Strange Meeting

Part One

He was afraid to go to sleep. For three weeks, he had been afraid of going to sleep.

But then, because of some old, familiar sound or smell, suddenly recalled, in this room of his overlooking the rose garden, he recalled also the trick he had used as a child, to keep himself awake.

He wanted to stay awake.

In the hospital, it had been different. Because of the pain in his leg, and because he could not bear the noises of the ward at night, the sounds of hoarse breathing and death, and the crying of the Field-Gunner in the next bed, he had only wanted to sleep. He had asked them to give him something, had tried and failed to get whisky or rum. He had even tried to bribe Crawford.

Crawford…

He remembered Crawford’s eyes, and his soft jowls, folding inwards towards the small nose, and mouth and chin. Crawford, standing at the foot of his bed. It had not surprised him, their meeting there. Nothing like that was surprising now. Though, at first, Crawford had been busy with the Field-Gunner, had not come near Hilliard until the following day. Then, as always, in the past, their pointless, mutual dislike.

‘Hello, Hilliard. Got it through the calf, did you?’

‘Thigh.’

‘Left?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bullet?’

‘No, shrapnel.’

Crawford nodded. The flesh over his cheeks was carefully razored. But there were dark smears beneath his eyes, as though he, too, did not sleep.

‘Good for a month back home, then. You always were a clever devil, Hilliard.’

When they were boys, they had both been sent to a dancing class, held on Saturdays at eleven, in the Methodist Hall.

‘If you are going to do a thing, do it properly,’ Constance Hilliard had said. ‘There is nothing to be ashamed of in learning dancing.’ He had not supposed that there was. His sister went, too. ‘Dancing will be a great asset to you later on, you will have me to thank for having taken you to proper lessons. I like a young man who knows how to dance.’ For she hoped that he would cut as good a figure as his father, would look so fine and be so accomplished, at the Waltz and the Lancers.

Saturday mornings in the Methodist Hall, and the smell of dust between the grain of the floorboards, the squeak of chalk where the steps were marked out, and, over the echoing piano, the voice of Miss Marchment.

‘The Crawfords are taking their boy,’ his mother had said, though she scarcely knew the Crawfords. Hilliard was three years younger.

He had not been embarrassed by the dancing class, only disliked it because he was no good, had no rhythm, could not convert her instructions into the right, patterned movements of his own feet.

‘You are to try, you are to stick to it. It will suddenly go “click” one morning, everything will fall into place, and then you will be like your father, you will be a beautiful dancer.’

He knew that he would not, but he did not care, either, only went, each Saturday and was bored – and sat out, much of the time, because Miss Marchment became impatient.

‘You have no control, John Hilliard, no co-ordination.’

Around the Methodist Hall, fat hot-water pipes ran like intestines, the lead-colour showing through in patches where the paint had worn away. He sat on the pipes and felt the secret movement of the water beneath him. They were warm pipes, though they did not give much of their warmth out to the hall. He sat, unworried, watching the others, watching Crawford. Crawford was good at dancing.

They had scarcely spoken to one another, then or later, the edges of their lives scarcely overlapped. They went away to different Prep schools, a hundred miles apart. In the years that followed, they met sometimes, at other people’s parties. Once, they passed in different punts, on the Backs at Cambridge.

But they had scarcely spoken to one another. There was only this dislike. Now, he saw that it had been because of something in Crawford’s expression, a smugness about the loose, soft cheeks, and the smallness of nose and mouth. But he was worried, this time, that someone he scarcely knew should have been, throughout his life, so consistently disliked. There ought to be no time, now, for that, no place for it. He was being petty.

Since going to the front in April, he had found out so many things, came up against traits like this, which he could not accept. He had thought, before April, that he knew himself. He was wounded during the second week of the offensive, in July. Came home again. Was twenty-two, then. Knew everything. Nothing.

And there had been Crawford, in a white coat, standing at the foot of his hospital bed. A familiar face. He had joined up straight from medical school, that first August.

‘Been out there long?’

‘April.’

‘And got yourself a blighty in July. I said you were a clever devil, Hilliard.’

Why? What do you know about me? You know nothing. I dislike you, Crawford.

But why that, either? Bloody silly. Childish. They were not children now. Crawford was Crawford. He had done nothing. Only that there was still the smugness of face, the fold of the jowls, the slight smile, as though he remembered that he had been good at dancing.

Dancing…

On the third night, he had tried to bribe him.

‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Hilliard.’

‘Look…’

‘Pack you off home on Wednesday. We need the beds, God knows. Nice casualty train, calm sea if you’re lucky. Month in Hawton. You’ll be all right.’

‘Crawford…’

‘How’s your sister?’

‘I can’t sleep.’

No. Only see the pale, moving lights, hear the screens drawn, metal scissors dropped into enamel bowls, hear the Field-Gunner with the bandaged face, crying.

‘Think yourself lucky you got off a bit early. It’s no picnic now.’

‘What?’

‘You’ve seen what’s coming in here, and there’ll be more. Something’s still boiling up. We hear things, you know.’

But have you been there, Crawford, have you been?

Well, does that matter? He has to be here, doesn’t he, somebody has to be here when they bring in the Field-Gunner, blinded.

Non-Combatant Forces. Crawford.

He wanted to sleep, shut out the noises. Why had it been so easy up there, to sleep on a firestep, on a table in a cellar, to fall asleep on horseback going up the road to Bapaume, to sleep through the noise of the guns? Not now.

‘I’ve got to sleep.’

Crawford had gone away.

Yet now, in the room above the rose-garden, he was trying the old trick of staying awake, keeping his head above the green-black water of nightmares. Outside, it was still, except, in the distance, the faint wash of the sea.

The trick was, to order yourself to be dead asleep by the time you counted ten, or twenty. Then, you couldn’t do it, you stayed awake, for as long as you wanted. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. ‘Go to sleep!’ Though perhaps, when he was a child, in this room, he had never, in fact, wanted it to be so very long, only wanted time enough to see the guests who were coming to dinner, or hear the owl begin to hoot in the trees at the bottom of the drive. Once, he stayed awake for the arrival of his mother’s cousin, who was a missionary in Africa (and who had been, after all, an ordinary woman in a dull green dress, who had been nothing, seen from two floors above through the stairwell, who bore no traces of Africa).

Now, he wanted to stay awake. There was nothing to hear, for the owls had moved away some years ago, there were no visitors to see, he was no longer a child excluded from secrets. Now, there were no secrets. His leg was better, that would not keep him awake. It only ached slightly when he had been walking, or in the cold. But it was not cold, it was late August, it had been hot all the weeks at Hawton. Hot in France, too.

He had been unhappy at home, where he could talk to no one, nobody knew, where they gave dinner parties and agreed about politics, where old men aired their military opinions and he could not join in, only sit there, staring at them, and then down his food, in disbelief. He had argued twice, bitterly, with his father. But after that, stayed silent. He had gone to London and wandered hopelessly about the streets, eaten in the club and listened to what they were saying there, too, had seen that life went on: flower-sellers sitting around Piccadilly, young women with parasols strolling in the sunshine through the Green Park, commissionaires in uniform, opening the doors of grand hotels. Uniform… He had felt a tightening in his head. Spoke to no one. Returned home. On the lawn under the cedar tree, his mother poured china tea for the ladies who came on Wednesdays to knit, grey and green socks and mittens and helmets, for the coming winter at the front. They turned their heads to watch him as he walked, limping slightly, up the gravelled path. The shadows were long and black, against the brightness of the sun. He had so hated being here.

But there? Would he rather be there again? Or even where Crawford was, far behind the front line, standing at the foot of beds, hundreds of beds. For it had gone on, grown worse, throughout that summer. Crawford had known what they all knew. ‘We hear things.’

Although, in England you could not tell exactly what was happening, only the official reports came through to the newspapers, telling nothing. He read them, read between the lines, read the Casualty Lists. Imagined. Knew.

Knew that he had been wrong, unfair to Crawford, that there was no place for such petty feelings now. Could he have stood it himself, night after night in the military hospital, hearing the terrible noises? He should not continue to dislike Crawford.

This was how it went on, he felt himself changing daily, felt himself to be old, twenty, thirty, fifty years older than when he had gone out in April. Hardened, too. He knew. Everything. There were no secrets. He scarcely recognized the person he had once been, the person his family seemed to remember.

He did not want to go to sleep. He ordered himself not to, and so it would work, the old, childhood trick. He turned his head on the pillow, keeping his eyes open.

It did not work, for he was conditioned, now, to obeying, not countermanding orders. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. ‘Go to sleep!’ He slept.

But at first, he dreamed only of horses, standing beside a hawthorn hedge in winter. The dark twigs were laced over with frost. There were four or five horses, and the breath came out of their nostrils and rose to hang and freeze, whitening on the air. He heard the soft thud of hoof on hard earth and the metal bits champing. Their muzzles were like the soft backs of moles.

He half woke, turned over. Horses? The first time he had ridden a horse was out across the Wiltshire Downs from the Training Camp, early that year. He had written so, in a letter home.

His mother had written back at once.

He had thought of recounting it, as a funny story, to Mason-Godwin, who shared the hut with himself and Archer. But did not do so in the end, because it seemed disloyal, Mason-Godwin was not a friend. Was humourless. A neat man.

That was the first time he had wished for Beth, for he could have begun to tell his sister the story and she would have at once supplied the ending, laughed with him, knowing their mother.

He would like to see her. But he felt no nostalgia for Hawton, then or later, and had been ashamed of that at first. He was indifferent to home, to mother or father. He disliked neither of them, but did not particularly miss them. Nor had he any ties with friends or his own past. All around him, the men of B Company told stories, about mothers and wives and friendly neighbours, became sentimental towards evening, in the billets at Selcourt, sang. Hilliard read their letters for censoring and passed over the conventional phrases of love and longing with curious detachment. Though certainly he looked forward to getting the mail that came to him, as much as any of them did, looked forward to his mother’s parcels, and the letters full of moral encouragement, and local gossip. Anything that broke the monotony, or the fear.

But he missed his sister. Beth’s letters were rather formal, disappointing. Communication between them had never been stated, they had relied upon thoughts and moments of humour, taken one another for granted. Were shocked by separation. The letters said nothing.

For a while, half-sleeping again, he still heard the gentle tossing of the horses’ heads, saw their breath smoking, saw ice meshed with cracks across a puddle.

Outside in the darkness, a hundred yards away, the soil became paler and drier, became sand, and the path led down to the beach.

His leg cramped suddenly, jerking him awake, but then at once he fell heavily asleep again, a hand came over his face, thick, moist and cold as an ether mask, and forced him down into the nightmares.

By day, walking about the garden or along the beaches in the hot sun, he had tried to remember the tiredness of the trenches, the lack of sleep that tipped him over into hysteria, to remember the longing for a mattress, sheets, a feather pillow. And there they were, on his own bed, in his own room. For three and a half weeks, he had been trying not to sleep.

The nightmares rose up through him in waves, like bouts of nausea, and at their crest, burst open and spilled over one another on confusion. Tomorrow, he was travelling to rejoin the battalion.

As he came awake the second time, he heard himself cry out. Had anyone else heard him? He sat up quickly, to shut out the sound of his own heart, thumping against the pillows, the rush of blood through his ears.

The day they had taken the German trench, they found the bodies piled on top of one another in layers, like sandbags, making a wall.

Jesus God, help me…

It was very quiet in his room. He moved his arm over the mound of quilt and blanket, and the memory came back to him of the soft bodies. And then, the soft bolsters through which he had had to thrust a bayonet every morning that spring. Bayonet practice had been the only thing he could not take, at the Training Camp. He hated the look of the blade, and the click as you fixed it home, the idea that it was somehow an extension of his own arm. Rifle shooting had been different, a skill to master and almost a matter of pride, to aim through the pale, clear light of March, across the open field to a neat target. He found that he was rather good at shooting. But not the bayonet.

The sweat was cooling on his back. The worst thing in his nightmares was always the smell, the sweet, rotten trench smell, of soil and chlorine and blood, and the mustard gas like garlic. His bedroom window was open and the room was full of the scent of roses, coming up from the warm garden. A sweet smell, and curiously like some cream or powder in a jar on his mother’s dressing table. A sweet smell.

He pushed the bedclothes away, retching, leaned over the washbasin and felt the walls of his stomach clench uselessly. Only a little water came up into his mouth, tasting bitter. He ran the tap and rinsed his mouth out, splashed his face. Shivered. Yet he had never been sick in France, not even felt sick, and only once had he had to turn his face away at the sight of a wound. He did not retch at the real things, only the memory of them, here in his old room above the rose garden.

Tomorrow, he was going back, and he would rather that than go back now to his bed. He had to get out of this room. He could still smell the roses.

It was somehow reassuring just to be putting on his clothes, to feel cotton and Shetland wool against his skin. He went out, walking on the grass in case the crunch of his feet on the drive woke them, and his mother should call out or come down, urging him back to bed, to sleep.

He went between the fruit trees into the copse, and took the path leading down to the beach. It was very warm, the sky clear and pricked all over with stars. First he heard the soft hiss and suck of the sea, and then saw it, thin and silvered as a snail’s trail where the moon lay along its edge.

The tide was right out, so that he had to wade through mounds of loose sand before it became damp, firm and satisfying under the soles of his feet. It was a wide bay, curved between two wooded tongues of land, and the coast continued like this, open and gentle, for more than twenty miles, before the cliffs grew steeper and more rocky, the currents dangerous. He lit a cigarette and the striking of the match, on open ground at night, made him panic, turn and look behind him, before he remembered where he was. He threw the match into a pool between two ribs of sand. Then, he began to walk slowly along the water line, no longer afraid, but poised between a sense of reassurance, at the sound of the night sea, and despair, because he had been at home and unhappy for three and a half weeks, he cared nothing for any of them, could explain nothing. He was simply waiting. For?

