A Half Forgotten Song (52 page)

Hannah got up for the brandy bottle and topped up both their mugs, even though she was the only one who had emptied hers. Zach tasted it and grimaced.

“I can’t believe any of this,” he said, shaking his head. “How did he get back here? Who was buried in France if it wasn’t Charles?”

“Who was buried? Can’t you guess?” said Hannah. Zach thought hard, but could make no sense of it.

“No. Who was it? Who did they bury in 1940, thinking it was Charles?” Hannah studied him for a moment, her eyes switching rapidly back and forth across his face.

“Dennis,” she said eventually. “They buried Dennis.”

C
harles told Dimity about it in one of his outpourings—his rare outpourings. Usually he would only talk about his drawings, or request art supplies, or tell her the odd food cravings he would get. Cherries one day, French onion soup the next. Once he wanted smoked salmon, and Dimity fretted and fussed and took days building a smoking barrel in the backyard, since there was none to be had in the shops and she could never have afforded it if there had been. The result was a tough and overdone trout, the flesh almost leathery, but Charles swallowed it down without complaint, smiling appreciatively. Dimity wondered then if she’d needed to bother—if she could have given him fresh herring and told him it was smoked salmon, and he would have eaten it with as much relish. But she would never try such a deception. She would always strive to give him whatever he asked for. Making him happy was all she could do for him, and all she could do for herself. Protecting him assuaged the feeling of falling that she still woke up with every single day.

But sometimes he had nightmares, and his shouts woke her and sent her rushing in to comfort him, both for comfort’s sake and in case, just in case, there was anybody outside to hear him. He would be up from the bed and pacing the room, clasping at his hair or wiping his hands down his body as though there was something on them that appalled him. She followed him and held him, even when he pushed her away, until he slowed and then sat down, the weight of her too much to resist. She tethered him back to the earth, to the Dorset coast, to where he was. Held him down until he could feel the sea booming through the bones of the house, and his body went limp. Then he would tell her what he had seen, and who had been to visit him in the darkness of sleep. A torrent of words, an outpouring like a purge. As necessary to healing as draining the poison from a wound.

And as often as not, it was Dennis he’d seen. The naked, charred remains of a young British soldier. The blast that killed him had burned the clothes from his body and left only his boots, which still smoldered. He was lying in the long grass a good thirty feet from the crater, and Charles tripped over him as he made his dogged and desperate way north, to the coast. No trace of his uniform and almost none of his skin. He was so badly burned that his eyelids were gone, as were his lips. His teeth ringed a mouth that sat slightly open, so that he appeared mildly surprised by his own death. One eyeball was charred black and ruined, but the left side of his face, which must have been turned away from the blast, was more intact. The iris was exposed and watchful. A rich brown color in a white stained yellow by the smoke. Charles stared into it and was reminded, grotesquely, of crème caramel. The man’s flesh was scarlet and orange and black; cracked, weeping, sticky, and raw. Flies had already begun to settle on him. Charles stayed with him for half an hour or more, because he could not look away from that one startled, piteous eye. The rest of Charles’s unit had moved away. He lay hidden, and felt the dread and panic of being left behind mingling with the terror of going forwards.

Gradually, things grew quieter, and a glint of color caught Charles’s eye. The sun, coming out from behind clouds and smoke, shone onto the green and red disks of the dead man’s identity tags. They had been flung around to his less-burned side, and lay against the top of his shoulder, still threaded onto a charred leather thong. There was nothing else to identify him. No badges, no papers. Charles ran his eyes the length of the man and guessed their heights to be roughly similar. He reached out to lift the tags, to read the man’s name, but they were stuck to his burned flesh. Nestled into it. He had to claw at the man’s shoulder with his fingernails, and pain and horror shot through his own body like electricity as he did so, because he could feel how much it must hurt.

