1982 - An Ice-Cream War (36 page)

“Hammerstein is going,” she said matter-of-factly. “An hour or two, I think.”

“Anything I can do?” Gabriel asked.

“No,” she said. “Nothing.”

Hammerstein took longer to die than estimated, so Liesl didn’t leave the hospital until quite late. Outside it was dark and the familiar noises of the African night—the crickets, the bats, the hootings and the howlings—were everywhere about her. Gabriel watched her pause for a moment in the doorway and then set off down the main street of Nanda towards her bungalow. The street was dark, lit only by a few glimmering lanterns set outside the doorways of the mud shops and houses and the glow that spilled from some windows. Gabriel watched her go. Then he turned and went round the back of the hospital, through the kitchen gardens and into the rubber plantations beyond. He set off down an avenue between the trees. This was another, more discreet, route he had found to Liesl’s bungalow.

He knew his way instinctively now, ducking under the low branch of a mango tree, squeezing through a gap in a thorn barrier, cutting through a dark copse of cotton trees. He paused as he came in sight of Liesl’s bungalow, waiting until he saw her enter. Then he moved forward across a patch of waste ground and past the huge stand of bamboo that towered over the house at the back, the dried knife-leaves of the bamboo crackling softly under his feet. He moved more slowly now, as he entered the thicket of bushes directly behind the house, praying silently to himself that the shutters would be open. It had been a hot day, surely the maid would have opened them in the evening in an attempt to cool the house?

He heard Liesl call “Kimi!” as he took up his position. The shutters were open, an oil lamp was already lit in the room, rilling it with its damp yellow light. Gabriel stood there, breathing shallowly, his heart beginning to beat faster as he mentally rehearsed the routine he now knew so well.

He had stumbled on it quite by chance some weeks before. Liesl had left some cigarettes he had made her in the hospital. He had taken them round to her bungalow only to be told by her maid that Frau von Bishop couldn’t see him as she was busy. Gabriel said it wasn’t important and had left the cigarettes. Going by the side of the house he had seen the light cast on to the bushes from the back window. Guiltily he’d made his way into the thicket to spy, for some reason suspecting a lover. But there he saw the sight that had proved his undoing. A magnificent pale Bathsheba, heavy-breasted and full-thighed, glistening palely in the lamplight as the buckets of water were tipped over her, while he looked on, captivated, an impotent David in the shadows outside.

He stood there now, well screened by the bushes and bidden by the darkness, peering through the leaves into her bedroom. Liesl came into view, framed for a moment by the window. Then she moved out of vision while she undressed. He heard faintly the tinny scrape of the bath being shifted into the middle of the floor and the mutter of some words she exchanged with her maid. It was only a matter of moments now.

For some reason Gabriel felt the acid bite of his guilt more strongly that night than before. He lay on his hard bed in the fetid heat of his hut unable to get to sleep, tormented and entranced by the remembered images of Liesl. Sometimes the desire he felt seemed to prove too much for him and he thought his chest would burst, his ribs springing apart like staves from an old barrel. The ache of his longing hit him with full force. He wanted desperately to bury his head in those pillowy enveloping breasts, set his forehead in the soft junction of her neck and jawbone, feel her strong arms about his body…

He turned over. It was only since he’d started spying on Liesl that the other dreams had left him. The dreams of Gleeson’s shattered face, of Bilderbeck’s shot, the steaming brain on his boot. Then the horrific race through the graveyard, the thumping feet of his pursuers. The writhing on the ground, the skewering, pronging jabs of the bayonets. He always woke up with the one that had glanced off his pelvis: when he felt the nail grating of the metal point juddering on the fresh bone, skidding off into his vitals.

He told Deppe about these dreams, how they came almost every night. Could that be why, he suggested, he was so weak and emaciated? Nonsense, Deppe replied confidently, dreams can’t have that effect.

