A military escort accompanies it: two cars in front and one behind. Four soldiers sit silently in each car, their hats held on their laps.

The land here, though still ravaged, looks more like countryside than the Somme, farther south. Here signs of life are returning to the farms. Here, even after everything, fields still look like fields—like land where something still may grow.

The convoy passes a farmer on his plow. The farmer looks up at the escort and the scarred old ambulance as they pass by. He returned to this farm just last year. He was wounded at Verdun and lost an eye, and was released back home, secretly relieved. An eye seemed a small price to pay for his life. But he left the farm to stay with his father-in-law in Burgundy after the German advance in 1918, after the Germans raced forward in that spring offensive and requisitioned his farmhouse, his cellar, and his lands. After they drank him dry, killed and ate his chickens—stunned by abundance, boys who had been starving behind the lines. After they got so drunk that he and his wife and children were woken by them, shouting in the courtyard, naked, reeling, their helmets held on their crotches, empty bottles of wine rolling around them on the ground. He knew then that it was over. That the Germans were finished. That the advance had been stalled by these drunken, starving boys.

These are some of the pictures he carries of the war. Now he only wants to be left alone. He wants to get through his plowing without disturbing any ordnance that may have been left here. He knows of many farmers who have lost limbs, or worse, trying to make the most of their fields.

He wonders briefly who the approaching cars carry: a foreign dignitary, perhaps? But he doesn’t wonder long. He bends back to his work, hunched against the drizzle, against the gray skies, thinking of eating his dinner in front of the fire, sitting alongside his wife.

In one fierce, clean movement, Ada slices through the knots, and with a small puff that looks like smoke, the string falls away.

On the top are Michael’s letters to her and Jack, two thick piles of them, each held in place with another knotted piece of string. She lifts them out and puts them beside her on the bed. Not yet
.

Lying beneath them is a smaller, loose collection of picture postcards. One is a picture of a church. Albert, it says, on the bottom right-hand corner. At the top of the bell tower is a statue of a woman with a baby, the woman holding the child in her outstretched arms, dangling it over the empty air. On the back, her son’s handwriting:

The woman is the Virgin Mary.

She’s been leaning like this for a couple of years.

They say if she falls then the war will be over.

Pray she falls when we’re winning Mum!

It was the first card he sent her, after he arrived in France in 1917, and the day she received it, she had tacked it up on the kitchen wall. It made her uneasy, though; there was something about that woman, dangling over the empty air, holding on so desperately to her child, that reminded her of herself.

She had the same chart on her wall as everyone else she knew; it had come free with the
Daily Mail,
and the town of Albert was right in the middle of the British Zone, marked red on the map. She drew a circle around it. Now she could picture him somewhere at least, could look at the church—see something that he had seen. It sounded like a good English name, too: Albert, easy in the mouth, not like some of the other names on the chart: Ypres, Thiepval, Poperinghe. She wouldn’t have had the first clue how to pronounce them.

She shuffles through the contents of the box. More postcards fall out from beneath that first: a picture of a river, and a riverbank, and picnicking people wearing summery clothes.
THE SOMME,
it says on the bottom. On the back of the postcard Michael had written, “It doesn’t look much like this anymore!” She remembers what she did when this postcard came to the door: searched the faces on the riverbank, relieved when the French didn’t look very different from the people at home.

The last picture is of the cobbled street of a town. Something is stuck faceup onto the back of it. She peels it carefully away; it is a photograph of Michael.

She remembers now: He sent it to her at the same time as the one that she has in the frame downstairs in the parlor, not long after he arrived. They must have been taken seconds from each other, and by the same photographer, because the same background—a painted wall—shows on each. He is not smiling here, though; his eyes are guarded and his edges are blurred, so that it is difficult to see where the wall ends and his uniform begins. She knows he must have moved as the shutter came down, and that this is the explanation for the way the photograph has turned out, but still, she doesn’t like it. It is as though he is already moving into a future in which he doesn’t exist.

Underneath are three smaller pieces of light brown card. These postcards have no pictures on them, and each of them reads the same, with printed writing ranged all the way down the left-hand side:

The first two cards are from June 1917, from when he first went into battle. She remembers that they didn’t receive a letter for over a week, and then these postcards came, one day after the other, with all of the phrases crossed out except one:
I am quite well.

How relieved she had been to get these, however little they said.

When they finally printed casualty lists for his company, she fell on the newspaper, running her finger down the list, frantically searching for his name among the injured and killed. It wasn’t there. Still, they had to wait a week for a proper letter from him. Meanwhile, she could read and try to understand what it meant: There had been fifty survivors from two hundred men.

And she knew then that, whatever her son had seen, it was something that took him somewhere far beyond her reach.

One more field service card remains in the box. This one is dated September 14, 1917. It came after two weeks of silence. Two weeks in which she had written to him four times. Two weeks in which every morning, when the mail came, she would run into the hall; in which every evening Jack would come into the kitchen, hat twisted in his fist, pretending that he wasn’t looking to see if there was a letter propped up against the teapot for him to read. This card, too, read the same:

I am quite well.

It was the last that they heard from him: September 14, 1917.

They scoured the papers, but this time there was nothing about his company. Nothing about any action they had been involved in, no clue.

At the bottom of the box is a letter in a small brown envelope. She takes it out and holds it in her hands. For something so heavy, it weighs nothing at all.

It arrived on a Monday in September, a day of late summer sun. She was hanging the sheets on the line. There were women out all the way along, doing the same, their gardens garlanded with flapping white. She hadn’t heard the tap of the letter box, and when she came back into the dim hall, she could just make out the shape of a letter lying on the mat. She bent to pick it up and saw a French postmark and Jack’s name in an official type. She dropped it on the floor and walked straight back outside.

There was the sun, hitting the whiteness of the sheets on her line, and all the way down the row of gardens, as though all the women of London were surrendering at once. Just in front of her was the rabbit hutch that Jack hadn’t got around to fixing yet. She stared at the place where the hexagonal wires were ripped away from the gray unvarnished wood. A fox had come and torn them years ago. Next door’s cat was sleeping beside it, lazy in a patch of warmth, its belly falling and rising in the sun.

The next thing she remembers is standing in the kitchen with the shadows lengthening around her, and Jack coming into the room. Holding the letter out toward her. Telling her to sit down.

“Don’t open it,” she said.

But he did. She watched his face as he read. His eyes as they moved along the page. Stop. Move back to the top. And in those tiny movements she felt her life, her future, contract and collapse.

“It’s not true.”

He put the letter on the table. Pushed it toward her.