His mind filled up suddenly with ordinary details, about his journey back tomorrow, about what he should not forget to take with him, things he had promised people – a bottle of old brandy, chocolate, a good torch, a pair of wire cutters that would actually cut wire, Gilbert and Sullivan music for Reevely, who sang so badly and had such ambitions: he wondered where he would find his battalion, where they would be going to next, who was left. He thought – I want to go back. For there was nothing for him here.

‘You must go across to The White Lodge,’ Constance Hilliard had said, during the first week of his leave. ‘The Major is so anxious for you to go and have a talk to him, he feels so out of things. He doesn’t see so well nowadays. You must be very patient with him. I have told him that you will be coming.’

Up the short, ill-kempt drive, then, past the kennel where the bulldog lay as it had always lain, and snarled at him and snuffled up its thick nose, an evil dog, smelly, old, fat. Up to the blue door.

‘He has always taken an interest in you, always. He used to give you sweets when you were only a toddler. You won’t remember that.’ He remembered.

‘He is looking forward to a long talk with you.’

The Major who had only daughters, five daughters, one of whom was left to keep house so inefficiently, and attend Constance Hilliard’s knitting parties. She smelt, too, as the bulldog smelt and the dim hallway and the Major’s own study. An old smell, faintly rancid.

What would he find to say to the Major?

‘Pity you weren’t a cavalryman.’

‘Oh, I’m happy where I am, on the whole.’

‘Pity.’

‘I do ride. We have horse transport.’

‘You should have been a cavalryman, you’ve got a good long leg. Far and away the most useful, cavalry, always were. You’re only clearing a way for them now, of course, you do realize that?’

Clearing a way.

‘Pity you’re not a cavalryman. Still… Come with me while I feed the dog. I always feed the dog about now. What time is it, exactly? Still, you’ll be back again before Christmas, before the year’s out. Yes. All be over. Hold that dish steady. I have to cut the meat up a bit, he hasn’t the teeth he once did, have to help him on. Come with me. Look here, you’ve no cause to hang behind, he’s harmless isn’t he? Look… You remember him well enough, don’t you, you used to come here from school a year or so ago – he’s harmless.’

The dog heaved on to its legs and strained at the chain. Hilliard stood back from the smell of its body, as it sweated in the autumn sun.

‘Given you long enough at home with your feet up though, haven’t they? You seem to be all right. Don’t mind the dog. He takes his time, he isn’t so good managing his food as he used to be. Likes me to stand with him, you see. Had you no ambition to go for the cavalry?’

The Major had offered him tea, and when it came, into the close-windowed study, he had only been able to drink, though the Major ate hugely, chicken and tongue sandwiches, currant loaf, éclairs, slapping the food noisily about his mouth. Hilliard looked out of the window. The White Lodge was a pink bungalow, in need of repainting. Thistles and dock had seeded themselves among the currant bushes of the garden.

‘Seen anything of the Russians?’

‘I’ve been in France.’

‘No, no.’ The éclair oozed cream over his fingers and he sucked them. ‘No, Russians. Don’t you read your papers, keep up to date? They’re here, the country’s full of them. Well, ask Kemble down at the station, he sees the trains go through at night, troop trains full of them, he’ll tell you. I thought you’d know all about it.’

‘Would you mind if I opened the window?’

‘I get rheumatism. It’s the damp. The dog gets it too, come to that. I get bronchitis in the winter.’

The window stayed shut. Over the top of the hedge, straggling with convolvulus, Hilliard saw the thin gold line of the sea, and the heat shimmering in between.

‘Cavalrymen always were more highly thought of.’

When he left, he took in great gulps of air, but it was not fresh, even outside, it was dusty, old, burned-up air, the end of summer. The dog heaved, growling deep inside its massive belly.

‘You’ll be back here before Christmas. They know what they’re doing.’

He stood at the broken gate, unable to see Hilliard beyond the first few yards of the road.

‘The Major always asks after you, John. He was a fine soldier in his day He takes an interest in you, a pride, even. He didn’t have a boy of his own. It’s a pity he doesn’t see so well now. He isn’t old, you know, not so very old. He feels left out of things. It’s a great pity.’

Half a mile on, he came to a small cluster of rocks, and sat down. He did not notice that they were damp, from the seaweed trailing over them, he was so used, now, to physical discomforts. The first night they arrived at the training camp, they had slept in a field because there was confusion over hut accommodation, too many officers sent to this one place. They had a groundsheet and one army blanket each. It was early March, bitterly cold. In the morning, they rose like shadows, scarcely able to see one another at ten yards distance, through a thick mist. The grass was soaking wet, their blankets and valises and the overcoats in which most of them had slept were wet. All the admonitions of childhood had come back to him, about damp feet and the perils of fog to the lungs, he had waited for pleurisy, bronchitis, pneumonia. He did not even catch cold, and had not been ill once, the whole time there, or in France, had felt, indeed, more than usually well, with an odd lightheadedness. The shrapnel wound in his thigh had healed very quickly.

The sea moved about, turning over and back upon itself at the shore line. Then, he thought that he could hear, even from so far away, the thudding of the guns. But there were so many noises now, imagined or remembered, filling his head as he walked about the lanes and fields beyond Hawton that summer, he could no longer trust his own judgement.

He thought, I want to go back. In the pit of his stomach, a flutter of apprehension, excitement.

He reached down and let his hand touch the water in a rock pool. It was quite warm and glimmering from some faint phosphorescence and then, as it stirred, the briny smell came up into his nostrils, reminding him of all the summers of his childhood. There were limpets, rough and conical, clinging to the sides of the pool, and he rubbed over them with the pads of his fingers. Immediately, he was conscious of his own flesh, of the nerves beneath the skin; of the bone and muscle which obeyed him: clench, unclench, move this finger, bend that. His hands looked huge and pale under the water. He had never realized before how much he cared about his own body, simply because it was so familiar, because he knew better than he knew anything every shape and crease of it, the exact width of knuckle, the flatness of his fingernails. So that, when he imagined his hand torn off at the wrist it was not the thought of the pain which so terrified him, but simply the loss of a part of himself, something he had always known. He was his hand – and his legs and neck, ribs and groin. Yet the wound had healed well enough.

He tried to pull a limpet away and felt it sucking in hard, resisting him. He knew that in the end he would win, could prise under the shell and probe out the weak spot in its defences. For a second he rested his fingers on the ribbed surface. Then let go abruptly, ashamed. He got up and began to walk back, looking down at the pebbles that glistened, dark as glass, where the water touched them. The easy movement of his own long legs pleased him, he could have walked on for mile after mile, forever.

Going up the road from Bapaume that Saturday afternoon, after eleven days in the front line without relief, Hurstfield, one of his own platoon, had swayed, staggered and then fallen, and the others had hauled him up and marched him between them for a while, supporting his arms, telling him to move his feet, left right, left right, left right, so that he obeyed them, like a drunk being taken home. They had been marching since seven, had passed the far point of exhaustion, rested for a quarter of an hour, gone on, and in the end, Hurstfield seemed to get strength again, he shook off their hands and moved away a little from them. Roberts the Welshman had taken over some of his pack but now, seeing the look on Hurstfield’s face, handed it back to him without speaking. Hilliard watched tensely, riding alongside them until a message came up for him to go ahead and meet the Adjutant at the crossroads. He forgot about Hurstfield. He was tired himself, his head ached in the sun. But the men were walking.

As he came off the beach he heard it again, the distant boom, like an explosion at the end of a long tunnel. An owl hooted. So they had come back then.

Owls, ravens, hedgehogs, snakes – augurs of death and mischance. But he had seen none of them in Picardy. Only lizards basking on their bellies against hot stone walls, only flocks of magpies and larks, soaring up out of sight at the end of the day, only hard black beetles and, in the copse at Selcourt, a nightingale. He had gone for a walk along the canal bank and watched a kingfisher dive down to a fish.

Yet until this year, he had scarcely known the name of any tree, though there was countryside all around Hawton, he took no interest in the garden, perhaps because of his father’s obsession with it, certainly had never been able to distinguish one bird from another. The owls had only pleased him because, as a child, he had found an odd comfort in their nightly hooting, and because of the tiny bones of the animals they hunted and ate, and which he used to pick out of their pellets. An owl could swallow a fieldmouse whole, and still digest it. He washed the bones and saved them, they might be somewhere in a drawer, still, for his mother allowed nothing to be thrown away.

Cliff House stood back, long and low and pale in the moonlight. Around it, the lawns, about whose closeness of cut his father worried the gardener daily, the symmetrical flowerbeds, the perfectly pruned roses. He had been born here. The windows were tall and blank. It meant nothing to him. He felt a quiet misery, that he had somehow failed, because of that. Tomorrow he was rejoining his battalion. Did he not even mind, then, that he might never see this house again?

His head sang. Jesus God, help me…

Beth. Beth. He had always gone to Beth. He began to run.

For some reason, after having learned to swim early and well, he had for a short time become afraid of the water. He had said nothing about this, only not gone out very far, paddled about at the edges where his feet could keep in contact with the sand. It was the beginning of the holidays. Beth had watched him. She had never liked swimming.

‘Come on.’

‘What?’

‘Come on. I want you to come out with me. I want to swim as far as the headland and back.’ She had spoken very quickly, bobbing up and down like a cork in the water beside him. ‘Come with me.’

‘You don’t like it,’ John had said.

‘I want to go.’ Her face went blank, stubborn, so that she looked like their father. She wanted to help him.

In the end, he said, ‘It’s not too far.’ But he was doubtful.

‘I know it’s not, don’t I?’

They waited, swam a little way, only just out of their depth. The sea was milky green. If they went a little further, they would be able to see Cliff House, up on the slope behind the trees.

‘I want to go.’ And she had gone, pushing ahead of him in a slow breast-stroke, the movements of her arms very careful, so that he knew she was counting, as she had been taught. She had been far more afraid than he was.

‘Here I come! Here I come!’ He had swum hard and fast, not allowing himself to stop or think, and then they were side by side, out as far as the end of the headland, they could survey the whole of the bay, lying on their backs and floating on the soft mattress of the sea.

‘I can see the windmill.’

‘I can see the house.’

‘I can see father. He’s in a deckchair.’

‘He’s wearing his panama hat.’

‘He’s gone to sleep.’

‘I can see your bedroom window. It’s open.’

‘I can see the whole, whole world.’

‘I can see a bird on a currant bush. And it’s a sparrow. I can see its eyes.’

‘Liar!’

‘I can so!’

He dived down and opened his eyes under the water, looking into darker and darker blue-greenness.

‘John… John…’ Her voice came from very far away, sounding different, hollow. ‘John…’

He surfaced, bubbling. ‘It’s all right, stupid.’

‘You could drown. You shouldn’t do it.’

‘There might be a shipwreck under here. I might go down and see.’

‘Don’t, you’re not to… Oh, don’t…’ Her voice rose in anxiety.

He had laughed, circled her once, and then begun to make for the shore, knowing that she had had enough, and was even doubting if she could get back, though would not say so. She followed him at her own cautious pace. When they finally came up on to the beach she was breathing quickly, but she had raced before him up the path, said nothing about any of it.

He had never again been afraid of swimming. Beth was older than him, by eighteen months, she had been almost eleven then. Beth. Beth…

He began to pant, climbing the stairs through the dark house, his hands were trembling. He tried not to count over all the possible ways in which, after tomorrow, he was going to die. Beth. Beth.

‘BETH!’

She sat bolt upright in her bed, eyes huge and shocked out of sleep.

‘I wondered what on earth it was! You frightened me.’

Had she forgotten all the times in the past when he had come here like this, for comfort, in the middle of the night? He sat on her bed, still trying to get his breath, wiping a hand over his face.

‘Is it your leg? It it hurting?’

He shook his head.

Beth’s room was on the other side of the house, away from the terrible scent of the roses. She had pulled on her blue dressing gown and, when he looked at her, and saw the thick brown hair, which she wore carefully piled up during the day, falling on to her shoulders, she seemed to be younger, the same Beth.

They had not put the light on.

‘You’re dressed?’

‘I went out. I’ve been on to the beach.’

‘What on earth for? It’s three o’clock.’

‘Twenty past three.’

‘Was it your leg?’

‘I walked a long way. The tide’s right out. It’s been so quiet down there.’ He spoke very slowly, pausing for a long time in between phrases.

‘Beth…’

He had not told any of them about the nightmares, but sometimes at breakfast he had seen Beth looking at him and thought that he did not have to tell her, that she knew, as she had always known everything about him.

In her youth, Constance Hilliard had been a great beauty, and she was beautiful still. But Beth had inherited their father’s long bony face, the high, narrow bridge to a nose that, in age, would become beak-like. Her hair grew far back from a very high forehead. Only her eyes, flint-coloured and thickly lashed, made her seem beautiful sometimes, because of their stillness.

He said, ‘You’re twenty-three, Beth.’ It amazed him.

‘Almost twenty-four.’

They sat in silence again, and he thought, then, of all the things that he wanted to tell her, which she did not know after all, had not guessed: the dread of returning to sleep, the faces of men in his nightmares, the voices, the sweet smell. Beth looked stern and, in spite of her hair falling about her face, looked her age, or even older, a woman. So she, too, had changed, though until tonight he had not fully realized it. This was another reason why the weeks at Hawton had not been happy. He had expected to spend time with her, walking about the beach, to laugh with her, explain things, but she had been busy, going out to lunch with their mother, helping twice a week at parties for soldiers on leave, leading a social life.

Hilliard had been to one of the parties, at which men sat along trestle tables lined down the church hall, and ate jellies and egg sandwiches and small, dainty cakes, their faces shocked and pale from the recollection of horrors. They had their photographs taken, looking embarrassed, and the women who served them, women like his mother and Beth and the wife of the Rector, stood by, looking proud and pleased. What do you think you are doing, he had wanted to say, what good is this? What good is this? But they were doing what seemed to them best, they knew nothing better, who was he to tell them the truth?

‘Your leg is better, isn’t it? They have said you’re really all right to go back?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, it’s not my leg, my leg’s nothing. Why do you go on and on about my leg?’

‘Don’t shout so, you’ll wake mother. I was only wanting to know.’

‘You look so prim now.’