Gabriel touched his throat, felt his bobbing, trembling Adam’s apple then trailed his fingers down his chest, touching a nipple, then through the damp chest hairs. He dragged a fingertip over the ridges of his ribcage, like rattling a stick on park railings. Then he flattened his palm over his belly, pressing down on the weals and distorted flesh of his two scars. Lower still he touched his penis, cupped and lifted his sweaty balls, feeling instantly more comfortable as he did so. It was curious, he thought, how the touch of your own hand on your genitals was so reassuring.

His mind began to wander. A soldier had been brought in with bayonet wounds the other day. Much worse than his, half his intestines on show. They had turned a peculiar carroty colour. He didn’t last long, even though Deppe was up all night operating, with Liesl and two of the other nurses. He’d worked hard that night too: they had been glad of his assistance. When the man died he brought everyone hot tea, got the cooks out of bed to make some food. Where had the dead man come from? someone had asked. From Morogoro, Deppe had said. The Central Railway. There’s heavy fighting there. We’re pulling back. It was surprising, Gabriel thought, how much you learnt from the war from casual conversation in a hospital. Injured men coming in from battlefields, cured ones going to new postings. Names were always being mentioned. He had quite a clear idea of the main troop dispositions, exactly as Major du Toit had said.

He sat up, shaking his head to wake himself. He suddenly saw what he had to do. Du Toit had been right all along. His position in the hospital
was
valuable. It was
still
valuable. He still had a job to do here. He would continue to gather information. He would conduct innocent conversations with the men in the wards, piece disconnected remarks together, build up a picture of the campaign. He felt suddenly elated by this. It was a kind of authorization of his continued presence. He would stay on in his present role for as long as he could: unassuming, ubiquitous, unsuspected. He would become an ‘intelligenter’, keep notes, plot positions on a map. And then? Then he would escape.

He lay back with a smile of satisfaction, and stretched his hands out to touch the sheet of butter muslin he used as a mosquito net. He wouldn’t think about escape just at the moment, though. He would stay on a few weeks and allow his store of information to accumulate. He felt his wound itching slightly, and he scratched at it through the bandages. Good, he thought, it’s beginning to fester again. He gritted his teeth and pressed his knuckles into the bandages, feeling the pain jolt along his leg. Deppe was coming tomorrow. It should look bad enough to get him back in the ward again.

25 June 1916,
Stackpole Manor, Kent

Charis wrote to Gabriel every month. They were chatty, inconsequential letters about life at Stackpole and the family, but they now suddenly became almost unbearably hard to write. She had no idea if he ever received them because she never got a reply. All they knew was that he was wounded and a prisoner. She had asked Henry Hyams about letters and he had told her to send them care of Divisional Headquarters, Indian Expeditionary Force ‘B’, Nairobi. He said that supplies and provisions for the care of British POW s were passed on to the Germans, which they were trusted to distribute, along with any personal letters. “That’s the general idea,” Henry Hyams had said. “Not that you can necessarily trust the huns to comply. But have a go, Charis my dear, have a go.”

So she wrote every month with an increasing sense of unreality, staring at Gabriel’s photograph, trying to summon up an image of him and their brief life together. It wasn’t very successful, and she had to keep stopping as, all too often, she ended up thinking of Felix.

But she hadn’t written for over six weeks now. For some reason she became suddenly convinced that all her letters had got through, that over the almost two years they had been separated they had come to represent—for Gabriel—his sole contact with the world he’d left in 1914. And as the days passed and the terrifying prospects of the future closed in, it was this personal failure that manifested itself as the most shameful sign of her guilt, the one thing that would ultimately condemn her and, even worse, lead Gabriel to guess that there was something terribly wrong.

But equally appalling in its way was the fact that there was nobody in the world to whom she could turn or confess. Not even Felix. He had written from Oxford saying that, as usual, he had booked them into the hotel in Aylesbury. She had invented a cousin in London and a visit there that would coincide neatly with the end of the summer term in Oxford. But everything had changed. She had written to Felix saying that she wasn’t well and wouldn’t be able to meet him. It was no lie.

But he wouldn’t leave her alone. Because she’d missed Aylesbury, he had started coming to the cottage in the middle of the night. And for the first time they had sex at Stackpole. This too had been enormously upsetting. She couldn’t use the bedroom—its associations with Gabriel were too intense—and so they made do with the sofa in the front room. But there was none of the conjugal intimacy of their hotel encounters. They couldn’t lie in each other’s arms and talk. When they finished they got dressed again, and Felix would sneak back to his room.

