Ashenden (27 page)

They stopped outside a door. The woman consulted her watch. You could see how time gave her a purpose in life.

“We’ve a photographer coming in half an hour.”

“I shouldn’t think it will take long.”

“Good. He’s through there.”

*  *  *

“Miss Wells,” said Harrison, standing. There wasn’t much room in the little office, but he brought another chair up to the table and turned his own round so they were facing each other. “Please have a seat.”

She sat down. So did he. He wanted a cigarette but he didn’t trust his hands. He didn’t know what fits and starts they might get up to.

Miss Wells put her bag on the table, took off her gloves, and laid them on top. She was like some sort of fierce woodland creature. Small, with pointed features and large hazel eyes. He wished she would take off her hat so he could see her hair. When had girls started cutting their hair? It was very odd. From what little he could see of it, he thought it must be like her brother’s, curly and coppery. Otherwise she didn’t look much like him at all.

“I’m sorry. I know this must be difficult.”

She bit her lip, lowered her eyes, and nodded. The instant she came into the room and saw this damaged, twitching man, hardly more than a boy, anger receded and in its wake came the foul swill of shame that had been lapping round her life for months. Most people got a telegram. That’s what you feared, a telegram. They had received a letter in the post from the War Office, which was worse.
Dear Sir. We regret to inform you that your son, Private Peter Wells of the 6th Battalion, Royal Berkshires, was sentenced to death for cowardice and shot at dawn on the 9th of August.
That was what it said. That was all it said. They never even knew there’d been a courtmartial.
Her father had kept the letter in his trouser pocket for the past three months so that no one could find it and read it. Her hands were clenched, her knuckles white. How much more shame did they want them to feel? She raised her eyes.

“Why did you want to see me, Lieutenant?”

Harrison reached across the desk, picked up the packet wrapped in oilskin, and handed it to her. “First let me give you this. These are his effects.”

She put the packet in her lap without taking her eyes off him. Her greeny-brown eyes. The colors of the English countryside, he thought.

He wanted a cigarette badly.
Effects?
Why had he come out with that? It was the sort of word a padre would use. Start again. “Miss Wells, I knew your brother and he was no coward.”

She was as good at silence as he was, which was saying something. After some time she asked him how old he was, as if she were asking whether it was raining or not.

“Twenty-three next month.” Worse and worse. Now he sounded like Sergeant Mullins, who was “getting on for five foot five.” Which was to say, five foot four. He gave in to his craving and began the long, jittery process of rolling a cigarette and lighting it.

“I know Peter wasn’t a coward,” she said, as his fingers twitched and leapt. She wondered whether she should help him and decided against it. “Which is why I can’t understand what happened.”

Somehow he found the courage to look her in the eye. “Things are different over there.”

None of them wrote what it was like in their letters. You wrote “Thank you very much for the socks” or “Thank you for the scarf, much appreciated” or “We all enjoyed the fruitcake” and “How are you all at home?” To write down the truth of it would be to admit that it was real. That it was as much a part of the world as anything else, which was unimaginable.

“Please be assured, Miss Wells, your brother was a fine soldier and you and your family have nothing to be ashamed about. I wrote to you because I wanted to tell you that in person.”

His mouth was dry and it was hard to swallow. It was hard to speak over the shame of his failure. A silence fell.

“Is that why you brought me here? That’s it?”

He lit the cigarette, inhaled, felt the smoke catch at the back of his throat. What had he expected? That his
assurances
would be enough?

“Forgive me,” he said. Then he began to talk to a patch of crumbling distemper on the wall.

“I first met your brother a few months before the offensive. He was running dispatches from high command to the field and back again, mostly by motorbike. Lines of communication, they’re as important as lines of supply. The staff officers need the intelligence from the ground and you need the orders. You might think that’s an easy job. It isn’t. You never know what you’re going to come across. Things change day to day. There are mines and snipers. We have pigeons, you know, carrier pigeons, but a man’s more reliable in the long run.

