Apple Blossom Time (47 page)

I pushed open the door of the shed.

‘Tom, it’s awfully late…’

*   *   *

Ludicrously childlike, a naughty boy caught in the act, Tom’s guilty face gaped back at me. I’d have laughed if there had been anything to laugh at.

In that fanatically neat shed, with its tools hung on nails, its pile of scrubbed pots, its stacked fruit boxes, the scatter of paper on the bench demanded my attention. Tom had been cutting paper, snipping letters out of old newspapers and reassembling them into words … into lies. There was a pot of gum, with its handy brush combined with the lid. There was an envelope, already addressed. I couldn’t see that far, but I knew it was addressed to me.

And the fertile, decaying, tobacco-and-cobwebs, dust-and-damp smell would have been transferred to the contents of the envelope. When I’d opened it, the smell would still have been there, lingering, reminding me of something, and I wouldn’t have been able to remember what.

But now I knew.

‘Tom, why…?’

And all the questions I wanted to ask were encompassed in that. Why you? Why me? Why him? Why then? Why now? I already knew the when, the where and the how. Only the why had eluded me. Until now.

Tom seemed to wake up. ‘Laura, my dear.’ He made an ineffectual attempt to scoop the snippets of newsprint into the envelope. Some of them fluttered to the earth. ‘What on earth are you doing? You’ll catch your death.’

‘Why, Tom?’ I bent and picked up a few of the letters that had spun to my feet. There was a D, a W and an I. I passed them to Tom to stuff into the envelope with all the other evidence of his guilt.

‘Just tidying up, you know. Bit of a mess in here…’

‘I’ve seen him, Tom. He’s very well. He sends his good wishes.’

A lie, that. But there had already been so many lies. Tom put his head in his hands. His fingers were laced into the thinning, sandy hair, snatching, tugging, hurting.

‘I didn’t think … he didn’t believe … we never meant it to come to this. Whatever else … you have to believe, Laura, whatever else…’

‘I
do
believe you, Tom.’

‘I still wake up suffocating, you know, with the mud clogging my nose, blinding me. I can taste it, grind it in my teeth and I know I’m going to die. In a funk, the CO used to say. Roding’s in a funk again. Roding’s in a blue funk. And I was, of course. Edwin knew that.

‘The listening parties were the worst. An extra tot of rum didn’t go amiss before you climbed over the top. Just you – only it was always me – and an NCO. Over the firestep and through a gap in your own wire and into the mud. Silent, you had to be silent, but the rum made you clumsy, only you couldn’t do it at all without the rum, without the trickle of fire that coursed down to your guts. And the mud was like badly made porridge, cooked too quickly, full of lumps and grit and nasty, unidentified things. If you stopped to work out what you were crawling through, you’d scream. And that wouldn’t do, because it was a listening party and you had to be quiet.

‘You’d had a good look at a trench map before you went over – no point in taking a map with you, because just a pinpoint of light would bring fire down on you – and you’d fixed a landmark in your mind – maybe a hundred yards to the left of the tree that looked like a hunched bird. But when you got down to the ground, down on your belly, everything was different. The tree stump didn’t look the same. It wasn’t there any more. The mud was deeper. Perhaps we’d churned it up ourselves with an artillery pasting that had lasted two days. The enemy lines had moved. The distances were all wrong. It took twice as long, three times as long to crawl through human soup as you’d estimated, so you thought you’d got lost. And then you’d start crawling round in circles and sometimes the sun would be coming up before you found your way back, having discovered nothing. And only a couple of stiff ones would stop you shaking. Roding’s in a funk. Send him out again. Make a man of him.

‘And then the next night – off you’d go again. And you’d stretch out your hand in the darkness and touch teeth, but the teeth wouldn’t bite because they were detached from their head. Or you’d put your weight on something that moved and belched. Christ, you’d think, the poor beggar’s still alive. Then the stench would hit you and you’d realize that it was only the escaping gases that had made him sit up and fart.’

