Spare Brides (35 page)

O
N THE FOURTH
night they decided to have a quiet supper at a little restaurant in Islington and then skip the club and return to his bedsit before nine o’clock. It was a risky manoeuvre, but Edgar managed to distract his landlady in the back room while Lydia crept upstairs, sneaking like a child locating a midnight snack. They made love again. She laughingly complained that it was almost becoming too much. Climaxing practically hurt her, she was so exhausted, whereas he went longer and longer each time, his body getting used to hers.

The screaming, when it came, was savage and relentless. The men were burning; they’d lost half their bodies but they could still scream. Their agony pouring, spewing over everything. He could smell their searing flesh and their blood. That of his men and the enemy. Both the same. He shot first, watching them splay their arms, reminding him of Punch and Judy puppets expressing surprise.
Whooosh.
Something wet splattered on his face. Another man’s chest, or brains or ear. Over they go. Over the top. Wasn’t worth thinking about. Couldn’t think anyway, the guns were too loud. He ran on, his boots sinking in the soft mud and swollen, bloated bodies. He scrambled over dead men and not quite dead men. They stared at him, shocked and horrified, although they must have known; after all these months, they all knew how they would end. He could still pick them off,
bang
, splayed arms, puppet, strings cut,
bang
. This wasn’t the worst. Too close to shoot now, no more bullets anyway. Slug the Hun. Bash in his fucking face with the end of your gun. If you’re lucky, he goes down after two or three heavy blows. If not, you have to do the worst. Shove it in. Stab him. Stupid fucking short blades. Couldn’t skin a rabbit. Over and over again. Stab, stab, stab. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Don’t look at his face. Don’t think of it as a face. Don’t think of him at all. He’d do the same to you. Was trying to. Don’t be sorry. Scream at him. Scream at them fucking all.

‘It’s all right, it’s all right. Baby, it’s me. I’m here.’

The sheets were damp with his sweat, but not the sweat of sweet loving; the sweat of terror. Of horror. He shook and whimpered. He could smell piss. She didn’t notice, or pretended not to.

She held him tightly even though he threw her off two, three times. She linked her arms around him again; not so much of an embrace as a padlock. She spoke in a low, calm tone, murmuring endearments over and over again. ‘Darling, darling. My love. My love. It’s OK, it’s OK,’ she soothed. He began to realise it was her kissing his ear, not rats trying to gorge themselves on his flesh, assuming he was an already dead man. Her skin was soft, nothing like the rough fabric of a uniform. She poured him a glass of milk, like a mother does for her child. He drank it obediently. He was shaking. She prised his fingers off the empty glass and took it from him. She changed the sheets and scrubbed the mattress as best she could. He couldn’t look at her. She took his hand and led him to the reading chair. He thought that if she put a blanket around his shoulders, they were finished. I can’t have her think of me that way. Damaged. An invalid. I will not think of myself that way. I can’t. If he did, it was over for him. If he sank into despair or depression, he’d never be able to pull himself up, it was too much effort. He’d given it everything. Everything and more. He had nothing left. He needed her to admire him, believe in him and in the war, because if she questioned, he’d disintegrate. He’d often thought that the war was a tragedy and a vast idiocy, a squandering of youth and of time, but he couldn’t have
her
articulate those same thoughts.

But she didn’t nurse him. She crawled on to his knee, her nakedness on his lap; he could feel the dark moistness of her sex. She was erotic and honest at the same time. He could see the fine hairs on her slender arms as she pulled his heavy, strong ones around her small body. ‘Tell me,’ she whispered. ‘What was it like?’

‘They told us not to tell you.’

‘I know, but we’re breaking so many rules, one more can’t matter.’

‘People say that all we need is work and then everything will be fine, everything will go back to how it was before, but it’s a lie. They hand out soup and pamphlets; if you are lucky they might show you how to walk on your new sticks, but no one teaches the men what they really need to know.’

‘Which is?’

‘How to forget, or at least, how to lie. Lie to oneself.’

‘I don’t want you to lie to me.’

‘I know.’ He said nothing for a long time, and then, finally, he admitted, ‘It’s a hideous thing to live with.’

‘Everything you witnessed?’

