Post of Honour (16 page)

No one around Will suspected that he had passed the extreme limit of endurance for as yet there was no such thing as ‘shell shock’ in the RAMC handbook. There were heroes and there were cowards and in between a majority who could endure a spell in the line and slough off the fear of death the moment they passed out of range of all but the heaviest artillery. It was this majority that Will Codsall envied but they were now cut off from him by the ghost of Martin, who seemed never to leave Will after they moved into a comparatively quiet sector, in April. Will came upon him in all kinds of improbable places, masquerading as the platoon sergeant in the bath-house, or sitting beside him on the companionable four-seater latrine, behind the billet, but it was not until Martin’s ghost began to speak that the confusion became intolerable for then, largely out of cussedness, Will began to defy the old fool and curse him as he sat beside him at battalion sing-songs, and advised him to draw his bayonet and prod the belly of the corpulent reserve officer, who had replaced Captain Bagshaw, blown to bits at Rue du Bois.

Leave saved his sanity for a time. Once he was tidied up and embarked on the long, cross-country journey back to Base, Martin’s ghost began to recede and by the time Will had reached Sorrel Halt, after a two-day journey of almost uninterrupted sleep in jolting trains, he felt reasonably assured that the old devil had been unable to escape from the lunar landscape about the Albert Canal and would stay there to be sniped, shelled, or bayoneted to death in the next local foray. And there, for all Will cared, Martin could suffer with all the other ghosts; he had never had much affection for his father when Martin was living and the recent persecution had put him on a par with Arabella.

III

L
ieutenant Palfrey, the only man in the Valley to fight as a regular, spent the month of April, 1915, in the area of the dreaded Cuinchy brickstacks, where the Germans held one half of the rubble and the British held on to the lower, disadvantageous half. As a gunner and an officer he was spared a good deal of the terror, misery and discomfort that had driven Will Codsall to the edge of a mental breakdown but he saw more of front-line conditions than most heavy gunners for he was employed, sometimes for days at a stretch, as an artillery spotter and was either aloft in a captive balloon or, more often, checking map references with division infantry officers in and about the grotesque ruin where the two lines of trenches ran as close as fifty yards.

Ikey had now been in France for five months and the fact that he was a professional conditioned his outlook and moderated his prejudices. He was unable to view the sprawling, bloody muddle of Armageddon with the enthusiasm of Smut, the phlegm of Jem, or the frantic dismay of Will, for to most professionals the war was looked upon as a tiresome interruption in the fashionable art of soldiering mitigated, to some extent, by the chance of rapid promotion. Regimental protocol was still enforced and time-honoured mess customs were still sacrosanct, a frigid welcome being extended to youngsters drafted in to replace casualties. Ikey, who had always been inclined to look upon regimental ritual with tolerant contempt, was grateful for his keen vision and highly developed sense of observation, that offered an excuse to absent himself from the battery and regimental HQ. He cheerfully accepted the risk of being shot down from his balloon or sniped on his way to and from the front-line if he could spend whole days out of reach of the sahibs further back. By the time spring had come round he had developed a theory about the war that, to a degree, blunted its impact upon his sensibilities. All his life, or so it seemed to him, he had stood exactly half-way between the possessors and the possessed, between people who jingled the bell when the fire burned low and those who came trotting up to replenish it. He had been acutely conscious of this personal neutrality during his schooldays and whilst engaging in his clandestine association with Hazel, and although it would seem that, by marrying Hazel Potter, he had crossed from one social sphere to the other this was not really so. As long as the war continued or as long as he was actively engaged in it he still retained a foot in each camp. It was this time-truce that helped to clarify and then buttress his sense of detachment so that he came to see the war as a kind of surgical operation that civilisation was performing upon itself, an agonising but extremely interesting attempt to demolish class-barriers that had been building in Western Europe since the early days of feudalism. Possibly at that particular time, he was the only man in France who saw the war as the last eruption of feudalism, a gigantic and masochistic combined assault by masters and men upon the bonds they had forged for each other over twelve centuries of pride, bigotry and licensed greed. Unlike the majority of his comrades-in-arms he could not view it as an exercise in national rivalry or even, as the more sophisticated were beginning to regard it, as a cynical struggle for world markets that would last, perhaps another few months, or at worst another year. He saw it for what it was, the explosion of a magazine of myths and the trappings of myths such as flags and tribal cultures and although its barbarity horrified him, and he could pity the little people trapped in the cogs, he could also accept the slaughter as inevitable during a vast shift in the pattern of life on the planet. It was his sincere belief in this that enabled him to shorten the recoil of his emotional reaction to scenes that he would have thought himself incapable of witnessing without disgust and perhaps a protest that would have led, sooner or later, to direct conflict with brother officers.