‘Tom … Tom, you don’t have to tell me this. Enough.’ I put my hand on his shoulder, very gently. He didn’t seem to notice it, but I could feel the quiver, strong and sustained, that was running through his body. He’d forgotten I was there, but now that he’d begun to talk, he didn’t seem to be able to stop.

‘Offensiveness. The CO was hot on offensiveness. We had to be as offensive as possible, all the time. One day, near the end, when the enemy was already on the run, he hit on the idea of really rattling the Jerries. He’d got hold of some leaflets from the intelligence chaps – in German – saying that the families at home in Germany were all starving, living on rats, children all had rickets, wives prostituting themselves for food, selling themselves to Israelite hucksters, Bolsheviks round every corner, you know the sort of bogeyman stories that a soldier would laugh at if they didn’t scare him half to death. Someone was ordered to take out a party and sow the leaflets round the German trenches. Me.

‘I decided not to come back that night. I decided to slip into the first Hun trench with my hands up and hope for the best. If they shot me, it couldn’t be as bad as creeping round in the dark like a rat, every night. Only it wasn’t as simple as that. A Verey light went up – phosphorescent white, turning the dead landscape to silver and our skin to the colour of corpses and our eyes to black holes – and the whole party was caught in its light. Sitting ducks. I hid behind a body and watched the others twist and spin in the hailstorm of Spandau fire. I heard the bullets whack into the corpse. They made a soggy plock, plock, plock. I was lucky, some would have said. They cut it to rags, but it saved me.

‘And when it was over, I couldn’t go forward and I couldn’t go back. Roding was in a funk again. When the attack began the next morning, Edwin found me – fell headlong over me, actually. If it had been anyone but him …

‘He tried to jolly me along with him. School prefect stuff, captain of cross-country and all that – you know. But I wouldn’t move. Any minute now, a mortar shell would drop on my head and that would be that and good riddance. If I moved, it might miss me. I couldn’t take the risk. The last thing I wanted to do was
survive.
Then he tried to persuade me to go back, say I’d been hurt – he couldn’t go with me because he was supposed to be going forward. But I wouldn’t do that either. I was waiting to die, the sooner the better.

‘The attacking waves washed against us and split and passed on. Edwin should have left me. It would have been better.’ He looked up briefly, as though only just realizing that I was there. It was a tormented glance.

‘Then there was a fearful bang. The earth fountained up and splashed back down on us, scattering us with things … things … I was deafened by the crash and dazed by the impact and blinded by the grit blasted into my face. Edwin was blown on to his back. There was blood all over his face.

‘When I could see again, I began to run – not forwards or backwards, but sideways, along the line of trenches, across the line of attack, scrambling across bodies, on my hands and knees half the time. And Edwin came after me. He had always been faster at school, but he couldn’t catch me that day. I didn’t see him again until he was under arrest.

‘I wandered in a circle and, at the end of the day, I was back where I had started. I dropped back into our front-line trench, all in one piece, not a mark on me. I had
wanted
to die, but I was not allowed to, yet there were thousands that day who died before they were ready. How do you explain that?

‘I was the only one of the night party left alive. They congratulated me on making it back at all. Edwin came back later still, much, much later, long after the advance had wavered and died, and was arrested and charged with leaving the scene of the attack. I knew he’d been looking for me. He ought not to have done it, of course. He really ought to have left me. That was his first mistake. His second was to keep silent.

‘That made sense to him, at the time, I suppose. He was an exemplary young officer, decorated, well thought of by his senior officers. I was nothing and no-one. With his record, he might get away with severe censure. I could only expect the worst. I never thought … I never believed …

‘The CO was raging. The offensive had been a ghastly failure and had cost us the best part of a company. Someone was going to be forced to pay for it and Edwin was company commander. Edwin could have made up some cock-and-bull story about being knocked senseless, but that would have been beneath him. He faced his accusers in silence and he did it for me.’

Tom leaned forward and clasped his hands around the back of his neck. ‘He died for me,’ he whispered.

‘But he didn’t die, did he?’

‘No.’

‘And you knew that.’

‘Yes.’ His voice was lower with every answer. ‘Not at first, I didn’t know for a long time, but – yes, I knew in the end.’

‘And you did nothing.’

