Shoulder the Sky (44 page)

"Who's taking you?"

"Taking me?" She drew in her breath quickly, a little shakily.

"May I?" he asked before she had time to think.

"If.. . if you want to? Yes. Thank you."

"Where shall I pick you up, and when?"

She gave him the address. "About six, to give us time in case the traffic is bad."

He heard the hesitation in her voice. "What is it?" he asked.

"Nothing! At least not.. . Joseph, this is Eldon Prentice's family, you know. And .. . and General Cullingford's sister .. . they've lost.. ." She did not know how to finish.

"Are you saying you would rather meet me somewhere else?" he offered.

"No! I was saying perhaps you could come a little earlier, and say something .. . decent about Prentice at least. It... Joseph, it's terrible for them .. ."

"Of course," he responded immediately, and without wondering how he would do it, especially now that he knew what Prentice had really been intending to do. "And no one has anything to say about Cullingford except good." He took a deep breath. "Are you all right, Judith?"

"No," she said a little huskily. "But then is anybody?"

"No. It's only a matter of degree. How about five, or is that too early?"

"Five would be excellent. Thank you."

"The only thing I have to wear is uniform. Is that all right?"

"It'll be perfect. Goodbye."

"Goodbye." He passed the receiver back to Matthew. "She's got a dinner tomorrow evening. I'll take her."

Matthew smiled. He did not say anything, but his pleasure was like a brightness in the room.

Joseph still looked a little haggard when he surveyed himself in the mirror in Matthew's bathroom, but he was almost as presentable as any other soldier home on a brief leave.

He borrowed Matthew's car, and by the time he pulled up outside Mrs. Prentice's house he was decidedly nervous. He was being faced again with the duty of trying to say something of comfort to people who had lost someone they had loved long and intimately. It hardly ever made sense, in peacetime or war. The wound was gaping, full of all kinds of regrets, wishes, guilt over things said, and unsaid, all sorts of hopes dashed. Mrs. Prentice did not know her son had been murdered, but Joseph did. He remembered Mary Allard's terrible, consuming grief. Nothing could limit it, nothing attempt to heal.

Would Mrs. Prentice be like that? Was he going to feel just as helpless? Or more so, because he had despised Eldon Prentice? Worse than that, Sam, who had killed him, was Joseph's dearest friend, and Joseph understood heart-deep, bone-deep, why he had done it. He had come close to doing something very like it himself.

He rang the doorbell. It was not a maid who answered, but Judith. He was startled because she looked so beautiful. She was utterly different from the healthy, rather coltish country girl, full of shy grace, that she had been a year ago. Now there were shadows in her face, a sculpting under the cheekbones. She looked far older, a woman, one who had seen passion and tragedy and understood at least something of each. She looked even more vulnerable than before, but also, oddly, she was stronger.

She was wearing a blue dress, which was quite deep in colour, muted like the sky at dusk. It had a wide waist, emphasizing how slender she was, and the skirt was swathed and fell to below the knee, then another skirt beneath it to above the ankle, keeping the fashionable line.

"Thank you," she said under her breath, then, after giving him a quick kiss on the cheek, she turned as another woman came into the hall. This was obviously Prentice's mother. She had the same fair skin and hair, although now it was leached of all vitality, almost as if she were a drawing the artist had forgotten to colour. She was wearing dark grey, not quite the full black of mourning.

"Captain Reavley," she said quietly. "How nice of you to come early. Judith said you might. Please come in. perhaps you would join us in having a drink before you leave for the party?"

"Thank you." It was unreasonable to do anything but accept. This was what he had come for. He thought ruefully how difficult he had imagined it was to sit in his dugout and write letters to mothers and widows of the men who had died, especially those he had known little, and about whom he had to invent something. It was nothing compared with facing someone like Mrs. Prentice, seeing the grief in her face, finding it hard even to envision what she had been like when there had been light in her eyes, when she could have laughed and meant it. He had disliked Prentice deeply, and now knowing what he had intended to do, he regarded him as a traitor to his own land. And Sam was his friend, with all the warmth, the laughter and gentleness, the trust that that word encompassed.

