The Sons of Adam (11 page)

‘Good news for you, Creeley. Mix-up at HQ. You’re sticking here instead of buggering off to the 21st. It’s a bloody shame from my point of view, though.’

‘I beg your pardon?!’

‘Won’t be able to get my millinery done for free. What? What? What?’

Fletcher roared with laughter at his joke and dug down amongst Tom’s belongings to find the bottle of whisky he kept there. Shellfire, heavier than usual that night, thumped the air and sent shock waves through the ground. Particles of chalk fell from the ceiling. Fletcher poured the whisky into a couple of mugs.

The earth quaked around them. They drank.

Incident and consequence. Cause and effect. Each effect becoming in its turn the trigger of a whole new cycle.

A trench raid. A medal honourably won. A need for officers. Guy seeking to separate Tom from Alan. Tom breaking in on Guy. A junior officer pointing a loaded gun at a senior officer’s head. The causes started out small, hardly visible even. But the effects were no longer so small.

And they were growing all the time.

Beechnuts crunched underfoot. It was the first hard frost of November and ice glittered on the empty twigs. The forest felt like a fairy-tale wood. The two men walked a good distance, chatting about a hundred things, but it was only when they were deep into the forest silence that Alan finally brought up the subject that had been plaguing him.

‘I happened to see Guy in the village the other day,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘He had some extraordinary story about you and that transfer to the 21st.’

‘Yes?’

‘That you thought he had been behind the transfer instruction in the first place, that you wanted him to reverse the decision.’

‘Perfectly true.’

‘And that you burst in on him waving a gun.’

Tom laughed. ‘Almost. I
did
burst in on him. I didn’t have a gun on me. He had one on his dressing table, which I think he’d started to load when he heard me come in downstairs. I did point that at him briefly. I don’t really know why.’

He was completely without embarrassment. Alan stared at him incredulously. ‘You aimed a loaded gun at him?’

‘Yes – at least I assume it was loaded. I didn’t really bother to check. Look at this.’ Tom eased some leaves aside with his toe and revealed the gleam of copper wire by a bare root. It was a trap laid for rabbits. ‘Neat job, eh? Here, what about this?’ Tom pulled a salami from his pocket that the two men had been intending to eat for lunch. Tom slipped the sausage through the loop of wire and drew the wire tight. He scattered leaves back as they had been before. Tom began to shake with laughter at the thought of the trapper returning to find his catch.

‘Tom! For God’s sake!’

‘What? I’d be damn pleased to trap a sausage.’

‘Not the trap, you idiot. Guy. You aimed a gun at him?’ Alan was shocked. He was also upset and torn, as he always was when Tom and Guy quarrelled.

‘Yes. I don’t think he enjoyed it much. But it did the trick, didn’t it?’

‘But for heaven’s sake! You can’t just go waving a gun at him. What in hell’s name did you think you were playing at?’

Tom’s nonchalant attitude suddenly disappeared. Alan had begun to shout and he had a tendency to sound preachy and schoolmasterly when he was angry about something. Tom never put up with that and he didn’t now.

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he said coldly. ‘I think – no, that’s not right, I
know
– that your so-called brother wanted to see us separated, and I knew that I could frighten him into undoing the damage. What’s more –’

‘But you
can’t
just aim a gun at him.’ Alan was angry and his voiced was raised. ‘You have to learn some limits. Guy has his faults but he
is
my brother –’

‘Oh? He’s your brother, is he? So what the hell was he thinking of then, separating the two of us?’

‘You’ve no evidence that he ever wanted to separate –’

‘No, you’re quite right. And after all, as you point out, he is your brother so he couldn’t possibly wish to hurt you.’

‘Listen, whatever else he may or may not be, Guy is family
– my
family, I mean, and –’

‘Your family?
Your
family? What am I then? What am I? The fucking gardener’s boy?’ Tom was shouting, his breath building storm castles in the freezing air. He was extremely angry.

‘For God’s sake, Tom! Calm down! If you’d mentioned your suspicions to me I could have had a word. It didn’t need you to aim a bloody –’

‘And just possibly you’re wrong. Had you thought of that? Perhaps aiming a gun at his head was just precisely what
was
needed. Or is your bloody good nature going to get in the way of seeing straight every time there’s a problem?’

Up till now both men had been panting with the effort of the argument. They were shouting hard at each other and Alan had unconsciously picked up a stick as though intending to assault Tom with it.

They felt ready to murder each other.

And then, as so often in the past, the anger slid away as though it had never been. The bottom dropped out of their rage and calmness returned. Though he wouldn’t admit it – not even to himself, perhaps – Alan knew that Tom was right. Alan’s reliance on decency and fair play would never have had the impact on Guy that a loaded gun would have had.

‘Listen, old fellow,’ said Alan. ‘You and I have always been close. Closer to each other than to anyone else. Guy doesn’t get a look-in. But when all’s said and done, and whatever Guy did or didn’t do, I think –’

‘He
did
do it. I
know
he did.’

‘Well, even so, I could have spoken with him. It didn’t –’

‘And he’d have told you that the whole matter had nothing to do with him and you’d have believed him. You always do.’

