The Winter Ghosts (10 page)

Fabrissa explained each new dish for me, local specialities, recipes I’d never encountered before. One was a peculiar
compote
of what she told me were medlars, an ugly fruit that had to be harvested and then ripened off the tree. It had the texture, the stickiness of honey. Another common winter dessert, she explained, was made from the flower-buds of cardoons. Blanched and then wrapped in cloth, they were buried in the ground before being dug up and mixed with honey to make a smooth paste.

Other than food, I can remember little of what we talked about in that early part of the evening. Everything is hazy, filtered through the warm fug of wine and conversation. Inconsequential, but such agreeable conversation to me. I cannot even remember if she spoke to me in French, or I to her in English, or
moitié-moitié
, a duet in two languages. But, even five years later, I can still taste the tang of the salt pork on my tongue, still savour the rough, woody texture of the broad beans, slippery in oil, still feel the gritty texture of the bread, like crumbled cake, between my fingers.

And still I hear the song in my mind, though I never caught sight of the troubadour. His voice floated through the hall, up into the rafters, into every stone corner and dusty cobweb. I remember marvelling that he could sing for so long, with a tone so even and unbroken, and I believe I said so. I think I might even have tried to tell her of the musical aspirations I’d once had before the War intervened and Father decided it was not a suitable career for his son. But I drew back from such confidences. I wished neither to burden her, nor to reveal myself as a man disappointed in life. Instead, I asked her to tell me the story of the ballad, and when she had, in return I explained the accompaniment, how one note worked upon the other to provide its own harmonies.

So time passed and yet did not move at all. And, for me, enchanted as I was, the world had shrunk to her slim white hands, the promise of her tumbling black hair, her grey eyes and her clear, sweet voice.

‘Are you an honest man?’ she said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

I started, taken by surprise both by the question and the grave tone in which she asked it. It was so different from the lightness of our conversations before that I hardly knew what to make of it.

But I answered. Of course I answered.

‘I would say so,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

Fabrissa then tilted her head to one side in that distinctive way of hers and looked at me.

‘And a man who can tell true from false?’

I paused as I considered how to answer. Ten years of voices in my head, of memories that were more real, more vivid, than the world outside my window. Ten years of living with George at my side. All this would suggest I was very far adrift from reality, that I was incapable of distinguishing true from false. But at that moment, sitting with Fabrissa in the warm companionship of the Ostal, the answer was obvious.

‘Yes. When it matters, then, yes. I am.’

She smiled, a broad and hopeful smile. And I, poor slave, felt a thousand emotions explode inside my head. I was lost. Bewilderingly, heart and soul, lost. Still she stared at me, as if seeking the answer to some question she had yet to ask.

‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘I can see it.’

A whistle slipped silently from between my lips. I felt as though I had passed some kind of test. A modern Gawain setting out from the Round Table, the conditions of his quest met. I was aware of her gaze upon me, weighing up the man I was. I could see she was considering and reflecting, I could see the movement in her eyes. But on the outside she was still, so very still. I tried to be the same, though nerves were sloshing in my stomach like bilge water in a scuppered rowing boat.

The moment stretched between us. The shapes and sounds and smells of the room, all the guests in it, faded away. Then Fabrissa shifted position on the bench and the enchantment was broken.

‘Tell me about him,’ she said.

The ground fell from under me, like a trapdoor beneath the hangman’s noose. A sudden, sharp drop, then the jerk of the rope.

How did she know? I had said nothing. Hinted at nothing. I did not want to talk about George, not even to Fabrissa. Especially not to Fabrissa. I did not want her to see me as the wretch I believed myself to be, but rather the man I had been for the past hours in her company.

‘What do you mean?’ I said, more sharply than I intended.

She smiled. ‘Tell me about George.’

Still I pretended not to understand.

‘Freddie?’ she said quietly. Her hand slid across the rough white cloth, a little closer to mine. Her fingernails were the colour of pearl.

I took a sharp intake of breath. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘I . . .’

How to explain? I stumbled for an excuse.

‘It’s all been said.’

‘Maybe only the wrong things have been said.’

Her hand was so close to mine now that we were almost touching. I noticed how the gold ring she wore on her right thumb was too big for her. It rested on the knuckle, as though surprised to find itself there.

‘Talking doesn’t help.’

The space between her skin and mine crackled. I dared not move. Dared not let the tips of my fingers stray towards hers.

‘Talking did not help,’ I repeated, the words dry in my throat. I glanced at her. She was still smiling, not with pity, but with compassion, curiosity. I felt something crack inside me.

‘And could it be you talked only because others required it of you? Maybe? But it is different here. Things are different. Try.’

‘I did try,’ I snapped back, appalled at how immediately the sense of being unfairly judged returned. Mother had accused me of not wanting to get well, Father too. I could not bear it if Fabrissa thought the same. ‘No one believed me, but I did try.’

Whether by design or accident, her hand brushed against mine as she withdrew it from the table and placed it in her lap. So intense, so profound was the sensation, I felt as if I had been burnt.

‘I—’

‘Try again, Freddie,’ she said.

And in those three quiet words, three simple words, somehow there was a promise of an entire life to be lived if I could only take the chance.

I can still recall the sense of possibility that came over me then, a kind of lightness. Every sinew, every muscle, every vein in my body seemed suddenly to vibrate, to be alive. If I could find the courage to speak, she would listen. Fabrissa would listen.

I took a deep breath and then slowly, steadily, exhaled. Finally, I began to talk.

