Women of Courage (84 page)

Andrew had been distraught, and the desire for revenge hatched like a dragon in his heart. He joined up, and his mother - a vivacious woman whom both boys idolized - spoke bravely of duty and loyalty to her adopted empire, and kissed him when he left.

By January 1915 he was at the front; by the end of the year he was a prisoner in a vast muddy compound in Hesse. In the spring of 1916 a letter from his father told him that his mother had been shot dead in the Easter Rising, by a bullet from a rebel outpost near Bachelor’s Walk. By Sinn Fein Volunteers, Andrew thought, with guns which had been sold to them by the Germans in 1914.

It was soon after that that he escaped. He climbed over the wire, killed one of the guards with his own bayonet, took his clothes, and disappeared into the German countryside. He headed south, travelling mostly by night, using the bayonet to steal when he had to. Three times he was nearly captured; each time he left dead men behind him. The way the bayonet slid into throat or stomach so smoothly, the grind against bone or cartilage as it came out, fascinated him. This killing was unlike that of the trenches; here, he looked into a man’s eyes first, and saw the recognition and the fear. Afterwards, there was a feeling of great, sensual pleasure, of enormous power, triumph and release unlike anything he had ever experienced. Later he would clean the weapon for hours, obsessively, half-exultant, half-ashamed, listening to the little devil whisper to his mind of revenge.

He headed south, towards the Schwarzwald - the Black Forest. Here, he hoped, there would be fewer people. He would be able to hide, perhaps hunt, and travel on to the Swiss border.

When he reached the fringes of the forest he was exhausted. He had been travelling for ten days and had eaten on only five. He needed food, rest, and shelter soon, or he would collapse. But each time he stole or killed, the hunt came closer behind him.

In the end he decided to approach a small isolated cottage at the mountainous end of a valley. It was surrounded by pine woods, there was no other house in sight, and he had watched it all day without seeing anyone come out except a single young woman.

He tried to clean himself up but all he could really do was pick the twigs out of his hair and brush some of the mud off his clothes. His face was still dirty, unshaven, and skeleton thin, his clothes old, ill-fitting and torn. When he walked into the kitchen and tried to speak to the young woman, she screamed. He used his best German, and smiled, but it only made matters worse. She threw a pan of warm water at him and ran out of the door.

He had to follow. She was running down the valley, towards the next farm, which was two or three miles away. When she got there she would call out a search party and Andrew would be recaptured or shot. He thought of stealing food and hiding in the forest but he did not think he could survive many more nights in the open. So he summoned up his last reserves of energy and sprinted after her.

Sprinted was hardly the word for it. After the first few yards his legs were shaking and he could feel his heart pounding as though his whole body were just a transparent skin covering it. But the girl did not run fast either. After the first quarter of a mile she looked back, saw that he was gaining slightly, leapt over the ditch at the side of the road, and ran into the forest.

She probably thought she could lose him in there. He caught a few glimpses of her brown dress and white apron ahead of him in the trees, and then she vanished. He stopped, his breath coming in great gasps, and looked around him frantically. Then he heard the snap of a twig behind him, turned, and saw her running downhill towards the track again. He ran to cut her off, she tripped and fell, and he was on her before she could get up.

He was too weak and exhausted to do anything but lie on top of her and try to pin her down. He thought of the bayonet but he had never used it on a woman. She rolled on her stomach and struggled free, but he managed to grab her ankles and pull her down again before she had gone a yard. She turned over, sat up, and hit him on the shoulder with a dead pine branch. He snatched it out of her hand, threw it away, and lay down flat on top of her with one hand holding each wrist. For several minutes she writhed and fought but he was just too heavy for her to get him off.

After a while the nature of the struggle under him changed. She closed her eyes and tried to push him off mainly with her hips. He rubbed his face against the side of her neck, and she turned her head and kissed him hungrily on the lips.

