Gifts of War (31 page)

Later that year a zeppelin bomb dropped near the school where Sam taught. The school itself wasn’t hit but the roads around it were cratered and the school was closed for a week, until the rubble could be cleared and the buildings that had been damaged made safe. I had accumulated a bit of leave by then and so I suggested to Sam that we use the opportunity to take Will out of London for a short break. The problems that many of the children in her school were facing were getting to her and she leapt at the idea.

“But where will we go?”

“I know where I’d like to go … I’d like to see where you grew up, in Bristol.”

She was taken with the suggestion. “Can I bring Lottie?”

“If she wants to come, why not?”

But Lottie didn’t want to come. She didn’t say why; she just said she preferred to remain in London.

So the three of us took the train—the first train ride that Will remembered, and which he loved, though he was made a bit sick with the rocking of the carriages and the smell of smoke. We stayed at the Clifton, one of the best hotels in town.

“I never thought I’d ever get to see
inside
this place,” Sam said as we settled into bed for our first night away. “It was far too swish for us when we were growing up.”

The only part of Bristol I knew, of course, was the Baltic Wharf, but I wasn’t about to tell Sam that. I did wonder if Crimson was still there.

Bristol proper was smaller than I expected, and hillier. Walking was quite arduous, especially when I had to push Will, which was normally the case after about half an hour under his own steam, when he conked out.

The next day we found the building where Sam’s parents had rented their flat, we found the school the girls had attended, the church they
went to on Sundays, and we found the tailor’s shop where their mother had worked as a needlewoman. Nothing seemed to have changed.

Sam stood outside the school, slowly shaking her head. “Look how
small
it is. I remember it as a huge place—a cavernous hall, big heavy doors, a
vast
playground. As, of course, it seemed to a tot like me.”

She recognized some of her erstwhile neighbors and school friends, but no one seemed to recognize her—she’d been gone from their lives for too long, and of course had grown up. It was only because they hadn’t moved that she recognized them. And she didn’t introduce herself.

She showed me a river nearby where the sisters used to go bathing in summer, an orphanage where the boys would chase them, and the warehouse where imported sherry was stored, with a back entrance the girls could sneak through to sample the “angel’s share,” the faint smell of fortified wine that escaped through the corks.

“As young girls we could get a little tipsy on the angel’s share,” she said with a guilty smile.

She was pleased we had come, I think. “I wondered, in the train on the way down, if all I would remember was our father.” She looked serious for a moment. “But no. It has brought back my sisters in an earlier time, when we were all together. Before … before we grew up.”

On the way back into the center of Bristol, where the hotel was located, we stopped off at a cemetery.

“I want to show you something,” said Sam softly.

She found the grave she was looking for without any trouble— her memory was good.

“Look at that,” she said.

From the names on the gravestone, which we could read only with difficulty, because it was so overgrown, there were about half a dozen people buried in this one plot, some of them named Ross, but not all.

“My father’s parents and grandparents are here, and my mother’s parents, and one of her aunts.” She looked up at me. “We used to come here a lot, with my mother. She wasn’t maudlin, or anything like that. She would come here, tidy the grave, clean it up, put fresh flowers in the vase, all the while singing to herself and talking to her mother and father as though they were still with us. No one thought it odd— everyone did it, and us girls would sit and have a picnic on the grass. It was what everybody did in those days; at weekends the cemetery was quite crowded, and there were picnics all over the place, children playing, making a noise, laughing.” She smiled. “It sounds odd, but when I was growing up this cemetery was quite lively. Visiting the cemetery was part of our life, we did it every week, and in a way it was healthy. It showed us girls that death was a natural part of life, that life went on afterward, that grief eventually passes. We learned not to be afraid of death.”

She made no attempt to tidy the grave but turned away, back toward the entrance and the road that led into the center of town. “Where will we be buried, Hal? And who with? That sounds crazy— right? What does it matter who you are buried with—you’re not going to know it, are you? But I think a family grave is right, I think a family grave is a natural ending. With this war … with all those men, boys, being buried abroad, in some foreign field, with strangers, it’s not right.”

“Not strangers, Sam. Or not necessarily.” Will had been poking around other graves and I lifted him back into his pushchair. “I agree it’s not the same as being buried in a family grave, but many of the men killed on the battlefield will be buried with colleagues, comrades, others they knew, laughed with, smoked with … many will have come from the same town. And it’s not dishonorable, is it, to be buried on the battlefield where you have given your life?”

“But will we remember them, one by one? I don’t see how we can.
An anonymous death… doesn’t that frighten you just a little bit? That if you’d been killed that day, and not just wounded, and you had been buried where your parents or Izzy could never find you, because your grave was unmarked… isn’t that, don’t you feel… doesn’t it make you go
cold
just thinking about it?”

I didn’t know what to say. The truth is, I hadn’t thought about death very much, not then, not—perhaps—as much as I should have done. And what did she mean? Was she thinking of her mother’s awful fate, of her own death, her sisters’, of Will’s—or of Wilhelm’s?

She was thinking of Wilhelm, of course. She was thinking that if he was dead, she might never find out where. That he was lost to her forever. And that if he was dead, he had died not knowing he had a son and what a… what a cold, empty, desolate
King Lear
–type end that was.

I dug my hands into my pockets. I was playing a… well, not a dangerous game, exactly; that was the wrong word… I was… I knew enough to help her, to give her hope, to remove at least some of the dreadful coldness she felt in her heart. Should I tell her what I knew? If I loved her as much as I told myself I did love her, didn’t I want her to be happy, to be released from the terror that gripped her? That was in my gift.