This improvisation—with its echoes of clandestine suburban adultery—proved doubly depressing. One night she’d broken down, crying into her hands. When Felix asked what was wrong she blamed it on the shabbiness of the way they were now forced to carry on. It was his total inability to console her, to say anything beyond a feeble. “Don’t worry,” or “It doesn’t matter,” that finally showed her Felix wouldn’t be—couldn’t be—any help. It wasn’t his fault. There was nothing he could do. It was simply the dreadful, final nature of her predicament.

Yet a solution did suggest itself with a kind of quiet, childlike logic one afternoon as she sat by the fishpond. She wasted no time. That evening she wrote to Gabriel. What she imagined would be the hardest letter of her life turned out to be simple and straight-forward. She told him everything, only leaving out the name and identity of her lover, and begged his under-standing and forgiveness.

She had sealed the letter and kept it in a drawer for several days, running through the futile options once more for form’s sake. Then the previous afternoon she had walked briskly into Stackpole village past the church where she’d been married, bought sufficient stamps at the post office and, without any pause, had placed it in the pillar box.

This done, a sort of cheerful calm had descended on her which was punctuated by brief moments of dreadful panic. These were quelled swiftly by an invocation to consider the future, which brought in its train such a sense of misery and guilt that the absolute rightness and inevitability of the course of action she planned to initiate established the comforting indifference again.

By such methods she had managed to get through the day. She had gone for a walk up the river and stood and gazed at the slowly flowing water for a long time. In the evening she had prepared a meal as usual, set it out, and eaten it down heartily. Half an hour later she found she was hungry again. She had banked up the fire and sat in front of it on a low stool, hugging her knees to her, watching the dance of the flames and the collapse of the coals in a benign mesmerized trance.

Shortly after midnight Felix tapped on the window. She fixed a smile on her face and let him in. They kissed.

“Is everything all right, Charis?” he asked. “I missed you at luncheon.”

“I went for a walk. I’m fine. I lost track of the time.”

Satisfied, Felix launched into details of his latest plan. Oxford was so terrible that he and Holland couldn’t face the prospect of another year there. Holland felt that it was perfectly acceptable for them to volunteer as ambulance drivers, as long as they were posted to France together.

“I say, Charis, are you listening?”

“Sorry. I was dreaming. You were saying?”

“I might be going to France as an ambulance driver. At the end of the summer.”

“Oh.”

“What do you think? Don’t you mind?”

“I shall miss you.” The deeper truth that this statement contained caused tears to brim on her eyelids. Felix was touched and put his arm around her.

“Don’t worry about me Carrie,” he said. “I shall be miles from the front.”

Their embrace led to a kiss and thence to a partial undressing and an uncomfortable union on the small sofa. They had become more adept and assured in making the necessary manoeuvres. Charis saw this confidence make itself daily more evident in Felix. He was twenty now; he seemed finally to be leaving the last traces of his boyishness behind.

He didn’t stay for long. Shortly after one o’clock he started yawning and said he’d better get off to bed. Charis saw him to the door, remembering to switch off the light in the hall so he wouldn’t be seen leaving. His complete obliviousness to everything she was suffering was, paradoxically, her greatest support. If he had sensed anything badly amiss, if he had questioned and probed, she doubted if she could have sustained the minimal poise and control she possessed. As it was it required very little effort on her part to convince him that everything was normal.

“See you tomorrow,” he said, kissed her on the nose and was gone.

Charis sat for an hour running through her plan in her mind. She couldn’t avoid causing grief and pain, she knew. But it would be nothing to the consequences that would fall on all their heads if the truth came out.

Eventually she sat down at the writing desk and wrote briefly to Felix.

My darling Felix,

I have been thinking things over and have decided to go away. Under the circumstances it seems the only possible thing to do. Any sort of compromise would be intolerable. I have written to Gabriel and told him everything.