The Ghost Road

CHAPTER SEVEN

29 August 1918

Bought this in a stationer's just off Fleet Street quite a long time ago. I've been carrying it round with me ever since unused, mainly because it's so grand. I bought it for the marbled covers and the thick creamy pages and ever since then the thick creamy pages have been saying, Piss off, what could you possibly write on us that would be worth reading? It's a marvellous shop, a real old-fashioned stationer's. Stationers', second-hand bookshops, ironmongers'. Feel a great need at the moment to concentrate on small pleasures. If the whole of one's life can be summoned up and held in the palm of one hand, in the living moment, then time means nothing. World without end, Amen.

Load of crap. Facts are what we need, man. Facts.

Arrived in London to find no porters, no taxis, and the hotels full. Charles Manning on the platform (the train was so late I was sure he'd've gone home), offering, as a solution, the room he rents in Half Moon Street, Tor the nights when he works late at the office and doesn't want to disturb the household'. Oh, c'mon, Charles, I wanted to say. It's me, remember? I was all for trudging round a few more hotels, but he was limping badly and obviously in pain and pissed off with me for going back when I could have been comfortably established in the Min of Mu chasing bits of paper across a desk, like him. (He'd go back to France tomorrow if they'd have him.)

When we got to Half Moon Street we went straight upstairs and he produced a bottle of whisky. Not bad (but not what he drinks himself either) and I waited for him to do what everybody else would do in the circumstances and collect the rent. He didn't, of course. I'm plagued with honourable people. I thought, Oh, for Christ's sake, if you haven't got the gumption to ask for it bloody do without. I was feeling tired and sticky and wanted a bath. After ten minutes of swishing soapy water round my groin and whisky round my guts I started to feel better. I had a quiet consultation with myself in the bathroom mirror, all steamy and pink and conspiratorial, and went back in and said, Right let's be having you. Over the end of the bed. He likes being dominated, as people often do who've never had to raise their voice in their lives to get other people running after them.

Then we went out to dinner, came back, Charles stayed a while, long enough to introduce me to Ross — extraordinary man, rather Chinese-looking, and not just physically, a sense of a very old civilization. I shook his hand and I thought I'm shaking the hand that… Well, there is the connection with Wilde. And I felt at home in this rather beleaguered little community. Beleaguered, because Ross thinks he's going to be arrested, he thinks the utterly disgusting Pemberton Billing affair has given them carte blanche to go ahead and do it. He may be exaggerating the risk, he looks ill, he looks as if he goes to bed and broods, but one or two people there, including Manning, don't seem to rule out an arrest. A comfortable atmosphere in spite of it. Soldiers who aren't militarists, pacifists who aren't prigs, and talking to each other. Now there's a miracle.

But then — Birtwhistle. He's a don at Cambridge, very clever, apparently. Curiously, he actually prides himself on having a broader grasp of British society than the average person, i.e. he pokes working-class boys' bottoms. Might even be true, I suppose, though the heterosexual equivalent doesn't pride itself on broadening its social experience whenever it nips off for a knee-wobbler in Bethnal Green. Ah, but these are relationships, Birtwhistle would say. Did say. Lurve, no less. And yet he spoke of his working-class lover — his WC — in tones of utter contempt. And he didn't succeed in placing me, or not accurately enough. So much for the broader grasp. I played a rather cruel convoluted game with him afterwards. Which satisfied me a great deal at the time, but now I feel contaminated, as I wouldn't have done if I'd kicked him in the balls (which would also have been kinder).

Manning — after we'd had sex — became very strange. Great distances opened up. Partly because he hadn't intended it to happen — or didn't think he had — and partly just because I'm going back and he isn't. Two inches of sheet between us—miles miles. I was glad when he went and I'm even more glad he's not here now. Very few pleasures in sex are any match for a narrow bed and cool, clean sheets. (A post-coital reflection if ever I heard one.)

30 August

Collected my coat today. I'm not even going to write down how much it cost, but it's warm and light and it looks good, and I need all of that.

Mooched round the rest of the day doing nothing very much. Dinner at Half Moon Street in my room. Saw Rivers afterwards. Had made up my mind not to ask what he thought about my going back — and specifically not to ask if he thought I was fit — then asked anyway and was predictably irritated by the answer.

I had a very clear perception while we were talking — I suppose because I've been away for a while — that his power over people, the power to heal if you like, springs directly from some sort of wound or deformity in him. He has a lot of strengths, but he isn't working from strength. Difficult to say this without sounding patronizing, which isn't how I feel. In fact for me it's the best thing about him — well the only thing that makes him tolerable, actually — that he doesn't sit behind the desk implicitly setting himself up as some sort of standard of mental health. He once said to me half the world's work's done by hopeless neurotics, and I think he had himself in mind. And me.

Got to the station with an hour to spare and Manning showed up. I wished he hadn't but there he was and of course we had one of these awful station conversations. The ripples between those going out and those staying behind are so bloody awful the whole thing's best avoided. However, we got through it, looked at each other through the window with mutual relief and then away we went. Or I went.

Arrived here (Folkestone) in the middle of the night, exhausted. There's something about railway stations, and I've been in a lot of them recently. The goodbyes all get trapped under the roof and suck the oxygen out of the air. No other reason for me to feel like this.

Saturday, 31 August

Woke tired. But got up anyway, not wasting time—'wasting time', 'killing time' start to be phrases you notice — lying in bed, and sat on the balcony for a while watching the sun come up and decided to do what people always think about doing, and then think again and go back to sleep: I decided to swim before breakfast. So down to the beach. Hovered on the shingle by the waterline, told myself not to be so feeble, etc., and plunged in. Water pearly grey, absolutely bloody freezing, but, after the first shock, total exhilaration. I stood for a while afterwards up to my knees, feeling the surge and suck round my legs, neither in the sea nor on the land. Marvellous. Still the slanting light of early morning. Worm casts on the beach very prominent, the sun casting vast shadows from little things, and I thought of the beach outside Edinburgh where I made love to Sarah for the first time. Went straight back and wrote to her. Then walked through town, giving myself small treats, chocolates, etc. and avoiding other officers.

Saw Hallet with his family, looking quite desperate. All of them, but I meant Hallet. Poor little bugger's had a station goodbye that's lasted for days. I waved and passed on.

On board

People playing cards below deck, but there's quite a heave on the sea, and I'd rather be out here watching it. Great bands of pale green in the wake, laced with thick foam, and terns hovering, riding rather — only the most fractional adjustment of their wings needed to keep them motionless. And they come quite close.

Watched the cliffs disappear. Tried to think of something worthy of the occasion and came up with: The further out from England the nearer is to France, and then couldn't get rid of the bloody thing, it just ran round and round my head.

Hallet came up and stood a few yards away, not wanting to intrude on what he took to be a fond farewell to the motherland. In the end I gave in, we sat down and talked. Full of idealism. I'd rather have had the Walrus and the Carpenter.

It's very obvious that Hallet's adopted me. Like one of those little pilot fish or the terns for that matter. He thinks because I've been out three times before I know what's going on. Seems a bright enough lad. I wonder how long it'll take him to work out that nobody knows what's going on?

Sunday, 1 September

Étaples marginally less brutal than I remember it, though still a squad of men passed me running the gauntlet of the canaries, who yelled abuse in their faces much as they always did. And you think, All right it has to be brutal — think what they're being toughened up for—but actually that misses the point. It's the impersonality that forms the biggest part of the sheer fucking nastiness of this place. Nobody knows anybody. You marshal men around — they don't know you, don't trust you (why should they?) and you don't invest anything in them.

Same feeling, in a milder form, between the officers. We sleep in dormitories, and it's the same feeling you get on big wards in hospitals — privacy sacrificed without intimacy being gained.

Hallet's in the next bed. He sat on his bed this evening and showed me a photograph of his girl— fiancée, I should say. His parents think he's too young to marry, which he fiercely objects to, pointing out that he's old enough for this. Of course I don't think he's old enough for this either, but I don't say so. Instead I told him I'd got engaged too and showed him a photograph of Sarah. And then we sat smiling at each other inanely, feeling like complete idiots. Well, I did.

Wednesday, 4 September

Time passes quickly here. Enough to do during the day, and a fair amount of free time. But the atmosphere's awful. The mess has scuffed no-colour lino — the colour of misery, if misery has a colour— and a big round table in the middle, covered with dog-eared copies of Punch and John Bull, exactly like a dentist's waiting-room. The same pervasive fear. The same reluctance to waste time on people you're probably never going to see again anyway.

I get out as often as I can. Walked miles today, great windswept sandy foothills, and a long line of stunted pines all leaning away from the sea.

Saturday, 7 September

Posted to the 2nd Manchesters. We leave tomorrow.

It's evening now, and everybody's scribbling away, telling people the news, or as much of the news as we're allowed to tell them. I look up and down the dormitory and there's hardly a sound except for pages being turned, and here and there a pen scratching. It's like this every evening. And not just letters either. Diaries. Poems. At least two would-be poets in this hut alone.

Why? you have to ask yourself. I think it's a way of claiming immunity. First-person narrators can't die, so as long as we keep telling the story of our own lives we're safe. Ha bloody fucking Ha.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rivers turned to watch the sun swelling and reddening as it sank, a brutal, bloody disc, scored by steeples and factory chimneys, obscured by a haze of drifting brown and yellow smoke.

He'd come out to walk on Hampstead Heath because he was feeling ill, and needed to clear his head before settling down to an evening's work, but it wasn't helping. With every step he felt worse, muscles aching, throat sore, eyes stinging, skin clammy. By the time he got back to his lodgings, he'd decided to miss dinner and go straight to bed. He knocked on the door of Mrs Irving's private apartments, told her he wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be in to dinner, and glimpsed through the open door the portrait of her dead son that hung above the mantelpiece, with flowers beneath it and candlesticks on either side.

Going slowly upstairs, pausing frequently to lean on the banister, Rivers thought about what he'd just seen: the portrait, the flowers. A shrine. Not fundamentally different from the skull houses of Pa Na Gundu where he'd gone with Njiru. The same human impulse at work. Difficult to know what to make of these flashes of cross-cultural recognition. From a strictly professional point of view, they were almost meaningless, but then one didn't have such experiences as a disembodied anthropological intelligence, but as a man, and as a man one had to make some kind of sense of them.

Once in bed he started to shiver. The sheets felt cold against his hot legs. He slept and dreamt of the croquet lawn at Knowles Bank, his mother in a long white dress coming out to call the children in, the sun setting over the wood casting very long, fine shadows across the lawn. The shadows of the hoops were particularly long and fearful. He'd been awake for several minutes before he realized he was trying to remember the rules of mathematical croquet, as devised by Dodgson, and actually feeling distressed because he couldn't remember them. Then he realized that although he was now fully awake he could still see the lawn, which meant his temperature was very high. Always, in a high fever, his visual memory returned, giving him a secret, obscurely shameful pleasure in being ill. He wouldn't sleep again — he was far too hot — so he simply lay and let his newly opened mind's eye roam.

On the Southern Cross, on the voyage to Eddystone, he'd stood on deck, watching the pale green wake furrow the dark sea, reluctant to exchange the slight breeze for the stuffy heat below deck.

At one of the stops a group of natives got on, the men wearing cast-off European suits, the women floral-print dresses. A few of the women had naked breasts, but most were obviously missionized. A pathetic little remnant they looked, squatting there, part of the small army of uprooted natives who drifted from one island to the next, one mission station to the next, and belonged nowhere. At first sight all mission stations seemed to be surrounded by converts, and the uninitiated always assumed these were converts from that island. Only later did one become aware of this uprooted population, travelling from one station to the next, most of them from islands where the impact of western culture had been particularly devastating.

He squatted down beside them, and, as he expected, found enough knowledge of pidgin to make conversation possible. He'd devised a questionnaire that he used on occasions when it was necessary to extract the maximum amount of information quickly. The first question was always: Suppose you were lucky enough to find a guinea, with whom would you share it? This produced a list of names, names which he would then ask them to translate into kinship terms. And from there one could move to virtually any aspect of their society.

When he sensed they were getting tired he paid them their tobacco sticks and stood up to go, but then one of the women caught his arm and pulled him down again. Poking him playfully in the chest, she retrieved two words of English from her small store: 'Your turn.'

The questions were posed again and in the same order. When he told them that, since he was unmarried and had no children, he would not necessarily feel obliged to share his guinea with anybody, they at first refused to believe him. Had he no parents living? Yes, a father. Brothers and sisters? One brother, two sisters. Same mother, same father? Yes. But he would not automatically share the guinea with them, though he might choose to do so.

