The Hour of The Donkey (29 page)

‘Okay.’ He looked expectantly at Wimpy. ‘Let’s go, then.’

Wimpy shook his head. ‘Not me, Harry old man. You.’

The thunder of the bombs was getting louder: he had lip-read the words, but had misunderstood them.

‘What?’

Wimpy held out his hand. ‘Good luck, old man—‘ his voice rose against the thunder’—
Audentis Fortuna iuvat
… or
Fortis Fortuna adiuvat
, if you prefer Terentius to Vergilius—it comes to the same thing, anyway. You’ll get through somehow.’

It wasn’t the bomb-sound that was ringing in his ears, it was consternation verging on panic.

‘No!’ he shouted, as the bombs got closer.

‘Yes!’ Wimpy shouted back at him. ‘You’re a good chap, Harry—I TAKE BACK ALL THE THINGS I’VE EVER THOUGHT ABOUT YOU—DO YOU HEAR? ONE OF THE BEST—I KNOW YOU DON’T WANT TO LEAVE ME, BUT YOU’VE BLOODY WELL GOT TO—DO YOU HEAR?’

‘NO!’ He shook his head vehemently. Leaving Wimpy didn’t come into it: without Wimpy he would be as helpless as a baby—he would do the wrong thing at the first opportunity. ‘NO!’

The earth shook so violently around them that fragments of soil fell from the lip of the ditch into the bottom, displaced by the shock wave.

Wimpy shouted at him, but this time the words were lost in noise, Bastable was aware suddenly that he was kneeling almost upright, and crouched down quickly to Wimpy’s level. Clods of earth showered down, descending through the half-canopy of vegetation like bombs all around them.

Bastable cowered down beside Wimpy on the bottom of the ditch until the thunder died away. For a moment or two he was unable to think clearly of anything, but then his brain cleared and he was conscious that he was miserable, not frightened.

Wimpy looked at him, white-faced under the grime. ‘Phew! That last one was close!’

Obstinacy was what was called for, decided Bastable.

‘No,’ he snapped.

Wimpy regarded him curiously. ‘Clod! Doesn’t anything frighten you?’

Everything frightens me
. The words stayed unsaid because Bastable was too miserable to say them.
And not having you to tell me what to do frightens me more than anything else
.

Therefore—obstinacy.

‘No,’ he said.

‘That’s what I thought. I just find it hard to believe,’ said Wimpy, banging his ear with his palm and then trying to extract dirt from it with his finger.

‘We’ll go together, or not at all,’ said Bastable, abandoning the idea of trying to explain what that ‘no’ had referred to; if Wimpy had the wrong notion, maybe it would be better not to disabuse him of it, just so long as he stopped arguing as a result of it. ‘Come on.’

Wimpy shrugged. ‘All right. If you think you can carry me, I can’t stop you trying, I suppose . .. even if it doesn’t make sense — I shall only hold you back—‘

Once Wimpy got started, there was no way of stopping him, he could argue the hind leg off a donkey. All Bastable could think of was to ignore him by standing up and looking around again.

Except for the farm cart, which stood untouched, the field was still empty, but it was different now: there were several large bomb craters in it, the nearest of which was so near that it surprised Bastable that he was still alive to see it.

Down the road, the German lorry was still burning; and now columns of black smoke were also rising up from the village itself in several different places, beyond the trees on the other side of the road. Either accidentally or deliberately there was another Colembert in the making.

He wondered what had happened to the Tyneside soldier who had baffled the Germans, and to the wounded men in the house down the track. So far as he could make out, the house wasn’t on fire yet, but he looked away deliberately from it before he was sure, putting the wounded out of his mind. He couldn’t do anything for them, so there was no point in thinking about, them.

What was worth thinking about was that if they were going to move, then now was the time to do it, while the coast was quite miraculously clear.

He reached down and dragged Wimpy to his feet.

‘— and together we’ll stand out like sore thumbs, too—‘ Wimpy had been rabbiting on all the time down below, but the effect of being raised up into the open closed his mouth at last.

He looked around him jerkily, pivoting on his good leg while leaning against Bastable for support.

‘Oh, Christ!’ he murmured, and sat down again in the mud.

Bastable ducked down to join him. ‘What’s the matter? It’s all clear, damn it—?’