Love doesn’t work like that. Love has its own logic. My sister had discovered that too. Instead, I told myself that maybe Sam was preparing herself for the fact that Wilhelm was probably dead, that she would never see him or hear from him again. That’s what all this talk of death meant. I didn’t really believe my own reasoning but it got me off the hook, at least for then. I said nothing.

THE NEW YEAR
, 1917, was marked by another innovation: the air war—the first in history—was getting under way. On a personal level, I was glad to get the festivities over with. For obvious reasons, Christmas for me was fraught with mixed emotions. Without meeting Wilhelm, I would never have met Sam. At the same time, the course I had followed played on my nerves, more so at Christmas than at other times of the year. His photograph was still safely hidden in my briefcase but I never took it out now, to look at it.

That Christmas, at the end of 1916, we did something Sam had had at the back of her mind for a while without telling me. On the day after Boxing Day, she invited some of the poorer children in her school for tea at the flat. About half a dozen turned up and, from the way they wolfed down the food we provided—sandwiches and jelly, mainly—it was clear that they hadn’t seen a square meal in weeks. All of us were eating less at that stage of the war, and we had all developed a craving for sugar. Meatless days once a week had been introduced by the government. To begin with, I had thought Sam risked being disappointed with her Christmas treat—that her approach was essentially patronizing—but, I have to admit, I was wrong: all the children seemed to enjoy their afternoon with “Miss,” as they called her.

I was disconcerted when, after tea and without warning, she asked me to give a repeat of the talk I had given to the schoolchildren in Middle Hill—the one about the Christmas truce. What did she mean by it, I asked myself. Did she mean anything?

Anyway, I got through it, and the children left.

Later that night, however, we were reading in bed and I was half way through the
Morning Post
when I shuddered. “Mannheim was bombed, according to this. How terrifying that must be, explosives dropping out of the sky. It must cause widespread panic, bringing killing miles behind the front lines, and affecting civilians as much as trained soldiers. What new horrors will this war bring us next? Didn’t Wilhelm come from Mannheim?”

She didn’t reply immediately; she was underlining something in the book she was reading. “Yes … yes he did. But how did you know that?”

I went cold. Too late I realized my mistake. I tried to remain calm, matter-of-fact. “You told me. How else would I know such a thing?”

“Did I? I don’t remember. When?”

I had made a mistake, a bad one, and having been cold, I was now sweating under my nightshirt. But I had the sense, or the low cunning, not to make too much of it, not to overreact, not to be too specific, not to get into a protracted conversation, giving an elaborate explanation that Sam might brood on.

“You must have told me on some canal bank or other. Do you want to read the article?” I handed her the paper.

She took it, and buried herself in the account I had been reading.

I turned out my light, lay back, and waited for her to finish.

She did and turned out her light.

We watched the shadows from the traffic on the Embankment chase each other across the ceiling. As we often did, talking, before making love.

I waited apprehensively for her next question. Surely she could sense my heart thumping like a drum in my chest. Sweat had formed at my temples—but I daren’t brush it away. That would show how tense I was.

In some ways it was extraordinary that I had not made any mistakes
in my deception before now. But one error was all it took, one small foot wrong, one false move could destroy everything, could cost me my happiness, could raze and unravel and dismantle the whole careful choreography I had concocted. The pillow under my neck was damp with sweat.

Her next question would tell me if, in one unguarded moment, I had unwound months of effort. I daren’t look in her direction.

And then I heard Sam’s regular breathing, a rhythm I knew well.

She was asleep.

At the end of January and beginning of February, three things occurred together—though I am not attaching equal weight or significance to each. On the thirty-first, Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare in the eastern Atlantic, even against neutrals, and immediately began sinking American ships. On the same day, Genevieve Afton was tried for treason. I gave evidence at the trial, which was held in a reserve court building just south of the river near Lambeth Palace, the official residence of the archbishop of Canterbury. The court had been bombed by a zeppelin a day or two before, and although the damage wasn’t serious half a dozen soldiers were stirrup-pumping water from a burst main into the courtyard. I was cross-examined for about two hours and, I think, gave a good account of myself. Anyway, I found out later that Genevieve was found guilty and sentenced to death. I tried to put that out of my mind.

I was helped, to some extent, by the fact that a week later the third thing happened and I was promoted again and transferred from the Gym to the basement of the building, colloquially known as the Crypt. My job now was to read raw intelligence reports, reports that had come in from the field, and so had already been pored over by intelligence officers in France, or Flanders, or wherever they’d happened to
surface. But we had access to all manner of material and the idea was that we were farther from the action, with a wider perspective, so that, perhaps, we could discern strategic matters in among the mass of material we had access to.

The Crypt was a step up in the career pecking order, but a definite step down in the life amenities department. The room was far more secure than the Gym and for that reason had no windows—the lights were always on, tobacco smoke of one sort or another was always swirling in and around the desks we worked at (no tables now), and the drone of a primitive air-recycling machine provided a steady hum that masked almost all other sounds. No chance of hearing the air-raid warning whistles that had been introduced.

The desks were arranged in concentric circles, facing a central glass booth where the commanding colonel sat, handing out the work. There was a good deal less camaraderie in this department than there had been upstairs, but in any case 1917 was a much more serious time. We all knew that the war could be lost at any moment; we would all have rather been at the Front in some more active role, though we knew that, at any moment, any one of us could come up with a crucial development. So we got on with it.