Consequences (31 page)

Matt was hit. The German ran on—I think he thought he’d got us both. I made Matt as comfortable as possible, but he couldn’t move, so I had to get to our nearest position, which was half a mile or so down the road, and fetch help for him.

I won’t drag this out. What happened was that I ran into a nest of them on the way down and got a flesh wound myself, so it took longer than it should have done. When the stretcher party got up to Matt he was dead.

He was a fine officer and a fine person. I want to send you and your little girl all my sympathy. Matt and I were together in the Delta, before Crete. Whenever he could he was sketching, he had that pad always in his pocket, and I realized he was a jolly fine artist too.

Yours sincerely,
John Marsh

Ruth has scrutinized this letter many times for its omissions and its silences, she has searched beyond and behind its stilted language for what really went on that day. “…to tell you as much as I can.” By what was he constricted, John Marsh? The attentions of the censor? A degree of inarticulacy? A wish to spare Lorna? For how long did Matt lie dying in that ditch? What exactly happened to John Marsh himself? Above all, the language of the letter excludes all she now knows from her reading—it excludes blood, shock, pain, horror, fear. Matt and John “get” German paratroopers; Matt is “hit.”

John Marsh could of course have written a different letter. He could have written a letter simply recording that he was a fellow officer who was with Matt on May 20th 1941, when Matt received a fatal wound, and that he wishes to convey his sympathy. But he preferred this partial account, this awkward expression of dismay and regret.

Dear Mrs. Faraday, he wrote, not knowing that he was writing to the future, that he was writing evidence of a kind, that he was writing a letter to Matt’s granddaughter. He thought he was writing to Lorna, to his friend Matt’s widow. He was writing the decent, tempered, conventional account to the bereaved. Doctored, bleached.

So that is how it was, thinks Ruth—thinks the future. So that—up to a point—is how it was, when
then
was
now.
But this evening, as she stares yet again at that careful handwriting—the writing perhaps of a man for whom language did not flow too easily—today
then
takes on a different complexion. She knows so much that John Marsh could not know. He is trapped within the slide of the present, his present. Ruth, in her own way, knows what will become of his—that the war will end, but not for a while, that Nazism will be routed, that a complicated new world order will emerge, with new nightmares, new Armageddons.

As she reads—the letter, the books—time is collapsed. Past and present seem to run concurrently: what happened, what is thought to have happened.

The next morning, Manolo is subdued—in deference, Ruth realizes, to their objective. On the way to the cemetery, he says, “How old was he—your grandfather?”

“Twenty-nine.”

Manolo sighs. “Younger than I am. Or you—excuse me.” He glances sideways at her.

“Yes. I often think of that.”

“Archaeologists become very used to young death. Most bones are young. Old people are for modern times. In antiquity, you did not get old. And always, it is the young who are sent to war.”

“Yes.”

“When we are there, I shall leave you. I have a friend in Canea—I shall go and make a visit. And then I will come back to fetch you. Two hours, perhaps?”

“Thank you,” says Ruth.

They reach the cemetery through olive groves, which serve also as the car park, though the only car there is that of the custodian. Manolo points out the little reception building, where you can find out how to locate any particular grave. Then he goes.

Ruth walks through the olives, and there ahead is a great expanse of bright flower beds, and rank upon rank of brilliant white headstones that stretch right away down to the blue curve of the sea. So many. They make orderly patterns as she stands looking—diagonals and lines ahead and lines to right and left. There are gravel paths between the rows, and beds of flowers in front of each—geraniums, petunias, canna lilies, hibiscus, and rosemary bushes. Everything is groomed, immaculate. This is order, and control. It is the antithesis of everything that went on here back then—the confusion, the carnage. It is very quiet, there are no other visitors. Just blue butterflies dancing above the flowers, swallows zipping overhead, the gentle rasp of cicadas.

The custodian smiles in welcome, and shows Ruth the book in which she can find Matt’s name, with a grid reference for his grave.

She does not hurry. She walks very slowly past line after line of headstones, stopping to look and read. Many say simply: A soldier of the 1939-45 war. Known unto God. Others are precise: Flying Officer G. S. Hall. Age 23. Gunner P. B. Graham. Age 20. Private W. G. Orme. Age 21. Trooper W. A. Willcocks. Age 22.

