Birdsong (28 page)

“No, thank you. This is your expedition. I have no interest in her.”

“She wants you to go. Go and see her. Go and see her, you bastard. You started this. You finish it.”

Weir was more agitated than he had been even during the bombardment.

Stephen had a sudden feeling of panic. “What have you done?” he said. “What have you done, you raving idiot?”

Weir sat down heavily in a chair and held his face in his hands.

Terrible pictures formed in Stephen’s mind as he ran through the door. He was confronted by a junction with four passageways. He called out.

The lighting was so bad he could barely see where he was going. He fumbled down a wall and pushed open a door. There was a fluttering of chickens inside. He slammed it closed with a shudder. He ran down a second passage, pushing open doors, closing them in relief when no fearful sight met his eyes, but pressing onward in desperation.

He heard a woman’s voice from behind him. “Monsieur?” It was a young, dark-haired woman. She had large, soft eyes and her hair was tied back with a red ribbon. Stephen stood speechless.

“What do you want?”

“I’m looking for … for your mother.”

“This way.”

She took him by the arm. They went into a room with a red carpet
and screens with oriental decorations. Around the door was a wooden cut-out shaped like a minaret. The floor was of the same beaten earth as in the parlour. Stephen looked aghast. The young woman took him behind a screen, where a double bed lay beneath a homemade canopy of cotton silk. There were half a dozen candles on the floor and one in the window.

“Don’t be alarmed. Give me the money now.”

The last sentence restored a kind of normality.

“I don’t want to … I just came to see that everything was all right.”

He heard a laugh from the other side of the screen. It was the middle-aged woman who had taken Weir off with her. “All right. As good as it will ever be.” She came and stood beside Stephen. He could smell some sweet scent on her. “Your friend is very strange. I take him like this”—she cupped her hand in Stephen’s groin—“and he backs away.” She laughed. “It is long and soft, and when I touch it, he begins to cry.”

She was older than Stephen had thought. In the candlelight he could see her more clearly than in the parlour. She sat on the bed and pulled up her skirt to her waist, then lay back and spread her legs. Stephen had never seen someone of that age naked. She put her hand into a bowl of disinfectant, then ran her fingers through the gash between her legs, through the coarse hair and the scarlet flesh that parted at her familiar touch.

Stephen began, like Weir, to back away. Then he laughed. He reached out to the young woman and took her arm. “You, Mademoiselle, yes. Otherwise, nothing.”

The older woman got off the bed and came toward him, pulling down her skirt. He felt her hands on the front of his trousers. She slid her fingers inside, and pulled out what she wanted, a piece of limp flesh, like a butcher taking something from display and laying it on the wooden board. When he felt her mouth close on it, Stephen braced himself not to back away from her slavering attention. He looked up and saw the young woman undressing. The candlelight caught the round white curve of her buttocks as she stepped out of her underclothes and Stephen felt himself stir in the woman’s mouth.

She stood up and smiled, holding his stiffening flesh in her hand. “You English,” she said, and vanished behind the screen.

It did not cross Stephen’s mind how ridiculous he must look. His skin was bursting, stretched almost to transparency by the blood pumped down into it.

The girl smiled at him from the bed. She had small round breasts. She sat with her legs straight out in front of her and her arms folded across her stomach. There was no sheet on the bed.

“Take off your clothes,” she said.

Stephen dumbly did what she told him. He stood naked in front of her. The girl was patient, as though she was accustomed to dealing with awkward soldiers.

Stephen looked at her. Almost six years had passed since he had touched a woman. She was beautiful. There was light in her dark brown eyes; there was air and life in her limbs. The flesh was young and unwounded. He wanted to drown himself in her, to bury deep into the cells of her skin and to forget himself there. She was peace and gentleness; she was the possibility of love and future generations.

As he took a step toward the bed he remembered a day when another woman had lain naked like this, her legs parted in front of his eyes, and he had kissed her there, allowing his tongue to open her, as though this unlocking would provide a way into her deepest self. He remembered her gasp of surprise.

He had obliterated himself in her; he had purged his longing and desire; he had lodged and invested himself in her body. In her trust and love for him, he had deposited the unresolved conflicts of his life. Perhaps his self was still in her—betrayed and unhealed.

The body was only flesh, but she had taken hers away from him; and in her physical absence there was more than missing flesh: there was abandonment.

The tenderness he had felt toward the dark-haired girl was gone. She smiled at him and rolled on to her side, so he saw again the white swell of her hip, too curved to allow the passage of her arms in running or aggression.

When he looked at the girl’s upper body, the ribs and spine, he thought of the shell casing that stuck from Reeves’s abdomen; he thought of the hole in Douglas’s shoulder where he had pressed his hand through almost to the lung.

His tenderness was replaced at first by a shuddering revulsion.
Then his mind emptied. There was only this physical mass. He was losing control. The old woman smearing disinfectant between her legs was unrelated to anything he had known with Isabelle. Her daughter’s body was no more than animal matter, less dear, less valuable than the flesh of men he had seen die.

He did not know whether to take the girl or kill her.

In the pocket of his trousers beside his feet was the knife he had carried on patrol. He bent down and took it out, opening it against the palm of his hand. He went over and sat on the edge of the bed.

The girl looked at him, her eyes wide, her mouth open but unable to produce a sound. He felt no pity for her ignorant fear.

He turned the knife so that the blade was in his palm, then ran the handle of it down between her breasts and over her thighs.

He did not know what he was doing. He hated her for not having seen what he had seen. He felt the skin on her legs give a little under his pressure. The knife left a thin white trail where the flesh was momentarily parted before the blood rushed in again beneath the skin. He wanted there to be more than just this flesh. He rested the handle on the hair between her legs, the blade pointing up towards her abdomen. The girl looked down in horror at the reflections of light on the steel.