The woman who'd pulled his arm looked amused at first, then, when she was sure she'd understood, horrified. And so it went on. Because the questions were very carefully chosen, they gradually formed an impression — and not a vague impression either, in some respects quite precise — of the life of a bachelor don in a Cambridge college. Hilarity was the main response. And if the questions had led on to more intimate territory? If he'd been able, or willing, to lay before them the whole constricting business of trying to fit into society, of living under and around and outside the law, what would have been their reaction then? Laughter. They'd have gone on laughing. They would not have known how to pity him. He looked up, at the blue, empty sky, and realized that their view of his society was neither more nor less valid than his of theirs. No bearded elderly white man looked down on them, endorsing one set of values and condemning the other. And with that realization, the whole frame of social and moral rules that keeps individuals imprisoned — and sane — collapsed, and for a moment he was in the same position as these drifting, dispossessed people. A condition of absolute free-fall.

Then, next day, after a restless night, he and Hocart transferred to a tramp steamer for the last stage of the journey, and there he met the logical end product of the process of free-fall — the splat on the pavement, as it were — Brennan.

* * *

Smells of engine oil and copra, of sweaty human beings sleeping too close together in the little covered cabin on deck. Above their heads, offering no clear reference point to northern eyes, foreign constellations wheeled and turned.

Brennan slept opposite, his profile, under a fringe of greying curls, like that of a Roman emperor's favourite run to seed. He snored, gargled, stopped breathing, gargled again, muttered a protest as if he thought somebody else had woken him, returned to sleep. On the other side of the cabin was Father Michael, trailing behind him the atmosphere of the theological college he'd not long left behind — cups of cocoa and late-night discussions on chastity in other people's bedrooms. Then Hocart, looking much younger than twenty-five, his upper lip pouting on every breath.

Rivers supposed he must have slept eventually, though it seemed no time at all before they were stretching and stumbling out on deck.

The deckhands, emerging from their airless hellhole next to the engine, swabbed passengers down along with the deck. They finished off with a bucket of cold water thrown full into the face so that one was left gasping and blinded. Brennan stood, eyes closed, one hand resting between his plump breasts, a hirsute Aphrodite, water dripping from his nose, his foreskin, the hairs on his wrinkled and baggy scrotum. It was impossible to dislike somebody who brought such enormous zest to the minute-by-minute business of living.

As the sun rose, beating down on to the steaming deck, they began the day-long search for patches of shade. Father Michael and Hocart came close to quarrelling about the record of missionaries in the islands. Hocart was the product of a Victorian vicarage, and something of a rebel. Michael obviously thought he'd fallen among atheists, or worse. Brennan listened to the argument, scratched his neck, then gathered phlegm in his throat, a rich, bubbling sound — his zest for life became a bit much at times — and spat it on the deck, where he inspected it carefully, and Rivers, cursing his medical training, found himself inspecting it too. 'I knew a missionary once' Brennan said, with a look of placid, lazy malice. 'Didn't speak a word of the language — just sets up shop — Jesus saves. And then he starts to get worried 'cause they all come flocking round but he can't get the buggers to kneel down. So down on his knees he goes. "What's the word for this?" Well you know and I know,' Brennan said, turning to Rivers, 'there's only one thing they do kneeling down. Come next Sunday, bloody great congregation, up he stands — raises his arms.' He looked at Michael and, in an amazingly pure counter-tenor, sang, 'Let us fuck.'

A bray of laughter from the open door of the engine-room where the skipper stood, wiping his fingers on an oily rag.

'I wish you'd leave Michael alone,' Rivers said to Hocart after the others had gone below deck.

'Why? He's an arrogant little—'

'He's a baby.'

But Hocart, a baby himself, saw no need for mercy.

After dark, packed round the rickety table on which they ate their dinner, there was no escaping each other's company. Elbows jarred, knees joggled, the leather seats tormented patches of prickly heat. Much covert and not so covert scratching of backsides went on. The skipper joined them for the meal, but contributed little to the conversation, preferring to be amused in silence. His trade had made him a connoisseur of social discomfort.

Brennan, sensing that Rivers liked him, embarked on what threatened to become his life story, interspersed with swigs of whisky and great breathy revelations of dental decay. He showed Rivers a photograph of his three naked brown babies tumbling over each other in the dust. Behind them, face, neck and breasts covered in tattoos, stood a young girl. 'She must be from Lepers Island,' Rivers said.

Brennan took the photograph back and stared at it. 'Yeh, that's right. Bitch:

He seemed about to say more. Rivers said quickly, 'I didn't realize you'd been in the New Hebrides.'

'Started there.'

He'd started as a 'blackbirder', as so many of the older traders had, kidnapping natives to work on the Queensland plantations, and he was frank about his methods too. Make friends with them, invite them on board ship, get them drunk and Bob's your Uncle. By the time they come round they're out at sea and there's bugger all they can do about it. Used to give the girls a bit of a run round the deck, mind. We-ll Why not, they're all gunna get their arses fucked off when they get to the plantations anyway. 'Do you know,' he went on, leaning across the table in search of somebody to shock, and fixing on Michael, though Hocart't expression might have made him the more obvious choice, 'you can buy a woman—white, mind — for forty quid in Sydney?'

'I'd've thought forty quid was a bit steep,' Hocart said.

'Buy, man, I'm not talking about fucking rent.'

'So why didn't you?'

'Nah,' Brennan said morosely, swishing whisky round his glass. 'Years on their backs.' He turned to Rivers. 'Half way through the honeymoon you'd be pissing hedgehogs backwards. He knows what I mean,' he said, jerking his thumb at Rivers.

'We all know what you mean,' Hocart said.

The skipper leant forward, smiling a positively old-maidish smile. 'How about a nice game of cards?'

And then there was no further talk, only the creaking of the spirit-lamp above their heads, and the plump slap of cards on the table. Rivers, amused, watched Hocart slowly realize that when confronted by a dwindling stock of coins, Father Michael cheated and Brennan didn't.

Next morning — a small triumph for Melanesia— Father Michael, who'd hitherto crouched over a bucket to wash, stripped off with the rest of them, his white arum lily of a body with its improbable stamen looking almost shocking beside Brennan's.

The conversation that morning meandered on amicably enough, as they leaned together, sweating, in their patches of shade, until a smudge of blue-green on the horizon restored them to separateness.

By late afternoon they'd moored by a rotting landing stage on Eddystone, and clambered ashore to supervise the unloading of their stores. Rivers was used to missionized islands where canoes paddled out to meet the incoming steamer, brown faces, white eyes, flashing smiles, while others gathered at the landing stage, ready to carry bags up to the mission station for a few sticks of tobacco or even sheer Christian goodwill. A cheerful picture, as long as you didn't notice the rows and rows of crosses in the mission graveyard, men and women in the prime of life dead of the diseases of the English nursery: whooping cough, measles, diphtheria, chicken pox, scarlet fever — all were fatal here. And the mission boat carried them from island to island, station to station, remorselessly, year after year.

Instead of that — nothing. Nobody appeared. Rivers and Hocart waved till the steamer dwindled to a point on the glittering water, then lugged the tent and enough food for the night up to a small clearing a hundred yards or so above the beach. Spread out below them was the Bay of Narovo. The village, whose huts they could just see between the trees, was also called Narovo.

'Aren't we a bit close?' Hocart asked.

'We don't want to be too far away. If we're isolated we'll be frightening. The wicked witch lives in the wood, remember.'

'What do you suppose they'll do?'

Rivers shrugged. 'They'll be along.'

By the time they'd erected the tent the swift tropical darkness was falling. After sunset the island breathed for a moment in silence; from the bush arose the buzz of different insects, the cries of different birds. Rivers was intensely aware of the fragility of the small lighted area round the tent. He kept peering into the trees and thought he saw dark shapes flitting between the trunks, but still nobody appeared.

After a meal of tinned meat and turnipy pineapple, Hocart said he would lie down. He looked utterly exhausted, and Rivers suspected he might be running a slight fever. Shrouded in his mosquito net, Hocart talked for a while, then switched off his torch and turned over to sleep.

Rivers sat at a table immediately outside the tent, trying to mend the oil-lamp which was smoking badly. A small figure alone in the clearing, in a storm of pale wings, for every moth in the bush appeared and fluttered round the light. Now and then one succeeded in finding a way in, and there was a quick sizzle, a flare, more smoke. Rivers shook out the charred corpse and started again. An oddly nerve-racking business, this. Working so close to the light, he was almost blinded and could see virtually nothing even when he raised his head. He was aware of the thick darkness of the bush around him, but more as a pressure on his mind than through his senses. Once he stopped, thinking he heard a flute being played in the village. He sniffed the oil on his fingers, wiped his chin on the back of his hand, and sat back for a rest, his retinas aching as they do after an optician has shone his torch on to them. He took his glasses off and wiped them on his shirt. When he put them on again he saw a figure had come out from among the trees, and was standing on the edge of the clearing. A man in early middle age, white lime streaks in his hair, around the eye sockets, and along the cheek and jaw-bones, so that it seemed — until he caught the glint of eye white — that he was looking at a skull. He sat absolutely still, as the man came towards him. Alone, or apparently alone. He indicated the other chair, thinking it might be refused, but his visitor sat down, inclined his head slightly, and smiled.

Rivers pointed to himself and said his name.

A thin brown hand raised to his shell necklace. 'Njiru.'

They stared at each other. Rivers thought he ought to offer food, but the only food easily available was the remains of the pineapple, and he was chary of breaking off the encounter by going into the tent to look for it.

Njiru was deformed. Without the curvature of the spine he would have been a tall man — by Melanesian standards very tall — and he carried himself with obvious authority. In addition to the shell necklace he wore ear-rings, arm rings and bracelets all made of shells, and somehow it was immediately apparent that these ornaments had great value. His earlobes, elongated by the constant wearing of heavy shells, almost brushed his shoulders when he moved. The eyes were remarkable: hooded, piercing, intelligent, shrewd. Wary.

They went on staring at each other, reluctant to start exploring their shared resource of pidgin, aware, perhaps, even in these first moments, of how defective an instrument it would be for what they needed to say to each other.

Suddenly Njiru pointed to the lamp. 'Baggerup.'

Rivers was so surprised he laughed out loud. 'No, No baggerup. I mend.'

* * *

Njiru was the eldest son of Rembo, the chief who controlled the most important cults on the island. Because of his deformity, he'd never been able to compete with other young men, in canoeing, fishing, building or war. By way of compensation, he'd devoted himself to thought and learning, and, in particular, to the art of healing. His abilities would have made him remarkable in any society. On Eddystone, his power rested primarily on the number of spirits he controlled. The people made no distinction between knowledge and power, either in their own language or in pidgin. 'Njiru knows Mateana' meant Njiru had the power to cure the diseases caused by Mateana. Similarly, Rivers was told within a few days of arriving on the island that Njiru 'knew' Ave. Without in the least understanding the significance of what he'd been told, he repeated it to Njiru. 'Kundaite he say you know Ave.' A snort of derision. 'Kundaite he speak gammon: He was by far the best interpreter and — when he chose — the most reliable informant, capable of making rigorous distinctions between what he knew and what he merely supposed, between evidence and hypothesis. But he did not generally choose to share information. If knowledge was power, then Njiru kept a firm grasp on his. Indeed, at first he would do no more than translate passively what others said. In particular, he acted as interpreter between Rivers and Rinambesi.

Rinambesi was the oldest man on the island, the liveliest, and, after Njiru, the most vigorous. He seemed immune to the apathy and depression that many of the younger islanders seemed to feel, perhaps because he lived so much in the glories of the past. Like very old people the world over, he was hazy about yesterday's events, but vividly remembered the triumphs of his youth. He'd been a great head-hunter once, ferocious enough to have secured the rare privilege of a second wife. His memory for the genealogies of the islanders was phenomenal, and this was chiefly what brought Rivers to him. And yet, time and time again, the flow of information faltered, though it was not immediately obvious why.

Sexual intercourse between unmarried young people was very free, though 'free' was perhaps the wrong word, since every act had to be preceded by a payment of shells by the young man to the girl's parents. After marriage complete fidelity was required, and one expression of this was that one must never utter the name of an ex-lover.

All the women's names in Rinambesi's generation had to be left blank. Looking at the row of cards in front of him, Rivers turned to Njiru. 'This fellow make fuck-fuck all women?'

A gleam of amusement. 'Yes.'