He followed Mrs. Prentice into the quiet sitting room, with its family photographs, slightly worn carpet and unmatched antimacassars on the backs of the chairs. There was a bowl of early roses on the Pembroke table by the wall, golden reflections shining in the polished mahogany. A silver-framed picture of Eldon Prentice stood next to it. He wondered where the one of Owen Cullingford was. Or had she room for only one bereavement at a time?

He thought of what Judith had said about seeing the photograph of Prentice and Cullingford at Henley, with the unusual girl, then mentioning it to Cullingford later. She believed it was that which had led him to the Peacemaker, and his death.

He looked again at the photographs. One of them was of a group at Henley: Cullingford, Prentice, a couple of other youths, and a tall girl with fair, wavy hair. Later he would ask who she was. There was no time now, without being rude.

There was someone else in the room, a girl in her early twenties, slender, dark gold hair. She looked too like Eldon Prentice not to be his sister, but the steady look, which in him had been arrogant, in her was merely candid.

Mrs. Prentice introduced them. "This is my daughter, Belinda. Captain Reavley has been kind enough to come early, to talk with us. It was he who .. . brought Eldon back to ... from no man's land." She was having difficulty retaining her composure.

"How do you do, Captain Reavley?" Belinda said gravely. "Please don't feel you need to tell us about it again. Judith already did, the first time she came. We are terribly grateful to you." She glanced at her mother, as if warning her, then back at Joseph again. "It is our maid's evening off. We're lucky still to have her. We expect her to go and work in a munitions factory any day now. May I get you a sherry? Or would you prefer something else? Whisky, maybe? I think we have some."

He had to accept something. "Sherry would be excellent, thank you."

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely." He made himself smile. "It's very civilized. We get raw spirits in the trenches navy rum. This will be far better."

She smiled back at him, relief more obvious in her face than she could have realized.

Mrs. Prentice invited him to sit, and they all accepted, but awkwardly, not leaning back in comfort. It was his responsibility to carry the conversation. He was the priest; they were the bereaved, the ones he was here to comfort, to offer some pattern of sense. Except that there was no sense he could share with them. And you never knew how much people wanted to know, what healed, and what only made the wound deeper.

Mrs. Prentice was watching him, her blue-grey eyes desperately hungry for any kind of gentleness at all, any hope of good.

"What would you like to know?" he asked her.

"I ... I'm not sure," she said awkwardly, looking down at her hands and then up again quickly. "I so much wanted you to come, and now that you are here, I'm not sure what to say. I know Eldon was .. . abrasive sometimes." She smiled, and her eyes were full of tears. "He could irritate people, because he had no patience with lies. He didn't understand that people have to ... to defend themselves not only what they say, but what they can find the courage to believe."

Was she talking about Prentice, or was she also asking him not to tell her a truth that would destroy the illusions she needed in order to survive?

"Of course," he agreed, keeping the smile in his eyes. "People who tell the truth have never been popular with everyone, regardless of the fact that some truths have to be told, and others can be concealed for a while, or perhaps for ever. It's the judgement that's so difficult. And the horror of the front line is not an easy place."

"He would have .. . mellowed." She gulped the words. "He was slow to learn tact. He was so angry at the loss of life, at the way the men were treated."

"He believed the whole war was wrong, Mother," Belinda put in, speaking for the first time since she had been introduced.

"Nobody but a lunatic wants war," Joseph turned to look at her, seeing the anxiety, the confusion in her face. "It's just that some alternatives are worse. Whatever the cost, there are some things that are worth fighting for, because life without them is a different kind of death, without hope for the future."