“And your brother was good with engines. Out there, they’re always breaking down. Sometimes it’s the weather, the mud, the dirt, the dust, the wear and tear. Sometimes they’re just substandard. Whatever the problem was, he could always fix it. So he was doing an important job and doing it better than anyone else could have done.”

He paused.

“Go on,” she said.

He swallowed. “Then we were sent to the front. We’d been training for months behind the lines. We knew the terrain. The plan was that we would shell their trenches, wire, and artillery batteries. Mine their gun posts. Destroy the lot. Then we would walk across and take their positions.

“The bombardment went on for a week. Shell after shell after shell. During the day there was nothing coming from the other side. Nothing at all. You could stand up and walk around as if you were off for a picnic. But at night the enemy were still shelling us, so we knew the barrage hadn’t been as successful as they said. The
morning of the attack, the mines were to be detonated a couple of minutes before the whistles went, and we were told not to cheer when we came up the trench ladders. Those were the general orders. In the south sector ours were slightly different. We were to advance a little ahead of the appointed hour, to get as far forward as possible, and that turned out to be the right decision in the end, despite what happened.”

Another pause. “You don’t want to be hearing this.”

“I do,” she said. “Go on.”

“Our position was opposite a machine-gun nest, which had been mined,” he said. “When we came over the top, the Germans started firing from it. The engineer in charge of detonating the mine saw that we were already out there, in the way of the blast. But if he didn’t go ahead and explode the charge, we would be mown down anyway. The problem was, when the thing blew up, it went in all directions. The charge hadn’t been laid deep enough. Those first few minutes after the blast, your brother saved two men that I know of. One of them was me.”

The patches of peeling distemper seemed to make a map of somewhere. He smoked his cigarette and was back in the weather of that summer morning, the red mist of blood and burning debris, the heavy earth rain, the obscene hail of body parts thudding onto the chalky ground. His knees began to knock and jump in his trouser legs. The weather of that morning.

When he came back to himself, he noticed that her silence had a different quality, which helped. He rubbed his chin, which was still bare and clean-shaven, and went on. “We took the crater where the machine-gun nest had been and the trench lines around it. By the end of the day we had taken all our objectives. We were luckier than some. In the south sector our orders were to vary our formation if we had to. If things didn’t go according to plan. Farther north, they were told to keep to theirs, whatever happened. And they were carrying more kit.”

He was leaving out a lot. “The cavalry never arrived like they were supposed to. Not at the end of the first day and not afterwards.
It became clear there wasn’t going to be any breakthrough. That we would be fighting over each field, each yard. Then three weeks later, the third week of July, we were sent to relieve the South African First Infantry Brigade. They’d suffered heavy casualties taking a wood. Delville Wood. Only it wasn’t a wood by then.”

Heavy casualties was one way of putting it. Just a fifth of the brigade left alive was another. He only realized that he’d stopped talking when she prompted him again.

“Lieutenant?”

He stared at the flaking distemper. “To be honest, I don’t remember much about it. My memory’s not so good these days.” He was lying. Shattered stumps, waterlogged craters, corpses piled four deep: he remembered all of it, and whenever he forgot it for a time, his dreams were happy to remind him. “We advanced in daylight, which was a mistake. There was heavy artillery and machine-gun fire. They called it a tactical victory.” He twisted round and stubbed out his cigarette in the Wedgwood ashtray. “Which is their way of saying it didn’t change anything.”

There were footsteps outside. A peremptory knock. “Lieutenant Harrison?”

He frowned at the door. “What is it?”

“The photographer has arrived. The men are assembling in the library.”

“I’ll be along shortly.”

“As soon as possible, please, Lieutenant,” said the officious voice. “The photographer says that the light’s going and there isn’t much time.”

The photographer can stuff his light, he thought. And you can stuff your bloody photograph. He turned to the girl.

“Delville Wood,” she said.

“Yes.” He fumbled with his tobacco tin and cigarette papers.

“Let me.” She took the tin and papers, rolled two cigarettes, and handed him one. “May I?” she said, holding up the other.

“Of course.”