Stephen took his hand off the knife. It lay balanced. The girl was too frightened to move. Eventually she slid her hand slowly up her thigh and took the knife, her eyes on Stephen all the time. She held the blade in her fingers, closed the knife, and threw it to the far side of the room, where it landed on the earthen floor.

Stephen looked down at the bed. His mind, which had been blank, was flooded with thoughts and recriminations.

The girl had regained her calm. She did not scream for help or remonstrate; she looked at Stephen’s broken attitude on the bed, his head bowed, his excitement shrunk. Her relief made her generous.

She touched his hand.

Stephen jumped and looked up. He could not believe her touch. It was tender. She should have killed him.

He shook his head in bewilderment. “What …?”

She raised her finger to her lips. She seemed to grow stronger by the second, feeding on her relief and his despair.

She said, “It is very difficult. The war.”

He said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“I understand.”

He looked at her with incredulous eyes, then took up his clothes and dressed hurriedly behind the screen.

I
n the turmoil of a division preparing to move, no one noticed the temporary absence of two officers in the night. They left the motorbike where they had found it and made their separate ways back to the front line, both feeling more sober than they had expected.

The next day Weir had his orders. They would move the following evening to a billet not yet specified, then march to Albert. They were expected to help complete the digging that had already begun near the village of Beaumont-Hamel. There was no indication of whether this was part of a larger strategy or merely a routine redeployment. Since the whole division was on the move, however, it appeared that the rumours were true: they were going to attack.

Weir slumped down on to the lower bunk in his dugout. He ran his hand back over what remained of his hair. So this was the attack at last. No more peace and tranquillity. The big push. He managed a snort of dry laughter. No more the quiet sector with its friendly routine patrols. With the men of the new army, he would sweep the Germans out of France.

He was resigned to it. He felt that he had lost control of his own life: when he had finally tried to alter some central part of his existence it had come to nothing but humiliation. The guns would not be much worse.

———

When he returned from his nighttime shift underground, Jack went to a quiet part of the trench with a cup of tea and took out Margaret’s letter. He read it very slowly, not allowing his eyes to glance ahead.

Jack put the letter down on the ground and stared in front of him. He thought: I will not let this shake my faith. His life was a beautiful thing, it was filled with joy. I will thank God for it.

He put his head in his hands to pray but was overpowered by the grief of his loss. No polite words of gratitude came, but only the bellowing darkness of desolation. “My boy,” he sobbed, “my darling boy.”

———

They arrived at Albert in the first week of June. The tunnellers were at once despatched to the Front, but the infantry were allowed to pass the time in rest, with fewer drills and inspections than usual and a suspiciously improved diet that included oranges and walnuts.

Captain Gray took Stephen to see Colonel Barclay, who was staying in a large house on the west side of town.

“He’s an irascible fellow,” said Gray. “But you shouldn’t be taken in by his manner. He’s a fine fighter. He enjoys hardship and danger.” Gray raised an eyebrow as though to question Barclay’s judgement.

They discovered the colonel looking at maps in the converted study. He was younger than Stephen had expected; although grey, he had a lean, ferrety presence.

“Pretty nice house, isn’t it?” said Barclay. “But never you mind,
I’ll be in the trench with you chaps when you go over the top.”

“Are you actually going to go over the top yourself, sir?” said Gray, with a note of surprise.

“I should bloody well think so,” said Barclay. “I’ve been stuck on my arse with creeping-Jesus staff officers for the last six weeks. The day the balloon goes up I’m aiming to have dinner off the regimental silver in Bapaume.”

Gray coughed. “That would indeed represent a remarkable advance.” His accent seemed to have become more Scottish in Barclay’s presence.

“And do you know who I’ll be having it with? The C in C of the Second Indian Cavalry.”

“I had not appreciated that the cavalry would be involved.”

“Of course they are. We punch a hole, they pour through. Haig’s dead set on it.”

“I see.” Gray nodded his head slowly. “This is Lieutenant Wraysford, who has some knowledge of the terrain. You may remember I mentioned him to you.”

“Yes, I remember,” said Barclay. “The Somme expert. Well, you’d better sing for your supper.”

They went out into the gardens of the house for a stroll, and Barclay asked Stephen about the lie of the land. At Grays suggestion, he had refreshed his memory by looking at a map and was able to tell him of the marshy flanks of the river Ancre, the rising ground toward Thiepval on one side and the ridge on the other.

“Hawthorn Ridge,” said the colonel. “That’s what they call that. We’re attacking on that line toward Beaumont-Hamel. They’re going to blow a bloody great hole in the ridge first.”

“I see,” said Gray. “So that will give the enemy plenty of warning and a nice bit of natural fortification.”

Barclay looked at him with a stern pity. “We’ll get to it first, Gray. But it’s going to be a long day. I expect we may be asked to reinforce other units at various stages depending on how it goes.”

“But we will be in the first wave of attack?”

“Oh yes,” beamed the colonel. “Over at dawn, don’t worry. Regroup and take a breather at midday. Back in the early evening to put the shoulder to the wheel if necessary. Your men ready for it?”

“Oh, I think so,” said Gray. “What do you think, Wraysford?”

“I think so, sir. Though I’m a little worried about the terrain. Also they’ve been here a long time, haven’t they, the enemy? They will have built defences like—”

“Good God,” said Barclay, “I’ve never come across two such faint-hearts. There is going to be a six-day bombardment which is going to cut every bit of German wire from here to Dar es Salaam. If there’s any Boche left alive after that he’ll be so bloody relieved it’s over that he’ll come out with his hands up.”