He had been too surprised and exhausted to do anything except hold on and kiss her back in case it was a trick, but she had kissed him so passionately and rubbed her pelvis so hard against his that he became hard and the more she writhed the harder he pressed her down until they had both climaxed almost together, he inside his trousers and she with great gasps and cries of ‘Ah! Ah! Aaaah!’ which he was terrified would bring someone down on them from the track.

But there was no one there and a little while later she kissed the lobe of his ear. He lifted his head and looked down at her. Her eyes were open. They were a bright cornflower blue in a broad face with a wide, generous mouth and flushed cheeks. Her hair flopped on the pine needles beneath her in two flaxen plaits, and her arms were still pinned above her head by the grip he had on her wrists.

They gazed at each other in fear and wonder.

He said, in his best German: ‘I don’t want to hurt you. I need food and shelter.’

She said: ‘You are Hans.’

‘My name isn’t Hans,’ he began, but she interrupted: ‘Yes. Yes, it is. You are my Hans come back.’ And she held up her mouth so appealingly that he kissed her again.

Then he said: ‘If I get off you, will you come back to the cottage quietly?’

She nodded, and they walked back slowly side by side, he a little behind her and ready to grab her arm at once if she should change her mind.

Once inside the cottage her attitude began to change again. She gave him some food and sat at the table watching him eat, and her face began to cloud over with suspicion. Then he made some mistake in German and she said: ‘You are a foreigner.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am a Prussian. I have run away from the army because I can’t stand it any more. If they find me they will shoot me.’

She looked slightly mollified about that but he wasn’t sure if she believed it. Prussia was about as far away from the Black Forest as you could get, and that was where he had learnt his German, so it was possible. He asked her about Hans. For answer, she took a photograph and a letter from a jar on the top of the dresser. The photograph was of a young man with a moustache and face not unlike Andrew’s, in a spiked German army helmet. The letter was from his colonel, telling his wife that he was dead.

‘But I know he is not dead,’ she said defiantly. ‘Every evening I hear his voice in the woods. One day he will come back.’

Andrew looked at her sadly and decided she was mad.

Then an idea struck her. ‘I have a widow’s pension from the government. Perhaps my Hans pretended to be dead so I would get the pension, and then ran away like you. Perhaps he is walking here now.’

‘Perhaps,’ Andrew said. If the German army was anything like the British, deserters were shot, publicly, ‘to encourage the others’.

But the idea had its possibilities. ‘If he is running from the army like me, your Hans will need a woman to give him food and shelter, too,’ he said.

She looked at him, and nodded slowly.

He stayed there for two months. By the end of the first evening he had decided she was simple, and unhinged by the loss of her husband. He was terrified that she would run and fetch someone while he was asleep so he made her sleep with her hands tied to the head of the bed. Also he told her that if anyone arrested him, he would inform them about Hans.

By the end of the first week he had realized just how much young Hans was missing. In the evening Elsie walked up into the woods, collecting wood and listening for Hans’s voice, and Andrew followed her because he was afraid to let her out of his sight. Then she looked over her shoulder and began to run, he chased her, and there was a repeat performance of their first meeting. This happened nearly every day. It became a game they began to elaborate on. He said that she could only go out into the woods without her shoes, then without her skirt, then without any clothes at all. Still she ran. Always he caught her, always she pulled him down on to her, into her. Andrew had never known any game could be so exciting.

At night, when he tied her wrists to the bed, she writhed and looked up at him as she did in the forest. He took off her clothes and looked at her, and she moaned and shifted her hips. Then he discovered, by experiment, how a woman could be brought to her climax with his hand, or his tongue, and that it was as much a pleasure to do that and watch her as it was to have an orgasm himself.

After a week he had known he was in love with her. The horror of the war in France, the fear of arrest and return to the squalor of the prison camp, were always in his mind as a threat and a contrast which made their lovemaking more desperate and urgent. They made little conversation; she was not talkative and had no knowledge of the world beyond her valley. After a while he came to trust her, too. An old man and woman came up from the village. She talked to them while he hid in the house, but she did not give him away. But the escape games continued, for their own sake.

