If Then (23 page)

“When have I ever been?”

“Did she take you through the procedure? The side effects? Did Alex tell you what you might lose?”

“We have nothing to lose.”

“Tell me what she said.”

“It’s experimental. There are risks. The Process can do more than just control my actions. It can change how I see the world. What I think about it. My memories and beliefs will be part of the Process. In some sense, there will be no distinction between the Process and myself. There will just be the Process and the part of the Process that thinks like me.”

“That sounds like death.”

“It’s a chance to start over and to leave behind all the aspects of myself that aren’t working. No one will notice, least of all me.”

“I’ll notice. I’ll suffer. Will you be capable of love? Afterwards?”

“Sex?”

“Love.”

“I’ll still be with you. We’ll still work at life together. But instead of digging a hole, we’ll be building a bridge.”

“What about your work?”

“What about it? The world has violently changed. Nothing we do has any value and any future prospect of our work being useful has been exterminated. Everything I believed was wrong. The other side was not right, either. But being right or wrong is irrelevant. There is only power or powerlessness, necessary or unnecessary. We’ve been given a chance for power.”

“And what if you do something terrible under its influence?”

“I will not be responsible.”

“
P
rivate
? Are you awake, private?”

The priest steps carefully around sleeping, drugged men. Father Huxley is an ascetic beanpole. His hands are soft, untouched by experience; as with so many of the soldiers, his skull is indecently apparent, the eyes hollow, the lips thin. His cheekbone presses lustily against the skin.

Huxley puts his Bible down between them.

“The sergeant tells me that you are a Sussex man. My final year of study was at an institute near Glynde, outside Lewes. I was meant to be spending my time in devotional reading and exercises, but instead I was often out on the Downs and exploring the Weald.”

James nods. The priest wants to talk, so let him. Relieved, no doubt, to speak to someone who is not in a ghastly state.

“Lovely town, Lewes. Nestled in the Downs, with the river running through it. I had breakfast in the ruins of the castle with an archaeologist, a Mr Dawson. Perhaps you are acquainted?”

Stretcher squads are on the move again, ragged wraiths fetching the vacated stretchers from outside the dressing station. The Milky Way pulses overhead.

“I grew very fond of the fauna and flora. The starlings winging their way out to sea. The great oak trees in November, so sad and ancient. The Institute had the most marvellous gardens, bursting with rhododendrons, and surrounded by woods so laden with life I fancied that evolution was going on all around me.”

He had dreamt of an Institute. Of a woman who cut a hole in his skull, like the skulls he found in the tomb on the ridge. The precise details of the dream had dissipated and would not come into focus, like very small writing that did not reveal its meaning no matter how close he brought it to his eyes.

“In a chestnut tree outside my window, a little owl would set up for the night. I studied to the rhythm of his hooting. “

“There are no birds here,” says James. It is an effort to speak.

“Not for another month, I suspect. And then the cliffs will be full of their migration. I doubt even the shelling will scare them away. Instinct is so strong. It’s bred in the bone. Did you ever see the starlings over Eastbourne pier?”

James coughs and cannot stop himself coughing. The priest apologizes, and unfolds the first of his legs from his cross-legged position. James stops him.

“Father, I’m troubled.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m suffering from a kind of vertigo.”

“Do you want me to fetch the doctor?”

“No. Vertigo of the soul, if such a thing exists. Do I sound mad?”

“Reason will not help you here. Only faith.”

Around them, the wounded men moan and shift in their sleep. Instead of the healthy snoring of the dugouts, the sounds of the clearing station are muted: weak curses and morphine whimpers.

The priest whispers to him, “This is part of God’s plan. This war. Your suffering. It must happen.”

With difficulty, James struggles up then looks out to sea. The silhouettes of the battleships are like cutouts in the bay. The lighters beetle in another division, the same as the night before, and the night before that. Upright, his chest is less congested. He breathes in the sea wind. It does not hurt so much.

“You took an urn from the tomb,” says James.

“Yes. I hope to keep it safe and deliver it to the British Museum.”

“There is a skeleton in it.”

“I daren’t open it. The air will turn its contents to dust. But yes, I imagine there are human remains inside.”

“In the tomb, did you see the holes cut into the skulls?”

“Trepanning. To let out evil spirits and evil thoughts.”