‘All clear?’ Wimpy grimaced. ‘So—we’re in the middle of bloody no-man’s-land then, old boy, that’s what. So we’ll probably get the chop from whoever arrives here first—“if it moves, shoot it”, that’ll be the order of the day,’ Wimpy’s voice trembled as he spoke.

Bastable felt disappointed that Wimpy had nothing better to offer than a conclusion he had already reached himself, more or less. ‘So what do we do?’

Wimpy grimaced again. ‘We get out of here—this bloody ditch is too handy, whoever comes this way’ll be certain to take cover in it. If we can hide somewhere less obvious we can wait and see how things turn out, maybe.’

This time it was Bastable’s turn to grimace. ‘Hiding somewhere’ sounded like going back into the village, and that was the last thing he wanted to do. Also, waiting to see how things turned out struck an uneasy note of doubt in his mind from which he shied away instinctively.

‘There’s a house all by itself on this side, just down the road—‘ Wimpy indicated the direction with a nod. ‘—maybe we can find something to eat there, I’m famished—and something to wear, too—‘ He pushed at Bastable ‘—so get moving, Harry— go on, go on! Crawl, and I’ll follow— go on!’

Bastable started crawling. Food was something he hadn’t thought about for hours, and even now, although his stomach hurt, he wasn’t noticeably hungry. But he was, he realized, quite desperately thirsty and his tongue filled his mouth like a sausage.

To wear?

Wimpy pushed him from behind. ‘Go on, damn you—go on!’

To wear? What did Wimpy mean—to wear?

Fifty yards down the ditch, level with the smouldering lorry, a dead German soldier lay waiting for them.

Sweat had rolled down Bastable’s forehead into his eyes, until the way ahead had become a green-and-brown blur which he had wanted to clear, but which, with his hands slimy with mud and Wimpy pushing and grumbling at him from behind, he was unable to attend to so long as no obstacle barred his way.

But then there was an obstacle, ard the obstacle was the dead German.

Bastable knew the German was dead even before he had wiped all the sweat from his face, not so much because the German didn’t move as because nothing could lie there in the mud so uncomfortably—so ridiculously—contorted, regardless of where legs and arms ought to
be
, and still be alive, so he wasn’t frightened, only momentarily shocked, and the shock was momentary because it was overtaken first by revulsion at the thought of having to navigate across the body and then by irritation with the dead man for being where he was, quite unnecessarily occupying the ditch when he hadn’t any use for it.

Wimpy had half overtaken him by the time all this had gone through his head.

‘Go on—get past him!’ The blighter sounded positively eager. He won’t bite you, poor bastard!’

Passing the German was much more horrible than he had imagined: the body was unbearably soft and for one sickening instant it seemed to be actually trying to embrace him as he squeezed past it, pushing it sideways against the ditch so that an arm flopped over on to his back.

Wimpy had no such qualms; no sooner had he clambered over the body than he turned back to it and started fiddling with its equipment.

‘Hold on a tick, Harry … we’ll have his water-bottle, he doesn’t need it now … Damn! It’s got a bullet through it!’ He dropped the water-bottle in disgust and began to pat the dead soldier’s pockets. ‘Well, then… we’ll see what else he’s got that’s worth having … ‘

Bastable closed his eyes on the scene. He knew that it made sense—he himself had robbed the first dead man he had ever encountered, he remembered. But there was something too unpleasantly businesslike about the way Wimpy was setting about the job, as though it was the most natural action in the world.

‘Ah!’ Wimpy let out an exclamation of pleasure. ‘Just the ticket and
two
of them—
and
my favourite sort as well! Here, Harry—one for me and one for you, old boy!’

Bastable opened his eyes, and found he was being offered a large bar of Nestle’s milk chocolate.

Wimpy was already eating his, positively wolfing it. ‘Here—go on, take it, man—bags of energy and whatnot in it—take it!’

Bastable took the chocolate bar. It was limp and broken, and distorted by heat—the body-warmth of the man who had carried it—and the very thought of eating it sickened him. Even the sight of Wimpy munching made his throat contract painfully.

‘I’ll eat it later,’ he mumbled thickly, stuffing the bar into the breast-pocket of his mud-encrusted battledress as he plunged down the shaded tunnel of the ditch again, unable to decide which of them daunted him more, the live Wimpy cramming chocolate fragments into his mouth with muddy fingers, or the dead German with his bloody hands and face.