Rivers threw the pencil down. Rinambesi, grinning toothlessly, was making a deeply unsuccessful attempt to look modest. Rivers started to laugh and after a moment Njiru joined in, a curious moment of kinship across the gulf of culture.

* * *

A thread-like wail from the baby Njiru held in his hands, one palm cradling the head, the other the buttocks, a morsel of black-eyed misery squirming in between.

Her name was Kwini and her mother was dead. Worse than that, she'd died in childbirth, which made her an evil spirit, likely to attempt to reclaim her child. The body had been dumped at sea, a bundle of rags strapped between the breasts to fool the mother into thinking she had her baby with her, but still… Kwini's failure to thrive was attributed to her mother's attempts to get her back.

She certainly wasn't thriving: skin hung in loose folds from her thighs. Rivers looked round the circle at her grandmother's wrinkled dugs, the flat chest of her nine-year-old sister, the highly developed pectoral muscles of her father. He asked what she was being fed on. Mashed-up yams softened by spit was the answer. The tiny hands clawed the air as if she would wring life out of it.

Njiru passed the leaves he was holding several times between his legs and then, stretching to his full height, attached them to the rafters at the gable end, where the scare ghost shivered in the draught. 'Come down and depart, you ghost, her mother; do not haunt this child and let her live.'

'Will she live?' Rivers asked.

He had his own opinion, but wanted to know what Njiru would say. Njiru spread his hands.

On their way back to Narovo, Rivers questioned him about the ghosts of women who died in childbirth. This was not a rare form of death, since the custom was for women to give birth alone, and there was no tradition of midwifery. Such ghosts could not be named, he already knew that. In the genealogies they were referred to as evil spirits. It had startled him at first to be told quite casually that such and such a man had married 'an evil spirit'.

They were called tomate pa na savo—the ghosts of the confining house — Njiru explained, and they were dreaded, since their chief aim was to ensure that as many other women as possible should die in the same way.

One ghost in particular inspired dread: Ange Mate. She was more powerful, more vengeful than any other ghost of the confining house. Rivers had been taken to see Ange Mate's well, a hole in the ground which had once been living spring, now choked with coconut husks. Still, he sensed there was something more that Njiru was reluctant to tell him. 'What does she do?' he wanted to know. It puzzled him that the men were obviously frightened of her, if it were true that the tomate pa na savo selected women as their victims.

Reluctantly, Njiru said she lay in wait for men, particularly for men who fell asleep on the beach at Pa Njale. 'But what does she do?' A ripple of amusement among Njiru's retinue, a strange response in view of the obvious terror she inspired. Then he guessed. When Ange Mate came upon a man sleeping she forced him to have sex with her. 'Is he good-fellow after?' Rivers asked.

No, seemed to be the answer, he suffered from a long list of complaints, not the least of which was a disappearing penis. Rivers would have liked to ask about the psychological effects, but that was almost impossible. The language of introspection was simply not available.

By the time they reached Narovo, the sun was low in the sky. Rivers went down to the beach, following the narrow bush path that petered out into fine white sand. Hocart's head was a dark sleek ball, far out, but then he saw Rivers, waved and shouted.

Slowly Rivers waded out, looking down, rather liking the dislocation the refraction of the light produced, the misalignment of knees and feet. As usual he was joined by a shoal of little darting black fish who piloted him out into deeper waters — always a moment of absolute magic. Behind him, the bluish shadows of rocks crept over the white sand.

After their swim they lay in the shallows, talking over the events of the day. In the rough division of labour they'd mapped out between them, death, funerary rites and skull houses belonged to Hocart, ghosts, sex, marriage and kinship to Rivers, but it had already become clear that no division really made sense. Each of them was constantly acquiring information relating to one of the other's specialities.

Hocart, though, was in a mood to tease. 'Why've I got death when you've got sex?' he wanted to know. 'Ghosts and sex don't go together. Now ghosts and death…'

'All right, you can have ghosts.'

'No…' Hocart began, and then laughed.

Not true anyway, Rivers thought. On Eddystone ghosts and sex did go together, or so at least it must seem to men who fell asleep on the beach at Pa Njale and woke between the ravening thighs of Ange Mate.

They lay in silence, almost too lazy to speak, as the shadows lengthened and the sun began its precipitate descent. Nightfall on Eddystone was abrupt, as if some positive force of darkness in the waters of the bay had risen up and swallowed the sun. At last, driven back to shore by the cooling water, they snatched up their clothes and ran, laughing, back to the tent.

* * *

Mbuko was dying of a disease caused by the spirits of Kita, and had no more than a few hours to live.

Kita, Njiru explained, causes a man to waste away 'till he too small all bone he got no meat'. Certainly Mbuko could not have been more emaciated. He looked more like an anatomical drawing than a man, except for the persistent flutter of his heart under the stretched skin. He lay on the raised wooden platform that was used for sleeping, though nobody else now slept in the hut. Njiru said they were afraid. Outside, bright sunshine, people coming and going. Now and then a neighbour would look in to see if he were still alive, 'Soon,' the people sitting round would say, indifferently, shaking their heads. Some were obviously amused or repelled by his plight. 'Rakiana' was the word one heard over and over again. Rakiana. Thin.

Even Njiru who, within the framework of his culture, was a compassionate man (and we can none of us claim more, Rivers thought), seemed to feel, not indifference or contempt exactly, but that Mbuko had become merely a problem to be solved. Njiru looked across the barely breathing heap of bones at Rivers and said, 'Mate.'

'Mate' in all the dictionaries was translated as 'dead'.

'No mate,' Rivers said, breathing deeply and pointing to Mbuko's chest.

There and then, across the dying man, he received a tutorial, not unlike those he remembered from his student days in Bart's. Mate did not mean dead, it designated a state of which death was the appropriate outcome. Mbuko was mate because he was critically ill. Rinambesi, though quite disgustingly healthy, still with a keen eye for the girls, was also mate because he'd lived to an age when if he wasn't dead he damn well ought to be. The term for actual death, the moment when the sagena—here Njiru breathed in, slapping his belly in the region of the diaphragm— the 'something he stop long belly' departed, was mate ndapu. In pidgin, 'die finish'. 'Was the sagena the same as the soul?' Rivers wanted to know. 'Of course it wasn't,' Njiru snapped, nostrils flaring with impatience. Oh God, it was Bart's all over again. Heaven help the unsuspecting public when we let you loose on them. The problem with Mbuko, Njiru pressed on, as with all those who fell into the power of Kita, was that he couldn't die. He seemed to be making a very creditable stab at it, Rivers thought rebelliously. Kita could 'make him small', but not kill him. 'Kitapausia,' Njiru said, stroking Mbuko. 'Kita loves him?' Rivers suggested. No, Njiru would know the word. Kita was nursing him.

Njiru hung malanjari leaves from the gable end of the hut where the scare ghost shivered in the draught, and began chanting the prayer of exorcism. His shadow came and went across the dying man's face. At one point Rivers got cramp in his legs and tried to stand up, but the people on either side of him pulled him down. He must not walk under the malanjari leaves, they said, or he would waste away and become like Mbuko.

Hocart came into the hut, edging round the walls, keeping well clear of the malanjari leaves, until he reached Rivers. Now that all eyes were focused on Njiru, Rivers could take Mbuko's pulse. He shook his head. 'Not long.'

Scattered all round were bits of calico and bark cloth streaked with mucus, with here and there a great splash of red where Mbuko had haemorrhaged. Now gobs of phlegm rose into his mouth and he lacked the strength even to spit them out. Rivers found a fresh piece of cloth, moistened it with his own saliva, and cleaned the dying man's mouth. His tongue came out and flicked across his dry lips. Then a rattle in the throat, a lift and flare of the rib-cage, and it was over. One of the women wailed briefly, but the wail faltered into silence, and she put a hand over her mouth as if embarrassed.

Rivers automatically reached out to close the eyes, then stopped himself. Mbuko's body was bound into a sitting position by bands of calico passed round his neck and under his knees. He was tied to a pole, and two men carried him out into the open air. Rivers and Hocart followed the little group down the path to the beach.

The body was propped up, still in a sitting position, in the stern of a canoe, his shield and axe were placed beside him, and he was quickly paddled out to sea. Rivers waited until the canoe was a shadow on the glittering waters of the bay, then went back to the hut and gathered together the stained cloths, which he buried at a safe distance from the village. As he scraped dry earth over the heap of rags, he felt an intense craving to scrub his arms up to the elbow in boiled water. That would have to wait till he got back to the tent. For the moment he contented himself with wiping his palms several times hard on the seat of his trousers.

He went back to the beach, where a disgruntled Hocart lingered by the waterline. They had both been hoping that this death would shed light on the cult of the skull. Instead…

'They don't keep the skull,' Hocart said.

As they watched, the paddlers in the canoe tipped the corpse unceremoniously over the side, where it sank beneath the water with scarcely a splash.

Rivers shook his head. 'I'm afraid what we need is a proper death.'

CHAPTER NINE

Wyatt had embarked on some interminable anecdote about a brothel he'd been to in which there was a whore so grotesquely fat you got your money back if you succeeded in fucking her.

Prior rested his cheek on the cold glass of the train window, glancing sidelong at the doubled reflection of cheekbone and eye, and then deeper into the shadowy compartment with its transparent occupants laughing and gesturing, floating shapes on the rain-flawed pane.

A roar of laughter as the story climaxed. Gregg, happily married with a small daughter, smiled tolerantly. Hallet uneasily joined in. One young lad brayed so loudly his virginity became painfully apparent to everybody but himself. Only Owen made no attempt to disguise his disgust, but then he hated 'the commercials', as he called them.

They'd been on the train for three hours, jammed together on slatted wooden seats, stale sweat in armpits, groin and feet, a smoky smell of urine where some half-baked idiot had pissed into the wind.

Five minutes later the train slipped into the dark station, a few discreet naphtha flares the only light.

Prior walked along to the trucks, where the men were stirring. Strange faces peered blearily up at him as he swept the torch across them, shading the beam in his cupped hand, so that he saw them — not figuratively but quite literally — in a glow of blood. They were not his, or anybody's, men, just an anonymous draft that he'd shepherded a stage further to their destination.

This section of the train had stopped well short of the platform, and there was a big drop from the truck. Repeated crunches of gravel under boots as men, still dazed from sleep, grappled with the shock of rain and windswept darkness. Marshalled together, they half stumbled, half marched alongside the train, on to the platform and through into the station yard where, after an interminable wait, guides finally appeared, their wet capes reflecting a fish gleam at the sky, as they gesticulated and gabbled, directing units to their billets.

Prior saw his draft settled in a church hall, said goodbye and wished them luck. Their faces turned towards him registered nothing, subdued to the impersonality of the process that had them in its grip.

Then he was free. Felt it too, following the guide through unlit streets, past that sandbagged witch's tit of a cathedral, along the canal accompanied in the water by a doddering old crone of a moon.

The night, the silent guide, the effort of not slipping on broken pavements, sharpened his senses. An overhanging branch of laburnum flung a scattering of cold raindrops into his eyes and he was startled by the intensity of his joy. A joy perhaps not unconnected with the ruinous appearance of these houses. Solid bourgeois houses they must have been in peace-time, the homes of men making their way in the world, men who'd been sure that certain things would never change, and where were they now? Every house in the road was damaged, some ruined. The ruins stood out starkly, black jagged edges in the white gulf of moonlight.

'Here you are, sir.'

A gate hanging from its hinges, roses massed round a broken pergola, white ruffled blooms with a heavy scent, unpruned, twisting round each other for support. Beyond, paths and terraces overgrown with weeds. Lace curtains hanging limp behind cracked or shattered glass; on the first floor the one window still unbroken briefly held the moon.

The guide preceded him up the path. No lock on the door, black and white tiles in the hall — a sudden sharp memory of Craiglockhart — and then a glimmer of light at the top of the stairs and Hallet appeared, holding a candle. 'Come on up. Mind that stair.'

Hallet had got his sleeping-bag out and arranged his belongings carefully in a corner of what must once have been the master bedroom. His fiancée’s photograph stood on a chair.

'Potts and Owen are upstairs.'

Prior went to the window and looked out at the houses opposite, fingering the lace curtains that were stiff with dried rain and dirt. 'This is all right, isn't it?' he said suddenly, turning into the room.

They grinned at each other.

'Bathroom's just opposite,' Hallet said, pointing it out like a careful host.

'You mean it works?'

'Well, the bucket works.'

Prior sat down abruptly on the floor and yawned. He was too tired to care where he was. They lit cigarettes and shared a bar of chocolate, Prior leaning against the wall, Hallet sitting cross-legged on his sleeping-bag, both of them staring round like big-eyed children, struggling to take in the strangeness.