She lit the cigarette. “What’s the matter? Haven’t you seen a girl smoke before?”

He smiled and moved the ashtray within her reach.

“Delville Wood. Was that where it happened?” she said.

“Where what happened?”

“Where my brother was arrested.”

“No, that was somewhere else.”

Delville Wood. Shattered stumps, waterlogged craters, corpses piled four deep. “We advanced. There was heavy artillery and machine-gun fire coming from the hill. I don’t remember much about it.” (The remnants of the brigade marching out of the wood to the pipes of the Black Watch.) “The last time I saw your brother, he was dragging one of the wounded to cover, except there wasn’t much cover. Later, afterwards, we discovered he was missing. I thought he must have been shot.”

“Missing, presumed dead,” she said.

“When they eventually found him, he was alive and a long way from the front.”

She leaned forward. “What are you saying? Are you saying that he deserted? That he ran off?”

“He was confused. He didn’t know where he was. He’d been wandering about for ages and wasn’t making much sense. What happened to your brother could have happened to any of us. Now they say two days is enough. After that you’re supposed to be relieved. We’d been at the front for weeks. Fighting or under attack a lot of that time.”

“But being confused doesn’t make you a coward!”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Then why did they arrest him?”

“Because he was alive and he was a long way from where he was supposed to be. Because he wasn’t wounded. That’s enough for them. That’s the way it is.”

He picked up the letter from the desk and handed it to her. “You don’t have to read this now. It’s from the chaplain who was at the court-martial. When he heard they were shipping me back, he asked me to give it to you. I’ve been in hospital for a while, otherwise you would have had it sooner. I’m sorry about that.”

She opened the envelope, took out the letter, and began to read. It was two pages long. When she got to the end of the first page, she gasped. She read the letter twice, then looked at him. Her hazel eyes were like the English countryside in the rain. Greeny-brown. Wet.

“He refused a blindfold.”

He nodded. “He was the finest soldier I’ve ever known. The bravest. The best.”

The door banged open and Mullins barged in. “They want you upstairs now, sir. For the photograph.”

“Anyone ever teach you to knock, Sergeant?”

“Sorry, sir.”

Miss Wells stubbed out her cigarette and put the letter into her handbag. “It’s time I was going in any case.” She got up and turned to Harrison. “Peter was my half brother, you know. But he was never half of anything to me. Thank you, Lieutenant.”

“It was the least I could do.”

“It has meant a great deal.”

He could see anger, resolve in her eyes. She wasn’t wearing it like a shield, she was carrying it like a spear.

“I’m going to see to it that his name is cleared,” she said.

He didn’t want to discourage her, so he nodded. “Good luck.”

“Good luck to you too.”

She put on her gloves, gathered up her things, and together they went across the courtyard, up the stairs, and through the echoing house, with all its symmetries and sight lines. On the portico, the land falling away in front of them and rising to a gentle hill, he shook her hand, and then he went off to the library to have his photograph taken.

I
t’s a simple equation: spend more than you earn, no matter how little or how much that is, and there’s trouble sooner or later. That time has come. With the land gone, sold to pay off debts run up in the pleasure spots of Europe, the house has fallen under the hammer.

Trapped in the looking glasses here and there are pale reflections that rise out of their depths and fade away again. So much has been left behind and little of it is of any consequence or value. Broken shooting sticks, burnt saucepans, cracked china, discarded clothes in abandoned wardrobes, clothes that no one will ever wear again. A nursery so long shut up that no one remembers it is there. Touch the curtains and they threaten to drop from their rings into huddled heaps on the floor, the threads disintegrated, eaten away by sunlight and dust.

*  *  *

“What a Dazzler!” read the gossip column headline.

Tantalizing news has reached our ears that the winner of the eagerly anticipated treasure hunt at Ashenden Park will find themselves in possession of a diamond bracelet. We call that
very
generous. Property dealer George Ferrars, who recently acquired the house at auction, refuses to say how much the
Cartier sparkler is worth but has confirmed that society’s favorite good-time girl Dido is among those invited to the glittering
soirée
.