The Thing Itself

EPILOGUE

Restless still, Watts roamed his father’s house. He wandered over to his father’s bookshelves. His father had read widely, more widely than Watts would have expected. Organized, too. Alphabetical within countries.

He was scanning the American section. It was all classic stuff: Hawthorne, Melville, Fenimore Cooper, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald. There was a narrow-spined work by Thomas Wolfe called God’s Lonely Man squeezed between John Dos Passos and some hard-boiled crime. There were signed copies of Chandler. Watts remembered his father telling him he’d once gone on a bender with Chandler and Ian Fleming.

On the shelf below were photo albums. An old cigar box was acting as a bookend. Watts took it down. He sat at the table by the window and slid the lid open. The box was filled with papers. He took out his father’s birth certificate. Three First World War medals lay beneath it. Watts smiled.

He knew the slang name for these medals were Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, sarcastically named after a long-running strip cartoon that had begun 1919. Pip was a dog, Squeak a penguin, Wilfred a rabbit with very long ears. They went everywhere together, as did this trio of medals. You got one, you got the rest. Though it didn’t mean you were alive.

Watts picked up one of the medals. The British War Medal, issued in 1919 to anyone, dead or alive, who had fought in the Great War. It was silver with George V’s head on one side and a naked St George mounted on a horse on the other. The sun of Victory shone down on St George trampling the Prussian shield beneath his horse’s hooves.

The second was the four-pointed Mons Star made of bright bronze, with a crown on one side and crossed swords on the other. It had a wreath of oak leaves beside a scroll inscribed ‘August 1914’.

The third was an Allied Victory medal, also issued in 1919 to all those who had been awarded the other two medals. This one was bronze lacquer. Winged Victory on one side, ‘The Great War for Civilization, 1914–1919’ engraved on the other.

His grandfather would have been awarded them post-humously. Watts knew he had been in the Royal Sussex Regiment, 2nd Battalion. He’d gone over with the first division of the Expeditionary Force in August 1914 and been killed at the battle of Mons.

The Great War. He had seen a TV drama about Rudyard Kipling and his son Jack recently. Kipling, gung-ho about the war, had pulled strings to get his severely short-sighted son into the Irish Guards. He had fought at the Battle of Loos in torrential rain. With his glasses on, Jack Kipling wouldn’t have been able to see anything, especially not the bullet that killed him.

Watts had visited his grandfather’s grave once at St Symphorien cemetery, near Mons. It had been created by the Germans for both the Allied and German soldiers who fell in the battle. Well, some of the ones who fell.

He’d stood on a mound beside a tall obelisk and looked down at the five hundred or so grey granite headstones laid out in neat rectangles on every side. The man he was named after was somewhere among them.

He spent the next thirty minutes looking for him. It was quiet in the cemetery, although a breeze occasionally shivered the branches of the trees.

Some graves were unidentified. He found the grave of Private John Parr, killed on 21st August 1914, believed to be the first Commonwealth soldier killed in the Great War. Nearby was the grave of the Canadian soldier, Private Gordon Price, believed to be the last.

He found his grandfather’s grave in a secluded patch of the cemetery. Private Robert Edward Watts, Royal Sussex, 24th August 1914. It didn’t state his age, though ages were listed on some of the others. A rosemary bush had been planted in front of the headstone. He took out his pocketknife, bent and sliced off a clump. Put it to his nose.

He ran his hand over the rough granite of the headstone. A little self-consciously, he saluted his grandfather, the clump of rosemary still between his fingers, then turned and headed for home.

In the box there was a faded, creased black-and-white photograph of a pretty young woman. Nothing written on the back but Watts was sure it was his grandmother, Jenny. Robert’s wife. He hadn’t known her either. She had died a decade before Watts was born.

He picked up the photo albums he had found earlier. He was surprised that his father kept something so sentimental. He went slowly through the albums, page by page.

He found a photograph of his grandmother standing beside a short, broad-shouldered man with a walrus moustache and dark hair scraped back from his forehead. It had been taken in a studio with a rural scene on a painted backdrop behind them. Both were standing erect and neither was smiling, though there was a glint of humour in the man’s eyes.