“The belief that good can come from suffering is an evil thought.”

The priest’s eyes glitter. “What would you say if I told you that I thank God for the war?”

“You cannot!”

“This is my prayer: ‘Thank you God for making me a priest, and thank you God for this war.’”

“Do you say this to all the wounded men?”

“The sergeant said you were an intellectual and a mystic. On those terms, I thought we could speak. Tell me more about your vertigo.”

“I see glimpses of another life. Similar to this one, almost a reflection of it. Imagine laying your forehead against a cool mirror. The thoughts of your reflection are obscure to you. And that impression – no, my intense conviction – is that I’m home. The landscape of Sussex and this place converge. The ridge of Kiretch Tepe has seven peaks, just the same as the Seven Sisters running along the South coast.”

“I know it well.”

“Where the Cuckmere river reaches the sea. Over the next beach, instead of Anzac Cove, there is the sheer cliff beach of Birling Gap. I spent my honeymoon there. In the vertigo, it’s more than a memory.”

Huxley grips him, his thin hand ridged with tendons.

“Tell me, when you were in the trench and it was on fire, was that the moment in your life when you felt most fully and fruitfully alive? God did not
create
the world. God is still
creating
the world. Creation is a process that we must participate in, and witness. The front line marks the advancing edge of Creation, and
you were there
.”

From further along the line, a soldier falls into spasms. His weary mate calls for a doctor and a priest. Huxley takes up his Bible. The glitter in his eyes is like shrapnel in the sun.

After the priest moves on to deliver the last rites, James attempts to stand, and finding it possible, absents himself from the wounded. Hundreds of fresh troops mass on the beach.

He takes out his Zweiss glass and, careful not to blacken the lens with his thumbs, he sweeps the heavens. Stargazing makes him feel like a boy. The act summons the memory of childhood, and that is comforting. He wouldn’t need Cavorite to get to the moon nor to be fired out of a cannon. A mere act of will would suffice. He finds Venus. It is so bright because its cloud cover reflects the sunlight. Such stultifying clouds would make the surface unbearably hot and intensely pressurized. Trees planted at altitude, where the temperature and pressure were not so great, might begin the work of converting the carbon dioxide to oxygen. What kind of man would adapt to that environment? We would not be land dwellers. We would live in the clouds. The winged men of Venus. Was there any truth in the priest’s obscene optimism? Would the descendants of man, high in their Venusian aeries, gaze back at the Earth and say that a war helped man to a new knowledge of the communion of all men? That the war was a practically unavoidable step in the dialectic of human destiny?

He is filthy with smoke. Bootless, he walks across the scrub, through the milling troops to where the sea laps quietly against the pebbles. He unhooks his braces, takes off his shirt, removes his trousers and his undershorts. The new troops shuffle in their ranks; naked, he wades into the sea. “The way your head twists when you swim,” said Ruth, “it’s as if you are violently disagreeing with the water.” He stretches his body underwater, his hands clasped together, reaching forward to stretch his stomach muscles. Then, as she taught him, he kicks his legs forcefully, staying close to the surface but not breaking it. His lungs are too sore for him to stay underwater for long. He surfaces. A lighter has run aground on the sandbank, and the troops who can swim are disembarking with full packs into the deep water. The sea water cools and cleans his entire body. Ruth taught him to always stay calm in the water and to control his stroke. It was a time of sensual instruction. The body does not forget such lessons.

Ahead the troops plop into the sea like stones. The fittest swimmers have a rope that they are bringing into shore, hoping to use it to dislodge the lighter. As he gets closer to the boat, he can see the hopeful, anxious white faces of the men peering down into the water. One man is familiar. Jordison climbs up onto the stern, his broad yeoman’s face contemplating the waves. James calls to him and yells. Jordison! You’re alive! The Lancastrian takes up his pack and rifle. He looks out into the sea in search of the voice that knows his name, but the light is at his back, and it is all dark ahead. Then, with a grim look, Jordison steps off the boat and disappears into the water.

19

P
rivate Brilliant brings
over the dixie for morning tea. Two cups and saucers on a tray balanced on an overturned crate.

“Tea up,” he says.

Collinson carefully spoons a dollop of apricot jam upon a biscuit. The moment the jam is out of the jar, fat flies cluster upon it, their emerald-and-ruby heads inscrutable and calm in the face of Collinson’s fussy gesticulations; he waves, the flies disperse, the flies settle upon the jam before he can bring his hand back again.