It'll wear off, Prior thought, lighting a candle and venturing across the landing to find a room of his own. It'll all seem normal in the morning.

* * *

But it didn't. Prior woke early, and lay lazily watching the shadows of leaves on a wall that the rising sun had turned from white to gold. He was just turning over to go back to sleep, when something black flickered across the room. He waited, and saw a swallow lift and loop through the open window and out into the dazzling air.

On that first morning he looked out on to a green jungle of garden, sun-baked, humming with insects, the once formal flower-beds transformed into brambly tunnels in which hidden life rustled and burrowed. He rested his arms on the window-sill and peered out, cautiously, through the jagged edges of glass, at Owen and Potts, who were carrying a table from one of the houses across the road. He shouted down to them, as they paused for breath, and they waved back.

He would have said that the war could not surprise him, that somewhere on the Somme he had mislaid the capacity to be surprised, but the next few days were a constant succession of surprises.

They had nothing to do. They were responsible for no one. The war had forgotten them.

There were only two items of furniture that went with the house. One was a vast carved oak sideboard that must surely have been built in the dining-room, for it could never have been brought in through the door; the other was a child's painted rocking-horse on the top floor of the house, in a room with bars at the window. Everything else they found for themselves. Prior moved in and out of the ruined houses, taking whatever caught his eye, and the houses, cool and dark in the midday heat, received him placidly. He brought his trophies home and arranged them carefully in his room, or in the dining-room they all shared.

In the evenings he and Hallet, Owen and Potts lit candles, sitting around the table that was Owen's chief find, and with the tall windows, the elaborately moulded ceilings, the bowls of roses and the wine created a fragile civilization, a fellowship on the brink of disaster.

And then ruined it by arguing about the war. Or Potts and Hallet argued. Potts had been a science student at Manchester University, bright, articulate, cynical in the thorough-going way of those who have not so far encountered much to be cynical about. The war, he insisted loudly, flushed with wine, was feathering the nests of profiteers. It was being fought to safeguard access to the oil-wells of Mesopotamia. It had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Belgian neutrality, the rights of small nations or anything like that. And if Hallet thought it had, then Hallet was a naive idiot. Hallet came from an old army family and had been well and expensively educated to think as little as possible; confronted by Potts, he floundered, but then quickly began to formulate beliefs that he had hitherto assumed everybody shared.

Prior and Owen exchanged secretive smiles, though neither probably could have said of what the secret consisted. Owen was playing with the fallen petals of roses he'd picked that afternoon. Pink, yellow, white roses, but no red roses, Prior saw.

'What do you think?' Potts asked, irritated by Prior's silence.

'What do I think? I think what you're saying is basically a conspiracy theory, and like all conspiracy theories it's optimistic. What you're saying is, OK the war isn't being fought for the reasons we're told, but it is being fought for a reason. It's not benefiting the people it's supposed to be benefiting, but it is benefiting somebody. And I don't believe that, you see. I think things are actually much worse than you think because there isn't any kind of rational justification left. It's become a self-perpetuating system. Nobody benefits. Nobody's in control. Nobody knows how to stop.'

Hallet looked from one to the other. 'Look, all this just isn't true. You're — no, not you—people are letting themselves get demoralized because they're having to pay a higher price than they thought they were going to have to pay. But it doesn't alter the basic facts. We are fighting for the legitimate interests of our own country. We are fighting in defence of Belgian neutrality. We are fighting for French independence. We aren't in Germany. They are in France.' He looked round the table and, like a little boy, said pleadingly, 'This is still a just war.'

'You say we kill the Beast,' Owen said slowly. 'I say we fight because men lost their bearings in the night.' He smiled at their expressions, and stood up. 'Shall we open another bottle?'

Alone that night, the smell of snuffed-out candle lingering on the air, Prior remembered the bowl of pink and gold and white roses, but did not bother to recall Potts's and Hallet's arguments. This house they shared was so strange in terms of what the war had hitherto meant that he wanted to fix the particular sights and sounds and smells in his mind. He felt enchanted, cocooned from anything that could possibly cause pain, though even as the thought formed, a trickle of plaster leaked from the ceiling of the back bedroom where a shell had struck, the house bleeding quietly from its unstaunchable wound.

* * *

In the mornings he went into town, wandering round the stalls that had been set up in front of the cathedral to sell 'souvenirs'. So many souvenirs were to be found in the rubble of the bombed city that trade was not brisk. Prior saw nothing that he wanted to buy, and anyway he had a shelf of souvenirs at home, mainly collected on his first time in France. He'd thought of them often at Craiglockhart as Rivers probed his mind for buried memories of his last few weeks in France. Souvenirs, my God. When the mind will happily wipe itself clean in the effort to forget.

On the way home he saw Owen and Potts ahead of him, and hurried to catch them up. Owen had found a child's lace-trimmed surplice in the rubble near the cathedral and wore it as a scarf, the cloth startlingly white against his sunburnt neck. Potts hugged a toby-jug to his chest, stoutly refusing to admit it was hideous. They turned off the road and cut through the back gardens, entering a world that nobody would have guessed at, from the comparative normality of the road.

A labyrinth of green pathways led from garden to garden, and they slipped from one to another, over broken walls or through splintered fences, skirting bramble-filled craters, brushing down paths overgrown with weeds, with flowers that had seeded themselves and become rank, with overgrown roses that snagged their sleeves and pulled them back. Snails crunched under their boots, nettles stung their hands, cuckoo spit flecked a bare neck, but the secret path wound on. Hundreds of men, billeted as they were in these ruined houses, had broken down every wall, every fence, forced a passage through all the hedges, so that they could slip unimpeded from one patch of ground to the next. The war, fought and refought over strips of muddy earth, paradoxically gave them the freedom of animals to pass from territory to territory, unobserved. And something of an animal's alertness too, for just as Owen pushed aside an elderberry branch at the entrance to their own garden, his ears caught a slight sound, and he held up his hand.

Hallet was in the garden, undressing. Dappled light played across his body, lending it the illusion of fragility, the greenish tinge of ill-health, though he was as hard and sun-tanned as the rest of them. As they watched, not calling out a greeting as by now they should have done, he stepped out of his drawers and out of time, standing by the pool edge, thin, pale, his body where the uniform had hidden it starkly white. Sharp collar-bones, bluish shadows underneath. He was going to lie down in the overgrown goldfish pool with its white lilies and golden insects fumbling the pale flowers. His toes curled round the mossy edge as he gingerly lowered himself, gasping as the water hit his balls.

They strolled across the tall grass towards him and stood looking down. Legs bloated-looking under water, silver bubbles trapped in his hair, cock slumped on his thigh like a seal hauled out on to the rocks. He looked up at them lazily, fingers straying through his bush, freeing the bubbles.

'Enjoying yourself?' Prior asked, nodding at the hand.

Hallet laughed, shielding his eyes with his other hand, but didn't move.

'I'd be careful if I were you,' Owen said, in a tight voice. 'I expect those fish are ravenous.'

And not just the fish, Prior thought.

'Anybody want some wine?' Potts asked, going into the house.

They drank it on the terrace, Hallet lying in the pond, till it grew too cold.

'You know they might leave us here,' Owen said, squinting up into the sun.

'Shut up!' Potts said.

Everybody touched wood, crossed fingers, groped for lucky charms: all the small, protective devices of men who have no control over their own fate. No use, Prior thought. Somewhere, outside the range of human hearing, and yet heard by all of them, a clock had begun to tick.

11 September 1918

I don't think it helps Owen that I'm here. And it certainly doesn't help me that he's here. We're both walking a tightrope and the last thing either of us wants or needs is to be watched by somebody who knows the full terror of the fall.

At Craiglockhart we avoided each other. It was easy to do that there, in spite of the overcrowding. The labyrinth of corridors, so many turnings, so many alternative routes, you need never meet anybody you didn't want to meet except, now and then, in Rivers's room or Brock's, yourself.

Two incidents this week. We were all in town together and we saw wounded being rushed through the streets — some of them quite bad. Hallet and Potts stared at them, and you could see them thinking,

That could be me, in a few days or weeks. Looking at the bandages, trying to imagine what was underneath. Trying not to imagine. Fear: rational, proportionate, appropriate fear. And I glanced at Owen and he was indifferent. As I was. I don't mean unsympathetic, necessarily. (Though it's amazing what you leave behind when the pack's heavy.)

The other was at supper last night. Hallet was cockahoop because he'd found some flypaper on one of those stalls in the cathedral square. Ever since we arrived we've been plagued by enormous wasps— Owen thinks they're hornets — and by flies, great, buzzing, drunk, heavy, angry, dying bluebottles. And Hallet had solved it all. There was this flypaper buzzing above our heads, revolving first one way, then the other, with its cargo of dead and dying. The sound of summer on the Somme.

I stuck it as long as I could, then climbed up on to the table and took it down, carried it right to the end of the garden and threw it away as far as I could. A pathetic effort — it described a shallow arc and fluttered to the ground. Hallet was quite seriously offended, and of course completely bewildered.

'Don't blame me if you all get tummy upsets,' he said.

Owen started to laugh, and I joined in, and neither of us could stop. Hallet and Potts looked from one to the other, grinning like embarrassed dogs. They obviously thought we'd cracked. The trouble is neither of us can be sure they aren't right. When I noticed the absence of red roses, I looked at Owen and saw him noticing that I'd noticed. It's no use.

My servant, Longstaffe

I chose him at bayonet practice. He was running in with blood-curdling yells, stabbing, twisting, withdrawing, running on. I thought, My God, textbook. Nothing of the sort — I've realized since that what he was actually doing was once-moreing unto the breach at Agincourt.

I had a word with him. He knew why, of course, and he wanted the job. Not a bad life, officer's servant, if you have to be here at all. He told me he'd been a gentleman's gentleman before the war and that clinched it. Later, when we were waiting for the train to Amiens, he owned up. He was an actor. The nearest he'd ever got to being a gentleman's gentleman was playing a butler at the Alhambra, Bradford. A larger part than it sounded, he was anxious to point out, because in this particular production the butler did it — a departure from convention that so little pleased the inhabitants of Bradford that the play had to be taken off after seventeen days.

Perhaps he was sure of me by then. Actually I found all that even more irresistible. Phoney gentleman's gentleman, but then I'm a fairly phoney gentleman myself.

An ironing board of a body, totally flat. Interesting gestures, though. He's the only man I've ever known to open doors with his hips. Perfectly plain, nondescript features. No Wanted poster would ever find him, but also this curious feeling that his face could be anything he wanted it to be, even beautiful, if the part required it. And burningly ambitious. Knows tracts of Shakespeare off by heart. A curious, old-fashioned romantic patriot, though I don't know why I say that, there's plenty of them about. Hallet, for instance. But then they don't all quote, 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,' as he did, quite without embarrassment, the other night while I was getting ready for bed. I said very sourly indeed that a more appropriate quotation for this stage of the war might be: 'I am in blood steeped in so far that should I wade no more…' His leap across the room was rather remarkable. He'd slapped a hand across my mouth, and we were staring at each other, dumbstruck, before either of us had time to think, his face chalk-white and I suspect mine as well, each trying to remember what the penalty is for smacking an officer in the gob. Quite possibly death.

Since then we've both gone very quiet, retreating behind the barriers of rank, which are as necessary to his protection as to mine, though not retreating quickly enough. Like the French lines at Agincourt, the barriers have been thoroughly breached.

Friday, the 13th September (No bloody comment)

We're not going to join the battalion. The battalion's coming here to join us. I suppose this explains this curious out-of-time holiday we've been having. Ended today, anyway. Rode round inspecting billets.

Weather also changed, which makes the other changes somehow more tolerable. Wind and rain, lowering grey clouds.

Saturday, 14 September

Watched the Manchesters march in, streaming rain, wet capes. Shattered faces, bloodshot eyes. Been having a bad time. One or two faces I recognized from last year. Before that? I don't think so. Nobody talks about the losses. What they moaned about, sitting on bales of straw, peeling socks off bloody feet, was the absence of fags. They'd been rolling their own in bits of paper, torn-up envelopes, anything, no tobacco of course, had to smoke weeds they picked by the side of the road and dried by tying them to their packs whenever the sun shone. I've written to Mam and Sarah and everybody else I can think of, begging for Woodbines.