‘Not that alone. Also the things I did.’ He glanced at her, nervous that he’d find condemnation in her expression but determined to face it if he must. She looked calm, interested. He fell silent for many minutes. She didn’t prompt him. At last he said, ‘We were not all in it together, like they told us. At least we weren’t for long. Not once we started to fight, because some made it through and others didn’t. That’s an insurmountable difference. It was lonely. They talk of comradeship, and it was there, alongside desperation and death, but we couldn’t make each other feel better; we could only watch each other die.’

He told her that junior officers had a life expectancy of six weeks at the Front. He admitted that when they first promoted him from private, to lance corporal, to corporal, to sergeant, he hadn’t wanted it. None of it. Dead man’s shoes. But he had no choice. There was never a choice. War took that away. He watched as men were slaughtered brutally, and their pathetic, disfigured bodies piled high. He told her that he’d helped pick up parts of his friends no bigger than a cat or a dog, put them together in grisly indiscriminate graves. He’d ignored the likelihood that the wrong arm was going in with the wrong torso. Made do. Did their best. Didn’t admit that their best was nothing. Nowhere near good enough. ‘A chance bullet takes out the man next to you. The one behind you, in front of you. It makes no sense. Whistled past my ear so many times. Took me down twice. Down but not out. Those injuries probably saved my life: eight months and then four months in the san.’

A bullet through the shoulder and then another buried deep in the thigh was seen as a bit of luck. A year less risk. He told her he’d been terrified and despairing at times. Lots of times. By talking, he was breaking the gentlemen’s code that the War Office had asked the men to live by. Best not to mull, they’d insisted. Best to forget, but he remembered it all. Perhaps it wasn’t courageous or right, but he told her everything anyway. He couldn’t not.

She listened carefully. It was clear from her face that she was shocked, horrified. Disgusted. But not at him; at the whole bloody mess. He’d had to do those things. He was under orders. There was a war going on. War, just another word for filth. Hell didn’t cover it. He’d been lucky and he’d been vicious, ruthless. That was how he’d survived. He had quick reactions; he ducked faster. He wanted to live. They all said the same – they had wives, sweethearts and mothers to go home to – but he’d always believed he wanted it more. He’d seen them give up. The light in their eyes went out. They wanted it to be over more than they wanted to survive. Then they were done for. He’d done anything he’d had to, to survive. When he was shot for the second time, he’d burrowed down deep into the dead bodies and let the battle rage around him. He didn’t try to get the attention of the stretcher-bearers because, despite agreements made by grey men who didn’t go into battle, there was always a danger that men could be picked off as they were being loaded up. He’d waited for hours, until the ceasefire, when the corpses were collected. He’d felt the bodies turn stiff above him and the lice crawl off the dead soldiers and nestle into him. Lice were transparent when hungry and turned black like raisins when they’d had their fill. As they swelled up with his blood he’d thought, thank fuck, at least I’m not dead yet, I’m not in hell. Although he was.

He had been told he was brave; over and over again they said it, and they gave him pips and medals. But brave was dangerous, brave was a step away from reckless. People said it was a miracle he’d survived, and they were right. He was always first over the top – as an officer it was his duty, he didn’t have any choice – but he kept low and the bullets flew to his left, to his right. He tried to keep some standards. Didn’t give a shit whether the men cleaned their boots; not that sort of standard. He tried to keep some humanity. He didn’t read his men’s letters. He let them self-censor, although it was his job to score out the words that might be truthful enough to upset those back home. He didn’t report the queers, and once, when his senior officer accused a man in his platoon of being a deserter, a coward – Edgar knew the lad had been talking about shooting off his own foot – he argued that it was a case of neurasthenia. The officer had been so surprised that a chap from Middlesbrough even knew the word, let alone the rights it carried with it, that he’d hesitated. The truth was, they all had chronic mental and physical weakness and fatigue; he could have got them all out on that technicality. He saved one life. A coward’s life. But a life all the same. It was something. Edgar’s men liked him.