At once, her face took on a stubborn cast, but then, as though she were consciously making an effort for him, softened.

‘Are you afraid to go back?’

He stared at her. She had had to ask him that. She was like all the others, understood nothing.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Perhaps it’ll be all right now. You’ve had your wound, so you’re not due for another.’ He thought that she believed it.

‘I don’t think it works like that.’

‘Oh, well… It’s been lovely having you at home.’

He thought she sounded like a hostess speaking to a departing guest.

On the chest of drawers across the room was a small leather photograph frame, standing open. He saw himself, looking foolish and pale and ethereal in his uniform cap. The edges of the picture had been somehow blurred out and made to look cloudy, his eyes were glistening. It had been taken the day before he left for the Training Camp. It was some stranger.

Beth shifted a little in her bed, fidgeted with the quilt, as though she might want to say something, or else to be left to go back to sleep. But the sound reminded him of the nights he had crept into this room and under her bed and gone to sleep there, on the rose-patterned carpet in the stuffy dark, with the hanging fringe of the coverlet, which was like the blankets over the door of the dugout. The creak of the springs as his sister moved was like the sound of the man sleeping above him in the wire-framed bunk.

He had always been forbidden to sleep in his sister’s room. In the mornings she had woken first and, knowing that he was there, leaned down and lifted the cover, whispering to him to go back quickly. He saw her face upside down, hair hanging. Outside, the sound of the martins and swifts that nested in the eaves of Cliff House. He had not minded returning to his room then.

That had gone on for what seemed like most of his childhood, but could only have been perhaps two summers when he was three or four years old. If he could creep under her bed now and lie on his back on the pink-flowered carpet, he would be able to sleep, he would be entirely safe, the nightmares would not come. In the dugout, there were soft voices behind the grey blankets passing messages, warning about careless lights or noises, sudden footsteps stopping abruptly: and the odd silences between, as when a train stopped in the middle of the countryside, and went still, so that through the windows came the calling of birds.

He felt calmer now, his head clear. Perhaps it was over, and he would simply sleep. Beth was watching him. He smiled at her, and she did not smile back. She said, ‘There’s a secret. But I think I could tell you now, you’re going back.’ Her voice was cool, formal as the letters. ‘I may marry Henry Partington.’

Then he knew that his sister had gone completely from him.

‘John?’

For a moment she looked concerned, wanting his approval.

Henry Partington, a lawyer who played golf with their father, who had looked as he looked now for as long as Hilliard could remember, though he must be only forty-five or -six, who had a son, was long widowed, had been to dinner twice in the past three weeks and talked the way they were all talking here. But Hilliard had not guessed, had seen nothing. How could he have seen? Henry Partington

‘He’s a very good man. He’s so kind. I’ve really grown quite fond of him.’

He tried to take in what she was saying but could not do so, even in the light of the realization that his sister had changed, had altogether gone away from him. Until, suddenly, it became clear. For who else was there for her? They were all away, her old friends, all being killed, there were no prospects. Beth was not beautiful, she was almost twenty-four, and had their father and mother to contend with daily.

He stood up.

‘John – I’m sorry I didn’t tell you but… but I haven’t actually said anything to him yet, I haven’t…’

‘You will.’

‘He thinks very highly of you, John. I’ve often talked to him about you.’

How? What had there been to say? She knew nothing about him now.

‘You’re not offended are you? Because I didn’t tell you?’

His hand rested on the cold china of the door knob. Tomorrow, he was going back, it was all right, nothing else could touch him.

He said, ‘Of course not. You’ve every right to your own secrets.’

‘Not a secret, but… Oh, you know.’

‘Yes.’

She was still sitting up, hugging her arms around her knees. If he came home again, this room would be empty. He tried to picture her in a wide bed with Henry Partington, and because she was no longer the same person for him, it was easy, it seemed entirely fitting.

He said, ‘It’s a good idea. I think you will be perfectly happy.’

‘Oh, John! Yes, you’re right, I will, I know I will. But I did want you to see it, I did want you to think so.’

He smiled, turned the door handle.

‘John – why did you go on to the beach? Was anything the matter?’ She had lowered her voice again, the old conspiracy, not to waken their parents.

‘Is it because you don’t want to go back tomorrow?’

‘No.’

He went back to his room and closed the window, to shut out the scent of the roses, he lay on the top of his bed, fully dressed, waiting for the first, thin light of morning.

His mother said, ‘I shall come with you to the station.’

‘NO!’ But seeing her face, he added more quietly, ‘I think I should prefer to go alone.’

For the truth was that he was leaving early, far too early. He could have caught an afternoon train from Hawton, for he did not have to embark until late that night, which should mean – even allowing for the crowds and the delays and the slowness of travel – not leaving Victoria until evening. But he had been up by seven with everything packed and ready. His room seemed once again as if it no longer belonged to him, the bed stripped, the top of the dressing table empty. He had looked into all the cupboards and drawers, and seen the things his mother had stored away – his school books and the shirts and trousers and socks he wore when he was twelve, the Meccano, the shells and stones he used to collect, cricket photographs: and, in one of his father’s old tobacco tins, the small, bleached bones from the owls’ pellets.

He wanted to be on his way.

‘I didn’t mean to come to London, John. But I would just like to walk with you down to the village, to see you on to the train.’

They were standing far apart from one another in the morning room. Constance Hilliard had her back to him, was looking out through the tall windows on to the lawn, baked and yellowing after the long weeks of summer. His father was becoming obsessive about the state of the lawns, pacing about them each morning and evening, poking with his stick, and holding, bitter, repetitive conversations with Plummet.

Once, his mother’s hair had been butter-coloured, but he could scarcely remember that, she had gone grey very early. Now, the sun made it glint with a curiously artificial light, like something concocted out of wire and floss by a theatrical wigmaker. She was a tall woman, tightly corseted, upright. But not graceful, though she always wore graceful clothes, which flowed and folded about her, she was fondest of silks and cashmere and lawn. Her dress today was of lawn, pale cream, with full sleeves and a high neck, bands of lace.

‘You look as if you were going to a wedding, mother.’ Though in truth she might always have been dressed for some wedding – or garden party or dinner or opera, she was a provincial woman who bought the type of clothes designed for some London society hostess. She said, ‘I do have standards.’ As a boy he had been embarrassed by the grandeur of her costume, when she came to see him at school. They said, ‘Who is she? Who is she?’

‘Hilliard’s mother.’

‘Only Hilliard? Good Lord!’

The sun shone, too, on the round walnut table which stood between them, on the Meissen figurine, and the copy of Blackwood’s and the bowl of roses. Roses.

‘I am dressed to come with you to the railway station.’

He was silent for a moment. Somewhere, around the side of the house. Plummet began to mow the lawn.

‘Look, actually I do have to go fairly soon, mother. I’ve got some things to do in London… shopping… and…’

‘You won’t be staying for luncheon?’

‘I – no. I’d better be off.’

‘Is there anything you like to have in your parcels? Anything in particular? It is so awfully difficult to know. Your father was asking.’

‘Whatever you like. Anything, thank you.’

‘Fruit? Sweets?’

‘Yes.’

‘You used to be fond of muscatels and almonds, as a small boy. Mary will bake you plum cakes, of course, they are so much better than anything we could buy.’

‘I don’t mind what you send, mother. Anything.’

‘Fortnum’s are very reliable, I think? You do get what we ask for? They send out things of good quality?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Now you are to complain, John, if anything is not quite right. We pay enough for the parcels, they should not put in substitutes, or anything which is not of the best.’

‘Mother, the parcels are perfectly all right, don’t go on about things. I’m grateful for whatever you send, that’s all. Don’t trouble.’

‘I like to trouble. That is the least I can do.’

He did not reply. Looking at his mother then, she seemed less of a stranger than she had ever been, almost closer, now, than Beth. He could hardly believe it. She had not changed, she looked no older. There had been no real communication between them since he came home, no more than throughout his life. Yet for this time, he loved her.

He knew little enough about her, however, did not even know tiny, factual things – as, what particular illnesses she had suffered in childhood, where she had first met his father, what she did in the mornings after breakfast, when she shut herself up in her sitting room overlooking the bay and would not see anyone, how much money she had to spend.

Her hands were folded together, palm to palm, in front of her. What kind of a woman? Would he be able to say anything at all about her when he got back to France?

From the bowl on the table in front of him came the terrible scent of roses.

‘I had better go. I really ought to leave quite soon.’

‘Is there a great deal you have to carry?’

‘Oh, no. Anyway, I’ve got used to lugging things about.’

‘Then perhaps we might walk. As it’s such a fine morning. As you are going before it gets too hot. Perhaps we could walk to the railway station?’

No, he thought, no. He wanted to leave Cliff House alone, to turn the bend by the blackthorn hedge and go out of their sight, he wanted to go.

He said, ‘All right, mother. If you feel like it. I’ll get my bags downstairs.’

Constance Hilliard nodded. And went to get ready also, to put on a huge, cream-coloured hat and pin it with pearl-headed pins, to change her shoes and take up the lace parasol, to look like a Queen, walking down the gravelled drive and along the lane and up to the main street of Hawton towards the station.

They said nothing. He saw that people looked at her, and he was no longer embarrassed by her extravagance of dress and her height and her coolness of manner, for he understood, suddenly, that she was obliged to make the best of what she had, here in this dull, restricted neighbourhood, and that she was perhaps unhappy, after all, bored with herself. He saw that she was beautiful.

By the time they reached the station he was sweating inside the heavy uniform, his shirt collar felt tight as iron. It was only a little after ten-thirty and already the sun was high and hot in a silvery sky. The awnings of the ticket office and the waiting room cast hard-edged shadows. On the opposite platform a young woman sat, nursing a child. Nobody else. They walked a little way up, beyond the buildings, towards a bench.

‘Off back then,’ Kemble said – Kemble who had seen the phantom Russian troop trains go through Hawton like thieves in the night, Kemble who remembered all the times he had waited here for a train to go back to school.

‘Kemble is letting this station go,’ Constance Hilliard said firmly, looking about her at the banks on either side of the line, where the grass grew tall and was seeding itself, with poppies and sorrel in between.

‘It always used to be so neat and tidy, we used to be proud of our station, but he seems not to care as he did. His son was killed at Mons. Do you remember Kemble’s boy? Or else he is too old, it has got too much for him.’

And it was true that the paint was flaking off the name sign, there were cracks in the green bench, a few sweet papers and cigarette packets lay as they had been dropped, in corners, to gather the summer’s dust.

‘Perhaps they don’t let him have any money for refurbishments.’

‘It isn’t a question of money. He could take a pride in things.’ She poked at a dandelion, growing up through a crevice in the stone, at her feet. ‘He has let everything go.’

She looked as if she would never let go, would never allow herself to loosen her corset, to have a crease in a dress or a spot of dirt left on her glove. She did not stand still beside him but walked up and down in the sunlight, casting a long, rippling shadow. She might have been nervous. Hilliard saw the young woman with the child watching her, saw Kemble the station master watching her. As he himself watched her. Was she aware of it?

It was very quiet. A pair of cabbage-white butterflies fluttered up and down like tiny kites blown by some breeze. But there was no breeze, no movement of air at all. Sun. Heat. Country silence. The rustle of his mother’s dress as she turned towards him again.

He thought, she has told me that Kemble’s son was killed, at Mons, and has gone on to speak of other things. Does she not know? Does she not think of it?

She said, ‘We look forward to your letters.’

Her skin was hardly lined, it had the moist look of chamois, though there was a tightness about the eyes and throat which revealed her age. He wondered if Beth felt bitter that she did not inherit such beauty, as he did. For he had his mother’s features, though they were arranged less disdainfully, he had the same grey eyes and pale hair and length of limb.

He looked at the gloved hand holding the parasol, at the small, flat ears beneath her hat. Should he say something to her? What would be the truth?

‘I shall not worry over you. I promised myself that when you first went away. Your father says that you will all be home by Christmas, in any case, it will be all over. And there is really no point in one’s worrying or one would simply never stop.’

‘Oh, no. Quite.’

‘There are so many things one could begin to imagine.’

Could they?

‘So many things are possible.’

Yes.

‘So you see, one simply tells oneself not to worry.’

Kemble had come out of his office holding the flag. Across the metals of the rails, the heat shimmered. The girl with the child had not moved, was still watching Constance Hilliard. Nobody else had come. He knew that when he left here he would not be able to believe it would all continue to exist, would go on in the same way, no matter where he himself was, or what happened to him. A small station, ill-kempt, with a ridiculously large clock. Butterflies. Long grass and sorrel. Half a mile away, the sea. Hawton.

‘Really, John, it’s quite like your going off to school, only then there always seemed to be more of a rush and a fuss, you never organized yourself in those days, you always chased about the house and forgot things and made us late. You haven’t forgotten anything today?’

‘I don’t think so.’

He knew that he had not, that there was nothing left of himself at Cliff House, only pieces of a past belonging to some stranger. Everything he had, everything he was, stood on this quiet platform in the sunlight, a tall young man in uniform, who had seen what he had seen, who knew – some belongings packed into a dark valise. Nothing more.

In the distance, the train was coming, very slowly, leaving behind a trail of steam, each puff of which remained separate upon the air.

‘Really, I think I shall have to ask Mr Kemble to ring up for Plummet, it is getting altogether too hot to walk back to Cliff House. I have to lunch with the Callenders and I do so hate getting dusty. But I should get dusty. I should have to change again. Perhaps I am dusty already?’

‘No, mother.’

For she was not. When the train pulled out, he looked back for a long time and saw her tall figure in the huge hat and the cream-coloured skirts, standing motionless in the sun. They did not wave to one another. On the opposite platform the girl sat, holding the child, transfixed by the sight of Constance Hilliard. And the picture of the two of them like that remained in his mind and was thrown up by it every so often, without reason, during the weeks and months that followed, like some painting remembered from a gallery. There were moments when he forgot that it had not, in fact, been a painting, had been real.

The train was almost empty. He put his case up on the rack and unbuttoned his tunic and dozed, watching the parched fields and thick, lustreless trees glide by the window, thinking of nothing, neither past nor future. He had, again, the odd sense of completeness, of holding everything within himself, of detachment.