But now, at least, he was able to leave Wimpy behind, first because Wimpy was too busy finishing his revolting meal and then because the ditch became so deep that he didn’t have to crawl, but could squelch along upright, screened by the nettles, while Wimpy still laboured on hands and knees behind him. Indeed, he was just beginning to wonder, as the distance widened, if he hadn’t been perhaps a teeny bit too quick to discount the liability of that damaged ankle against the advantage of the undamaged wit that went with it… when the end of the ditch came in view.

Or not the end, but here it vanished into a drain-pipe, and the drain-pipe carried the bridge which connected the road with the driveway of the house Wimpy had selected as their destination.

On the bridge, canted up at a steep angle with its handles sticking in the air and its pathetic bundles mostly tipped out, was a crude hand-cart which looked as though it had been knocked together out of orange boxes and a pair of old bicycle wheels.

Bastable raised himself cautiously, and saw that one of the bundles wasn’t a bundle at all: beside the hand-cart, stretched out in the dust, lay a little old Frenchwoman in a black coat with an imitation fur collar, black woollen stockings and brown carpet slippers.

Bastable frowned at the carpet slippers, and the frown released a rivulet of sweat which ran down between his eyebrows into his right eye, the salt stinging it sharply. Carpet slippers really weren’t the sensible thing to wear. He had seen women in the poorer part of Eastbourne wearing carpet slippers just like these, down along Seaside.

Now the sweat had got into his other eye. He blinked at it in an attempt to dislodge it.

He wasn’t sure whether the old women down along Seaside wore slippers in the street because slippers were more comfortable, or simply because slippers were cheap: he’d just never thought about it before.

Blinking didn’t shift the sweat. He raised his arm and wiped his face carefully with the inner part of his sleeve.

Someone ought to have told the old Frenchwoman not to set out in carpet slippers. It was one thing just walking round the corner to the shops in them, but when it came to walking any distance they’d be worse than useless. She wouldn’t have got far in a silly damn pair of carpet slippers—

‘What’s that you said?’ Wimpy’s voice came from behind and below. ‘Carpet slippers, did you say?’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ said Bastable.

‘Yes, you did. You said …’ Wimpy trailed off doubtfully as he began to pull himself up beside Bastable, ‘ something about
carpet slippers
, it sounded—‘ He stopped abruptly.

Bastable shook his head angrily and transferred his attention to the house. It was a typical French house, ugly and foreign and quite out of proportion. In his observation, detached houses in France, other than the more substantial better-class ones, were either squat cabins, more like dilapidated stables with their shutters and half-doors, or fussy boxes with one storey too many and no taste in design. This was one of the boxes, only it was no longer fussy, but half-ruined by bomb-blast, every tile shaken loose and every window blown in. Even as he stared at it, a small avalanche of displaced tiles slithered and scraped down the roof, to fall with a crash into the garden below.

‘It must have been the bombs just now,’ said Wimpy softly. ‘The shock, most likely—she doesn’t look as though she’s got a mark on her, poor old thing.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Bastable automatically.

Eat up your brown Windsor soup before it gets cold, now.

‘All right, then—let’s get inside, and see what we can find—help me out, old man, there’s a good chap—‘

The inside of the house was like every other half-bombed house, full of broken things and fallen plaster which crunched underfoot.

Brown Windsor soup.

He leaned Wimpy against the nearest bit of open wall, between a barometer and a tall mahogany hat-stand which had a mirror in the centre of it. The mirror was blemished and pock-marked with age, where its silvering had peeled away, and he resisted the temptation to look at himself in it: whatever Wimpy looked like, he, with his blue jowl, must inevitably look worse, and there was no point in confirming that image.

‘Find the kitchen,’ commanded Wimpy, pointing down the hallway, ‘Don’t wait for me, man.’

There were two doors opposite each other at the end of the hall, both ajar, and Bastable took the right hand one, putting his shoulder to it when it grated and stuck on debris beneath it.

It wasn’t the kitchen, it was a parlour of some kind, and it was almost filled with an immense table covered with a biege moquette cloth on which a bowl of artificial fruit was the centre-piece. Both were covered with fallen plaster.

In the corner of the room, by the window, an old man with white hair and a bushy white moustache sat staring at him from the depths of an armchair. A gold watch on a chain hung down from the centre button of his waist-coat. Like the moquette table-cloth and the bowl of artificial fruit, he was covered with dust and fallen plaster.