“The problem,” says Collinson, “is that a fly’s perception of time is keener than mine. A single second to a human is a lazy Sunday afternoon to a fly.”

Brilliant is a small man in an ill-fitting uniform and he makes a rather baggy silhouette against first light over the Aegean, swinging the dixie on its handle as he goes. James reaches over to take the cup and saucer. Half of Collinson’s eyeglass is entirely caked in earth and yet he has not bothered to clean it. His dark eyebrows are rimed with dirt.

“At Cambridge, we had a trick to keep wasps away. When we were taking a picnic beside the river, we would set a pot of jam under a tree some way back from our party so that the wasps would congregate there rather than trouble us while we were dining. The efficacy of this tactic was dependent upon the number of wasps: if wasps in the immediate area exceeded twelve, then we would have to open two pots of jam.”

Collinson tests a corner of the biscuit with his front teeth and, finding it resistant, flicks it out of the dugout.

“The question is: how many flies are there and at what rate are they increasing?” He sips noisily at his tea, and finding it as unsatisfying as the hard biscuit, flings the cup’s contents out in the direction of the sea.

“Every day we provide improved breeding conditions and food for the flies. Their rate of growth must be exponential. But how can we be exact?” Collinson taps the bowl of his pipe clear then digs out charred remains from the stem. His bottom lip is blistered and his muzzle is wild. There is a long tired pause as he tries to remember how to light the pipe, then the bowl of embers seethes and smoulders like Chocolate Hill. The smoke stirs him from his reverie. He gets up and walks over to the discarded jam and biscuit. With the toe of his boot, he prods at the feeding clump of flies.

“This biscuit does not constitute a representative sample of the frequency of flies to the surface area of the battlefield.”

“You are concerned with the flies,” says James. His voice comes from somewhere far away.

“The flies are important. If the flies prevent me from eating the apricot jam, then that constitutes a measurable degradation of my spirit. Of my will to fight. Also, the constant irritant of flies prevents me from attending to other tasks that may aid my survival. That’s before we even get onto the transmission of disease.”

“You are saying the flies are the enemy?”

The tea is cold and tastes strongly of chlorine.

“No. My argument is that if one were to devise an equation to predict the outcome of this battle, then the flies would have to be a factor. I wager the flies have never figured in the plans of our leaders. Therefore, one can infer that their method of planning is inadequate for war. They stand on the hill or back at the battleship, and try to influence events with merely their intelligence and their will when clearly a vast range of unfathomable contingencies come between the logic of their battle plan and any final dispatches. Tiny details imperceptible to them decide everything.”

“Such as flies,” says James.

“Yes. The flies indicate two things: firstly, corruption has set in. Secondly, our leaders are guilty of a fundamental error in their attempts to influence the battle from the helm, as it were, by willpower alone. The battle, as we have observed since the landing, is determined by the most complex interdependencies. Only a set of algorithms could accurately predict the outcomes of such a network.”

Should he tell Collinson that he saw a man returned from the dead? Jordison had stood on the prow of the stranded lighter, then stepped out into the water. James had lost track of him in the chaos of the landing, as the rest of the division thrashed through the dark shallows. It could have been a hallucination. If he is to be visited by more hallucinations of such palpable quality, then he is lost. The doctor had warned him about giving in to these moments of vertigo. However, the vision had been indistinguishable from reality. He was swimming at the time, and so entirely awake, and alive to physical sensation. He was tempted to believe what he saw, regardless of what it might mean.

Collinson continued, “Do you know the concept of cause and effect? That I draw upon my pipe and so must exhale the smoke?”

He takes a demonstrative puff of his pipe.

“Our leaders believe they can plot out a battle by anticipating cause and effect. But on the battlefield, to talk about causality is meaningless.”

James disagrees, “A man shoots at me, the bullet goes in me, I die. That is clear cause and effect.”

“Of course. But causation of that type is strictly a local phenomenon: say, between an enemy sniper and yourself or even between you and Hector when you are carrying a stretcher. Or between the guns of a destroyer and the target up on the ridge. We know that you will follow orders, but the effect of that cause is unknown to us: how many men will you rescue? Impossible to say without knowing the landscape, the rate of enemy fire, and your stamina.”