It was the thirtieth of August.

By three o’clock in the afternoon there was nothing left for him to do. He had been to The Army and Navy Stores and gone slowly from counter to counter buying what he needed, and after that, looking, looking. The war had brought out a fever like that of Christmas among manufacturers and salesmen, there were so many possible things to buy, expressly for the men in France. Hilliard watched people buying them, mothers, aunts, sisters, wives, who had no idea what might be really suitable, who wanted to send something extra, who were misled by the advertisements and the counter staff into ordering useless gifts to be packed up and sent. He saw bullet-proof waistcoats and fingered them in amazement, remembering the bullets, saw leather gauntlets, too stiff and thick and hot, saw ornamental swords and pistols of use only to gamekeepers, saw the shining new metal of entrenching tools and spurs.

But he wanted to buy something then, something that was entirely superfluous, an extravagance, a gift to himself. He moved about among the women and could see nothing, felt as he had felt on a day’s outing from school, when the money his father had given him burned a hole in his pocket and he was almost in tears at the frustration of finding nothing he desired to buy.

He spent more than two pounds on a pale cane walking-stick with a round silver knob, and, carrying it out into the sunlit street, felt both foolish and conspicuous, as though he had succumbed to the temptation of some appalling vice. The cane looked so new. At school it had been the worst possible form to have an unblemished leather trunk with bright buckles: the thing had been to kick it, or to drop it several times from luggage van on to station platform. Now, he felt like a soldier who had not yet been to France, because of the cane: people looked at him and he wanted to shout at them, ‘I have been before, I have been and now I am going back. I know.’

There was nothing that he could think of to do. Outside Victoria, crowds of women and soldiers and children gripped hard by the hand. An old woman in a black veil fed the pigeons. The heat was unbearable, striking up from the pavement. He had not eaten and did not want to eat. There were three hours before his train.

And so he went into the shadow of the station, where it was a little cooler, and found a bench and sat, his cases and the cane walking-stick beside him, sat for three hours. At first he bought a paper, and did not read it, bought an orange from a barrow, and did not eat it. Only watched the gleaming trains come in and go out under the vaulted roof and saw, beyond it, the curve of blue sky. He felt nothing, no particular fear or despair.

The world came and went, then, for three hours, inside Victoria station. Men departed for the front and returned from it, and he saw those who came with them to say goodbye, and those who walked in agitation up and down the platforms, waiting, saw partings and greetings, saw the waving and the tears. He thought of his own farewell to his mother, remembered her still figure in the cream-coloured dress. Once or twice he made as if to move, to get up and stretch his legs, go for a drink in the bar, walk outside and take a look at the sky and the pigeons and the taxi-cabs, but in the end he did not, he simply sat, watching.

There was a good deal about which he might have thought, and he wondered why he did not do so. There were memories: last night’s quiet beach, the faces of his family, Henry Partington. Or there might so easily have been anger, at the things he had heard and read in England about the conduct of the war: he could have despised the Major, who was going blind and fed his dog and felt out of things, who would have thought something of Hilliard if he had gone for the cavalry. Or could have pitied him.

He wondered, too, why he did not think ahead, as he had done yesterday, about his own platoon, and what had been going on and what would go on during the coming autumn. He thought nothing. A few yards off a man in a frock coat fidgeted with a carnation in his button-hole and, when he was satisfied with the set of it, took out a handkerchief and because of grief or heat, wiped his eyes carefully, before he walked away.

It was like being under water or some mild anaesthetic, everything around Hilliard and within him was remote, people parted and moved and reformed in bright, regular patterns like fragments in a kaleidoscope.

After more than an hour he felt a strange contentment begin to seep through him. He was quite relaxed. He had left Hawton, where he had been so unhappy, and his future movements would be decided for him by other people in some other place. He had only to follow. There would be no more anxieties about what he should or should not let himself say to them at home, or about whose names he might read in the lists in the newspapers, about how he could bear to sit in the sour-smelling room with the Major, tensed with dread of the night to come, of his dreams and the open window letting in the scent of roses.

‘What would you like for lunch, John?’

‘Is there anything I can get you from the library?’

‘Do you want to be woken for church in the morning, or shall I leave you?’

‘Is your leg healed enough for you to try and swim?’

‘Your father says you’ll be back by Christmas, it will certainly be all over. Is he right? Do you agree with him?’

‘Shall I marry Henry Partington? Do you approve, John?’

‘What would you like for dinner, John?’

No more of that. He would only get their letters, as faint reminders of some other world. Instead, he would be making entirely possible decisions, about maps and marches and the conditions of rifles and feet, he would be taking simple orders about life and death.

He felt a moment of singing happiness.

Most of the men stayed on deck for a long time, watching the lights and rooftops of the town disappearing behind them. The boat was very full and it was easy, he now realized, to pick out the ones who had been here before, so that he ceased to worry about the silver-topped cane. Instead, he lay down across two wooden-slatted chairs, using his valise as a pillow, and, after a while, slept. He did not dream. Around him men talked and played cards, drank and read and sang, or were alert, silent.

When he awoke, he saw the sea immediately in front of his face through glass, and the sky, white as a gull’s belly, and, for a moment, it seemed that he was asleep on the beach at Hawton, that nothing had passed between his last walk there in the moonlight and this dawn. But when he sat up he saw the houses of Cherbourg. His back was aching. He was very hungry.

‘Mr Hilliard…’

‘Coulter! Good evening.’ For a second, he had not remembered the man’s name, but he was delighted to see a familiar face, to feel that he was almost home.

‘How are you, sir?’

‘Better. Very well, thanks. I was expecting Bates. Where is he?’

Coulter frowned, shaking his head, but for a moment, Hilliard did not take in his meaning.

‘Excuse me for just a moment, sir, there are some men I’ve to look out for. We’ve had reinforcements this week – not before time. If you wouldn’t mind holding on, sir.’

They were standing in the early evening sunlight, on the grass beside the train. No station, no buildings, only a stopping place, this. Other men peered down at them through the smeared windows, waiting to travel on. Hilliard had only a rough idea of where he was. The train had taken over seven hours but that meant nothing, they had stopped and crawled, stopped and crawled. Only once he thought he recognized a town they went through and then a village, a part of the countryside, white châteaux with green shutters glimpsed through some trees.

The message for him at Cherbourg had been that his battalion was at a rest-camp, twenty miles behind the front line. So they must have come down after Pourville Wood. More than that he could not know. Except that he had expected his own batman, Bates, to meet him and take him on, and here was Coulter, whom he scarcely knew – a small man with a crumpled, old-young face. Hilliard tried to remember something about him.

It was very quiet. Ahead of him the road ran down, dusty-white, between sloping fields. The trees were as parched as they had been at home, but much yellower, here it was already autumn. The sun glinted on the weather-vane of a church, just visible behind a copse in the far distance, and it was bright as a shell in the night sky. But silent.

‘If you’re ready now, sir?’

Coulter picked up his bags. Behind them, a group of men, all of them new to France. Hilliard saw that they looked tired, though it was only because of the heat and the tedious journey, but they were excited, too, willing and keen. Incredibly young. Coulter had organized them, they began to walk. The train stood where it was.

He wanted to say, ‘Do I look older than that? Do I look as old as I feel?’

‘Glad to see you looking fit, sir.’

‘Thanks.’

‘All right walking now, are you?’

‘Oh, yes, yes. Fine.’

‘It’s not so far away. Mile and a half.’

‘How long have we been down here?’

‘Best part of a week, sir. It’s a nice place, I must say. Very pleasant.’

They passed down the hill between sun-soaked trees, and the gnats and midges hovered in thick, dark clusters. The road narrowed, became a lane. There were dried cart rucks along the edges. A rabbit shot across a few yards ahead of them, and stopped in the middle of the road, ears quivering, waited. It’s like going back to school, Hilliard thought, it’s so bloody peaceful, it’s like going back to school, with a prefect to lead you up the road from the station because you’re new, you don’t know the way, you haven’t been here before. Except that he had.

The rabbit stayed until they came within a few feet of it, before making in panic for the brambles.

‘Where’s the war, Coulter?’

The man smiled. Behind, the new recruits to the Battalion. They were not talking.

‘How many for B Company?’

‘Eight, sir. We had forty, last week, and ten just before we came down.’

‘What?’

‘Not enough. We’re still well under strength.’

‘What’s been happening, for God’s sake?’

‘Don’t you know, sir?’

They rounded a bend. Somewhere he could hear water.

‘Coulter?’

‘You’ll find out about it all, the C.O.’ll tell you, soon enough. He’s been waiting for someone new to tell.’

‘It was hopeless trying to make any sense out of the newspaper reports.’

‘I’ll bet, sir!’

‘They garble everything, it’s all lies, you can’t work out who’s doing what, who’s where – who won.’

Coulter looked at him sideways. ‘Won, sir?’

‘Well – yes, I saw the lists.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Bates?’

‘Oh yes, sir. Most of your platoon. Most of the Company, really, sir. You won’t find many faces you know, sir.’

Bates had been his batman from the beginning. A bad-tempered man, strong as an ox, entirely reliable. Hilliard had trusted Bates, and liked him, too, because the war had not changed him, he was morose as he had always been, he was an Old Army man, apparently indestructible.

‘There’s a new Adjutant, sir. Captain Franklin – B Company.’

‘Yes.’

He had read Captain Ward’s name in one of the first Casualty Lists after he had returned to England. Ward and Houghton, Fane, Bryant, Anderson and Sergeant-Major Pearcy. And Mason-Godwin, who had shared a hut with him that spring in Training Camp, had gone into the artillery.

‘They gave him the M.C.? Captain Ward, that is, sir. Came through just after you left. Did you know that? A day or two before he was killed. He went up with a mine, sir. See that red roof just to your left, behind the dip? That’s the place. Manor house, it was, and a farm alongside. Yes, very pleasant it is, sir.’

The sky was rose-red, and darkening at the edges as the sun dropped down.

‘Been hot, sir, I can tell you that.’

‘And at home.’

‘Yes, so Mrs Phipps writes.’

Then he remembered about Coulter: that he had no family at all, had been brought up in an orphanage, from which he had run away at the age of eleven, to join the circus. His only letters came from a friend and his wife who travelled England with a team of performing monkeys. Coulter was a happy man, self-sufficient, small and hard as a nut.

‘I daresay you enjoyed your time at home, sir.’

‘Yes,’ Hilliard said. ‘Yes, thank you.’

They turned up the long drive through orchards of pear and apple. The fruit was thick, and brown and much of it lay in the long grass, rotting.

The main building was three-storied and built of red brick, with two large wings at right angles, and a number of barns, stables, and outhouses and, further down the road, some cottages. Beyond and between them, in the fields and orchards, green tents. Smoke was rising from the chimneys in pale, thin plumes. But it was the lull at the end of the day, there was for the time being no other sign of life.

Hilliard felt suddenly tired. But excited, too, he wanted to see everyone, hear everything, even the worst, he felt at home even though he had never been to this place before. He thought, it’s like going back to school.

‘Most of your platoon. Most of the Company, really, sir. You won’t find many faces you know.’

‘The C.O. asked to see you, sir, when you’ve settled in. And there’s a new second lieutenant attached to your platoon. Came three days ago. Mr Barton, his name. He’s sharing with you, sir, we’re a bit short of space here even if we are under strength. And I’ll be serving for both of you, sir, for the time being, anyway.’

Hilliard felt irrationally angry. He wanted a corner to himself, even though he knew that was the one thing you never got, in France. He wanted his own room like the one overlooking the rose garden at Hawton, not an attic or an outhouse shared with another subaltern. A stranger.

They had come into the front yard of the main building. A mongrel-dog, rough-coated and dirty, was lying across the cobbles, chewing a bone, happy to stay in familiar territory and be petted by the army. Hilliard thought how ludicrous it was to be here, in the last of the evening light, standing before these red-tiled, serviceable country buildings, how ludicrous that it should be so quiet, that there should be grass and apple trees and the smell of cooking, a dog and blackbirds. That there should seem, apart from the young recruits behind him and the short, uniformed figure of Coulter, to be nobody here at all, no Battalion, no front line trenches twenty miles away, no guns, no armies in the country. No war.

He followed Coulter, feeling the silver knob of his stick warm and hard in the ball of his hand. The cane was already scuffed and dirty.

Coulter was right about the overcrowding. B and D Companies were together at the farm which was also serving as Battalion Headquarters, but the rest were in the village of Percelle, half a mile down the lane. It had been badly shelled that spring. Coulter said, there was scarcely an unshattered roof over anybody’s head. But because of the good weather and because at last they were away from the front line, here, where it was so quiet, nobody complained.

When Hilliard stood upright in the room he was to share with the new second lieutenant, he cracked his head on a rafter. This was part of the loft, reached by a wooden ladder that came up through the floor. For years, apples and pears had been stored here and although there was no fruit now the juice had soaked and stained the boards, so that every so often, as one trod them, there came up an old, faint smell of cider.

Coulter had left him after having brought up water in an enamel bowl. Above his head the roof light was propped open, showing a square of damson-dark sky. As he unstrapped his case to find soap and razor, he heard, for the first time since his return, the boom of guns. But they seemed very far away, they had sounded more clearly than that sometimes at Hawton, when the wind was blowing off the sea.

The bugle had gone for the men to eat, he had heard shouts and footsteps on the farmyard cobbles below, and once, the grind of a motor, coming up the long drive.

The narrow apple loft might have been a corner of a dormitory. Below, the sounds of the other boys, settling in. It’s like bloody well going back to school.

And then he looked across at the other man’s belongings, resenting their presence. He was not anxious to acquaint himself with this stranger.

The lettering was upright and plain and clear, done in black ink. The leather of the valise still shone, the buckles were not yet tarnished. There was a tortoise-shell backed hairbrush and comb, and a slab of Chocolate Menier. A copy of The Turn of the Screw and of the complete works of Sir Thomas Browne, and one of the Psalms, bound in navy morocco. Hilliard reached out a hand towards it, hesitated, drew his hand back.