His letters to Hazel encouraged the growth of his detachment. He enclosed one, at least once a week, in his cheerful, factual letters to Paul, who now paid Hazel a weekly visit for the express purpose of reading Ikey’s letters to her. To Hazel herself Ikey said little about the war but confined himself to irrelevant minutiae, a patch of clover growing beside a trench; the fatness and multiplicity of rats and their dexterity in dodging revolver shots; the wandering flight of a chalkhill blue butterfly braving shellfire over the brickstacks; and sometimes even a comic quote from the gunners’ letters he censored. He did not know whether Paul, in reading his letters aloud, ever attempted to convert his words into the brogue that he himself had always used when talking to her but he deeply appreciated Paul’s kindness in fulfilling his promise to keep an eye on wife and child and was touched when Paul enclosed a letter allegedly dictated by Hazel, describing his small son’s attempt to wade the Sorrel that had ended in a drenching. He had no means of knowing that it was Paul’s regular visits to Mill Cottage that precipitated a second crisis at the Big House, or how near Claire came on his account to allowing the wound inflicted by his marriage to fester.

IV

C
laire had done her share of flirting. In the days before Paul came to Shallowford when she was belle of the Valley she had enjoyed the stir created by her arrival at a Hunt Ball or at one of the charity dances in the Paxtonbury Assembly Rooms and because he was proud of her good looks and fine figure, Edward Derwent had given her far more freedom than her competitors received. Then, after her humiliation at the Coronation soirée, she had taken it out on the Tunbridge Wells beaux but without a serious thought for any one of them. Since her return to the Valley, however, and certainly since her marriage, she had never given anyone the slightest encouragement to flirt with her although a good many tried, particularly after the establishment of the camp on the heath where the permanent staff included a dozen regular officers in their early thirties, including one or two accomplished mashers.

She would certainly not have involved herself with Aubrey Lane-Phelps, the twenty-five-year-old musketry instructor, had her relationship with Paul resumed its tranquil pre-war course after the Hazel Potter incident but Lane-Phelps was not a man to wait upon encouragement. He possessed, besides hard and rather flashy good looks, an easy way with men and women, a small but adequate private income and, above all, a colossal but carefully camouflaged vanity. He met and marked down the Squire’s wife on his first visit to Shallowford House and the suspicion that, in due course, he would be drafted to France applied a spur to his determination to make one more conquest before he was sucked into the Flanders mincing-machine, where the life of a junior officer was estimated at six to eight weeks.

He had sampled Claire, so to speak, at a Christmas party given by Paul for the permanent staff and had kissed her, very expertly, under the mistletoe in the hall, accomplishing this when everyone else’s attention was engaged elsewhere. It was getting on for eight years since Claire had been kissed by any man other than her husband and she decided that it was a wholly pleasureable experience, particularly the way Aubrey Lane-Phelps went about it. All the same she broke from him rather indignantly and went out of her way to avoid him for the remainder of the evening. For several days afterwards her thoughts returned to him at odd moments when she was pondering how she could capitulate to Paul without losing too much face or when she was sitting in front of her mirror combing her long golden hair and wondering if, after all, she wasn’t beginning to spread a little in certain directions.