Boys, she thinks. Boys.

By the time she reaches the grave she is dazed. She feels numb. She has read name after name, stared at the impersonal, white headstones, each of which makes its simple statement. This was a person. A boy. A man. They conjure up nothing; she does not allow them to do so. Everything that she has read is pushed far away, where she can neither see nor hear it. She sees only the stones, and the blue butterflies, and the silver-green of the olive grove back there, and the sparkling sea beyond the graves. The names are silent, but also eloquent. Those many anonymous graves are differently eloquent; at each, she stands for a moment.

Here it is at last. Lieutenant M. J. Faraday. Age 29. The letters of his name stand out with urgent intimacy. This one. Him. Matt. Her grandfather. For a moment there floats before her eyes that photograph of him—one of the only ones. A young man in shirt and trousers, hair that flops over his forehead, his eyes screwed up against the sun, somehow nailed to another age by the cut of his clothes, the deck chair beside which he stands, the unfocused snapshot. But this crisp white headstone is very much here and now; it is tangible, present, evidence—and suddenly he is more real for Ruth than he has ever been. He was here, once, or not far from here. He too saw olive groves, and that sea, felt this hot sun. And he is still here—gone but not-gone, a mute, impersonal reminder, along with a thousand others.

She stays in front of the headstone for a long time. She has no thoughts, she simply stands there. Then she walks away down to the seaward end of the cemetery, past the long white ranks, and sits on a bench.

There, tears come to her eyes. For him. For all of it.

Back at the hotel, she and Manolo say good-bye. Her flight is tomorrow morning. Then she goes to the bungalow and speaks to the children, reminding them that she will shortly be home. They sound quite surprised, which she takes as a good sign; they cannot have been too disturbed by her absence.

She considers going for a swim, but the thought of that complacent crowd on the beach is off-putting. It is early evening now, but there will still be people clinging to the last of the sunshine. She is deciding to order room service dinner when her phone rings.

“Hi, there!” says Al. “How was your day?”

“Fine.” This is an automatic response, and an inaccurate one, but she does not propose to go any further.

“Good. Me too. I got some good pictures. Listen—I’m tired of this dump. How about going some place else for a meal? I have this hire car. We could go along the coast.”

Ruth dithers. No, she thinks. Then—why sit here?

“Ruth?” says Al.

“Yes. Yes…I…Well—Okay, then.”

“Half an hour,” says Al. “Meet you at the entrance.”

They drive into Rethymnon. There are restaurants on the waterfront. “Great!” says Al. “Seafood. I could use a lobster. Shall we try this one?”

Al orders lobsters and white wine. They share a platter of calamari. He is relaxed, talkative, neutral. He is not making a pass, Ruth decides. Which is just as well because—well, because she does not quite know what she would do if he were.

Al talks about Phaistos. “Amazing place. Not that I could make much sense of it, but the shoot’ll come out just as good.” He laughs.

“You should have had Manolo with you.”

“He’s a great guy, our professor, but tell the truth I cover more ground on my own.”

“Where do you go from here?”

“Berlin. A shoot for a German magazine. Then it’s New York.”

“I couldn’t live like that,” says Ruth.

“Not many could.” He grins. “And I can’t stay put for long. So…have you got your piece all sewn up?”

“Plenty of notes. It’s just a question of writing it when I get back.”

“And what’s next for you?”

Jess’s dentist appointment, she thinks. Tom needs new shoes. Fix for the boiler engineer to come. “Oh—routine sort of things. An article about the Child Support Agency.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“You really don’t want to know,” says Ruth. “It pursues deficient fathers.”

“Not guilty, I’m glad to say. I’ve never fathered anyone, far as I’m aware.”

The lobsters have arrived. Dismemberment is both messy and convivial. “Here,” says Al. “You’re making a real hash of those claws. Let me…”

It is dark now. The restaurant overlooks the harbor, its light flooding onto the water, where shoals of small fish flit to and fro. Ruth discovers that if you throw down pieces of bread a football scrum ensues, a silver melee of darting fish.

She says, “Tom would love that. My son. He’s six. And Jess is eight.”

“I guessed you had kids.”

“Oh. What’s such a giveaway?”