On top of the trunk which served as a table beside the camp-bed, a double-folding photograph wallet. The back was to him, he could not see, without touching it, what faces were inside. He did not touch. Instead, he turned away, made preparations to shave. The sound of the motor vehicle going away again. Footsteps. But no one came up the wooden ladder.

Putting his hand into the bowl of water, he found that it was warm, and thought how he would remember once they were back at the front, the luxury of shaving in warm water from a clean bowl. At home, he had not been able to get over it at first, the simple availability of water, for washing, shaving, bathing, drinking – for wasting. He had turned on the taps in the bathroom and splashed drinking water again and again over his face, let it slide coolly down his wrists, wondering at it. For so long, there had been only the tins of green water, stinking of chlorine, to drink, and the grey scum in which someone else had washed before him and the foul water at the bottom of shell holes, before the sun of June and July had come to dry them out. He remembered the men brought in wounded and set down in the bottom of the trench, or being taken up on stretchers, who were crying out not only from pain and fear, but for water. At Neuville, he had sent five emergency messages up the communication trench demanding more water, more water. It had not come. The sixth time, they had sent a runner who was hit, and the water can had burst open and spilled on to the soil beside him.

Hilliard lifted the dripping wet shaving brush up to his face.

He could not get used to what the C.O. looked like. He sat on the opposite side of the table, with the wide windows, overlooking the orchard, behind him. It was not dark yet but the lamp was already lit. Perhaps it was that, he thought, perhaps Garrett looked better in the undistorting daylight. But it was not that, not just an expression. Everything about him had changed.

‘Hilliard!’ He had almost cried out his name, and come quickly across the room to greet him, and it was as though he had been sitting here, for hours or days, awaiting his return. Here was one familiar face, someone who had survived.

‘How are you? I hope they haven’t cut your time short? I hope they’ve seen to it that you’re properly fit?’

Yes, he said, yes they had, yes he was fit, no, there was nothing wrong at all, the leg was more than healed. And all the time, he stared at the Colonel.

‘I’m surprised they didn’t send me back sooner – a week ago. It seems you could have done with me.’

Garrett turned and gave him a curious look. But he only said, ‘No. You needed the rest.’

He went over to a cupboard, took out glasses and a bottle of whisky. Hilliard saw other bottles, gleaming darkly behind it. The C.O. had developed a strange half-limp, but it seemed not to be the result of any physical injury, rather of agitation. He moved a hand up to his head, smoothing back the hair nervously again and again, while the other poured drink into the glasses.

‘Soda?’

‘If you have it?’

‘I suppose we do. Yes.’

‘Water will do.’

‘No, no. There’s soda. I saw it. I’m positive there was some soda. It’s Keefe, he moves things, he’s a damned nuisance. Tidies everything. He’s obsessed with tidiness.’

Hilliard had never heard him complain like that, like a peevish old man.

‘You don’t know Keefe.’

‘No.’

‘There won’t be many you do know.’

Garrett was sorting helplessly among the bottles and glasses in the cupboard.

‘This is perfectly all right, sir. Don’t trouble about the soda.’

‘No? Well, I don’t seem to be able to find it. Perhaps there wasn’t any’

‘This is fine.’ Though he had forgotten how strong neat whisky could be against the back of his throat.

‘Keefe moves everything, blast it.’

He came back, fidgeted with some papers, moved the lamp, sat down in the end. Hilliard thought, I have been away five weeks and he is twenty years older, he is… He could not take it in.

From the beginning of his time here he had liked Colonel Garrett, had got on well with him, though without holding him in the same sort of esteem he had held Ward, the dead Captain of B Company. But the C.O. had befriended him, had seen that he was as comfortable as any man could be, that spring on the Somme. He made a point of keeping in touch, of sending for and talking to his subalterns as well as the senior officers, he came down into the trenches frequently.

Garrett had trained as a lawyer before taking his army commission and he still seemed much more like a solicitor than a soldier, though he had been in the army for so long. Hilliard wondered why he was in the army. He knew that Garrett had a wife and four daughters somewhere, in Worthing or Horsham or Lewes. He was not an imaginative man. But careful, a good planner, cool headed. Perhaps all that simply meant, brave.

Within the space of five weeks, and those after two years of consistent service in the Old Front Line, his air of calm and the slight ponderousness had vanished. His face was altered, was thinner, the eyes puffed but the cheeks drawn in, his fingers moved all the time about the rim of his glass, or smoothed down the patch of thinning hair. Mons, Le Cateau and Ypres, and then the first battle of the spring offensive had not shaken him. So what had the past month been like? Hilliard was appalled, he had not dreamed that this could happen and so quickly to a man like Garrett. To a man who was yet not ill or wounded, who had survived for so long by careful management, perhaps, and luck. Well, and he still survived, he was here. An old man in the yellow-grey lamplight.

It was possible to see what this room of the farmhouse had been like as a parlour: there was a wide stone fireplace and an uneven floor, you could imagine old soft sofas and coarse mats, stone jugs full of marigolds and cornflowers. The windows, long and loose in their frames, shaken by past shelling, were open now. The smells of the autumn evening came in, of grass and trees and rotting fruit, and the army smells, tobacco and bullet smoke, horses and cooking.

The guns were booming like summer thunder, away in the distance.

‘You lost Bates, of course.’

‘Yes.’

‘I think Coulter’s a good man, isn’t he? You’ll be all right with Coulter.’

‘Yes.’

For a moment, he wondered whether nothing else might be said, whether Garrett would not want, after all, to go over what had happened, preferring to leave the summer behind him. There were too many names to bring up, too many individual deaths.

Silence. The C.O. jerked his head and looked behind him suddenly, as though he had heard something unusual, and then turned back again. Hilliard could not get over his face, the change in his face. He waited for the usual questions about home.

‘We lost three quarters of the Battalion in a day and a half. Getting on for two dozen officers. Major Gadney, young Parkinson, Ward – all the best. Half of them went because we didn’t receive an order telling us the second push was cancelled. They just went on. You were well out of it. I’m glad you were out of it.’

Hilliard did not speak.

‘I’ve seen nothing like it. Nothing. Not that we were the only ones. They went mad, we might have been a pack of schoolboys in a scrum. Did you hear about the Jocks? Most of them went straight on to the wire. They were on our right, we watched it. The sun was shining, you could see for miles, even through the smoke, we just watched them go. We lost Pearcy and thirty-eight men all in one go. I’d just gone down there, I saw them. God alone knows what was supposed to be going on. I didn’t. I haven’t found out yet. None of us knows. I suppose it’s all on paper somewhere. Nothing came through to us at all, everything went to blazes, telephones, runners. Half the artillery blew themselves up with their own Lewis guns backfiring because somebody hadn’t attended to them properly. Most of Parkinson’s lot went up with a mine. There was a barrage they didn’t tell us about and we couldn’t get word through to them to stop, we were running into our own covering fire. And then they started to shoot machine guns from the left flank, they’d lost their bearings, they thought we were Boche. Not surprising. After an hour or so you couldn’t see a thing. It was a day and a half, two days, of absolute bloody chaos. Bloody pointless mess.’

Hilliard realized that this was what had upset his careful, lawyer’s mind more than anything else, this lack of order and reason. The mess.

‘And then we had another full week without any relief, and most of our support line gone.’

All the time he spoke he turned the whisky glass round and round in his hand, so that the lamplight caught it. Hilliard could not piece the story together, could not picture what might have happened in the battle, any more than Garrett could remember. He did not even know exactly when it had been. It did not matter. He had only to listen.

‘It was about eighty degrees during the day. I’ve never known it so hot.’

He remembered the heat, in the ward of the military hospital. They had pulled down the green blinds but it had felt no cooler. The Field-Gunner had tossed about, crying all day as he cried all night.

‘You were well out of it.’

‘Yes.’

‘Clifford went berserk. Do you remember Clifford? Swarthy looking chap, bit of a gypsy. Went completely berserk, they couldn’t hold him down, couldn’t shut him up, couldn’t do anything with him at all.’

‘Was he hurt?’

‘No.’

‘What happened in the end, then?’

‘Oh, he shot himself.’

Garrett’s voice trailed off. Hilliard did not remember the man, Clifford, but that did not matter, either. He wondered how long it was since Garrett had talked so freely. Talked at all. He could not say anything either at Brigade Headquarters, or to the newcomers. He had been waiting for Hilliard.

Then, he seemed to come to abruptly, and his eyes refocused. He said, ‘Well, what about you? You seem all right.’

‘I am, thank you, sir.’

‘Home?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘I’m due for a turn of leave. Doesn’t look as if I’ll get it, not yet, anyway.’

No, and better not, Hilliard wanted to say, you had far better stay here, in this farmhouse among the apple trees. Don’t go back to London, to England, don’t go and listen to what they say and read their papers, don’t try and talk to them as you are talking to me, for there is nobody, no one knows. Don’t go.

But that was not right. For Garrett was not like him. He would enjoy all the time he spent with his wife and family, would play golf and stroke the cat and go for a week to Cowes or Ventnor, and up to London to see a show, would drink malt whisky and china tea and eat in good restaurants, stay in the most comfortable hotels, would close his eyes and ears to what he did not want to see and hear, and his mind to what he wanted to forget. If he could. So much had changed, he was changed, he would not belong in England now. None of them belonged there. And Garrett had lost his faith.

Hilliard felt a wave of misery, that there was no one left and, of those who were, Garrett could no longer be relied upon. Garrett had been like a rivet, hard and secure, down the back of the Battalion.

He finished his whisky. The guns thundered. It had gone quite dark.

‘Have you met Mr Barton yet?’

As soon as he put his foot on the bottom rung of the loft ladder, he could see the other man’s shadow above him. Then he heard a board creak, as Barton walked across the room. Hilliard waited. He had never felt it before, this irrational disinclination to come face to face with someone. He was not shy though he did not make close friends. He had found his feet easily enough in the army, from the beginning. There were always new arrivals, changes, people to get used to, just as there had been at school. Some he liked, some he was indifferent to, a few he detested. As was normal. He knew nothing at all about the new subaltern except that Garrett had said. ‘Pleasant young chap. Lively.’ BARTON D.J.C. He had been here three days.

There was no further sound from above. He would have to go up, it was almost time for dinner. The large measure of whisky had made him slightly giddy.

Oh, for heaven’s sake….

But he did not want to meet Barton. He wasn’t going to like him.

He went very quickly up the ladder.

Barton had his back to him, was reading a letter.

‘Good evening.’

At once the other man turned, said, ‘Hilliard?’ with pleasure. Hilliard stood upright in the loft and cracked his head again on the beam.

Barton grinned. ‘I’ve been doing that for three days! You think you won’t forget it another time but you generally do.’

He came across and shook hands. There was a lamp on the small table which lit up only the immediate area encircling it, and cast long fingers of shadow on to the wooden roof. The corners of the loft were in darkness. Hilliard could not see him distinctly, the side of his head blocked out the light.

‘I saw your things. I knew you’d arrived.’ He hesitated. ‘To tell you the truth, I was frightened to death of you!’

At once, Hilliard felt a wave of relief, coupled with an instinctive suspicion. It was all very well to feel something, to think it, but not to say so openly. ‘I was frightened to death of you.’ He himself would never have said, ‘I didn’t want to meet you, I thought I was going to dislike you.’ He realized now, that he Had been quite wrong.

Barton was younger than himself, though Hilliard was uncertain by how much, and he was more than a head taller. He had a particularly deep voice, with a faint hint of amusement in it, not at Hilliard but at himself.

He said, ‘I was just going down.’

‘Yes, we better had. I’ve been talking to the C.O.’

‘He told me rather a lot about you as soon as I got here. He was wanting to have you back.’

Hilliard brushed the sleeve of his tunic.

‘He thinks a lot of you, doesn’t he?’

‘I really don’t know.’

At once he was ashamed of himself for being so curt. But there was an openness about Barton which for some reason made him uneasy.

‘You carry on,’ he said, ‘I’ll join you.’

Barton hesitated. Then moved towards the ladder.

In the officers’ dining room, which had been the old dining room of the farmhouse and still retained the long refectory table, the light was better, he could see Barton clearly. He did not seem a man who would ever attract dislike. He was not quite twenty, and he looked older because he was mature, in complete possession of himself. It was not the premature ageing that often came to those who had been a short time at the front. He had some kind of central poise and calmness. But all around that, on the surface, nothing was calm or still, he talked easily and quickly, smiled, laughed at himself and, on all sides, attracted a response. Attracted, simply, liking. He did not seem a stranger, among all those here who were strangers. Looking around him, Hilliard realized for the first time exactly how many had gone.

He found himself watching Barton, listening, he felt drawn into the circle of his attention. He was talking about some relative, an aunt, who dashed about the Warwickshire countryside on a horse, riding astride not side-saddle, wearing breeches not skirts, to the horror of all who met with her. She was called Eustacia.

‘Only we none of us could ever say it properly, we all called her You-Stay-Shy. We still do.’

We?

Barton was cutting a wedge of cheese. He looked up for a moment, catching Hilliard’s eye. His own were a curious green-blue, under a low forehead and thick, black hair. His voice was still full of amusement.

‘The best thing is, she’s had nine children to date and I shouldn’t have thought there’s anything at all to stop her having another nine, in between the hunting seasons.’

What is it, Hilliard thought, why are we all listening and laughing and waiting for more? Is it that he is simply very young and new to this place, has no idea at all of the future, of what it is really like, and so there is still time left, a short time, for him to entertain us. He has seen nothing, he can talk in this way and assume that we have nothing else to occupy our thoughts. We might simply be out to dinner at some hotel in England, a party of officers on leave. The wine, reasonably good wine, was going round the table freely. He felt light-headed and warm, companionable, even among so many strangers, in the lamplight. He saw Colonel Garrett watching Barton too, and although the terrible change was still so noticeable on his face, he was more relaxed, smiling occasionally, in his old, tight way, he was clearly anxious for Barton to continue.