They walked a few paces more in silence. Alan looked long and hard at some animal tracks. Hare. He could see fox tracks as well. If he listened carefully, he could hear the almost silent animals of the forest: the cautious footfalls of the deer, the quiet munching of the rabbits, the tapping of woodpeckers in the trees. He looked up.

‘Take care, brother,’ he said. ‘You play a dangerous game at times.’

Tom smiled brilliantly and gave an airy wave. ‘That’s what comes of being a gardener’s son. Nothing to lose.’

He was wrong, of course. And it wouldn’t be long before he knew it.

It was nine months later, 10 August 1916.

Alan and Tom were both alive, both intact. That was the good news.

Meanwhile, the war was continuing. The Battle of the Somme was in progress. In the last six weeks alone, a hundred thousand British soldiers had been killed or wounded. So far, Tom and Alan’s battalion had been kept out of the conflict, but that happy interval was about to end. The battalion was due to attack the very next day. The fighting would be as severe as anything the two men had ever experienced. Casualties were certain to be high. Perhaps colossal.

That was the bad news.

And, in a way, it was untrue to say that both men had survived intact. They hadn’t. They couldn’t. No man survives, life in the combat zone for very long. Nerves shred. Humanity frays. The spirit fails.

Of the two men, Alan had been worse affected. Devoted to his men, he often pushed himself too hard. Too serious to unwind easily, he found relaxation difficult. He smoked. He rode. He wrote letters home.

And he’d found a girl.

Called Lisette, she was pretty, dark-haired, smiling and kind. They’d met by accident one day in a village seven miles behind the lines, Ste Thérèse-sur-Tarne (‘Saint Tess’ to the men). He was billeted there. She was the daughter of one of the local farmers. Caught outside during a rainstorm, he helped her home. They ran into her farmhouse, shared some coffee, laughed together. She invited him back. And back. After three visits, he could take a hint. Excited and embarrassed in about equal measure, he undressed in her little bedroom. They made love. During the rest of the fortnight that Alan was in Saint Tess, they met on a further nine occasions, making love on eight of them.

The evening before the assault found the battalion sheltering in the wreck of what had once been a village. The officers’ mess was a ruined cellar, whose entrance was neatly flanked by two rows of shell cases, graduated in size, ranging up to the height of a man.

Tom was still Tom. He was handsome, brilliant, unmilitary, courageous. But over time, his outlook had blackened. He lounged against the cellar wall, barely protected by the sandbag parapet in front of him. He picked up a flint and threw it out beyond the sandbags.

‘A fine place to die,’ he commented.

‘For God’s sake!’

Alan jumped to find a piece of wood to ward off Tom’s unlucky words. A discarded crate lay nearby and Alan passed a chunk of it to Tom, who touched it absently. The side of the crate was marked in English: ‘Shell Motor Spirit’. Tom nodded at the marking and smiled.

‘Good choice.’

‘Let’s get out there right away, shall we?’ said Alan. ‘After the war, I mean. Not wait any longer.’ He meant get out to Persia, of course.

Tom laughed and shook his head.

‘What?’ said Alan defensively. ‘You can’t want to go back to Standard, can you? Lord knows, I couldn’t stand to be cooped up in somebody else’s office.’

Tom laughed again, kindly this time. ‘That’s not what I meant, old man. I meant … Look, you don’t think we’ll both survive this, do you?’ Tom spoke quietly, talking almost to himself. ‘But there are worse things, after all.’

‘Tom, for God’s sake!’

‘If I’m to die, I’ve decided to fight like a maniac first. Take a few Boche with me.’

‘Don’t speak like that. Don’t even think like that.’

Tom shrugged. ‘I haven’t always thought like that. This whole damned war is so stupid, I couldn’t see much purpose in trying to fight it hard. I still can’t, in a way, except that one has one’s self-respect to think of.’ He flicked his white and purple medal ribbon thoughtfully, then his tone changed again. ‘If I am killed, will you promise to do what you can in Persia?’

‘Of course.’

‘Drill. If there’s oil, you’ll find it. If there isn’t – well, at least you’ll have tried.’

‘We’ll find it together.’

‘You’re probably right. Dead or alive, I’ll be there in spirit. But promise me, brother. Your most sacred promise.’

‘I promise.’

‘And don’t give the damn thing away to a bunch of stupid stockmarket investors. I mean, you’ll have to at some point. But not straight away. Find the oil first.’

‘The oil first, if humanly possible.’

Tom gravely nodded his acceptance. ‘Good. Good man.’

The way he said it, it sounded like goodbye.

The battalion moved off at eight that evening. Its goal: a full-frontal attack on enemy positions.

It was pitch-black and raining, and the ground was evil. Three times, artillery fire forced the company to flatten itself into whatever cover was available. Each time the shelling lifted, the company moved forwards again, leaving a small handful of wounded men behind. On one occasion, Alan was struck with a shell splinter, shaped like a goose quill, in his shoulder blade. An NCO lying in the ditch next to him tweaked it out with finger and thumb and threw it away. Neither man commented on the incident, or was even thinking about it five minutes later.