Watts went back to the cigar box. There was a thin envelope addressed in faded copper plate to Mrs Robert Watts at an address in Haywards Heath. He extracted two sheets of flimsy paper, one wrapped in torn tissue. He carefully removed the tissue paper. There was a crumpled, muddied, sheet inside it. A note in faded pencil. It had been folded twice and on the back the same pencil had written: ‘For Jenny’. Not all the words were legible. Watts wrote it out on a sheet of paper, filling in words as best he could. It read:

Dear[est?] Jenny,

I don’t know if this will ever get to you. They tell us the post from here only takes a day although I feel a world away from hearth and home and my beloved family. If you are reading this, however, that will probably not bode well [for me?]. A big surge tomorrow and I’m over [the top?] again. I pray all goes [well?]. I carry your picture at all times in my breast [pocket?] and [your?] last words and kisses to me forever in my heart. If this is to be Adieu then God bless to you and the little ones. I pray your father will find it in his heart to forgive your strong-headedness in marrying me and take you back in. Other[wise?], I [fear?] how you will fend.

I love you until death do us part — and forever thereafter.

Your loving husband,

Robert

There was something written in brackets after ‘Robert’ but Watts couldn’t make it out. He placed the note carefully on the table and took a few slow breaths.

He looked in the cigar box. There was another photograph, face down, in the bottom. He turned it over.

Four men in uniform with ‘Somewhere in France’ written in chalk on a blackboard in front of them. All had muddy puttees and boots. Four men, four different moustaches. Three wore peaked uniform caps. Robert Watts was bareheaded.

He looked on the back of the photograph. Nothing written there. He put the photo down and picked up the second sheet of letter-paper. It had the same neat handwriting as the envelope. It was addressed care of a hotel in Brighton and dated 25th February 1915. He read it slowly.

Dear Mrs Watts,

I understand that you have by now received news from the War Office of the sad death of your husband, Robert Edward Watts. (We knew him as ‘Ted’.) I was with him when he died. He and I were firm friends. He was a fine man who spoke of you and your children in loving terms every day. I have some few small items of his possessions and a note he wrote to you the night before his death that I hope you may allow me to bring to you. I am spending some days leave in Brighton. Perhaps you would be good enough to let me know if a visit would be welcome.

I am most sorry for your loss. My best wishes to you and your children.

He looked at the photograph of his grandparents in the album again. He ran his hand through his shock of blond hair. His father had been blond in his young days. Watts couldn’t see any family resemblance between himself and the man in the photo, although he thought there was something of his father in the woman’s features.

He picked up his father’s birth certificate. Robert had his occupation listed as ‘Soldier’. Jenny was listed as ‘Teacher’. The birth was registered at Haywards Heath, Sussex.

Watts looked at the date on the birth certificate and frowned.

He had always believed, as the obituaries had stated, that his father had been born on 27th November 1913. The birth certificate had a different date. 27th November 1915.

He pondered this, then walked over to his father’s bookshelves. He double-checked the date of the Battle of Mons.

He returned to his seat. Robert Watts last saw his wife at the start of August 1914. He was dead by 23rd August 1914. His son, Donald Watts, aka Victor Tempest, was born in November of the following year.

Some fifteen months after Robert had died.

Watts steepled his hands under his chin. Looked down at the photo of his grandmother. He could see how it might have happened. It was almost a cliche. The grieving widow. The wounded soldier who had fought alongside her beloved husband delivering his final note to her. Misplaced emotions. A sense of gratitude. Sorrow. Loneliness.

In those days she would need to hide the fact of a child conceived after the death of her husband. Especially if she was to get help from her father.

Did his own father, Donald aka Victor Tempest, know? Perhaps Jenny confessed it to him, her son, when he was grown-up. Perhaps he figured out from his birth certificate that his father couldn’t be his father.

But did he know everything?

Watts looked again at the photo of the four men. Only one of them had a blond moustache and blond hair. The tallest of them. He looked straight into the camera and Watts could see his father in the cold eyes and pursed lips.

He picked up the letter and looked at the name carefully printed out below the indecipherable signature. It was a name he now knew. The name of his true grandfather.

Eric Knowles.