Sunday, 15 September

Joined battalion. Adjutant a nice worried-looking man who suggested I might be battalion Gas Officer (which reveals a sense of humour not otherwise apparent). Marshall-of-the-Ten-Wounds was there, striding up and down, talking loudly. Everything about him — skin, gestures, expression, posture, voice — bold, free, coarse. Unscrupulous? Perhaps, I don't know, at any rate he doesn't care. Enjoys life, I think. By temperament and training a warrior. Bold, cunning, ruthless, resolute, quick of decision, amazingly brave — and if that's a human being then a human being isn't what I am. He's spent his entire adult life gravitating towards fighting — impossible to imagine him leading any other sort of life.

Last night, our last night in Amiens, there was a great storm, flashes of sheet lightning, wind buffeting and slogging the house.

I'd just got to bed when I heard a strange rumbling from above. Hallet appeared in the doorway, white-faced and staring. Only starlight to see by and the whole house with its broken windows so draughty the candle kept being blown out. We got an oil-lamp from the kitchen. Hallet said, 'Is it the guns?' I said, 'Of course it bloody isn't, it's coming from upstairs.'

The stairway leading to the upper floor and the nursery is narrow. We got to the nursery door, paused, looked at each other. Hallet's face illuminated from below had bulges under the eyes like a second lid. I pushed the door open and a blast of cold wind from the broken window hit me. All I saw at first was movement at the far end of the room and then I started to laugh because it was just the rocking-horse rocking. The wind was strong enough to have got it going, I can't think of any other explanation, and its rockers were grinding away on the bare wooden floor.

It ought to have been an anti-climax, and at first I thought it was. We moved the thing away from the window, out of the draught, and went downstairs still laughing, telling Potts, who peered round the door of his room, there was nothing to worry about, go back to sleep, but in my own room with the lamp out I lay awake and all night long that rumbling went on in my head.

CHAPTER TEN

They didn't have to wait long for their proper death.

Ngea was a strong, vigorous man, the most powerful chief on the island after Rembo. Everything to live for, apparently, and yet, as one saw so often in Melanesia, he was not putting up a fight. He lay in his hall, watching the scare ghost turn and turn in the draught, and his life lay, it seemed to Rivers, like a dandelion clock on the palm of his open hand.

His condition was so bad that, at one point, Emele, his wife, and the other women began to wail, the long, drawn out, throbbing, musical wail of the women, but then the sick man rallied slightly and the wailing was abandoned.

Rivers said goodbye to him, promised to see him again tomorrow, though he knew he wouldn't, and walked back to the tent. It was dark by the time he got back, and the green canvas of the tent glowed with the light of the lamp inside it. Hocart's shadow, sharply black and elongated, reached hugely over the roof. Rivers pushed a heavy weight of damp washing aside and went in.

Hocart was sitting cross-legged on the ground, with a pencil held sideways in his mouth, typing up his notes. 'I had to retreat because of the midges.'

'Midges?'

'Whatever.'

Hocart was careless with quinine, careless with the mosquito nets. Rivers threw himself down on his bed, clasped his hands behind his head and watched him. After a few seconds Hocart pulled his shirt over his head, and fanned himself with a sheaf of blank pages.

As always the heat of the day was trapped inside the tent, and their bodies ran with sweat.

'You've lost weight,' Rivers said, looking at the shadows between Hocart's ribs. 'Rakiana, that's the word for you.'

'Well,' Hocart said, round the pencil. 'Just as long as your pal Njiru doesn't start trying to put me out of my misery…'

'Is he my pal?'

A quick glance. 'You know he is.'

They worked for a couple of hours, ate some baked yam pudding that Namboko Taru had made for them, worked again, then turned off the lamp.

An hour or so later Rivers heard the sound of footsteps approaching the tent. Hocart had fallen asleep, one raised arm shielding his eyes, the pressure of the pillow pushing his cheek and mouth out of shape. Enough moonlight filtered through the canvas for the shadow of the passer-by to stalk across the inside of the tent. A minute later another, taller shadow followed.

Mali? Mali was a girl of thirteen who'd recently retired to the menstrual hut for the first time. When she'd re-emerged, five days later, arrangements for her defloration were already well in hand. A young man, Runi — he'd be about eighteen — had paid her parents the two arm rings that entitled him to spend twenty consecutive nights with her, and had decided — it was his decision, the girl had no say in the matter — to share the privilege with two of his friends.

Runi was considered a bit of a pest. Only the other day he and his two closest friends — presumably the two he'd invited to share Mali — had climbed some kanarium trees and pelted their unfortunate owners with unripe nuts. Rivers had been reminded of Rag Week. The old people grumbled, and then said, what can you expect, young men cooped up on the island sitting about like old women, instead of being off in their canoes, as they ought to have been, burning villages and taking heads.

Whispers, quite close by. A startled cry, almost a yelp, then grunts, groans, moans, a long crescendo of sobbing cries.

Hocart woke up, listened. 'Oh God, not again.'

'Shush.'

There was a belief on the island that a girl's defloration is never the first time, because her first bleeding means the moon has already lain with her. The men denied they believed it, insisting it was just a story they told the girls to reassure them, which at least implied a certain tenderness. He hoped so. She looked such a child.

A few minutes' whispering, and the grunts began again. What it is to be eighteen. Another cry, this time definitely male, and footsteps coming back.

'One down, two to go,' Hocart said.

'You realize for the rest of their lives they won't be able to say each other's names?'

No reply. Rivers wondered if he'd drifted back to sleep but when he turned to look, caught the gleam of eye white under the mosquito net. More footsteps. Another shadow climbed the far wall of the tent. A short pause, whispers, then the gasps began again.

Rivers sighed. 'You know, Rinambesi says when a chief dies the last thing that happens, used to happen, rather, is a great head-hunting raid, followed by a feast, and all the girls are available free to all the warriors. And not reluctant either, apparently. They run into the sea to greet them.'

'Head-hunting as an aphrodisiac?'

'Why not?'

They seem to be doing all right without it,' Hocart said, as the moans got louder.

'No babies, though.'

The genealogies made grim reading. Families of five or six had been common three or four generations ago. Now many marriages were childless.

The last shadow came and went. Rivers supposed he must have slept, because it seemed no time at all before the grey early morning light made the mosquito nets as stark and sinister as shrouds. Fowl-he-sing-out was the pidgin term for this pre-dawn hour, and the fowls had started, first a bubbling trickle of notes, always the same bird, he didn't know its name, rising to a frenzy of competing shrieks and cries. But this morning there was a new noise. At first he lay, blinking sleepily, unable to attach meaning to it, but then he realized it was the wailing of women, almost indistinguishable at this distance from the sound of flutes. And he knew Ngea was dead.

* * *

They arrived at Ngea's hall to find the corpse bound into the sitting position, propped up against a pillar. A stout stick had been strapped to its back, keeping the head and neck more or less erect — a sort of external spine. Ngea had been bathed and dressed in his best clothes, the lime on his face and in his hair freshly painted, bunches of riria leaves, a plant forbidden to men in life, fastened to his necklaces. Beside him sat his widow, Emele, not crying or wailing with the other women. Very calm, very dignified.

While the women rocked and wailed Njiru was systematically destroying the dead man's possessions, with the exception of the axe which he had set aside. One rare arm ring after another was smashed. Rivers squatted beside Njiru, and asked, in a low voice so as not to disturb the mourners, why they had to be destroyed.

'You make him no good he go Sonto. All same Ngea he stink, he rotten, bymby he go Sonto.'

The wailing went on all day, people coming from across the island to bid Ngea farewell. Towards evening — surely, Rivers thought, the disposal of the corpse could not be much longer delayed — Njiru hung a bunch of areca nuts from the rafters by the scare ghost, took down a cluster and held it out in front of them all. He waited till the last wail faltered into silence and every eye was on him, before he began to pray. 'I take down the portion of the chiefly dead.' He bowed towards the corpse, which gazed back at him with glazed eyes. 'Be not angry with us, be not resentful, do not punish us. Let them drink and eat, break coconuts, open the oven. Let the children eat, let the women eat, let the men eat, and be not angry with us, you chiefly dead, oh, oh, oh.'

The curious sound, half howl, half bark, that ended prayers on Eddystone. Njiru put a nut in his mouth and ate it. The people kept glancing nervously at Ngea, but Njiru went round the circle, offering the cluster of nuts to each person in turn. Every man, woman and child took one and ate it. Even a small child had a tiny crunched-up fragment forced into its mouth.

Ngea, without further ceremony, was slung on to a pole and carried off 'into the bush', they said, though in fact they took him to the beach, where he was placed in a stone enclosure — an era—with his axe and his shield at his feet. Still propped in a sitting position, his head kept erect by the stick, he looked out over the low stone wall, westwards, to the sunset. Food was left with him, and food for his mother and father, the 'old ghosts'. Once, Njiru said, and there was no mistaking the bitterness in his voice, a slave would have been killed at this moment, and the head placed between Ngea's feet. Njiru glared at Rivers, as if he held him personally responsible for the abolition of the custom. 'Now no all same.'

Next day Rivers went to Ngea's hall to offer his condolences to Emele, and was confronted by an extraordinary sight. A wooden enclosure had been built inside the hall, similar in size and shape to the stone era in which Ngea's corpse had been placed, but with higher walls. Inside this enclosure, knees bent up to her chin, hands resting on her feet, in exactly the same position as the corpse of her husband, sat Emele. She had been there, it seemed, all night, and from the expression of agony on her face it was clear cramp had set in.

A number of widows squatted round the enclosure, looking like stumps of wood in their brown bark loincloths. Many of them were his regular informants on such topics as sexual relations, kinship, the arrangement of marriage. Rivers mimicked Emele's cramped position, and asked for the word. Tongo polo, they said reluctantly, glancing at each other. Tongo polo, he repeated, making sure he'd got the inflection right. But his efforts to speak their language were not received with the usual maternal warmth. He thought they looked nervous.

'How long?' he asked, crouching down again.

But they wouldn't answer, and when he looked round he saw that Njiru had come into the hall and was standing just inside the door.

* * *

Before Ngea's death Njiru had agreed to take Rivers and Hocart to see the cave at Pa Na Keru. It was situated near the summit of the highest mountain on the island, and it was a morning's walk, the early stages through thick bush, to get there. Rivers was inclined to think Ngea's death would lead to the postponement of the trip, but when he emerged from the tent the following morning it was to find Njiru, surrounded by a much larger retinue than usual, waiting for him.

He gave them leaves to wear to protect them from the spirits of the mountain, and the whole group set off in good spirits, laughing and chattering, though they fell silent in the late morning as the ground sloped steeply upwards and the muscles of thighs and back began to ache. The path up the mountain, like all the paths on the island, was so narrow that they had to go in single file.

A solemnity had settled over the gathering. Rivers watched the movement of muscles in the back ahead of him, as they toiled and sweated up the slope. Before them was a massive rock-wall with a cave set into it, like a dark mouth. They slipped and slithered up towards it, sending showers of small pebbles peppering down behind them. The final slope was encumbered with big rocks and boulders, and other, flatter stones, some of them sharp. It was near noon, and their shadows had dwindled to ragged black shapes fluttering around their moving feet. One of the men picked up a stone and threw it at the cave mouth to scare away the ghosts. Rivers and Hocart were the only people there never to have visited the cave before, and they were not allowed to approach until Njiru had prayed that they might be protected from disease. While the prayer went on they watched the others bob down and disappear under the hanging wall of rock.

The cave was low but surprisingly deep, deep enough for the far end to be hidden in shadow. A flat stone near the entrance was called the ghost seat. This was where the new ghost sat and occasionally, to pass the time, drew on the walls. Further in, on the cusp of darkness, was another boulder where the old ghosts sat. 'All old tomate come and look new tomate,' they were told.

Rivers turned to Njiru and pointed to the seat of the old ghosts. 'Man he stink, he rotten, bymby he go Sonto. Why him no go Sonto?' he asked.

Njiru spread his hands.

Various marks on the wall were interpreted as being the drawings of the new ghosts. Hocart started sketching the marks and recording the identifications he was given. A man, a spirit, pigs, a war canoe.

Njiru wanted to pursue the matter of the old ghosts. He did not himself believe, he said, that there were ghosts in the cave. It was a, a… His patience with pidgin ran out. A varavara, he concluded. As nearly as Rivers could make out, this meant a metaphor, a figure of speech. Increasingly now, when they were alone, they tried to understand concepts in the other's language, to escape from the fogged communication of pidgin. The language barrier was more formidable than Rivers had initially supposed, for in addition to the ordinary dialect there was the 'high speech' of ritual, myth and prayer. There was also, though he had not been permitted to hear it, talk blong tomate: the language of ghosts.