He was whimpering by the time he got the tags free, and wiped the mess from them with his thumb to read the name.
F. R. DENNIS
. Beneath the twin holes where the tags had been, a whitish gleam of bone showed through the black and red. Charles lifted the bald, leathery skull to get the thong over it, then took off his own tags and put them around Dennis’s neck. He fitted them into the holes in his shoulder, covering the exposed bone. Then he put on Dennis’s tags and backed away, and felt something clinging to his hands and caught beneath his fingernails. It was shreds and chunks of Dennis’s burned skin and flesh, and he wiped them frantically on the long grass, whimpering, and then vomited until he fainted. When he made it to the beaches, to the chaos and the fire and the thronging men, he was bundled onto a small ship by an officer he didn’t know.
Careful with this one,
the officer said to someone else on board.
I don’t know what happened to him, but I think he’s gone wackers.

F
. R. Dennis? So . . . all these years the body lying in Charles Aubrey’s grave was in fact this F. R. Dennis?” said Zach. Hannah nodded. “I’ve been to his grave. I paid my respects—I took flowers. I almost prayed, for God’s sake!”

“I’m sure Mr. Dennis appreciated it,” said Hannah quietly. Zach tapped agitated fingernails on the tabletop, thinking rapidly.

“This is . . . this is incredible. That such an important man lived on for so long when the whole world thought he was dead . . .” He shook his head, and the scale of that secret made his pulse pick up. “It’s incredible . . . And the pictures?”

“All his work from the last sixty years of his life. Well, all except three or four pictures, that is.”

“The ones that were sold?” Zach asked. Hannah nodded. “You sold them for her?”

“For her, and for me. When we needed the money.”

“For you?” Zach stared at Hannah for a second and thought about this. “You mean . . . she gave you drawings, and you sold them?”

“Not exactly.”

“You
took
drawings?” Hannah said nothing. “Because if Dimity wanted it all kept secret, then I guess that gave you the leverage to take whatever you wanted, right? How could you do that?”

“It wasn’t like that! I . . . I had every right to. Besides, she needed the money, too, and she couldn’t have sold them without me.”

“I hardly think dealing with the auction house for her gives you the right to—”

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about . . . making the pictures saleable. Making them viable.” Zach shook his head in incomprehension, and Hannah fidgeted slightly. It was the first time he had ever seen her look guilty. She sighed suddenly. “A lot of them we couldn’t let anybody see, because they were of Dimity, but obviously later on in her life, when he supposedly couldn’t have known her, since he was meant to be dead. And a lot of them are scenes of war, so obviously they couldn’t be seen, either. That left some of Dennis, and some of Dimity while she was still young but . . . He never dated any of them. None of the pictures he did after he came back from the war were dated.”

“Why not?”

“Because, I suppose, he had no idea what the date was.”

“Christ. And you . . .”

“I wrote the dates on them,” she said. Zach drew in a steadying breath.

“I knew it! I
knew
the dates weren’t right!”

“You were right,” she said solemnly, and Zach’s moment of excitement faded. They sat in silence for a minute.

“You do a good imitation of his handwriting,” Zach told her, not sure how to feel. “You have a talent for that.”

“Yes. I know.”

Again they sat in silence for a while, each lost in thought. Outside, the wind had got up and it started to rain. It made a lonely sound, and Zach felt the sudden need to gather Hannah close to him, and warm her. But the shadows in the corners were too deep, too distracting. Years of lies and hidden things left so long that they’d hardened, ossified. Beside him, Hannah reached behind her head and pulled her hair out of its ponytail, and the familiar scent of it gave him a sharp, unhappy pang.

“You had no right, you know,” he said quietly. Hannah looked at him, and her gaze hardened.

“I think I did.”

“Those pictures don’t belong to you. They don’t even belong to Dimity! She was never his wife . . . she never had his child. Keeping somebody prisoner for sixty years doesn’t make you their common-law wife, if that’s what you’ve been thinking . . .”

“Prisoner? He was never a prisoner! If he’d wanted to leave, he could have.”

“So it was okay that she let the world think he was dead? That she let his family think he was dead?” Hannah pursed her lips; answered him in a clipped tone.

“If that’s what he wanted. Yes,” she said. Zach shook his head and Hannah seemed to wait. Waiting for his next attack, his next argument.

“Those pictures belong to Charles Aubrey’s next of kin,” he said, and to his surprise, Hannah smiled.

“Yes, I know that. And you’re looking at her.”