Then he took to riding over to the house on one of the dejected screws they kept at the camp and usually appeared towards the end of the short winter afternoon, when Paul was out on his rounds, seeking the means of putting more acres under the plough or selecting timber to meet the demands of the Government’s Forestry Commission.

At first she was rather distant with him but then, under the accurately sustained bombardment of his lively conversation, she began to thaw and at length made no secret of welcoming his company. The day he bent low over her hand and told her that he was in love with her she was far more flattered than outraged but after a moment of confusion, decided to treat his declaration as a joke, returning his heart with the sweet firmness of a broad-minded matron redirecting an infatuated youth. She misjudged him hopelessly. His experience was far wider than hers, so that he moved in smartly to pick up the next trick, projecting himself as a young man marked down for death, whose emotions had been cruelly mocked. Had she been less kindhearted, or better grounded in the business, she would have told him to mend his manners and not come again until he could resist the temptation to play the fool but it so happened that he caught her at a special disadvantage. Claire, at this time, was going through a very disturbing phase in her relationship with Paul. The quarrel concerning Ikey’s marriage had died down but it had left a sensitive spot and whereas Claire had emerged from her long sulk, Paul unwittingly kept the issue alive by avoiding mention of Ikey or Hazel and keeping Ikey’s letters to himself, so that a sense of strain crept into their relationship, showing itself in artificial silences and a marked slowing down of the physical rhythm of their marriage. It was not that he ever rejected her or she him but something of the gaiety and excitement of pre-war exchanges was missing and when they did make love it seemed to her that he roused himself with an effort, as though performing a duty expected of him. She had no way of knowing that this apathy on his part was due far more to his brooding preoccupation with the war, and his own uncertainties regarding it, than to their quarrel over Ikey’s marriage but she had too much of her father’s pride and obstinacy to broach the subject. It was because of this, and really for no other reason, that Lane-Phelps’ interest in her as a woman and not merely as a convenient hostess excited and flattered her and when he threw in his reserves of pathos she faltered so that he was able to gauge her state of mind with considerable accuracy. He said, humbly, ‘I know I haven’t the slightest right to expect love in return, Claire. In any case, apart from you being married, I’m due to go overseas any day and my chances of coming back to you are not more than fifty to one. I’ve said what I feel for you because I had to but I can bow myself out with dignity I hope.’

It was a virtuoso performance, particularly as he knew well enough that there was not the slightest chance of him going to France until the new Kitchener armies were fully trained and that he meant to do his damnedest to land a staff appointment, for which he was fortunately placed. She said miserably, ‘Don’t say that, Aubrey! Let’s hope to God it’ll be over before any of you men up there are killed!’ but as he turned away she caught his hand and the kiss that followed was somewhat more adventurous than that exchanged under the mistletoe, for in the course of the embrace his hands performed a light but very expert reconnaissance over two areas of his field of operations. Then, her Derwent commonsense catching up with her, she broke from him violently but experience told him that it was from motives of panic rather than repugnance and he decided not to press his luck but await a more opportune occasion. He picked up his hat, cane and gloves saying, ‘If I should be posted suddenly, as usually happens, you’ll see me again?’ and she said she would, although he was not to call when Paul was out and she promised nothing.

She was in a very confused mood for the next day or so, a curious but not altogether unpleasant compound of guilt, fear, recklessness and elation. Paul seemed not to notice as much, being excessively engaged just then persuading the Government commissioners that, whilst they were welcome to all the soft timber on the estate, the war could be won without sacrificing Shallowford timber that had been maturing over two centuries. Suspense, and guilt also, made her amorous and at ordinary times he could not have failed to notice this, for she came very close to parading herself before him in the intervals between the time he came stumping up to bed and the turning down of the bedside lamps but although he was talkative it was not of love that he spoke but of Valley men overseas and the maddening perversity of officials pestering him for timber and agricultural returns, so that she was thrown back on her own thoughts and they were thoughts that might have dismayed him. She began to reflect that they must have reached a stage in their marriage where a spur was needed to remind him that she was something more than an audience for his rumbling complaints.