The others, the few who were left that he knew, had greeted Hilliard warmly enough, had said a word or two about what he had missed, and then changed the subject, hurried to eat and drink and introduce him to the strangers. To the new Adjutant, Franklin. A particularly tall man. Now, Hilliard saw that it was only Franklin whose attention was not wholly taken up with Barton’s story. He leaned back in his chair, one hand resting on the table in front of him, a blank, faintly detached expression on his face. He did not look at Barton, did not smile, was drinking little. Hilliard wondered where he had come from.

‘I’m going to write out a neat little notice. PLEASE LOWER YOUR HEAD. I shall get Coulter to nail it up, else Hilliard and I will have our brains bashed in before we get near any guns.’

He was still smiling. Hilliard stiffened, waited for someone to express, by a look or gesture, disapproval of the remark. For did they want to be reminded of the front line, of skulls cracked and brains spilled, here, tonight and by this new young subaltern, who had seen nothing, knew nothing?

He felt himself suddenly ready to defend Barton, as he might defend a younger boy at school who had blurted out something because he did not yet know the form. He thought, we need him, he has something none of us have, we need him to stay here, just as he is, to sit here night after night, telling us his stories, or nodding in that way he nods when someone else talks, sympathetic, happy to yield the floor – liking us. For there is little enough left of what he has. And what is that? What is that?

He caught Barton’s eye and Barton smiled. The C.O. was talking. Hilliard looked away, filled with unease.

The glasses and cutlery were cleared, Garrett brought papers, a map, he had things to tell them. Barton listened with great concentration, his body completely still, head turned towards the Colonel. Hilliard looked at him once and then did not do so again. He thought, what is it?

It was gone ten o’clock when they broke up from the conference around the dining table, and Hilliard wanted to get outside, after the wine he had drunk and the stuffiness from oil lamps and tobacco smoke. In one of the two large sitting rooms of the house, which served as an officers’ mess, someone had put on a gramophone record of The Mikado. Upstairs in his valise, there was ‘The Favourite Selection from Gilbert and Sullivan,’ bound in green cloth with gold lettering on the cover, bought as a present for Reevely, who had sung so badly and who was dead. Hilliard wondered what he was going to do with the music now.

He stood for a moment in the doorway of the farmhouse. From the stables, the sound of buckets clanking, as the horses were fed and watered for the night: from a barn, some of the men, singing; someone shouted to the dog. He stepped out on to the cobbles and breathed in the smoky smell of night. Someone came up behind him in the doorway.

‘Do you play cards, Hilliard?’

Captain Franklin. His face was curiously expressionless. He had hair and moustache of a pale brown, like gingerbread.

‘I don’t really, sir.’

‘Not even whist?’

‘I’m no good at it.’

‘No good at bridge then, I suppose?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Pity. We need someone to make up a four. Barton’s no use either.’

‘Sorry.’

‘All right.’

Hilliard felt that it was not all right.

‘Are you going out?’

‘I think I need to stretch my legs, yes.’

‘You might walk over to the stables for me, see if Preston’s there and ask him to keep an eye on my horse’s leg. He’ll know.’ He paused for a moment, and then added in the same tone, ‘If you’re going that way.’

‘Of course.’

Hilliard was irritated, he felt that the Adjutant had been putting him to some sort of test, because the message sounded unnecessary, and in any case he could perfectly well have sent his batman across with it. It had been mid-way between an order and a request for Hilliard to do him a favour. But then, there was no reason why he should not, in fact, be ‘going that way’.

The stables were warm and the smell of hay and manure was nostalgic to him, even though his acquaintance with it only went back as far as that spring, in Wiltshire. They were good stables here, roomy and solid. The company’s horses did not seem to be so overcrowded as the men.

He opened the half-door and stepped inside. A Tilley lamp stood high up on the window ledge.

‘Mr Hilliard!’

‘Hello, Preston, how are you?’

The usual questions, the usual replies. But he was glad that here was someone he knew still left.

Preston had been a stable boy at Newmarket, and Hilliard suspected that he was under age when he joined up the previous year. But he looked after the Company’s horses as though they were all being carefully primed for the next race. Hilliard had once asked him if he did not feel these animals to be greatly inferior to the thoroughbreds he was used to. Preston had looked shocked. They were horses, so it was all one, they were what he cared about.

‘Captain Franklin wanted me to give you a message?’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Apparently there’s something wrong with his horse’s leg?’

Preston did not reply, but turned away and picked up a bucket. The animals moved about, humped against their stalls, tossing their heads up now and again quietly.

‘Anyway he wanted you to keep an eye on it.’

Preston was slight, with a thin face and quick movements. He had little personality and little to say for himself, unless it were on the subject of horses, but there was an air of cleverness about him. He preferred to be in the infantry, though he could have gone into transport, where he would have had more to do with horses and less with everything else. Hilliard sensed that he either resented Franklin’s message or was scornful of it, but his face gave nothing away, nothing was said at all.

‘We’re for the front again next week, aren’t we, sir?’

‘Are we?’

‘So they say.’

‘You seem to know all about it.’

Preston slapped the thick flank of a horse. It champed on at the hay basket, unperturbed.

‘Well, I shan’t mind, I like being where there’s something going on, I suppose. I get fed up here, waiting around.’

‘Were you at Neuville?’

‘Oh yes, sir.’ He sounded casual. ‘You missed all that, didn’t you? Never a dull moment!’

Hilliard could not take it in. Perhaps Preston had been in one of the quieter bits? But no, none of them had because there had been no quiet bits that summer. Was he unaffected, then? Did he think nothing of what he had seen? Was he blunted, or simply resilient? It could be that he was unimaginative. But you had not needed imagination.

‘You were in Parkinson’s platoon, weren’t you?’

Preston glanced over his shoulder as he reached for the Tilley lamp. It swung, flickering momentarily over the eyes and nostrils of the horses. ‘That’s right, sir. There were just two of us left, me and Andrews.’ He lifted the lamp up and moved it along the line of animals, taking a last look at each of them in turn. As he did so, his expression altered.

‘Most of these have come to us new,’ he said, ‘we lost all the others. They’ve no right to make horses suffer in a war, not the way those did. They don’t choose to come out here, do they? All I do is try not to think about it, so much. It bothers me, thinking about it, sir.’

His voice was the same, the flat, Cambridgeshire accent, and his face looked ferret-like, seen in profile above the lamp. He means it, Hilliard thought, he just means what he says. That he tries not to think about the dead horses.

It did not seem wrong, then, that this should be so. He had forgotten how much he himself had come to like the horses.

‘Had you no ambition to go for the cavalry?’

He had not, for he saw no point to it, in this war, but none of that would have made any sense to the Major.

‘Don’t forget about Captain Franklin’s horse then.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with Captain Franklin’s horse that decent riding won’t put right again.’

‘Preston!’

‘Sorry, sir. Yes, I’ll go and take a look at it now, sir.’

‘All right.’

As Hilliard stepped out of the stables, he heard the splashing sound of a horse beginning to urinate against the stone floor.

Ahead of him, the shadow of a man, standing at the top of the drive.

‘Hilliard?’

Barton.

‘I though I’d walk with you for a bit, if that’s all right.’ His voice was friendly.

Hilliard had thought that what he wanted was to be alone, to go down between the fruit trees and into the dark lane and get his bearings. But now, with Barton standing in front of him, he realized that he did not, that he had had more than enough of walking by himself, of his own thoughts and memories and despair, had had too much solitariness, at Hawton.

He said, ‘Yes, do.’

Barton fell into step with him on the rough farmyard path. Away to the west, a succession of green Verey flares lit up the sky, followed by the guns. Then it went black again, as they came down into the lane facing a belt of trees. Again, Hilliard heard the sound of water.

‘If we go up here and turn off to the left we come into another orchard. It leads across to the church eventually. There’s a bit of a stream.’

Hilliard nodded and they went that way. The air smelled damp, there might be some mist at dawn.

He thought, I should remember this, I should remember everything about it, for it will not last. At once, the atmosphere around him seemed too insubstantial to be remembered, it was nothing, was only a walk between trees and through long grass at night, there were the usual sounds and smells, the hidden movements of small creatures in the undergrowth. There was nothing in particular to remember. And everything.

‘We’re for the front again next week, sir.’

The men always heard rumours and the rumours spread and turned out to be the truth.

Their footsteps swished through the grass. They came nearer to the sound of water.

‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ Barton said easily.

They went as far as the edge of the stream and then sat down, leaning against some willows. Barton lit a cigarette and the sparks flickered upwards through the leaves of the tree. His eyes and the lower half of his face were in darkness, but the line of his nose, with its high, narrow bridge, gleamed bone-white. The tree trunks were like pewter.

Looking at him, Hilliard though that Barton was handsome, and that he would have liked to introduce him to Beth. That thought had never occurred to him with any man before, probably because he had taken so few friends home. But he dismissed the idea almost at once, for Beth was too old, was twenty-four, was plain and about to marry the lawyer Henry Partington. Thinking of the new person she had become, he knew that she would not understand anything about Barton. He was not sure if he did so himself. But he wanted to understand. Beth might not.

‘I didn’t expect it to be like this,’ Barton was saying. His knees were up to his chin, head forward as he looked at the water. ‘I’d heard all the things you do hear about the war. I hadn’t expected it to be such a pleasant life.’

‘We are in rest camp, you know.’

You wait, he should be saying, you wait. But where was the point of that? Barton would find out, soon enough.

‘All the same, it’s a bit like being back at O.T.C. Rather boring. I thought at least we’d be under shell fire or sharing a room with some rats.’

‘Is that what you were looking forward to?’

‘Oh God, no!’

‘Then why say it? And this won’t last forever.’

‘No. I didn’t want to come out here at all, I was in a blue funk. I’d have done more or less anything… but I’m fit and of age, I couldn’t slip through the net. So I suppose I’d better make the most of it.’

‘Do you always tell people everything you’re feeling?’

Barton looked round at him in surprise. ‘Generally. If I want to. If they want to hear.’ He paused and then laughed. ‘Good Lord, we’re not at school now, are we?’

Hilliard did not reply.

‘Besides, it’s the way we were brought up. To say things, tell people what you feel. I don’t mean to force it on anyone. But not to bottle things up.’

‘I see.’

‘It’s my father mainly. He’s pretty busy so we might easily go through life seeing hardly anything of him. He makes a point of seeing each of us alone, for a while, every week, find-out what we’re doing, asking if we’ve anything to tell him, you know? It’s a bit like having an appointment in his surgery really!’

‘He’s a doctor?’

‘Yes.’

‘When you say “we…”’

‘There are six of us. Three brothers older than me, two sisters, younger. We all came tumbling one after another though, so we seem much of an age. It’s good that way, especially now. We’ve always been close, of course, but when you’re small children you just take that for granted, don’t you?’

Do you? Hilliard tried to decide. Yes, he had been close to Beth. But that had changed, now they were older, separated.

He said, ‘I have one sister.’

‘Younger?’

‘No, she’s twenty-four.’

‘Is she married?’

‘She – not yet.’

‘Tell her to get a move on, then you can have all your nephews and nieces – you’ll enjoy that.’

‘Shall I?’

‘Oh, of course. I do. I get on with my sisters best, I think. Both of them are married now.’

Barton slid down the tree-trunk into the grass, resting on his arm. ‘No, I withdraw that, there’s really no difference between any of us, we all live out of one another’s pockets. And the brothers-in-law now. They’ve just been absorbed into the family! I shan’t like it being out here and not seeing any of them. We’re all so split up now.’

‘Haven’t your brothers joined up?’

‘One’s got exemption because he has tuberculosis. Dick’s in the R.A.M.C. but he’s gone out to Egypt. My youngest brother’s in prison.’ He talked about them as though he had never in his life found any reason to keep things back. Hilliard was slightly embarrassed.

‘He’s a conchy. I nearly was, but then I realized it was nothing to do with conscience, it was just because I was frightened and wanted to get out of coming to France. Edward’s different, he really means it. He put up a terrific fight, and he’s having a rotten time, it isn’t much fun for him. I’m better off than he is, at the moment.’

What he felt most of all was envy of Barton. He tried to picture what it would be like to have a family, to whom you were so close, about whom you could talk so lovingly, people you missed every day, and admitted to missing. What would it feel like? What kind of people were they, all these Bartons? What did they say and do together?

‘I suppose you didn’t much want to come back either, did you? Especially since you already know what it’s like?’

‘I don’t…’ But there seemed no way he could begin to explain, not without telling everything about himself. He had never done that.

Barton had moved forward and was leaning his arm down into the stream. ‘This is pretty well dried up,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I wonder how long since it rained?’

Something seemed to click inside Hilliard. It was all right. Barton was all right. He could talk, after all, could tell him anything.

‘I didn’t mind coming back,’ he said, ‘it was so bloody awful at home. I couldn’t stick it. Not that I forgot what it had been like out here – I had nightmares about it. Nobody ever forgets. But I couldn’t bear to stay on at home, to stay in England at all, it’s… I can’t explain. I wish I could tell you.’

‘Tell me,’ Barton said simply. He still lay on his stomach, hand dabbling gently in the water. His legs were very long, reaching back through the grass towards Hilliard.

He had been waiting for someone, just as Garrett had waited for him. Waiting for Barton. Though he had not known it. Long ago, he would have talked to Beth. Not now. There had never been anyone else close enough.

‘Go on. Tell me.’

Hilliard did so. It was not difficult, after all.

When he had finished, Barton lay without moving, his head resting on the grass now, both arms outstretched. Hilliard wondered if he had fallen asleep. His own voice seemed to have gone on for so long, he had never talked so much. But if he expected some comment, none came. For a long time, they were both silent. A breeze came from somewhere behind them, rustling the willow leaves like silk. A few of them drifted down on to Hilliard’s shoulders and into the water.

He did not want to have to move from here. All the anxiety he had felt for so many weeks, longer than he could really remember, had left him, but the effects of the wine he had drunk earlier were quite gone, too, this inner warmth was different and strange to him, it had come because of Barton. It was a thought he could not yet cope with.

