Armistice (2 page)

More images of Philomena flash before me at machine-gun speed, as if my memory is rapidly discharging its final rounds. One day: her in a white blouse and long skirt on her bicycle, giggling as she struggles up a hill; her letting out a small cry as she slips naked into the freezing waters of that hill pond, her back arched away from the cold; later her warm breath in my ear as she moves slowly on top of me—was that the best day of my life?

Past tense?!

No! No! I think I cry.

Jonathan is holding me and I can see him calling but his voice is as if from afar. “Dan. Dan. No. No. Daniel Case: can you hear me? Dan!”

If I am about to die I know that I have to tell Jonathan … It is imperative … If there is just one more sentence, or
phrase, or single word left to me to utter then I know what it—I must tell Jona—If I can just spea—Or if I can just make a—indica—slide my eyes toward—move any part of my bod—

Some men had started a war, other men went off to fight it; the living were left with the mess.

She'd left a note at work. “Back the day after tomorrow. Nothing to worry about. Sorry. Philomena.” Her train slowed down and the smoke from the funnels fell and swirled about the carriages rather than streamed above them, thus her first views of central London, of Euston, were wreathed in vapor. Philomena's hands, which had lain together in her lap, lifted slightly and parted, and began to describe small, slow shapes in the air. They seemed to move independently of the rest of her, they had recently begun to do this, as if responding to a quiet, sad orchestra playing inside her, or if moving more swiftly, betraying her anxieties. Jo should be seeing her scribbled note about now. Should she have told her where she was headed? She didn't know where, exactly. London, yes, but she had nowhere yet to stay tonight, and the note was written in a rush, on an impulse; she'd had to come. Philomena knew no one in the capital. All she had was three names and two addresses of men she'd never met. Who weren't expecting her.

She could hear the elderly guard along the corridor calling: “All change! This train terminates at Euston. London and North Western apologize for the late arrival of this train. All change!” When he passed her compartment he met her eye for a fleeting moment, then she resumed her watch through the glass. The platform appeared below. The train's brakes screeched intermittently as it slowed more. The couplings clanked as they contracted and stretched, jolted and bumped. She directed her hands to take out, from her worn leather everyday bag, a sheaf of envelopes held together by elastic bands. Locating one, an official letter, she nervously checked the sender's peacetime address for the umpteenth time and returned it to its envelope. She touched several of the other well-thumbed envelopes in succession, divining which, if any, she should next revisit. As the roof of the station slid overhead obscuring the faint stars in the end-of-the-night sky her eyes welled with tears. “This won't do.” But another voice butted in, “This might be the way things will be for some time to come.” Voices in her head; was she mad? On the spur of the moment she had decided yesterday evening to travel alone to London, then had been unable to wait for the first train of today, the eight thirty, for that would not have delivered her until lunch time—half a day wasted. So she had caught the last yesterday, the midnight—had banked on sleeping on it, if it felt safe enough. It had, but oblivion proved only fitful, despite the mesmeric rocking of the carriage. Now she felt ragged, but so what? Her life since mid-November had been chaos: breathless lungs racing heart scrambled thoughts,
interrupted by periods of torpor; slow, leaden hours with a black dog in a long dark lane.

She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands then stood. There was no one to help her down with her overnight luggage from the rack so she stood on the seat and hauled herself up. On boarding at Manchester last night an officious guard had quite unnecessarily shoved the bag up there, wordlessly, scowling, she felt, because of something about her. After he'd gone she'd put on the wedding band, precautionary lump on her finger, sad reminder of what was not going to happen.