“You looked at kids a lot when we were in those villages. A sort of professional look.”

Ruth laughs. Then she adds, “Their father’s not with us. We’re separated.” She always prefers to get this out into the open; no good reason to make an exception now.

“Ah. Too bad.”

The lobsters have been demolished. “Pretty good,” says Al. “Ever eaten crocodile?”

“I have not.”

“Don’t bother. I met that once in India. Curried. You do global food, in this job—take what’s on offer. Sometimes I’d kill for a Big Mac.”

“Are you sure it was crocodile? I’ve simply never heard of them being eaten.”

“Are you questioning my integrity, ma’am?”

“Handbags, yes. And shoes. But eaten?”

“Well, that was what we understood, from the gestures. Something long, with teeth. Mind, China’s the worst. There it’s dog. And owls. And fried cat.”

“I’ve always thought oysters were going too far,” says Ruth. “Let alone snails. I’m conservative, gastronomically.”

“But you’ll allow a lobster?”

“That’s where I go a bit radical. They’re so delicious.” Ruth smiles wryly.

“In fact,” says Al, “I can’t get up a big interest in food. Gourmet stuff, I mean. Basically, it’s just essential fuel, isn’t it? Cookery shoots I will not do. Food and fashion—no thanks.” He eyes her. “Hope I’m not treading on toes. You’re not in that line, are you?”

“No,” says Ruth “I’ve got out into…issues. The deficient fathers, and suchlike.”

“And this sort of thing?” Al waves vaguely at the light-strewn harbor, the gleaming water.

“This was a one-off, really. I don’t do travel.”

“Very wise.” Al describes various occupational disasters: a hurricane in Cuba, a dodgy aircraft in Mozambique. She looks at him across the table—the long rangy body, the maleness of him. She is disturbed once more. Damn, she thinks. Shit. She focuses deliberately on the backdrop: the floodlit Venetian ramparts, a line of bobbing fishing boats—and now the afternoon comes back, the geometric patterns of the white headstones, the cavalcade of names. And I’m sitting here, she thinks, drinking wine and talking, as though all that never happened, sixty years ago, as though I didn’t know what I now know about it. But that’s what you do, isn’t it? It’s what people do—move on. That’s all that can be done. What must be done.

“Hey!” says Al. “I’ve lost you. Where’ve you gone?”

“Sorry. I’m a bit distracted. By where I’ve been today.”

“More of Manolo’s ruins?”

“No, no.” And, without having intended to, she is telling him. About Matt. About all of it.

He listens carefully. He asks the occasional question. What’s a wood engraving? How old did you say he was? What happened to his wife?

Eventually he says, “Now I understand why you seemed to know so much about world war two. It was personal.”

“Sort of. Though how can it be, when I never knew him?”

“That’s not the point. It’s that he’s—well, all those other guys who died are anonymous, as it were. He’s real.”

“Yes,” says Ruth. “That’s what it is, I suppose. It takes on a different dimension. And you start to feel—guilty, in some awful way.”

“About being here, like this?”

She nods.

“Ruth,” says Al, “you have to ditch that, right? Okay—I understand the sentiment, but it doesn’t get anybody anywhere. Least of all your grandfather. If he’s looking down from up there he’ll be saying—go for it, girl. Live.”

Ruth smiles wryly.

“So think positive, okay? This is now. Then was then—all we can do is respect it, and you’ve been doing that, today.” And he pats her arm—a warm, friendly pat from a large sunburned hand. It seems to seer Ruth’s skin.

Oh no, she thinks, you had better not do that. Kindly do not do that.

“So what I’m thinking,” says Al, “Is that we should have some more wine, and perhaps a dessert, and when we’re done here what about a stroll through the town?”

And so it goes—more food and drink, and then the lit-up populous narrow streets where shops apparently never close, and the beautiful youth of Rethymnon parade, eyeing up the competition. Al shepherds Ruth through the crowds, she buys T-shirts for the children. They stop off for a coffee at a pavement bar.

Ruth observes to Al that there is more left of this town than she would have expected, given the pounding it took in 1941. There are ancient houses, Venetian doors and windows, stone fountains.

“Of course,” says Al. “Nothing gets wiped in this place—friend Manolo’s history lesson. Nothing ever gets wiped—period.”