Twenty-four hours ago he had been asleep across two wooden chairs, on a boat in the English Channel. It seemed years away, he had been another person. How often was he going to feel like that? He almost said his own name out loud, into the quiet orchard, as some kind of reassurance. ‘John George Glover Hilliard. Born 10 April 1894. Only son of George Alfred and Constance Hilliard, of Cliff House, Hawton, Sussex, England.’

He remembered the clear, black lettering on the label of the valise in the apple loft.

‘What’s your name?’

Barton rolled over lazily. ‘David.’ He had answered at once, because it did not seem an unusual question, though it was, for Hilliard knew the Christian names of very few of the officers here, and would not have thought to ask. He had no occasion to use them, and more, the question would have been regarded as an impertinence. For that matter, he himself might have reacted in the same way. Yet he had said, ‘What’s your name?’ to Barton. He was glad to have done so, glad he knew.

‘Had we better be getting back?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

But for some time neither of them made a move.

‘I imagine it was fairly painful?’

Hilliard glanced up, startled. Barton was looking with interest at the red, rough-edged scar along his left thigh. It made him want to conceal it hurriedly, he felt ashamed in some odd way, it seemed a blemish, a flaw, for which he was accountable. The only people to look at it until now had been the doctors, and that was not the same thing. He himself had examined it, peering at it closely as he used to peer at scabs and bruises on arms and knees when he was a small boy, charting their progress from blue to brown to yellow, watching the thickening of the skin. He touched this shrapnel wound with the pads of his fingers, sitting on his bed at Hawton, and now Barton was looking at it with the same kind of curiosity.

‘You’ll see a lot worse than this,’ Hilliard said shortly, reaching for his pyjamas.

‘But that’s not the point, is it? I’ve never seen any shrapnel wound before, this is the first.’

‘You must have seen plenty of gore in your father’s surgery.’

‘That was different. Isn’t this different, for you? It’s your own injury, that’s the one you know about, that’s the one that counts. Only by that can you assess what other people suffer, surely. By the damage to your own flesh, by the amount of pain you feel.’

Hilliard thought, how does he know?

‘What happened?’

‘Not sure. Some bit of metal flying through the air.’

‘Oh come!’ Barton was laughing at him. ‘How did it happen?’

‘I’ve told you, I really don’t remember too clearly. One minute I was making my way along the trench, trying to get past a pile of pit props someone had left in the way – it was pitch dark – then a shell dropped somewhere behind us and it was a bit flying off that caught my leg. Nobody else was hurt. It all happens so quickly.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Most of it comes about just like that.’ Hilliard snapped his fingers. He thought of the deaths and injuries he had seen, not in battle but caused by the single, random bullet, by a careless accident, by sheer bad luck. One shell coming out of nowhere, through the blue sky of a May morning, singing down into a corner of a trench where Higgins was frying bacon and talking to a couple of men from Glazier’s platoon. All killed. Then nothing more that day, only the warm sunshine and ordinary jobs. Sergeant Carson had had his arms blown off demonstrating a new type of hand grenade at the Training Camp. So many pointless, messy, inglorious deaths, ‘just like that’. He resented them more than anything.

‘Will it disturb you if I keep the lamp on for a bit?’

Hilliard smiled. ‘I can sleep through most things.’ And so will you, he thought, glancing across to where Barton lay reading, The Turn of the Screw, propped on his elbow.

‘Oh, God…’ He spoke before he could stop himself.

‘What?’ Barton laid down the book at once. ‘What’s up?’

The last time he had lain in bed like this and looked sideways at the man beside him had been the night before he was sent home from the hospital, the night Crawford had gone away, without giving him anything to help him sleep, so that he had had to lie and hear the noises, look at the rows of humped shapes and feel the pain in his own leg, like a deep burn. Then, the Field-Gunner had stopped crying and spoken suddenly across the space between their beds, half-delirious, had begged Hilliard to talk to him, to help him, help him, to take him away.

‘Who are you?’ he had said. His face could not be imagined beneath the white bandages. ‘I don’t know… Please… what time is it? What time is it?’

‘Just after twelve.’

‘Is it day?’

‘No.’

‘Where is it?’

‘This is the hospital.’

‘No, no, where is it?’

Uselessly, he had said, ‘Shall I get the nurse to come?’

But the Field-Gunner seemed not to hear, he lay muttering words Hilliard could not catch, except now and then a fragment about ‘the green light, the green light’. Then, for a few moments, he had surfaced, his voice became clear and quite steady. He said, ‘Who are you?’

‘Hilliard.’

‘Artillery?’

‘No, I’m an infantry lieutenant. Look, you’d better get some sleep now, hadn’t you? If you can. I don’t think you ought to talk.’ He turned over himself.

The reply had come out high and urgent, half a cry. ‘Oh God, don’t go away, talk to me. They keep going away. Don’t you go. Please, talk to me, talk to me.’

Hilliard could not. He knew that he should have got out of his own bed and sat on the chair beside the Gunner, touched him, given him a drink, let the man know that he would stay there, would listen to whatever it was he had to say, to the incoherent words about the green light. He could not do it, he was too afraid. He had rung the bell and after a long time one of the nurses came, hurrying because they were busy that night, seven men had just been brought in, the survivors from an underground explosion near Artois, she had no time to sit with the Field-Gunner.

‘Try and keep him quiet. You can do as much for him as I can, just at the moment.’

Her footsteps went away. The Field-Gunner began to cry again very quietly, as though he had given up hope.

Remembering it now Hilliard’s stomach seemed to come up into his mouth, he thought, ‘I fail people.’ He did not know what had happened to the Gunner, and it would be impossible to find out. He could not forget the sound of his voice and the sound of his crying.

He got out of bed again, rinsed the tumbler and drank some water. It was lukewarm. Barton was still watching him.

‘Hilliard?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘Tell me what’s up.’

But he had told him too much already. Barton would have enough of his own to cope with as soon as they left here. He must manage by himself over this, as he had managed in the past.

‘Wouldn’t it be a good thing for you to talk about it?’

It was not simply what Barton said but his tone of voice, the chance it offered. With shock Hilliard realized that he wanted to cry out, as the Field-Gunner had cried, to go across the room to Barton, who would listen, would know, as Beth had known on the nights he had crept into her room and slept in the safe darkness beneath her bed.

The surface of his skin went hot as he took in what he had been thinking. Barton had released some anxiety which had been coiled up within him, and there he was now, on the other side of the apple loft, this new person, a stranger, entirely familiar, just as he had been when sitting in the orchard and at the officers’ dining table. He was… What?

Behind him. Barton got out of bed. He went over to one of his cases, opened it and took something out, came back and removed the tumbler from Hilliard’s hand. ‘Not too much,’ he said. ‘but it’s what you need, I think.’ His father might have spoken like that to a patient.

‘Go on.’

Hilliard lifted the tumbler. The brandy was slightly diluted by the water which had been left there and it tasted warm and comforting as some medicine of childhood. He drank it slowly. He remembered the change that came over the men’s faces in the cold early mornings as they drank their rum issue, and the colour came seeping back into the night-time greyness and tiredness of the flesh.

‘We’d better get some sleep now. They seem to wake up pretty damned early here.’

‘When we…’ But Hilliard did not go on, he was overcome with such tiredness that he wondered if he could reach his camp bed. He had been going to say, ‘When we get back to the line.’ The mornings would be even earlier then and the sleep they had had at night even less. But he would not speak about it after all, there was no point.

His last thought after the lamp had gone out was that he did not want Barton to go up to the front line, he wanted to have him stay behind here, put into some administrative job, anything. For he should not be there among the roaring, blasting guns, in such appalling danger, risking his life in the small daily accidents. He thought, we need him, we need what he has to give us. I need him.

For the second night he slept without dreaming.

‘Any time now.’

‘Day after tomorrow.’

‘End of this week.’

‘Well, it can’t last, can it?’

Every day Hilliard heard one man or another prophesying the Battalion’s return to the front line. But no order came through, they stayed on at Percelle and after a time, in the September days, that seemed almost as hot as those of June and July, a vague air of restlessness hung about the camp. The men were on edge, wanting to know something for certain. Nothing was said.

The days were taken up with a succession of drills and parades and inspections, lectures, exercises, demonstrations, physical training, bayonet and trench mortar practices. Many of them were resented simply because of their uselessness. Nothing, Hilliard thought, had ever really been taught him which was a true preparation for the everyday physical life of the trenches, no battle went in practice as it went on paper, and so there was no chance to utilize this or that theory. So much of what they had to do here, shocked as they still were, was fatiguing and pointless.

At night the men sat about smoking, playing cards, writing letters in copy-pencil and going over and over again all their stories of that summer, as if they could not help probing a sore. The new recruits listened, their expressions faintly incredulous, as though they were hearing the adventures of old men, for it was so easy here, among the drooping orchards in the sun, it was all an exercise, tedious but unreal, they could not fully imagine what the others talked about.

But, gradually, the faces of those who had been in France through the summer looked less tired and drained, even than when Hilliard had returned, rest and release from immediate fear, and the leave some of them had had, were like moisture, pulping out dehydrated flesh. They were all sunburned.

Only the C.O. was the same, looked haunted, his eyes and hands continually restless. He sent for Hilliard and talked to him, kept Barton telling one story after another over the dinner table, like a child spinning out the time before having to go to bed.

The early mornings were beautiful, when the orchard trees and beyond them those of the copse and the poplars lining the canal loomed as milky shadows out of a thick mist, until the sun struck down, catching the dew on cobwebs, the air cleared. All around Percelle the life of some of the farmers continued, the soldiers met them coming down the lane from the fields, wearing old corduroy trousers and huge shoes. That spring they had almost all been driven away, Percelle had been in a belt of land that had come under a short spell of heavy cross-fire. But the war had moved on far enough for some return to be made to everyday life, though not to normality, for the army and the shattered houses were still there. It was the older people who came back and carried on.

Five miles southwards, the small town of Crevify had escaped much damage, the café tables still stood out on the pavements in the market square, covered in stiff cloths, coffee was served with hot croissants and meringues and éclairs, and in the evenings, bad beer and wine but good brandy. Hilliard and Barton walked there through the fields and, once, the town band came out and played – selections from musical comedies of the nineties, Russian waltzes and French marches, with the late evening sun glittering on their instruments and ruddying the puffed-out faces of the players. Barton sat back, his legs up on another cane chair, smiling with pleasure at the incongruity of it. He said, as Hilliard had said that first evening to Coulter, ‘Where’s the war?’ But the streets of the town were full of their own Battalion, and the only Frenchmen in Crevify were old.

That was the evening when Captain Franklin had gone walking past alone, and Barton had called out to him cheerfully, ‘Come and have a drink, sir. Listen to the band!’

For although there was something about the Adjutant which Hilliard did not like, Barton would never agree with him. ‘He’s all right,’ he said, as he said about everyone.

Franklin had stopped and looked across at them, the same lack of expression on his long face. His skin was not tanned but reddened by the sun.

‘The beer’s rotten but the chairs are comfortable.’

Hilliard had not thought that anyone in the world could have resisted Barton’s friendliness, the knack he had of attracting all available company. Franklin did not move, but there had been something like disapproval on his face, though in fact he had not looked at Barton but at Hilliard when he spoke. ‘I won’t if you don’t mind. I’m on my way back.’ And walked on slowly. But when Hilliard swore, Barton had only said, ‘Oh, he’s all right!’ as always and then forgot it, calling for more drinks.

It was here at the café table that he wrote so many of his letters. Because, for every one Hilliard sent, his friend wrote four or five, long letters in quick, black handwriting, sprinkled with exclamation marks and, when he was writing to his sisters, with small drawings and doodles in the margins, for their children.

‘What do you find to say?’ Hilliard had once asked, watching the flow of Barton’s hand on and on, page after page. He had looked up, puzzled.

‘Oh, there’s no shortage of material, surely?’

‘Isn’t there?’

‘I tell them what we do all day, I describe this place, what I can see, who goes by, what the band’s playing, and then there are all the questions to answer and ask – oh, we have jokes and so forth.’

‘Jokes?’

‘Family jokes – you know the kind of thing.’

Hilliard did not. His own letters to his family – and he wrote to them collectively, now that he had nothing private left to say to Beth – were dull, full of polite thanks for parcels and always, when he read them over, very much the same. He never referred to Barton.

‘When the war’s over or we manage to hit leave at the same time you can come and meet them all,’ Barton had said. ‘Then you’ll know who I’m talking about and writing to, you’ll get them sorted out.’

Though Hilliard had imagined them endlessly, these people who shared so much with Barton, he had looked at their faces, staring out at him from the photographs, and put names to them and remembered their individual characteristics, as Barton had described them, he built up the family piece by piece within his own mind. It pleased him.

He said, ‘I wouldn’t much like you to meet my family.’

‘Oh, I think we’d probably get on rather well.’

‘No.’

‘Why? I get along with most people.’

Yes, that was true, and he saw at once that Barton would charm his mother and tease Beth, would listen to his father without impatience, would take trouble over the Major, and that they would all like him. But he wanted to keep Barton to himself.

Then, Barton’s mother had sent him a message. It came at the end of one of her long letters. ‘And all kind thoughts to your nice friend John Hilliard.’

Barton had read it out mockingly. ‘You’re my “nice friend” – there now!’

Hilliard felt both acute pleasure and, again, a curious unease. He was afraid, too, of being known and referred to by this person he had never seen, by Barton’s mother, whose name was Miriam and wore her hair in a soft, loose bun at the nape of her neck, whose features were both plain and pretty and also strangely old-fashioned. Hilliard could not imagine his own mother sending any messages to a young man she had never met, even making allowances for the informalities of wartime. He had only managed to say, ‘Oh – well, thank her very much.’

‘Right.’

And he had watched Barton’s hand move smoothly across the paper, seen the words form upside down. ‘Hilliard says, “thank you very much”!!!’

The message back in the next letter had been, ‘John Hilliard is clearly a man of few words.’

‘So you’ll have to do better next time,’ Barton had said.