As the train glided in, the glass window in the compartment door took a heft to get down before she could reach out for the handle on the outside. She looked along the smoky platform to the ticket barrier, and waited for the train to come to a complete rest. While it still moved some doors in other carriages opened and the air was filled with the sound of shod feet hitting stone platform—crack! Men in suits and ties carrying briefcases forged ahead, as if using the train's final velocity to launch themselves, stealing precious seconds in what appeared to be a race to urgent business in the heart of the metropolis. Philomena felt herself infected by the rush, tensed as if ready to spring. Trying to relax her body was hopeless—the surge of human energy was irresistible, pointless to buck. She tried to join in but in stepping down onto the platform she stumbled and had to take another three or four steps to balance herself, by which time other disembarkers were nudging into her from behind. Some veered then converged ahead of her as if she were an obstacle that
they must flow around, but the mass swept her up and along, crammed through the narrow gate—breathlessly squeezed—then spewed out into the Great Hall of the station, where it spread and dispersed and she was deposited, sediment, a particle, forgotten.

Everyone but her seemed to know exactly where they were going, but she'd been in a crowd before, just not a London crowd—she wasn't completely naive as to the ways of crowds. Used to at least the principles of urban navigation, she sped up, dropped her left shoulder, slowed down, paused on her toes to let a man cross, dropped to her heels, dipped her right shoulder, thrust her bag ahead of her to part a way and slipped through the gap. Now she was in an eddy. Here, because she wasn't having to concentrate on avoiding collisions she became aware of all the voices—hundreds, perhaps thousands of voices reverberating back off walls and floor, amplified by the towering ceiling. Cutting through this hubbub were the specific cries aimed to catch the attention: the newspaper vendors, shoe shiners, coffee and sandwich sellers—just like Manchester only bigger, louder, taller, fuller!

As she had planned en route she purchased a cheap map of central London. Unbuffeted at the side of the stall she unfolded this but immediately felt dismayed by its complexity. Famous names: Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Pall Mall led her bewildered eye this way and that but for the most part it was a maze, a blur of routes and names, too much to take in. She folded it and headed out through the station entrance in search of a bus. That was the sensible thing to
do. Look at the first address again; find the correct bus. Out came the envelopes. That one was on the top.

Feeling the massive portico as she passed underneath she turned to look up at it. She craned her neck to see to its tip, pale against the lightening sky. The slightly darker shapes of scudding clouds made it appear that the station was swaying—she felt dizzy, reached out a hand to steady herself, unwittingly touched a passer-by, a man in a three-quarter double-breasted in blue chalkstripe, who muttered “sorry” without even glancing at her. More sights and sounds assaulted her senses: the hooves of hundreds of horses on Drummond Street, the engines of motor cars, motor bikes, motor lorries, motor buses—the latter, from competing companies, swooping at queues of passengers as soon as they formed, the drivers in their exposed cabs impatiently sounding their horns, waving each other out of the way. Familiar names on the buses' sides: Iron Jelloids, Heinz Pickle, Veno's Cough Cure, like the faces of friends in a crowd of strangers. She consulted her map again and this time was able to locate Euston Station. But where on the map was she going? Her finger shakily traced the names of roads in the index. She found a grid reference. There! But which bus was headed that way?

Feeling very much like the country mouse, she searched the impassive faces of those around her for the least unapproachable, to ask for help.

A soldier in uniform ushered Philomena into Major James' office.

“He won't keep you waiting long. Sit there, miss.”

The room was plain and formal: a desk, a portrait of the king. It didn't feel like anyone's room in particular. He might not have been back here very long. The leather seat creaked as her weight shifted upon it.

She looked down at her hands and found that they were moving slowly, like fronds in water; little ripples. She made no attempt to influence them, instead trying to remember all the potential questions she had for Major James. She told herself off for not having written them down and decided to try to do that now. Rifling through her everyday bag she found a stub of pencil and the sheaf of envelopes. On the back of one she began to scribble a question. She drew a line from it and scribbled a sub or supplementary question. Then more lines to additional queries. What began as an orderly list quickly became a diagram, as if a structure was being exposed, or she was inadvertently mapping the truth that there never was, nor could be, a single consequence of an action.