While talking, they had unconsciously wandered deeper into the cave. Now Rivers touched Njiru's arm and pointed to a narrow slit in the back wall. They had to clamber over fallen rocks to reach it, and when they did, it seemed to be too small to admit even a very thin man. Once, Njiru said, the cave had been 'good fellow' right into the centre of the mountain, but then an earthquake had dislodged part of the roof. Rivers knelt down and peered into the darkness. If he crawled he was sure he could get through. And he'd brought a torch with him, not knowing whether the cave would be dark or not. He turned on his back and wriggled through, catching his arm, feeling a wetness that he thought might be blood. On the other side he stood up tentatively, and then stretched his arms high above his head. He had a sense of immense space around him. The cave was big. He was reaching in his back pocket for the torch when he realized Njiru was following him through. He put his hand into the hole, trying to shield the other man's deformed back from the jagged edge of the rock.

They stood together, breathing. Rivers shone his torch at the floor and cautiously they moved deeper into the cave. He put a hand out and touched something that slithered away under his fingers, then swung the torch round, a weak sickly ring of yellow light that revealed what for a second made him doubt his sanity: the walls were alive. They were covered in heaving black fur.

Bats, of course. After the first jolt of fear, it was obvious. He directed the torch at the ceiling where more bats hung, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands perhaps, little sooty stalactites. As the torch swept over them, they raised their heads, frenzied little faces, wet pink gums, white fangs, all jabbering with fear.

Moving very slowly and quietly, not wanting to disturb them further, he again shone the torch at the ground, so that they stood, disconnected feet and legs, in a pool of light. He shouldn't have been startled by the bats, because he knew — Njiru had mentioned it — that in the old days it had been a regular outing for the men of Narovo to go and hunt bats in the cave at Pa Na Keru. But then one day, or so the legend said, a man took the wrong turning and, while his companions wound their way out of the mountain, his every step was leading him deeper into it. At last he stumbled upon another exit, and made his way back to the village, but, though he'd been missing less than a week, he returned an old man. He stayed with his mother for three days, but then his face turned black and he crumbled away into dust.

Nobody had followed them into the inner cave. Hocart was busy with his drawings and the islanders were presumably afraid of the legend. Was Njiru also afraid? If he was, he didn't show it. They could hear talk and laughter only a few feet away, in the outer cave, but their isolation in this hot, fur-lined darkness was complete.

This was the first time he'd been alone with Njiru since Ngea's death, and Rivers wanted to talk about Emele: partly because any ceremony connected with the death of a chief was important, but partly too because he felt concern for the woman herself.

'Tongo polo,' he said.

He felt Njiru withdraw.

'How long?' he persisted. 'How many days?'

Njiru shook his head. 'Man old time he savvy tongo polo, now no all same.'

The last words were accompanied by a dismissive chopping movement of his hand, not intended to make contact with anything, but his fingers clipped the end of the torch and sent it clattering to the ground, where it continued to shine, a single yellow eye focused on them in the darkness. Then the walls lifted off and came towards them. Rivers barely had time to see the beam of light become a tunnel filled with struggling shapes before he was enclosed in flapping squeaking screaming darkness, blinded, his skin shrinking from the contact that never came.

He stood with eyes closed, teeth clenched, senses so inundated they'd virtually ceased to exist, his mind shrunk to a single point of light. Keep still, he told himself, they won't touch you. And after that he didn't think at all but endured, a pillar of flesh that the soles of his feet connected to the earth, the bones of his skull vibrating to the bats' unvarying high-pitched scream.

The cave mouth disgorged fleeing human beings; behind them the bats streamed out in a dark cloud that furled over on to itself as it rose, like blood flowing from a wound under water. Eventually, shocked into silence, they all turned to stare, and watched for a full minute, before the stream thinned to a trickle.

Inside the cave, Rivers and Njiru opened their eyes. Rivers was not aware of having moved during the exodus, indeed would have sworn that he had not, but he discovered that he was gripping Njiru's hand. He felt… not dazed, dazed was the wrong word. The opposite of dazed. Almost as if a rind had been pared off, naked, unshelled, lying in contact with the earth.

Wonderingly, in the intense silence, they gazed round the grey granite walls, with here and there in the vastness black squares of baby bats hung upside-down to await their mothers' return.

* * *

A shaft of sunlight struck his eyes.

'Sorry,' Miss Irving said, and pulled the curtain a little way back. 'What sort of night did you have?'

'So-so.'

He seemed to have spent the entire night between hot, fur-lined walls and the fur had got on to his teeth.

'Here's your tea,' she said, putting the tray across his knees.

He drank it gratefully, sending out messages to various parts of his body to find out what the situation was. Ghastly, seemed to be the general response.

'Don't you think you should have a doctor?' She smiled at him. 'Doctor.'

'No. All he'd do is tell me to stay in bed and drink plenty of fluids. I can tell myself that.'

'All right. Ring if there's anything you want.' 'Would you mind drawing the curtains?' The darkness reminded him of the cave. All night he'd had bats clinging to the inside walls of his skull. But now at least there was a breeze, the curtains breathed gently. But he was still too hot. He kicked off the covers, unbuttoned his jacket and flapped the edges, ran his tongue round his cracked lips. Hot.

* * *

The sun beat down the moment they left the cave. It was past noon, but the hard bright white rocks reflected heat into their faces. They walked more slowly on the way back, Rivers intensely aware of Njiru walking just ahead of him, though they did not speak. Near the village they began, by mutual consent, to lag behind the others. Hocart turned to wait, but Rivers waved him on.

They sat down on an overturned tree trunk covered in moss. The sun crashed down, beating the tops of their heads, like somebody hammering tent pegs into the ground. And yet even in these sweaty clothes, the shoulders of his shirt thickly encrusted with bat droppings, Rivers had the same feeling of being new, unsheathed.

They sat tranquilly, side by side, in no hurry to begin the mangled business of communication. A slight breeze cooled their skin.

'Tongo polo', Rivers said at last, because that's where they'd left off. How long? he asked again. How many days?

A bright, amused, unmistakably affectionate look from Njiru. There was no fixed time, he said, though eighteen days was common. His grandmother had observed tongo polo for two hundred days, but that was exceptional because Homu, his grandfather, had been a great chief. The men of Roviana blew the conch for her.

Blew the conch? Rivers asked. What did that mean?

A short silence, though not, Rivers thought, indicating a reluctance to go on speaking. At that moment Njiru would have told him anything. Perhaps this was the result of that time in the cave when they'd reached out and gripped each other's hands. No, he thought. No. There had been two experiences in the cave, and he was quite certain Njiru shared in both. One was the reaching out to grasp each other's hands. But the other was a shrinking, no, no, not shrinking, a compression of identity into a single hard unassailable point: the point at which no further compromise is possible, where nothing remains except pure naked self-assertion. The right to be and to be as one is.

Njiru's grandfather, Homu, was famous for having taken ninety-three heads in a single afternoon. Through his grandmother he was related to Inkava, who, until the British destroyed his stronghold, had been the most ferocious of the great head-hunting chiefs of Roviana. This was his inheritance. Rivers glanced sideways at him, close enough to see how the white lime flaked on the taut skin of his cheekbones. Njiru was speaking, not out of friendship — though he felt friendship — but out of that hard core of identity, no longer concerned to evade questions or disguise his pride in the culture of his people.

The blowing of the conch, he said, signifies the completion of a successful raid. He turned and looked directly at Rivers. The widow of a chief can be freed only by the taking of a head.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Monday, 16 September 1918

We live in tamboos — a sort of cross between a cowshed and an outdoor privy. Corrugated iron walls and roof — bloody noisy when it rains, and it's raining now — carpeted with straw that rustles and smells and gleams in the candle-light. Fields outside — perfectly reasonable fields when we arrived. Now, after last night's heavy rain and the constant churning of boots and wheels, there's a depth of about eighteen inches of mud. The duckboards are starting to sink. Oh, and it gets into everything. The inside of my sleeping-bag is not inviting — I was tempted to sleep outside it last night. But. Mustn't complain. (Why not? The entire army survives on grousing.) In fact mud and duckboards are about the only familiar things left.

I've got a permanent feeling of wrongness at the nape of my neck. Exposure's the right word, I suppose, and for once the army's bad joke of a haircut isn't to blame. We're out in the open all the time and I'm used to a war where one scurries about below ground like a mole or a rat. (Rats thrived on us — literally. We must have devastated the moles.) It occurred to me last night that Rivers's idea of my using myself as a test case — the football he told me to dribble across — has one fundamental flaw in it. Same loony — different war. As far as I can make out, Rivers's theory is that the crucial factor in accounting for the vast number of breakdowns this war has produced is not the horrors — war's always produced plenty of those — but the fact that the strain has to be borne in conditions of immobility, passivity and helplessness. Cramped in holes in the ground waiting for the next random shell to put you out. If that is the crucial factor, then the test's invalid — because every exercise we do now is designed to prepare for open, mobile warfare. And that's what's happening — it's all different.

I told Rivers once that the sensation of going over the top was sexy. I don't think he believed me, but actually there was something in common — racing blood, risk, physical exposure, a kind of awful daring about it. (Obviously I'm not talking about sex in bed.) But I don't feel anything like that now. There's, for me, a nagging, constant apprehension, because I'm out in the open and I know I shouldn't be. New kind of war. The trouble is my nerves are the same old nerves. I'd be happier with a ton or two of France on top of my head.

Day was spent on general clean-up. The men's reward was compulsory games. I stood obediently on the touchline and yelled and waved. A cold grey day. The ball seemed to fly across the lowering sky like a drenched, heavy, reluctant bird. The men were coated in mud, plumes of steam rising from their mouths. All tremendously competitive, of course—'C' against 'D'—and curiously unreal. Street-corner football played in the spirit of public-school rugby. I stood and watched my red-faced, red-kneed compatriots charging up and down a social No Man's Land. But at least officers and men play together — it's the only informal contact there is outside the line.

At half-time some of them stripped off their shirts and the steam rose from their bodies, red and white, chapped hands and faces, as they stood panting.

Jenkins waved at somebody off the pitch and for a moment his face was turned towards me, greenish eyes, red hair, milky white skin blotched with freckles, I had to make an effort to look away. Mustn't get the reputation of 'having an eye for Tommy'. Bad for discipline. Though I don't know what the fuck else there is to look at.

That's the other change: the men's expressions. That look on Jenkins's flee as he turned to wave. Before, there were basically two expressions. One you saw at Étaples, the rabbit-locked-up-with-a-stoat look. I've only ever seen that expression in one other place, and that was the Royces' house. Family of four boys in the next street to us. Their father used to make them line up every night after he'd had a few pints, and lift their shirt-tails. Then he'd thrash them with a ruler on their bare bums. Every night without fail. One of them asked once, 'What's it for, Dad?' And he said, 'It's for whatever you've done that you think you've got away with.' But my God they could fight. One of them was the bane of my life at school.

The other expression was the trench expression. It looks quite daunting if you don't know what it is. Any one of my platoon could have posed for a propaganda poster of the Brutal Hun, but it wasn't brutality or anything like that. It was a sort of morose disgust, and it came from living in trenches that had bits of human bone sticking out of the walls, in freezing weather corpses propped up on the fire step, flooded latrines.

Whatever happens to us it can't be as bad as that.

Wednesday, 18 September

Today we went to the divisional baths, which are in a huge, low barn. For once it was sunny and dry and the march, though long, was not too tiring. They weren't ready for us and the men sat on the grass outside and waited, leaning on each other's knees or stretched out on the grass with their arms behind their heads. Then it was their turn.

The usual rows of rain butts, wine barrels, a couple of old baths (proper baths). The water any temperature from boiling to tepid depending on where you were in the queue. They take off their clothes, leave them in piles, line up naked, larking about, jostling, a lot of jokes, a few songs, everybody happy because it's not the dreary routine of drills and training. Inside the barn, hundreds of tiny chinks of sunlight from gaps in the walls and roof, so the light shimmers like shot silk, and these gleams dance over everything, brown faces and necks, white bodies, the dividing line round the throat sharp as a guillotine.

One of my problems with the baths is that I'm always dressed. Officers bathe separately. And… Well, it's odd. One of the things I like sexually, one of the things I fantasize about, is simply being fully dressed with a naked lover, holding him or her from behind. And what I feel (apart from the obvious) is great tenderness — the sort of tenderness that depends on being more powerful, and that is really, I suppose, just the acceptable face of sadism.