"I know that, Captain Reavley," she said with a very slight edge to her voice. She was struggling to defend her brother, as well as her own conviction, and yet not tear her mother's loyalties apart. "Eldon felt he could change things, make people stop talking and thinking about the war as some glorious crusade, and realize how terrible it really is." Her face tightened with anger. "You should read some of the pieces that are written words used like "courage" and "honour", "noble sacrifice", "warriors laying down their lives"I Eldon said it's nothing like that! It's mud and rats and body lice, filthy food, stinking latrines .. ." She ignored her mother's gasp. "And terrified men being slaughtered for no gain at all!"

Joseph thought of the men he knew men like Sam, Barshey Gee, Wil Sloan, Cullingford himself, and Andy.

"He wasn't there long enough to see all of it," he answered her, not avoiding her eyes or offering pity. "All those things are true, and worse. But the best is true also. The courage is there, but it's real, not fairy-tale. It's going forward to face what turns your bowels into water and makes you sick with fear, knowing the shrapnel could hit your body any moment, but you do it anyway, because it's the right thing to do. Above all, there is the friendship in things as big as giving your life to save someone else, and as small as sitting up all night telling bad jokes and sharing your chocolate biscuits." His voice was rough with emotion, remembering talking with Sam all night, about anything, everything, and surviving hell, because he was not alone. "It's about cold and terror and death all around you, and finding someone reaching out his hand to you, thinking of your pain not his own."

Mrs. Prentice heard it and bit her lip.

There was a moment's silence. There were tears on Belinda's face.

"He had someone willing to publish his work, didn't he?" Judith intervened, her voice harsh with her own grief. She was speaking to wrench her mind away from it. "Because most national newspapers wouldn't."

"Oh, yes!" Mrs. Prentice said quickly. "If anyone had found his notes, we would have forwarded them on."

"It probably wouldn't have helped," Belinda put in. "He used to write in his own kind of shorthand. Unless they could decipher it, it would be meaningless."

It was absurd. Joseph thought of Sam, and his knowledge of the schoolboy cipher. A week ago he would have given almost anything to have known where to find the publisher. Now, because of Richard Mason, Matthew would find out and it no longer mattered.

"It wouldn't have made any difference," he said to Mrs. Prentice, mostly so Judith would know. "If it would be against the Defence of the Realm Act the article would be suppressed. The Intelligence Services know who your son's publisher is." Then as her face crumpled in confusion he wondered if he should not have said it. It was Judith who needed to know that it did not have to be pursued. Mrs. Prentice could have kept her dreams, if they were of comfort. But could he retrieve the situation without being obviously patronizing, and destroying everything else he had said? How could you touch such grief without adding to it?

"It was secret," she protested. "He meant to do so much good! He said no one tells the real truth, and people have the right to know. You can't ask men to give their lives, and lie to them how it will be."

"Sometimes we can only take bits of the truth, and still survive," Joseph reminded her. "We have to fight, and for that we need courage, and hope. By the time he got back to England, Eldon might have realized that, especially if he had spoken with you."

She turned away quickly, her voice choking. "Do you think so? I'm sorry' She stood up. "Please excuse me." And she hurried from the room.

"I shouldn't have said that," Joseph apologized.

"Oh, it's all right!" Belinda said hastily, her face white. "Eldon was too arrogant to listen to anyone, but it's nice to imagine he might have. It's all we have now."

Joseph said nothing. Perhaps Prentice might never have grown wiser or kinder, or have matured into a man of anything like Richard Mason's humanity, but it was still a tragedy that he had been robbed of the chance. Sam's face was sharp in his mind. He was everything that Prentice was not. What he would have become was only a hope, his mother's hope because she loved him, perhaps felt responsible for his failures as well as protective of the good she knew of him, the ability to struggle, to feel pain. One defended one's own, it was part of the love that was belonging. It was instinct more powerful than reason, the passion that forgave, that never surrendered belief. It had saved many when nothing else could have.