‘There’s nothing you can do to me, Laura,’ he answered with a sudden burst of spirit. ‘Nothing you can say is worse than the things I have said to myself. You don’t have to torment me. I do it every day. I look at Diana and know that I couldn’t give her up. She mustn’t know.’ He grabbed at my arm. I flinched under the unexpected strength of his wiry, bony body. ‘I’d do anything to shield Diana.’

‘Even kill me.’

He nodded. ‘You had a right to know. He was your father. But once you started looking, I couldn’t let you go on. You do see that, don’t you? And you are so determined – so like Edwin – you never give up. I’d do anything to save Diana from being hurt. I let my friend die so that I could have Diana. She mustn’t be hurt any more.’

I looked at him and tried to whip up the anger and indignation that I knew I ought to feel. There was nothing. Disgust, resentment, all the importantly named feelings that the righteous have for the wrongdoers … they wouldn’t come. I felt only pity. And love.

I put my hand on his head and he turned his face into my breast. I stroked his hair as he used to do mine, when I was little and miserable. He was still shuddering and I gathered him more closely to me.

‘But Tom, it doesn’t matter any more. It’s all over. He’s happy.’

‘Diana must never know.’

‘She won’t know. He has a new life. He’s happy. It’s over.’ I felt his body sag with relief and exhaustion and I let him go. ‘Tom,’ I urged softly. ‘You’re tired. Come home. Mother’s waiting for you.’

‘Yes. Yes, soon. You go. I’ve a bit to think about. I’ll follow you soon.’

*   *   *

And in the morning, when he had not returned, I guessed. Maybe I knew all along. I daren’t think about that.

I left Mother laying the table for breakfast and ran back to the walled garden. Then I had to run on to the village. Reg Shellard was already about, delivering the first post. He came back with me and helped cut Tom down from the walnut tree, before Mother saw him.

Tom … oh, Tom. It wasn’t meant to end like this …

It’s getting cold, too cold and wet to sit any longer, without seeming noticeably eccentric. I shovel in the manure, just as I’ve seen it done before, and mix it with a spadeful of earth and a couple of handfuls of bone-meal.

‘That’s right. That’s the proper way to do it,’ he says, over my shoulder. I haven’t heard him. His gumboots are silent through the sodden, fallen leaves. ‘You learn quickly.’

‘I’ve had good teachers,’ I answer. ‘Two of them.’

Like all the trees in Edwin’s church, these two have names. One is for James and one is for Tom, who was as much a victim of the war as any other commemorated here. They look spindly, very frail, hardly capable of surviving the harsh weather that is still to come.

He seems to read my thoughts. ‘They’ll do,’ he says.

And when we turn to leave, I see Martin crossing the bridge. From this distance, he looks no older than the boy I remember in Ansty Parva. But I know that when he is closer, I’ll see the marks that war has left on him. As he will on me. We are both older, greyer, tougher, harder, but we have come through with our principles and beliefs intact.

And now I see, with sudden clarity, that our love has survived, too. I see it in his smile, in the quickening of his step as he notices me, in the diffident way he begins to wave to me and then stops, as he sees I’m not alone. Martin has come home.

‘Hello, Martin,’ I say and I’m shy and young again. ‘I’d like you to meet a friend of mine.’

And Edwin Ansty holds out his hand to Martin.

THE END

Kathryn Haig was born in Scotland. She has been an officer in the Women’s Royal Army Corps, a civil servant and a computer programmer, and now lives with her husband, daughter and an assortment of animals in the New Forest.

APPLE BLOSSOM TIME
. Copyright © 1997 by Kathryn Haig. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Der Fuehrer’s Face
by Oliver Wallace, © 1942 Southern Music Pub. Co. Inc., reproduced by kind permission of Peermusic (UK) Ltd, 8–14 Verulam Street, London.
Two Sleepy People.
Words by Frank Loesser. Music by Hoagy Carmichael. © 1938 Famous Music Corporation, USA. Used by permission of Music Sales Limited. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

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ISBN 0-312-18313-5

First published in Great Britain by Corgi Books, Transworld Publishers Ltd.