He might have stayed for ever but one day in October the old couple told her that a detachment of recruits had been billeted in the town at the foot of the valley, and the next day a platoon marched up to the house behind a mounted officer with a map, reconnoitring. Andrew hid in a cupboard until they had gone. That evening he tried to persuade her to leave with him, but she refused. Hans would come back, she said, she had to wait for him.

Andrew left the next morning, before dawn, walking south towards Switzerland. He never saw her again.

Andrew escaped from Germany to a world where his father was dying, his mother had been killed by rebels, and the Empire faced defeat. He returned to the trenches, embittered, not caring whether he lived or died. For two more years he fought in the mud, expecting death every day, sometimes seeking it, and gaining a reputation for cold, detached ferocity. But death only mocked him, dragging a cruel finger down his face and giving him medals. So when the war ended he had come back to Ireland as an unwanted war hero, a landlord, and a recluse. He had gained the habit of warfare, and lost his hopes of love.

New Year’s Night came a fortnight after the visit of the Sinn Feiners. Henessy, the butler, had worked for fifteen years in Scotland, and grown attached to the Scottish custom of Hogmanay. Andrew’s father had indulged him, and Henessy had introduced various inventions of his own, including a midnight game of football with a burning whiskey barrel, so that before the war the New Year’s festivities at Ardmore had become something of a local tradition - not least because of the obvious need to consume the contents of the whiskey barrel before burning it.

Despite his age, Henessy had asked permission to welcome in the year 1920 in the traditional way. So for an hour or two Andrew had sat in the great kitchen, listening to the stories and songs of his servants and the villagers and friends they had invited. But he was not in convivial mood, and soon after midnight he went to bed, knowing that he was lifting a pall of respectability from the proceedings, which could now take life without him.

He lay in bed and fingered the long raised line of his scar. It was the main reason he gave himself for avoiding human company. When he had visited the girls in brothels in London and Paris they had gawped at it in pity or disgust, and he had caught the same look in the eyes of the serving maids here. And yet the right-hand side of his face was handsome enough; he could speak clearly, see, had good lungs, all his limbs intact; more than dozens of poor fellows he had known.

He wanted Ardmore to be a great house again but he hated company. He had begun to buy in horses, with the idea of starting a stud, breeding perhaps for the turf. But it was a slow business, needing a stock of patience which he lacked. Some days he could be charming, on others he sank into a black mood, brooding. The little devil in his mind whispered to him of the pleasure they had had in Germany, on the run; and he told himself there was no place for that in peacetime, at Ardmore. He wanted the place to be the haven, the paradise it had seemed in his childhood. But for that he would need a wife and children. And a wife would have to be as dashing and handsome as his mother, as thrilling as Elsie. He fingered the ridge of his scar, and remembered the way the new housemaid had winced in distaste at the sight of it this evening.

If she thinks you’re so horrible, the devil inside him whispered, why don’t you strip the clothes from her and lash her little pert buttocks with a riding crop until they look the same? He smiled to himself, knowing it could never happen. Ardmore was a peaceful, civilized place now. In time, perhaps, it would grow into something he could be content with. He fell asleep, listening to the distant sounds of revelry and laughter downstairs.

Four years of war had made him able to sleep through any noise, so the whoops and shouts did not disturb him. Not until five o’clock did he wake, and realize that something was wrong.

It was still dark, and the noise downstairs was as loud as before. He sighed, and pulled the pillow over his head.

Then he heard a scream, and smelt the smoke.

He leapt out of bed, and dragged back the curtains. Light flickered over the lawns - huge tongues of red light and shadows, dancing across the grass. He saw figures running. One, who looked like a housemaid, was lugging a bucket of water from a pond.

He flung the door open and ran out into the corridor. But he could see nothing; great clouds of smoke billowed round him and there was a draught, like a gale, blowing past him up the stairs. He couldn’t breathe. His throat was like sandpaper and he began to cough continually. Using his hands to feel the way, he floundered back to his room and slammed the door.