‘I remember everything about that day,’ I said. ‘Every tiny detail. The smell and the texture of it, every second before and after the knock at the door.

‘I was in the nursery toasting bread. Cross-legged on the floor, a slab of butter ready on an old green china plate. It was September, but with the promise of autumn to come. The purple leaves on the copper beech were turning and there was condensation on the inside of the windows in the early morning. The fire had been lit for the first time since the previous winter and there was the bitter, musty smell of singed dust in the chimney.

‘On the wall above my bed was pinned a hand-drawn map of Europe printed by the
Manchester Guardian
. It was covered with red crosses, my attempt to mark each place the Royal Sussex Regiment had been - at least, where I imagined my brother’s division might be. Where George might . . .’ I stopped, the stab of memory too sharp.

Fabrissa waited. She seemed to have no need to hurry me or require me to turn fragments into a single, clear narrative. Her patience rubbed off on me, and when I found it in me to continue, the sequence of events was clearer in my mind and the words I needed came, if not easily, then at least less hesitantly than before.

‘I didn’t hear the knock at the door. But I remember being aware of our maid’s footsteps on the flag-stones in the hall. Florence always did shuffle and fail to pick up her feet. I was aware of the door being opened and mumbled words, too faint for me to make out.

‘Even then, I think I knew. There was something in the quality of the silence which shouted out that this caller was unwelcome. I stopped what I was doing and listened, listened to the silence. Then my mother’s clear, shrill voice in the hall. At the door. Yes, yes, I am Mrs Watson. And, moments later, a single word, so much the worst for being spoken so softly: “No.”

‘The fork dropped from my hands. I can see it now, falling slowly down, metal clattering on the hearthstone, toe, heel, toe, like a tap dancer, before coming to rest. The bread, so perfectly burnt on one side and raw white on the other. I ran. Sending the door flying back against the wall, I ran down the nursery stairs in my stockinged feet. On the same old dangerous turn, I slipped and lost my footing, cracked my shin. Blood started to seep through my sock and, absurdly, I remember thinking how I would be scolded for being so clumsy.

‘Down to the first landing, along the passageway where the carpet began. From the hall below, a sound that tore through me like a butcher’s knife. Not screaming exactly, more a howling, a wailing, the same word repeated over and over, “no, nooooo”, becoming one, single note.’

I stopped again, the memories too painful. I glanced at Fabrissa, seeking her reassurance and that she really did want to hear this.

She nodded. ‘Please, go on.’

I held her glance, then fixed my eyes back to the same spot on the table.

‘It was the fifteenth of September, did I say that? Almost two years to the day since George had enlisted. I had seen him once or twice, of course. He had been injured and sent home twice. A problem with his ears after a bombardment, not too bad. A bullet in his thigh the second time, again not life-threatening. ’

I shrugged, a casual gesture concealing the anger I felt with the doctors, with my father, for letting him go back to the Front at all, though I knew it was what he had wanted. It was a thin line between heroism and arrogance, and George had always walked it. We were the Watson boys. Nothing could harm us. He had believed in the myth of his own invincibility, whereas I? I had always felt the world was a dangerous place, waiting to spring its traps.

‘Both times, they patched him up and sent him back. But we hadn’t had a letter in a while, not since May. He was due home for a couple of days’ leave, so I tried not to be worried. Also, that summer I’d been ill with a serious bout of influenza, so I’d not been able to follow the progress of George’s battalion in the newspapers so closely.’

I stared at my hands, at the lines on them. They were no longer the hands of a child pushing pins into a map on the wall.

‘The worst of it was that no one talked to me. Not then. Not later. No one told me anything. When I got to the hall and ran to my mother, she lashed out at me, as if she could not bear to have me in her sight. Not hard, but I stumbled back against the hall table, sending a bowl of late pink roses in a crystal vase crashing to the ground. Water and glass and torn petals all over the rug. It was left to Florence to take me to the kitchen and dab iodine on my shin. She was crying. Her cap was all awry. They were all weeping, Florence and Maisie and Mrs Taylor, our cook. They loved him, too.

‘Mother shut herself away in the drawing room until Father came home. I could hear them talking behind the closed door. I pressed my ear against the polished wood, praying that they would know I was there and allow me in. Comfort me. But they didn’t. And although I knew that there had been a telegram and that everything was spoiled, nobody told me what it said. What, precisely, had happened to George. They simply forgot about me.

‘I was fifteen, but I stationed myself halfway up the stairs, as I’d done when I was a boy, watching the front door, my head resting against the banister, my arm wrapped around the spindles for comfort. I sat there for hours, watching the setting sun shine through the stained glass and throw beams of red and blue onto the flagstone floor.’

‘Willing George to come?’

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

Softly, gently, she reached out and covered my hand with hers. Her skin was cold, her touch insubstantial, so light, as if she were barely there. But I was overwhelmed by the understanding implicit in her gesture. Grateful for her care.

‘It was only some time later I learned the telegram said George was missing in action. I never understood why the news had taken so long to reach us. It had happened weeks before, weeks and weeks. The thirtieth of June. The Battle of the Boar’s Head, a place called the Ferme du Bois outside Richebourg l’Avoué. The day before the Battle of the Somme began. Missing in action, the telegram said. Not dead. So I was confused. I thought - hoped - that there was some doubt. Perhaps the Germans had taken him prisoner. Perhaps he was in hospital having lost his memory. I was furious with my parents for believing the worst so easily. For not holding firm to the idea he could be alive.