This doesn't matter with a lover, where it's just a game, but here the disproportion of power is real and the nakedness involuntary. Nothing to be done about it. I mean, I can scarcely trip about with downcast eyes like a maiden aunt at a leek show. But I feel uncomfortable, and I suspect most of the other officers don't.

Through the barn, out into the open air, dressing in clean clothes, a variety of drawers and vests, most of them too big. The army orders these things to fit the Sons of Empire, but some of the Sons of Empire didn't get much to eat when they were kids. One of the men in my platoon, barely regulation height, got a pair of drawers he could pull up to his chin. He paraded around, laughing at himself, not minding in the least when everybody else laughed too.

Watching him, it suddenly struck me that soldiers' nakedness has a quality of pathos, not merely because the body is so obviously vulnerable, but because they put on indignity and anonymity with their clothes, and for most people, civilians, most of the time, the reverse is true.

March back very cheerful, everybody singing, lice eggs popping in the seams of the clean clothes as soon as the bodies warm them through. But we're used to that. And I started thinking — there's a lot of time to think on marches — about Father Mackenzie's church, the huge shadowy crucifix on the rood screen dominating everything, a sheaf of hollyhocks lying in the chancel waiting to be arranged, their long stems scrawling wet across the floor. And behind every altar, blood, torture, death. St John's head on a platter, Salome offering it to Herodias, the woman's white arms a sort of cage around the severed head with its glazed eyes. Christ at the whipping block, his expression distinctly familiar. St Sebastian hamming it up and my old friend St Lawrence on his grid. Father Mackenzie's voice booming from the vestry. He loved me, the poor sod, I really think he did.

And I thought about the rows of bare bodies lining up for the baths, and I thought it isn't just me. Whole bloody western front's a wanker's paradise. This is what they've been praying for, this is what they've been longing for, for years. Rivers would say something sane and humorous and sensible at this point, but I stand by it and anyway Rivers isn't here. Whenever a man with a fuckable arse hoves into view you can be quite certain something perfectly dreadful's going to happen.

But then, something perfectly dreadful is going to happen. So that's all right.

Sunday, 22 September

Morning — about the nearest we ever get to a lie-in (I've been up and on the go by 5.30 every day this week). Wyatt's shaving and there's a voluntary service starting just outside. Smell of bacon frying, sound of pots and pans clattering about and Longstaffe whistling as he cleans my boots. Hallet's on the other side of the table writing to his fiancée, something that always takes hours and hours. And the rain's stopped and there's a shaft of sunlight on the ground and the straw looks like gold. The razor rattling against the side of the bowl makes a pleasant sound. The ghost of Sunday Morning at home— roast beef and gravy, the windows steamed up, the News of the World rustling as Dad drops half of it, the Sally Army tuning up outside.

Onward, Christian soldiers,

Marching as to war,

With the cross of Jesus

Going on before.

Twenty — perhaps a few more — male voices in unison. Longstaffe's singing the alternative version:

Forward Joe Soap's army

Marching without fear

With your brave commander

Safely in the rear.

He boasts and skites

From morn till night

And thinks he's very brave,

But the men who really did the job

Are dead and in their grave.

Sung very cheerfully with great good humour. We're all looking forward to Sunday dinner, which is roast beef and roast potatoes. I'm famished. And there is not going to be a gas drill during this meal. I know.

Tuesday, 24 September

Bussed forward. Men sang all the way, in high spirits, mainly I think because they didn't have to march.

Thursday, 26 September

The nearest village is in ruins. Extraordinary jagged shapes of broken walls in moonlight, silver mountains and chasms, with here and there black pits of craters thronged with weeds.

Some of the other villages aren't even ruins. You're not supposed to mention the effects of enemy fire, but a lot of this is the effect of British fire so perhaps I can mention it. Nothing's left. We passed through one village that hadn't a single wall above knee height. Old trenches everywhere, tangles of rusting barbed-wire, rib-cages of horses that rotted where they fell. And worse and worse.

The men, except for the one or two I remember from last year, are still reserved. Sometimes when they're alone at night you hear laughter. Not often.

They guard the little privacy they have jealously. Most of the 'devotion' people talk about is from officers—some of the officers — to the men. I don't myself see much sign that it's reciprocated. If they trust anybody they trust the NCOs, who're older, for the most part, and come from the same background. But then I wasn't born to the delusion that I'm responsible for them.

What I am responsible for is GAS. Either the Adjutant wasn't joking or if he was it's a continuing joke. My old nickname — the Canary — has been revived. Owen for some reason is known as the Ghost. Evidently when he disappeared into Craiglockhart — and I suspect didn't write to anybody because he was ashamed (I didn't either)— they concluded he was dead.

Gas drill happens several times a day. The routine lectures aren't resented too much (except by me — I have to give them), but the random drills are hated by everybody. You're settling down for the night, or about to score a goal, or raising the first forkful of hot food to your lips, and wham! Rattles whirl, masks are pulled on, arms and fists pumped, and then the muffled hollow shout GAS! GAS! GAS! Creatures with huge eyes like insects flicker between the trees. What they hate — what I hate — is the gas drill that comes while you're marching or doing PT or bayonet training, because then you have to go on, flailing about in green light, with the sound of your breathing — In. Out. In. Out. — drowning all other sounds. And every movement leeches energy away.

Nobody likes the mask. But what I have to do is watch out for the occasional man who just can't cope with it at all, who panics as soon as it comes down over his head. And unfortunately I think I've found one, though he's in my company which means I can keep an eye on him.

The attitude to gas has changed. It's used more and feared less. A few of the men are positively gas happy. OK, they think, if a whiff or two gets you back to base and doesn't kill you, why not? It's become the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot and a lot harder to detect.

At dinner I told Hallet and Potts that four years ago we were told to protect ourselves from gas by pissing on our socks. You folded one sock into a pad and used the other to tie it over your mouth and nose. They gaped at me, not sure if I was serious or not. 'Did it work?' asked Hallet. 'No,' I said. 'But it didn't half take your mind off it.' And they both laughed, quite relieved, I think, to know I was only having them on.

It used to give you spots round your mouth. Not that that was our main worry at the time.

And today was pay day. After an afternoon spent crawling running falling crawling again across wet fields, the men were so caked in mud they looked as if they were made of it. Tired, but pay day's always good, even if you've nothing to spend it on, and they were chattering, jostling, laughing as they queued. Then the rattles whirred. A groan went up — (with the real thing there isn't time to groan — more practice needed) and then the usual routine: clenched fists, pumping arms, GAS! GAS! GAS!

They went on queuing. Mud-brown men standing in mud, the slanting rays of the sun gilding the backs of their hands, the only flesh now visible. I was sitting next to Hardwick, ticking off names on the list. One man, waiting immediately behind the man who was being paid, turned his face a little to one side, and

I saw, in those huge insect eyes, not one but two setting suns.

Friday, 28 September

Since yesterday evening there's been a continuous bombardment. All the roads forward are choked, drivers stuck in the mud, swearing at each other, a flickering greenish-yellow light in the sky and every now and then the whine and thud of a shell. A constant drone of planes overhead, all going one way.

We move forward tonight.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Rivers walked along the path between the tent and Narovo village, the full moon casting his shadow ahead of him. All around were the scuffles and squeals of the bush, the scream of some bird that turned into a laugh, then silence for a moment, more scuffles, more squeals, the night-long frenzy of killing and eating.

Once in the village he went straight to Ngea's hall, stooped and went in. The scare ghost shivered at his approach.

The women were asleep, the widows who tended Emele. He tiptoed past them, and knelt down, calling, 'Emele! Emele!', an urgent whisper that caused one of the widows to stir and mutter in her sleep. He waited till she settled before he called the name again. When there was no reply he pushed the door open and there, curled up in the prescribed position, back bent, hands resting on her feet, was Kath.

'Kath, Kath,' he said. 'What on earth are you doing here?' And the movement of his lips woke him up.

He sat on the edge of the bed, peering at his watch. Four o'clock, never a good time to wake. His throat was very sore. He swallowed several times, and decided what was needed was that good old medical stand-by, a glass of water.

In the bathroom he blinked in the white light, caught a glimpse of himself in the looking-glass and thought, My God, is this really what you've done to yourself? He took a moment to contemplate baggy eyes and thinning hair, but he wasn't sunk so deep in neurosis or narcissism as to believe an overhead light at four a.m. lays bare the soul. He drank a glass of water and went back to bed.

Despite the hour the curtains let in a little light, starlight, he supposed, there was no moon tonight. It was curiously reminiscent of the light in the tent on Eddystone. He beat the pillows into a more comfortable shape, and tried to get back to sleep.

* * *

'Leave the flap open,' Rivers said.

It had been hotter than usual, an oven of a day in which people and trees had shimmered like reflections in water. The earth outside the tent was baked hard. He watched a line of red ants struggle across the immensity, a group at the rear carrying a dead beetle many times their own size.

Hocart emerged from the tent. 'I don't think I can face sleeping in there tonight.'

'We can sleep out here if you like. As long as you're careful with the net.'

The remains of their evening meal lay on the table. Neither of them had felt like eating much.

'What do we do?' Hocart said, sitting cross-legged on the ground beside Rivers. 'What do we do if they come back with a head? Or heads, God help us.'

Rivers said slowly, 'Logically, we don't intervene.'

'Logically, we're dead. Even if we decide we won't tell the authorities, how do they know we won't? From their point of view, the only safe thing to do is—'

'Obey the law.'

'Get rid of us.'

'I don't think they'll do that.'

'Could they?'

'Well, yes, probably. The point is, it won't happen, there isn't going to be a head.'

'But if—'

'If there is we'll deal with it.'

A long, stubborn, unconvinced silence from Hocart.

'Look, you know what the penalties are. If they go on a raid there's no way the British Commissioner isn't going to hear about it. And then you've got a gunboat off the coast, villages on fire, trees cut down, crops destroyed, pigs killed. Screaming women and children driven into the bush. You know what happens.'

'Makes you proud to be British, doesn't it?'

'Are you suggesting head-hunting should be allowed?'

'No.' Tight-lipped.

'Good. When these people were taking heads they virtually depopulated Ysabel. It had to be stopped.'

'So how are they going to get her out?'

Rivers hesitated. 'I don't know. She can't stay in there for ever.'

What he secretly thought, but was superstitiously afraid of saying, was that the situation would end in Emele's suicide. He could see no other way out.

The following morning he went to see Namboko Taru. She'd become very fond of him (and he of her) ever since his miming of alternating constipation and diarrhoea had kept her amused while Njiru removed the nggasin from her belly.

She and her friend Namboko Nali had been bathing in the sea and their hair smelled of salt water. Taru's scrawny brown arms were folded across her breasts as she sat, with her back against the wall of her hut, steaming gently in the sun, while hens stepped delicately around her, pecking the dust. He sat beside her, admiring the gleam of dull emerald in the cockerel's neck feathers, as the village came slowly to life.

After a few minutes' gossip he started asking her above love charms, the subject they'd talked about at their last meeting. Three other women came out and listened. He got out his notebook and took down the words of the charm Taru supplied, aware that more than the usual amount of whispering and giggling was going on. Taru offered him betel to chew, and thinking, What the hell, who needs teeth? he accepted it. The women giggled again. A little while later Taru offered him lime, and to humour her he let her draw white lines on his cheekbones. The giggling was now almost out of control, but he pressed on to the end of the charm, at which point it was revealed that the words only became efficacious if the man accepted betel and lime from the woman's basket.

He laughed with them, and by the time they'd finished they were on such terms that he felt he could ask them anything. Even about Emele and tongo polo. Taru vehemently denied there was any question of suicide. Suicide, ungi, was totally different. Taru and Nali had helped Kera, the widow of the previous chief, to kill herself. She had tried poisoning herself with tobacco and that hadn't worked. And then she'd tried to hang herself, but the bough had broken. So they'd held a pole for her, high above their heads, and she'd twined a strip of calico round her throat and hanged herself from the pole. Garrotted more like, Rivers thought. It would not have been a quick or an easy death. What decided whether the widow would ungi or observe tongo polo? he asked. It was her choice, they said.

Returning to the tent, he found Hocart lying outside, having spent the first part of the morning washing clothes. He was asleep, or resting, with his arms across his face shielding his eyes from the sun. Rivers put his foot on his chest and pressed lightly.

Hocart peered up at him, taking in the white lines on his face. 'My God.'

'I think I just got engaged.'

A bubble of laughter shook Hocart's ribs. 'Lucky woman.'

* * *

Sleeping was difficult, because of the heat, even after they'd taken their beds outside the tent. Sometimes they gave up altogether, and went to lie in the shallows, where the small waves, gleaming with phosphorescent light, broke over them.