She was hunched over engaged in this when Major James swiftly entered the room so she sat up straight a little too swiftly to be dignified. She noticed that he looked anxious in his body if not in his face, losing his stride a little—it wasn't a trip, nor was it enough to be called a stumble, but there was a definite malfunction and correction. Caused by the abrupt way she had sat up?

“Miss Bligh?” His smiling eyes looked practiced.

“Yes,” replied Philomena, suddenly worried about military etiquette, gathering herself to stand.

“Please, stay seated,” said the neatly uniformed major as he made his way to the other side of the desk and put down his cap. Then he looked as if he changed his mind, and came to the front of the desk, nearer his visitor, where he perched, working off his tight gloves, which he afterward held in one hand. He was stiff-backed. He sported a bushy mustache. In his early forties? His ears stuck out a little.

“Thank you for seeing me without an appointment,” Philomena said, “and so early in the morning.”

“It's a pleasure to meet you,” he said, taking in the overnight bag on the floor by her feet. “Traveled far?”

It was a new bag; paisley. When Philomena had bought it she'd worried it might have a bit too much pattern. Now, in that austere room it looked positively brash. If in the shop it had quietly burbled, in Major James' office it screamed.

“From Manchester.” She examined the word “pleasure,” turning it over in her mind's eye. It jarred but she decided that the major wasn't being haphazard or insensitive; it was just a word. As if he knew what she was thinking the major went on:

“I'd rather not have to meet you in these circumstances, of course. It was especially poignant, your fiancé's death.”

He spoke with clipped consonants, long vowels; very Standard English.

“Poignant because it was the last day?” she asked.

“Yes,” replied the major.

He'd entered the room possibly anxious and now Philomena could sense—from how he looked away, eyes flickering, that
he was embarrassed or awkward in some way.

“Yes,” she said, “the day of the Armistice, first post I had a letter from him, then last post next day the notification and letter from you.”

She searched a while for the next thing to say. Major James frowned and she realized her hands were doing their moving thing. She asked them to stop and they dropped to her lap. It was as if her hands slipped her consciousness from time to time and had to be reminded that she was supposed to be in charge.

“Daniel Case was a very good man,” said Major James.

Philomena felt her pulse quicken. There was something about the major—it
wasn't
that he was embarrassed or awkward; she felt that he was engaged in some sort of evasion, and decided to test him a little.

“Dan was always a little wild,” she said.

“Not incompatible with being good,” replied Major James without hesitation, and she could see that he meant it. Notwithstanding, her doubts about the major hardened into a suspicion that he was concealing something. Was she reading the major wrongly?

Feeling a little flustered by her possibly misguided reaction she said: “It's a shame that they had to fight on the last day,” then immediately thought that shame was altogether too mild a word. “It's appalling that they couldn't have all got together and agreed that as it was the last day they'd stop there and then, and make the day before the last day.”

As she said this she feared she was being stupidly naive
about how things happen on a battlefield, but the major gave no sign of passing judgment. He explained, as if she were his equal: “We had to keep going; to take ground if possible. Some thought that we shouldn't stop until we were in Germany; give them a taste of their own medicine.”

Philomena suddenly felt like crying again and didn't want to in front of the officer, so to distract herself she stood up and made moves to go. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the major's brow had furrowed and his mouth had dropped open.

“Thank you for seeing me,” she said, making herself look him in the eye.

Major James' mouth closed, and Philomena thought that he looked a little relieved that the meeting was ending; she didn't blame him. He certainly reached the door quickly enough.

“I just wanted to see some of the men who knew him,” said Philomena.

“Who else have you met?” asked Major James, lightly.

“No one yet. You're the first.” She took a few steps then remembered she hadn't got one of the things she'd come for.

“Actually, I wonder if you might be able to help me. I have one address but I need another. I have the names of two of Dan's friends, but only the peacetime address for one of them. I have Captain, or, rather Mr. Jonathan Priest's name and address.”