“My stamina as influenced by my intake of apricot jam.”

“Precisely. A battle is more than the sum of its parts. It is a network distributed in space and time. If we had some way of performing the necessary calculations instantaneously, as events in space and time change, then we could theoretically express the war in a series of algorithms, which could then be used to anticipate events on future battlefields.”

“We could count the flies.”

“And then I would know how many pots of jam to open so that I could breakfast in peace.”

Their conversation is interrupted by a rumble rolling down from the high ridges south of their position.

“That is not a storm,” says Collinson.

Hector slides down into their dugout and takes the Zweiss glass from around James’ neck.

“It is the sound of men cheering,” says Hector.

Collinson’s dark eyebrows rise in expectation. “Oh. Have we won?”

The cries of men pour down the gullies like meltwater. Disembodied voices eddy along the runnels, shallow trenches, dunes and swells. Cries of utter release. Cries of absolute relief after almost unendurable hardship and tension.

Hector grabs James and together they stumble down the beach for a better southward view. James has one boot on, and the other half-off and he wants to make a decision either way. Hector looks through the Zweiss. He lets go of James. He stumbles back a step.

“It’s a Turkish battle cry,” says Hector. “We’re dead.”

He hands James the Zweiss and points to the steep bare bluff of the southern ridge. A horde of soldiers pour over the crest, line after line of Turkish infantry, skidding and screaming down three great gullies toward the allied position. Six battalions with the sunrise at their back.

The sun shears across his line of sight, and, magnified by the glass, his retinas flare out. He focuses the glass away from the crest and upon the steep dark bluff. The horde kicks up a long dust cloud; ahead of it, among the thousands of soldiers, he sees the faces of women. Not Turkish women but women he recognizes, from his past. He can’t remember their names but they are familiar to him. The women run shoulder-to-shoulder among the Turkish soldiers, their heads turned back to the crest, straining to retreat even as their legs carry them forward against their will, making their gait unsteady and unnatural.

“I see women,” says James.

Gently, Hector takes the glass from him.

The wave of the battle cry becomes choppy. Here comes the machine gun rattle that knocks under your breastbone. The battleships open fire, their guns clanging like hell’s iron lid. Under the downward stabbing light of shrapnel clouds, legions of attacking soldiers slump to the ground. After days of shelling the haunted rock of the ridges, the shells explode joyously across the faces of the enemy. Losses mount. The bodies of the fallen build up in piles over which thousands of soldiers clamber.

“It’s a slaughter,” says Hector. “Thank God for the navy.”

He hands the Zweiss glass back to James. Floating in the dust cloud, a flock of boots, scraps of cloth and arcing chunks of this and that. He focuses on the steep rocky bluff and sees English men and women crawling along the smouldering ground, not Turks at all but the townspeople he evicted in Lewes. He doesn’t remember their names, he was never any good at remembering names, not since the operation. He puts his hand to the back of his head and feels, under his hair, a scar and a ridge of flesh. How could he have forgotten the operation? His hand shakes. The sun spears in through the Zweiss glass again. He sets it aside. Hector takes pity on him, thinks it is the spectacle of the slaughtered Turk that has made him swoon.

After a long weekend of futile war, the allies are eager to see some reward for their efforts, some evidence of victory, and show no mercy to this miscalculated attack. The dead form a rampart which slides down the ridge, and soldiers in their thousands run and scream and throw themselves onto this rampart and die there, adding their bodies to the construction. Rifles jut out of the rampart at all angles, bayonets gleaming in first light like the spines on the back of a single massive creature. Now and then, out of the multitude, he sees a familiar face.

A last shell from the destroyer stops the horde’s advance. Thousands of inert bodies cover the bluff, and a few crawl back toward the crest. After the last echo of the battle, a dreadful quiet ensues. At the water’s edge, the waves ripple soundlessly over the hard ridged sand. He feels weak with apprehension, as if the slaughter is somehow his fault.

James faints. He crumples at the knees and feels the world turn within him and without him. He rolls down the gully, through the thorny bush until he comes to a stop, sprawled on the loose rocky earth, one boot off and one boot on. All around him, placed at even intervals of a yard, open jars of apricot jam form a sinuous line along the entire length of the gully, the mouth of each jar a seething mass of flies.