Rivers had become obsessed by Emele. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, the thought of the woman cramped inside the enclosure, inside the hut, followed him until he saw every other aspect of life on the island in the shadow of her imprisonment.

In the mornings he would go down to bathe and watch the canoes go out, foam flashing from the paddles, a wordless song drifting across the water: 'Aie, aie, aie.' All vowel sounds, it seemed to be, no consonants. And then the smack of water being slapped to lure bonito into the nets.

It was still idyllic. His own happiness did not lessen, but always, now, there were these two points of darkness: Emele cramped in her enclosure; Ngea rotting in his era. Once he walked up the path on the other side of the beach, unable to explain his desire to see Ngea, for the facts of physical decomposition neither fascinated nor frightened him. A corpse was something one buried or dissected. Nothing more. And yet he needed to see Ngea.

The smell reached him when he was no more than half way up the path. He pinched his nostrils, breathing through his open mouth, but even so a few yards further on he had to abandon the attempt. A black cloud of flies, so dense it looked solid, rose at his approach, heat made audible. He backed away, as much as anything because they reminded him of the bats in the cave, and that experience, the sense of being unshelled, peeled in some way, that had seemed so positive at the time, now made him afraid. He was open to whatever might happen in this place, open in the way that a child is, since no previous experience was relevant.

The heat continued. From mid-afternoon onwards there was a curious bronze light in the sky, which became brownish towards evening, as if even the air were singed. Occasional flicks of wind teased the outermost branches of the trees, but did not disturb the intense brooding stillness.

Rivers slept uneasily, waking finally at 'fowl-he-sing-out', aware of having heard a new and different sound. He lay and listened and was just about to turn over and try to snatch an extra hour when it came again: the brazen blare of a conch shell.

He was on his feet and outside the tent in a matter of minutes. The bush distorted sounds, bouncing echoes back, but then he was aware of the crash of hurrying footsteps through the undergrowth, people running down to the beach. He shook Hocart awake, and followed the crowd, holding back a little, not knowing how secret this was, or how much it might matter that he was witnessing it.

He saw Njiru at the water's edge, draped in a white cloth, with a staff in his hand, looking out over the bay.

A canoe was heading in, quickly, paddled by Lembu, and in the stern was a bundle of some kind. He was too far away to see what it was, but an ah went up from the crowd, and suddenly, the women and girls began running into the sea, prancing like horses until they reached a depth where they could cast themselves forward and swim. Clinging to the canoe's side, they escorted it into the shallow water, and Lembu got out, everything about him shining, teeth, hair, eyes, skin, and hauled the canoe up the beach. He walked back to the stern, unwrapped the bundle, and dragged the contents out on to the sand. A small boy about four years old.

Rivers walked down to the canoe, since nobody seemed to care whether he saw this or not. The child's face was tear-stained, streaked with dirt and snot. He was not actually crying now, though irregular hiccups shook his thin chest. As people surged towards him and stared, he moved closer to his captor, resting one grubby hand on Lembu's naked thigh.

Rivers went up to Njiru. 'Is that your head?' he asked, unaware that he spoke English, not pidgin.

'Yes,' Njiru said steadily.

He took the child from Lembu and, surrounded by excited, smiling people, carried him up the beach path to the village. Rivers followed, but kept well back as the crowd gathered outside Ngea's hall. Lembu blew the conch as they entered the village, and again inside the hall. After a while Emele emerged, hobbling, resting her arms on the shoulders of Taru and Nali. Lembu and Njiru followed her out, and there was general rejoicing, except from the small boy, who stood alone at the centre of the throng, his eyes like black bubbles that at any moment might burst.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

4 October 1918

What can one say? And yet I've got to write something because however little I remember now I'll remember less in years to come. And it's not true to say one remembers nothing. A lot of it you know you'll never forget, and a few things you'll pray to forget and not be able to. But the connections go. Bubbles break on the surface like they do on the flooded craters round here — the ones that've been here years and have God knows what underneath.

The night of I think the 1st (dates go too) we lay all night in a trench one foot deep — the reward of success because this was a German trench. Another reward of success was that we had no British troops on our left, we'd raced ahead of them all. I think I'm right in saying we were the only units that broke through the Hindenburg line and maintained the position. It was dark, early evening, deep black, and we expected a counter-attack at dawn. Until then there was nothing to do but wait, both intolerably cramped and intolerably exposed, enfilading machine-gun fire on three sides. 'Cramped' isn't a figure of speech either. The trench was hardly more than a scraping in the earth. Any careless movement and you'd had it. And for a lot of the time we wore gas masks, because there'd been a very heavy gas barrage put down by our side and it lingered. The whole area smelled like a failed suicide attempt, and I kept hearing Sarah's voice saying about Johnny, It was our own gas, our own bloody gas. In spite of all the drills some of the men were slow to put their masks on, one or two had bad reactions, and then Oakshott decided to have a panic attack. I crawled along to him, not past people, over them, one eel wriggling across the others in the tank, and tried to calm him down. I remember at one point I burst out laughing, can't remember why, but it did me good. There's a kind of angry laughter that gets you back to the centre of yourself. I shared a bar of chocolate with Longstaffe and we huddled together under my greatcoat and tried to keep warm. And then the counter-attack came.

Two bubbles break here. Longstaffe sliding back into the trench with a red hole in his forehead and an expression of mild surprise on his face. And the bayonet work. Which I will not remember. Rivers would say, remember now—any suppressed memory stores up trouble for the future. Well, too bad. Refusing to think's the only way I can survive and anyway what future?

The whole thing was breakdown territory, as defined by Rivers. Confined space, immobility, helplessness, passivity, constant danger that you can do nothing to avert. But my nerves seem to be all right. Or at least no worse than anybody else's. All our minds are in flight, each man tries to reach his own accommodation with what he saw. What he did. But on the surface it's all jollity. We're marching back, through the same desolation, but towards safety. Another battalion has leap-frogged us into the line. And every time my right foot hits the ground I say, over, over, over. Because the war's coming to an end, and we all know it, and it's coming to an end partly because of what we did. We broke through. We held the position.

5 October

I think the worst time was after the counter-attack, when we lay in that trench all day surrounded by the dead. I still had Longstaffe by my side, though his expression changed after death. The look of surprise faded. And we listened to the wounded groaning outside. Two stretcher-bearers volunteered to go out and were hit as soon as they stood up. Another tried later. After that I said, No more, everybody keep down. By nightfall most of the groaning had stopped. A few of the more lightly wounded crawled in under cover of darkness and we patched them up as best we could. But one man kept on and on, it didn't sound like a human being, or even like an animal, a sort of guttural gurgling like a blocked drain.

I decided I ought to try myself, and took Lucas with me. Not like going over the top used to be, climbing out of the bloody trench. Just a through the wire, barbs snagging the sleeves, and into the mud. I felt the coldness on my cheek, and the immense space above, that sense you always get when lying on the ground in the open of the earth as a ball turning in space. There was time to feel this, in spite of the bullets — which anyway frightened me less than the thought of having to see what was making that sound.

The gurgling led us to him. He was lying half way down the side of a flooded crater and the smell of gas was stronger here, as it always is near water. As we started down, bullets peppered the surface, plop, plop, plop, an innocent sound like when you skim a flat stone across a river, and bullets flicked the rim where we'd been a second before and sent cascades of loose earth down after us. The gurgling changed as we got closer so he knew something different was happening. I don't think he could have known more than that. I got right up to his feet, and started checking his legs for wounds, nothing, but then I didn't expect it. That sound only comes from a head wound. What made it marginally worse was that the side of the head nearest me was untouched. His whole frame was shaking, his skin blue in the starlight as our skins were too, but his was the deep blue of shock. I said 'Hallet' and for a second the gurgling stopped. I gestured to Lucas and he helped me turn him further over on to his back, and we saw the wound. Brain exposed, a lot of blood, a lot of stuff not blood down the side of the neck. One eye gone. A hole — I was going to say in his left cheek — where his left cheek had been. Something was burning, casting an orange light into the sky which reflected down on us. The farm that had been one of our reference points. The underside of the clouds was stained orange by the flames.

We got a rope underneath him and started hauling him round the crater, up the other side, towards our trench and all the time I was thinking, What's the use? He's going to die anyway. I think I thought about killing him. At one point he screamed and I saw the fillings in his back teeth and his mouth filled with blood. After that he was quiet, and it was easier but then a flare went up and everything paled in the trembling light. Bastards, bastards, bastards, I thought. I heard a movement and there on the rim of the crater was a white face looking down. Carter, who, I later discovered, had come out entirely on his own initiative. That was just right. More than three and we'd have been getting in each other's way. We managed to drag him back through fire that was, if anything, lighter than before, though not intentionally I think. Too little mercy had been shown by either side that day for gestures of that sort to be possible.

We fell into the trench, Hallet on top of us. I got something damp on my face that wasn't mud, and brushing it away found a gob of Hallet's brain between my fingertips. Because he'd gone quiet on the last stretch I expected to find him unconscious or dead, but he was neither. I gave him a drink of water. I had to press my hand against his face to get it down, because otherwise it slopped out of the hole. And all the time, I was doing it I was thinking, Die can't you? For God's sake, man, just die. But he didn't.

When at last we were ordered to pull back I remember peering up at the sky and seeing the stars sparse and pale through a gauze of greenish light, and thinking, Thank God it's evening, because shells were still coming over, and some of them were falling directly on the road. At least we'd be marching towards the relative safety of night.

The sun hung on the lip of the horizon, filling the sky. I don't know whether it was the angle or the drifting smoke that half obscured it, but it was enormous. The whole scene looked like something that couldn't be happening on earth, partly the sun, partly the utter lifelessness of the land around us, pitted, scarred, pockmarked with stinking craters and scrawls of barbed-wire. Not even birds, not even carrion feeders. Even the crows have given up. And I stumbled along at the head of the company and I waited for the sun to go down. And the sodding thing didn't. IT ROSE. It wasn't just me. I looked round at the others and I saw the same stupefaction on every face. We hadn't slept for four days. Tiredness like that is another world, just like noise, the noise of a bombardment, isn't like other noise. You see people wade through it, lean into it. I honestly think if the war went on for a hundred years another language would evolve, one that was capable of describing the sound of a bombardment or the buzzing of flies on a hot August day on the Somme. There are no words There are no words for what I felt when I saw the setting sun rise.

6 October

We're far enough back now for officers from different companies to mess together again. I sit at a rickety little table censoring letters, for the post has arrived, including one for me from Sarah saying she isn't pregnant. I don't know what I feel exactly. I ought to be delighted and of course I am, but that was not the first reaction. There was a split second of something else, before the relief set in.

Letters arrive for the dead. I check names against the list and write Deceased in a firm bold hand in the top left-hand corner. Casualties were heavy, not so much in the initial attack as in the counter-attacks.

Gregg died of wounds. I remember him showing me a letter from home that had big 'kisses' in red crayon from his little girl.

Of the people who shared the house in Amiens only a month ago, Potts is wounded, but likely to live. Jones (Owen's servant) wounded, likely to live. Hallet's wounds are so bad I don't think he can possibly survive. I see him sometimes lying in the lily pond in the garden with the golden fish darting all around him, and silver lines of bubbles on his thighs. More like a pattern than a picture, no depth to it, no perspective, but brilliantly clear. And Longstaffe's dead.

The Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?

I look across at Owen, who's doing casualty reports with a Woodbine — now blessedly plentiful again — stuck to his bottom lip, and his hair, rather lank at the moment, flopping over his forehead. For days after the battle he went round with his tunic stiff with blood, but then I had blood and brains on me. We must have stunk like the drains in a slaughterhouse, but we've long since stopped smelling each other. He looks like one of the boys you see on street corners in the East End. Open to offers. I must say I wouldn't mind. He looks up, feeling himself the subject of scrutiny, smiles and pushes the fags across. I saw him in the attack, caped and masked in blood, seize a machine-gun and turn it on its previous owners at point-blank range. Like killing fish in a bucket. And I wonder if he sees those faces, grey, open-mouthed faces, life draining out of them before the bullets hit, as I see the faces of the men I killed in the counter-attack. I won't ask. He wouldn't answer if I did. I wouldn't dare ask. For the first time it occurs to me that River's job also requires courage.

We don't even mention our own dead. The days pass crowded with meaningless incident, and it's easier to forget. I run the ball of my thumb against the two first fingers of my right hand where a gob of Hallet's brain was, and I don't feel anything very much.

We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think — at least not beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.