He gave Hilliard most of his letters to read, sharing them with as little concern as Hilliard shared the Fortnum and Mason’s groceries in his parcels.

After that, a dialogue was established between him and the Barton family, mother and father, brothers and sisters, short messages were passed, jokes made and he was at first uncertain how to manage it all, for he had never experienced such people. But when he said as much, Barton looked amused and only said, ‘Well, you have now!’ Hilliard knew that he did not completely understand, for to him his own family were the norm, were altogether known and presented no problems. Besides, people never did present problems to him, he got along, as he said, with everyone.

‘I hope we keep Mr Barton with us, sir,’ Coulter said, coming up into the apple loft one afternoon when Hilliard was changing into his riding boots. ‘He’s done the world of good to this company, anyone can see that. He’s done the C.O. good as well, sir.’

‘You’re right, yes.’

‘You know what happens though, sir – we always lose our best officers.’ Then, turning and catching sight of Hilliard’s expression, he added, ‘No, sir, what I mean is, they ship them off to another Battalion or put them up at Brigade H.Q. just when we need them. You know that, sir – how they mess us about, and it’s never the ones we could do without, is it?’

‘Well, let’s hope it doesn’t happen.’

‘Yes, sir. By the way, sir, I don’t know if anything’s up but I hear the Brigadier’s coming down tomorrow.’

‘Probably just routine.’

‘Checking up on us, yes, sir.’

‘I suppose we’d better get some rifle cleaning done though – give him something to approve of!’

‘If you ask me, sir, the men are all a bit sick of rifle cleaning and such, they’ve cleaned them till they’re about worn away, this past week or so.’

‘I know. But do you think they’d rather be on the move?’

But the Brigadier’s visit passed off quickly and without event, the men waited all the rest of that day and on into the evening, for some order. None came. It was only Hilliard who was sent for by Garrett – Garrett, who looked more than ever anxious, as though this long rest period were getting on his nerves, too, he would rather move back up and have it over with.

He said, ‘Captain Franklin thinks one of B Company might go off on a gas course. He thinks it would be useful. I’ve told him I didn’t want to spare you, Hilliard. If we get our marching orders this week I want you with your platoon. There are few enough experienced officers left in this Battalion, God knows. But Franklin’s got some bee in his bonnet about it. I said I’d have a word with you. Perhaps we’d better send Barton? That’s what Franklin had in mind.’

‘How long would it last?’

‘A week plus a couple of days’ travelling.’

‘Are you asking for my opinion, sir?’

‘I suppose so.’ Garrett shifted the papers about on his desk. ‘Yes. Opinion. Advice. I don’t know.’

‘We’re not likely to stay here much longer, are we? We can’t possibly.’

Garrett was silent.

‘Well – you probably don’t know anything about it, but that much does seem obvious. We don’t get an indefinite rest period and we’ve overstayed this one, surely? So the chances are that we’ll be going somewhere or other within a day or two. And – I would rather Barton stayed and went with us. I think…’ He paused. Garrett was staring down at the table, perhaps not even listening.

‘I think we heed him.’

‘Yes.’ A bluebottle droned on and on against the window pane, behind the desk. For a long time, Garrett sat, mesmerised. Hilliard noticed the faint, brown discolorations on the backs of his hands, like the mottling on the skin of a much older man. Garrett was not fifty. ‘Yes, I know.’ He looked up and into Hilliard’s face. ‘Only Franklin seems to…’

What? Garrett did not finish. Then, Hilliard knew for certain that the Adjutant disliked both Barton and himself, distrusted them, perhaps, and had done so for no good reason, from the beginning, from the first night at the dining table when he had not smiled at Barton’s stories about his horse-riding Aunt Eustacia.

‘Well – I’ll think about it. I can’t decide just now. I thought I’d find out how you saw it, that was all.’

Hilliard went out of the room and through the low doorway into the yard. The farm dog came bounding across from between the trees, nuzzling at his legs, as he nuzzled those of anyone who stopped for a moment in his vicinity. Hilliard roughed the hair of its head automatically. Franklin wanted Barton to go. Perhaps the gas course was only the first move in some plan to get him permanently transferred. Well, had he himself not wished, every day now, that Barton should not have to go up to the front line?

The sun dipped down between the trees of the copse and for a second or two flamed straight into his face.

He did not want Barton to go away.

‘Franklin won’t be pleased.’

‘What the hell?’ Barton lay on his bed reading a letter. The C.O. had sent someone else on the gas course.

‘Only that it’s better to get on with your senior officers if at all possible. It makes life easier.’

‘Life seems perfectly all right to me.’

For the first time, Hilliard lost his temper. ‘Don’t be so bloody complacent. You haven’t been anywhere yet, you haven’t seen anything. You’re in a rest camp, remember? You don’t know what you’re talking about but you damn soon will.’

‘I know,’ Barton said quietly.

Hilliard was silent.

‘Look, I don’t really care for Franklin much more than you do, John, but it’s a perfectly irrational dislike. He’s done nothing to me at all – or to you, for that matter. It’s a pure case of Dr Fell.’

‘Oh, no. He’s got it in for us.’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘If it boils down to it, he doesn’t seem to like anyone much, does he?’ Barton sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. ‘He doesn’t have any particular friends, doesn’t do much in the way of relaxation except play bridge, and even then, it’s for the sake of the game, not the company.’

‘He doesn’t like to see other people being friendly.’

‘Nonsense. He could perfectly well have friends himself if he chose. He wouldn’t have to put himself out a great deal, but he doesn’t choose.’

‘Why?’

‘Lord, Hilliard, I don’t know.’

‘A Captain is easily capable of making one’s life a misery at the front, if he has half a mind.’

‘I should have thought that went for a C.O. or a Brigadier or for that matter for one’s own batman.’

‘All the same…’

‘Oh forget it, forget it.’ Barton laid a hand on his shoulder, laughing. ‘I didn’t go on the gas course, about which I’m fairly relieved. I didn’t enjoy all that plunging in and out of smoke-filled chambers at the training camp. I never could bear masks over my face. Franklin didn’t get his way. Now, let’s make the most of this place, while we can.’

Footsteps came quickly up the ladder. Whenever Coulter appeared, Hilliard could imagine him in the circus ring, he half-expected him to take a leap off the floor of the loft on to some trapeze dangling from a beam. He had given them an off-the-cuff juggling display one afternoon in the mess kitchen, throwing spinning saucers up into the air, and balancing glasses of water on his nose; ‘What are you doing in the army, Coulter? You should have stayed on at home and kept their spirits up!’

Coulter brought the crockery down neatly, piece by piece, turned and began to stack it away. ‘I’m right out of practice, sir, if you did but know it. Besides, I joined up to come to France, didn’t I, this is where the war is. I’m more use here than in a circus ring just at present.’ For Coulter was aggressive about the war, still patriotic and still confident, in spite of all he had seen. He had a distant respect for the Generals, close admiration for the officers of his own regiment. It was only politicians about whom he might occasionally say a bad word. But Hilliard liked Coulter, he had come to rely on him, though their relationship was entirely different from the one he had had with his former batman, the morose Bates. Coulter was more easygoing, he had greater nerve, and probably less stamina. But no, you couldn’t say that, for it was impossible to tell until you were in the line, you couldn’t pass any kind of true judgement upon a man, here, in the uneasy calm and quiet of the rest camp.

Now, Coulter did not come into the loft, only to put his head through the hatchway. ‘Excuse me, sir – the C.O. wants to see both of you right away, sir. He wants to see all the officers. It seems as if there’s something up.’

Garrett looked calmer, full of some sort of relief. The Battalion was leaving Percelle first thing the next morning for the front lines at Lully, near Barmelle Wood and Queronne, an area which had been under heavy fire for the past six or seven weeks.

For the rest of that day the atmosphere of the farm changed, and the yard and the orchard and the lane leading down from the village were full of men moving about, shouting orders, carts arrived, two advance motor buses came, were packed up, left again. The farm dog wandered about and was repeatedly pushed out of the way, until it retired behind the stables.

Hilliard thought that the men were relieved, as Garrett had been, no matter what might be to come: they knew where they were now, were able to immerse themselves in physical activity with a clear end in view.

He noticed that Franklin was everywhere, supervising everything, though he seemed to be in no hurry and his face showed no interest in what went on. He would be a good officer under fire, efficient and cool-headed. But Hilliard disliked him more than ever.

Garrett had ordered the evening meal to be put back by an hour because there was so much to be done, they would not be eating in the officers’ mess until after nine. But Hilliard’s platoon had finished earlier, there were only the tents and kitbags to be put up just before they set off the following morning.

He found Barton.

‘I’d like to walk down to the orchard.’

‘Say a fond farewell!’

‘Why not?’

‘Indeed.’

‘Hilliard?’

They both turned. Hilliard walked back towards where the Adjutant was standing, outside the stables.

‘Either you or Barton will have to be on foot tomorrow. There aren’t enough horses for everyone.’

‘Harrison’s gone off on that gas course, though.’

‘There still aren’t enough, too many are needed for carrying.’

‘I see. Well, Barton had better ride in that case, sir.’

‘I’d prefer it if you did. You know the form, you can keep an eye on things. We’ll probably be stopping overnight at Feuvry.’

‘Yes.’

‘All right.’ Franklin turned and strolled back towards the farmhouse.

But when Hilliard told him, full of annoyance, Barton only smiled. ‘I don’t mind marching. I’d prefer it, actually. I did walk 800 miles down through Italy with my brother a couple of years ago, you know.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Ah!’

‘He could perfectly well have asked someone else.’

‘But he didn’t, that’s all there is to it.’

‘He’s making bloody sure we don’t waste time tomorrow chatting together.’

‘Don’t be so touchy – you’ve got a thing about this. And would we, in any case? We’d both have too much else to do and we know it and Franklin knows it.’

Hilliard let out a long breath. ‘You’re too good natured,’ he said.

‘I ought to be more like you.’

‘Perhaps I just plump for a quiet life.’

‘No.’

He looked at Barton, walking beside him with his odd, loose gait. The Battalion barber had shorn him up the back of the neck but he had not managed to prevent the front hair from falling in a thick ledge over his forehead, so that he looked as though he held his head at an angle, that the front might suddenly tip, unbalancing him.

‘Well,’ Barton said. It was simply an expression of contentment.

They had come through the copse into the orchard, and were following the bank of the stream. The sky was mulberry coloured, over the church.

Barton stopped. ‘I can smell something.’

There were no sounds except the song of larks and blackbirds and the trickle of water over flint-stones.

‘Can’t you smell it?’

‘Burning? Yes, I can now.’

They looked around the orchard. Nothing.

‘It’s probably the camp kitchen.’

‘We’re too far away and there’s no wind. Besides, it’s a different sort of smell.’

‘I can’t see anything. I suppose the farmers must burn things. It’s autumn – bonfire time.’

They moved on. The stream flowed under a small wooden footbridge and then curved away slightly. If they were not going to be late, they ought to turn back here.

‘I can still smell it,’ Barton said. Then they both caught sight of the fine line of smoke, rising from behind the sycamore copse, a hundred yards or so ahead, nearer the church.

‘It is a bonfire.’

‘No.’

Barton began to run, his legs covering the ground remarkably quickly, so that Hilliard was well behind, going through the thick grass. He heard a shout.

As far as they knew nobody had seen or heard the plane come down. Indeed, there had been very few planes over this area at all during the past few weeks and when one did appear it had seemed unreal, a distant reminder of war.

This one, a small German monoplane, had smashed nose forwards into the field immediately behind the copse. It was badly charred at the front, like some ungainly bird which had been half shoved into an oven. The smoke was dying away, the plane might have been here since early that morning.

‘What do we do?’

‘Go back and report it. Though one of the farmers probably has already. But we’ll have to check.’

It looked an ugly plane. They were about to turn away.

‘Good God,’ Barton said. He had gone much closer and now he stopped. Hilliard moved up to his side.

The pilot was still strapped into his seat but he had slid forward and down. His head was bent over to one side and the eyes were open, looking over in the direction of the trees. He had a plump, young face, with high cheekbones, and the flesh of it was quite undamaged. His front teeth protruded slightly, to rest on the bottom lip. But Hilliard saw that the rest of his body, up to the chest and arms, was almost burned away. He wondered why the plane had not gone up in flames completely and, as it had not, why the man could not have scrambled out.

‘We shall have to report it,’ he said. He had a sudden feeling of acute reality, he was back, now, in the world where such things happened, were normal. This was the first dead man he had seen since his return from France and there would now only be all the rest who were to follow. He felt the old, heavy sensation in his stomach, misery and fear and anger, compounded but also slightly deadened.

But he was used to it. Barton was not. Glancing at his face now, Hilliard recognized in another what he himself had known, the first time he saw a corpse in France. There were only a limited number of responses he could make. He remembered the one that the Sergeant who was leading him up the trench they called Pall Mall had made, when they came upon a heap of perhaps forty bodies piled up together, bloated and black, unburied for weeks, for this part of the line had been particularly bad, there had been a large number of casualties and no time to do anything about them.

He had said, ‘Mind your feet, sir.’

Perhaps Barton was being broken in gently, after all. He did not look as if he thought so. His face had not gone paler but more darkly flushed under the already sunburned skin; he said nothing. Hilliard thought that he would do anything now, anything at all, for him not to have to go, not to see any more of it: he was almost beside himself in a rush of dread on Barton’s behalf.

It had gone much darker, the birds were quiet. The smoke still plumed up from the engine of the German plane, there was the faint tick-tack of cooling metal.

‘Come on.’ Barton jerked his head up. ‘We’d better go back.’

‘David…’

Barton stopped, glanced back. He said, ‘No. It’s all right.’

They both began to run.

Much later, in the apple loft, where all their things stood about in cases and bags, waiting to be moved, he said, ‘Pity, I shan’t be able to think about it in the same way now. I shan’t remember the orchard without remembering that bloody plane.’

‘I suppose we shouldn’t have gone back for a last look. It’s generally a mistake, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, no,’ Barton turned the lamp down. ‘After all, it had to start somewhere, didn’t it?’