The misery was beyond articulation, and yet here he was pouring it all out. Loneliness and terror were the henchmen of silence. ‘By the end, I hated everyone. I hated the other men who survived around me and had seen what I had done; I hated them because they had done the same. I hated the senior officers and politicians who insisted we push on, over and over again. I hated the enemy for not just bloody giving up and going home. And I hated the rats,’ he confessed. ‘I’m not afraid of them; I just hate them. The ones in the trenches became as large as Labrador puppies as they stuffed themselves on rotting dead men’s flesh. The rats developed a reaction to dead man. Ironic, hey? Eating flesh made their faces bloat and turn chalky. They became like lanterns in the darkness of the trenches. I often woke with a start as a rat’s tail whipped my cheekbone, searching out another meal.’ Lydia quivered, but he did not stop. The violence and terror poured from his mouth, an unbrookable stream. ‘My stomach turns when I pass the abattoir on Canton Street. The death reek is unforgettable. Have you ever seen a dead body, Lid?’

‘Yes, my aunt and then Lawrence’s father.’

‘Laid out, were they? Peaceful?’

‘I suppose. They didn’t look quite themselves.’

‘I’ve seen dead men that I’ve killed and they weren’t laid out and peaceful. They were crying for their mothers and sweethearts. They smelt of piss and fear. I’ve pushed men off my bayonet and known that the only thing I could do for them was plunge it in again. Can you imagine?’

‘No.’

‘No, and you shouldn’t have to. I shouldn’t ask you to. We fought with knives and even our bare hands.’

Eventually his words slowed. His eyes stung and his throat ached with grief and stories. ‘You can tell me more another day,’ she whispered.

‘Yes, I can, can’t I.’

They let sleep take them. Knotted together – a tangle of limbs and thoughts, disappointment and hope – they slept on the wooden reading chair.

S
HE WOKE NEXT
morning back in the bed. He must have carried her there at some point. The sun was flooding in through the rooftop windows, like a bar of gold bullion stretching down from heaven into the bedsit. He was whistling and she could smell bacon frying. The place was already too hot. She’d soon discovered that his lodgings were eternally too hot or too cold; even when it was bright outside, they’d shivered in here. The place was heated by a largely ineffective penny-in-the-slot gas stove, so it was nearly always necessary to light the fire in the grate. The fire was a hungry, dirty monster which greedily consumed a sackful of coal in just a few hours and emitted volumes of smoke that covered Lydia and Edgar and all his possessions in a film of black soot. Edgar had to regularly trudge down two flights of stairs, out to the coal shed in the yard, to get another sack. This chore invariably led to irritating encounters with his unyielding landlady en route; she would question the wisdom of him burning coal in spring and insist he pay for it there and then, not trusting any of her tenants to settle at the end of the week. Edgar did not waste his charm on his landlady, but he was fair and polite and never baulked at paying over the odds for the coal. He even paid for all the chimneys to be swept. His rooms were, by Lydia’s usual standards, grubby and inconvenient. Yet she was mostly comfortable and happy here. Happier than she was anywhere else.

Lydia was scared and amazed by her happiness. It filled her being and her head. She had never imagined it could be so. She had always thought happiness was synonymous with conforming to strict social standards and amassing enormous wealth. She thought beautiful clothes had an awful lot to do with it too. She’d spent a lot of time with him, alone. Talking. Making love. Just being. Every moment was irresistible, essential; and yet secretly, in a strange, unfathomable, contradictory part of her brain, she always hoped to find fault, to tire of him. She’d quietly hoped that her deep longing was lust, not love. That her fascination with him would wane. It had not.

And now, now that he had opened up to her, laid himself bare, she was bound: heart, body and soul. She was his. As inconvenient as it was.

‘Are you hungry?’

‘I’m starving.’

He beamed at her. His good looks were such that she was surprised afresh every time she set eyes on him. ‘Boy, you are good-looking,’ she would often murmur, without embarrassment or device. Just a fact.

He made a meal for her: strong tea, fried eggs and bacon, with big chunks of bread that weren’t quite fresh. She watched as he threw it all together. He managed the pan and spatula, plates and cutlery with his right hand. He used his left to take his cigarette in and out of his mouth. He had rolled up his sleeves. His white shirt hung loosely around his neat waist as it flowed from his broad shoulders. His trousers were kept up with braces. She loved him completely and hopelessly.