The Blasphemer: A Novel (3 page)

Daniel slowed down as his headlights illuminated an ethereal figure in white trousers and shirt standing on the verge twenty yards ahead. His arm was extended and his thumb raised. As the car drew closer, Daniel saw the hitchhiker was wearing the shalwar kameez, the traditional Muslim dress of long white shirt and
baggy trousers. It was inadequate protection against the snow.

‘Look at this guy,’ Daniel said.‘He must be freezing his nuts off.’ Nancy was rummaging in her handbag.

As the car drew level, Daniel stared.

The man stared back and pointed, following the vehicle with his finger. A slow smile of recognition appeared on his face, the ghost of a smile, like a negative undergoing slow exposure.

Daniel was unnerved. ‘See him?’

‘See who?’

‘That hitchhiker.’

Nancy swivelled the rear-view mirror. ‘I can’t see anyone.’ Daniel checked his side mirror and frowned. The hitchhiker was no longer in view. He had looked familiar.

AS THE TYRES OF HIS CAR CRUNCHED UP THE GRAVEL PATH OF HIS
parents’ house, Daniel felt the usual low-grade nausea – a reminder that he loved his father without liking him, and that the feeling was mutual. His father, Philip, was a retired – and decorated – army surgeon. He was also a remote and unreadable man, one capable of terrible, genial coldness. It wasn’t anything he said; it was what he didn’t say.

Once Daniel had parked and opened the boot, Kevin the Dog sprang out and bounded across to a stone-balustraded terrace massed with pots.‘Kevin!’ Daniel shouted too late as one of the pots shattered. The front door opened and Amanda stepped out into a semicircular porch which had two Ionic pillars and a curved fascia that looked more grey than white against the snow. She was in her stocking feet and the cold of the stone made her retreat back inside. Kevin skittered past her, trailing powdery snow indoors behind him.

‘Sorry, Mum,’ Daniel said, kissing the figure silhouetted in the doorway. ‘I’ll get a dustpan and brush. Thanks for doing this. House feels nice and warm.’

‘You’ve time for a coffee?’ Amanda said with an upward tilt of her head as she returned to the kitchen. ‘Keep talking. I’ve got some milk on the stove.’

Philip was carrying logs into his study. ‘Hello, everyone,’ he said in his unhurried, oaky voice. ‘Have you brought Crush?’

Martha held up a squashy green turtle with a goofy grin and sleepy eyes, its velveteen skin worn smooth and greasy. Crush was the name it had been given by the merchandising division of Disney Pixar. Daniel had brought it back from America as a first birthday present and it still went everywhere with her.

‘Phew. Wouldn’t want to leave Crush behind. I think there might be some Coco Pops in the kitchen if you’re hungry. Daniel, can I have a word?’

Because his father used words sparingly, storing them like a cactus stores water, Daniel felt hollow-stomached as he followed him into a panelled room cluttered with antique glassware, Penguin Classics stacked crookedly on shelves, and display cases containing row upon row of medals attached to colourful silk ribbons. Philip tipped the logs on to the fire he was laying, brushed off splinters of bark caught on his tweed jacket and straightened his back. Though he had shrunk slightly since reaching his seventies, he was still 6ft 1in, an inch taller than his round-shouldered son – and he still had a straight spine. He also still had a stern expression, which owed much to the feathery eyebrows that formed a ‘V’ above his beaky nose. Noticing the poppy in his father’s buttonhole, Daniel folded his arms and half covered his own lapel with his hand.

‘You like this?’ Philip said, indicating a brown, smoky mirror above the inglenook fireplace. ‘We bought it on eBay last week.’

‘How much?’ Daniel asked, wishing his father would come to the point.

‘What?’ Philip was partially deaf, having lost a section of his ear during a friendly fire incident in the First Gulf War. He rarely wore his hearing aid because, he said, it wouldn’t stay in, there being little left of his ear to attach it to.

Daniel repeated his question, louder this time.

‘Eight hundred,’ Philip said.

‘They saw you coming.’ Daniel said this under his breath.

Philip knelt down, flipped his tie over his shoulder and, with his hand shaking slightly, put a match to the ball of newspaper he had rolled up in the grate. ‘No, I saw them coming,’ he said. ‘It’s Regency. Worth twice that.’ His deafness could be selective.