“I’m
what
?”

D
imity could hear them speaking downstairs, but she couldn’t understand their words, so she stopped trying, and let them wash over her like the blurred sounds of the wind and rain outside. None of it mattered anymore. The room was empty. Charles was gone. No way to explain to them that keeping the door closed had kept her heart beating. No way to explain that as long as she couldn’t see that he’d gone, she could dream he was still there. The shifting of the house that sounded like his footsteps, the breeze moving his papers that sounded like him working. She had come to believe it, over the last few years. Come to feel like he had not gone, and the long, happy years she had spent looking after him still continued. The sudden emptiness of the house was as cold and deep as death. She could hardly find the breath to go on living. The chill of his absence crept closer all around her, leaching the warmth from her blood and bones. Every limb felt heavy, every breath was a labor. Her heart was as vast and hungry as the sea; as empty as a cave. Life was just a burden, with the room upstairs sitting empty. The long debate of the young man and woman downstairs kept the other voices of The Watch quiet, at least. The living were louder than the dead. But there was a new face in the shadows; come to see her at last, come to haunt her. A silent reprimand of wide eyes, full of anguish.
Delphine.

She came to The Watch one day. Out of nowhere, on a still, yellow autumn morning tangy with the smell of dew and dead leaves. The war went on, all unobserved. Charles had been with her for over a year and they had settled into their strange new life together, finding a rhythm to it, the comfort of habit. And for Dimity, the joy of having everything she ever wanted. A person to love, and be loved by; to be needed by.

“Hello, Mitzy,” said Delphine with a cautious smile, and all at once the ground yawned open at Dimity’s feet again, vertiginous as the cliff edge, just ready for her to teeter and fall. Delphine looked older. Her face was longer, and thinner. Her jaw followed an elegant curve; her hair was parted to one side, and swept back in gentle waves, soft and shiny. Her brown eyes were deeper than they’d been before. As deep as the earth; they seemed far older than the rest of her. “How are you?” she asked, but Dimity couldn’t answer her. Her heart was beating too hard, her thoughts clamored, and no words would come. Delphine’s smile faltered, and she fiddled with the clasp of her handbag. “I was . . . just hoping to see a friendly face. A familiar face, you know. And I . . . I wanted to make sure you know about . . . Father’s death. Last year. They sent me a telegram at school. Did you know?” she said, in a rush. Delphine’s eyes flooded with tears as Dimity nodded. “Well, I thought I should check. I thought you ought to know. Because . . . well, you loved him, too, didn’t you? I didn’t like it at the time, when Mummy told me. But why shouldn’t you love him, too, just because we did?”

“I . . . I loved him,” Dimity said, with a tiny nod of her head.

They faced each other across the step for a while, and Delphine seemed undecided about what to do or say next.

“Listen, I . . . Could I come in, for a while? I’d like to talk to you about—”

“No!” Dimity shook her head rapidly, as much in refusal as in denial—in response to the small voice at the back of her mind that was telling her that of all the wrong things she had done, turning Delphine away would be one of the worst. She buried the voice, stood firm.

“Oh,” said Delphine, taken aback. “Oh, right. Of course . . . Will you come out for a walk then? Down to the beach? I don’t want to go just yet. I don’t . . . know where to go next.” Dimity stared at her for a moment, and felt her careful emptiness deserting her; felt the falling start. But Delphine’s eyes were meek, imploring, and in the end she could not refuse her.

“All right. To the beach then,” she said.

“Just like old times,” said Delphine. But it wasn’t, and neither of them smiled.

They went down the valley, through Southern Farm’s fields, then onto the shore. They walked westwards into the late-season sun, weaving through the boulders to the shingle by the water’s edge. It was a flat sea that day, all silvery and pretty, as though the world was a calm and safe place. The two young women, as they walked, knew otherwise.

“How is your mother?” Delphine asked. “I think back a lot, you know. Over the time we all spent here. I think back and I can see, now, how hard it must have been for you, for us to just come and go. And I can . . . guess, now, how hard a time your mother must have given you. All the bumps and bruises you always had . . . I was so blind, at the time. I’m sorry, Mitzy,” she said.