Daniel was contemplating a sooty painting on the wall: a nineteenth-century naval battle in oil. Below this, in the light of an anglepoise lamp, was a side table and an open book. Philip’s reading glasses, their arms joined by cord that could be tightened by a toggle to compensate for his missing ear, were resting on top of it. Daniel flipped the book over to see its cover:
The Conscience of a Soldier
by General Sir Richard Kelsey. ‘Any good?’ he asked.

‘Bit pompous. Met him once.’

‘Served with him?’

‘No, Kelsey was long before my time.’

Conversations about great generals and historic battles were always, Daniel knew, an efficient way of cutting through the ice with his father, even if the water below was still cold. As a child he had sat at Philip’s knee and listened in awe to tales about the world wars in which his grandfather and great-grandfather had fought. One of his favourite bedtime stories, indeed, had been from a war memoir, an account of how his grandfather had posthumously won his VC, shortly after D-Day.

Yet in recent years, whenever his father mentioned the army, Daniel had also felt a ripple of guilt. They had never discussed it properly, but it was obvious that Philip had hoped his only son would follow him into the Medical Corps. It was to do with his look of paternal pride when he was offered a place on a degree course in medicine, and his unspoken disappointment when he had dropped out of it and taken up biology instead. In the end, Daniel read zoology for his doctorate, specializing in nematodes, before getting stuck as a junior research fellow for eight years at Trinity College, London, and an associate professor awaiting tenure for a further four. At the age of thirty-seven came a glittering prize of sorts: he was asked to write and present a natural history programme on a cable television channel. And with a second series of
The Selfish Planet
in pre-production, he was, as he never tired of saying, close to being a certified media don. His father rarely asked him about his television work. His father didn’t own a television.

‘By the way, Dad,’ Daniel said, as if remembering, ‘looks like I got that promotion.’

‘They’ve given you the zoology chair?’

‘Yep.’ It wasn’t quite true. It had yet to be officially announced. But he had heard from his friend Wetherby, the professor of music who had also recently taken on the role of vice provost, that it was a formality. As good as his. Wetherby had been the only member of staff at Trinity he had told about the surprise holiday he had arranged for Nancy. And that was when Wetherby had said it could be a joint celebration, because his professorship was to be rubberstamped at the next Senate meeting.

‘About time,’ Philip said. ‘You must be relieved.’

‘I’ve been practically running the department for the past six months anyway.’

‘I know. Other men would have complained.’

Daniel could feel his blood pressure rise. He needed to score a point back. ‘I suppose they thought I didn’t need a pay rise after the success of
The Selfish Planet
.’

‘
The Selfish Planet
?’

‘My TV series.’

‘Of course, yes.’

Father and son fell into a customary silence. Daniel, his mood dampened as it always was after an encounter with his father, half sat on the corner of a leather-topped desk, dangling one leg, helping himself to a Mint Imperial from an open packet. Around him in gilt frames were familiar family photographs that had lost some of their colour in the sunlight: Amanda on a beach looking annoyed at being photographed; Philip as a boy standing with his mother and sister next to his father’s grave at the Bayeux War Cemetery; Daniel as a schoolboy in a Scout uniform; Philip again, standing outside Buckingham Palace on the day he collected his medal.

Set apart from them was a photograph he hadn’t seen before. It was a sepia print of a group of grinning soldiers in a trench, the whiteness of their eyes contrasting dramatically with the muddiness of their faces. At the centre of the group, standing forward from the
others, were two men with their helmets pushed back on their heads. One of them had his arm around the other’s shoulder and was smiling widely, showing his teeth. The other wore a moustache and a more forced smile that was tight-lipped and inscrutable. Handwritten in block capitals across the bottom were the words: ‘Private Andrew Kennedy, 11th Battalion, Shropshire Fusiliers. Ypres. 30 July 1917.’

‘Which one is he?’ Daniel asked, holding the frame up.

‘Moustache.’

‘Really?’ Daniel examined it more closely. Though the young man in the picture had a wider face than either he or his father had, he could nevertheless see a family resemblance now: the heaviness of the eyelids; the dimpled chin. Daniel had seen a photograph of his great-grandfather before – a formal portrait of him in uniform, but he hadn’t had a moustache in that one.

‘Taken the day before he was killed,’ Philip said.

Daniel looked at the date again. He knew his great-grandfather had died on the first day of a big battle, but he couldn’t remember which one. He wanted to say the Somme but that didn’t sound right. He read the caption again. ‘So the Battle of Ypres …’

‘The Third Battle of Ypres … They called it Passchendaele. That’s a line from a poem by Siegfried Sassoon. “I died in hell – (They called it Passchendaele).” ’ Philip picked up his glasses, slipped the cord over his head and tightened it. Next he reached for a slim volume of poetry, looked in the index, flicked to the relevant page and handed the opened book to his son.

Daniel gave the poem a cursory glance and clapped the book shut. Something about his father’s relentless seriousness always made him want to be flippant. ‘Passchendaele was the one with all the mud, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it began …’ He checked the date on the photograph again. ‘On the thirty-first of July?’

‘And lasted a hundred days.’

‘And we won it, right?’

If Philip was irritated by this comment, he chose not to show it.
Instead he blinked slowly – an eagle’s blink – before taking the photograph from Daniel and turning his back on him, so that he could study it against the light from the window. ‘The British gained five miles of ground. Four months later they withdrew, leaving the ruins of Passchendaele to its ghosts. If it was a victory, it was a pyrrhic one.’

Daniel tried not to convey his annoyance at his father’s pomposity, but he couldn’t help himself, he was feeling annoyed. ‘So Andrew was one of the lions led by donkeys? Have I got that the right way round? Yeah, lions led by donkeys.’

Philip stiffened but affected not to hear. He put the photograph in a drawer, face down, and got to his knees again in front of the fire. There was a wheezy sound as he lined a set of bellows up against the grate and began pumping.

Daniel walked over, opened the drawer and took the photograph out again. ‘Where did it come from?’

‘Your aunt Hillary. We found it in her garage after the funeral, in a biscuit tin …’ Philip paused, momentarily lost in his thoughts, then shook his head. ‘It was with some other personal effects. They must have been sent back from Passchendaele after Andrew was reported missing in action. We haven’t had a chance to go through them properly yet. I’ll show you.’ There was a creaking of brogues as he stood up, walked to a cupboard and lifted a tin from another drawer. Though tarnished with rust, the word ‘shortbread’ was still discernible on its lid. ‘Look, here’s his hip flask, wallet, a lock of hair, some letters he wrote. And this …’ He handed Daniel a copy of
Punch
magazine that was covered in doodles. Handwritten in faded ink above its masthead was ‘Major P. Morris, 2/Rifle Brigade’.

‘Is this musical notation?’

‘There’s more of it inside. There’s also a music score tucked into the back.’

Daniel opened the back cover and a folded sheet of paper dropped out. When he smoothed it out on the desk he saw it had brown stains on it and was annotated in German. He read out loud: ‘
Das Lied … Der Abschied … mit höchster Gewalt
… This a passage from a symphony or something?’

‘I don’t know. There are two names at the bottom. Peter and Gustav.’

‘I could get Wetherby to look at it. He loves shit like this.’ Daniel cringed as the word came out. His father never swore.

‘That’s kind, but I’d rather hang on to these things for the moment. What’s interesting is the magazine. Look at the date on it.’

‘April the twentieth, nineteen eighteen.’

‘Nine months after Andrew was killed.’ Philip rested a hand on the fender as he got to his feet. ‘Some of this Major Morris’s personal effects must have been muddled up with Andrew’s.’

Detecting a faint smell of uric acid, Daniel looked at the crotch of his father’s moleskins. There was a small, dark patch. Feeling shocked that Philip hadn’t noticed – how long had this been going on? – he looked away, slipped the music score into the magazine and handed it back. ‘You wanted to talk to me about something, Dad.’

‘I do.’ He frowned for a moment. Nodded. ‘It’s about the tin. I wanted to ask your advice.’

‘This is a first.’ It sounded more sarcastic than Daniel intended.

‘I’ve glanced at Andrew’s letters but my French is not what it was.’

‘They’re in French?’

‘I thought Nancy might be able to translate them properly, if she’s not too busy …’ He reached into the tin again and picked up a bundle of thin, yellowing letters bound with hairy string.

‘Well, you could have asked her yourself, Dad. There was no need to call me in here like …’

His father looked at him.

‘Sure,’ Daniel said, backing down. ‘I’ll ask her to have a look at them.’

‘But only if you think we should.’