Birdsong (38 page)

“Well I’m going anyway. Let me know if you change your mind. The CO said you spoke very good French.”

“Did he? I’m going to see if everyone’s settled in.” Stephen drained the glass. “Do you know where the tunnel head is?”

“It’s about fifty yards that way.”

There was a hole in the ground roughly where Ellis had said. Stephen asked the sentry when the shift was due to come up.

“About half an hour, sir.”

“Is Captain Weir with them?”

“Yes.”

“If he comes up before I get back, tell him to wait for me.”

“All right, sir.”

Stephen went along the trench, twice tripping on the outstretched legs of men who had scraped sleeping holes for themselves in the front wall. He wondered if it would really be possible to get to Amiens. It was almost seven years since he and Isabelle had left on the night train. Surely now it would be safe to return. After occupation and bombardment by the Germans, after the passage of almost seven years, surely the place could hold no disquieting reminders.

Michael Weir was emerging from the tunnel as Stephen arrived. There passed a moment of physical awkwardness between them when neither offered to shake hands. Weir’s company had been sent back to its original position soon after the initial attack on the hot July morning. He was delighted when, some months later, Stephen’s battalion also returned.

“Good rest?” said Weir.

“Yes. Fine. What’s happening underground?”

“We’ve had a new consignment of canaries. The men are delighted. They were worried about gas.”

“Good. Come and have a drink if you like. It looks pretty quiet. We’ve got a patrol going out later but it should be all right.”

“Have you got whisky?”

“Yes. Riley always seems to get it from somewhere.”

“Good. I’ve run out.”

“I didn’t think that was possible. Can’t you just order some more?”

“Apparently I’ve been through my ration.”

Weir’s hands were shaking as he took the bottle and filled his glass in the dugout. Ellis watched silently from the bunk: he was frightened by Weir’s dishevelled appearance and his inability to talk sensibly until the liquor had put some strength and reason into him. He looked too old to be crawling underground with explosive charges, especially in those trembling fingers.

Weir gulped at the drink and shuddered as it ran down inside him. He found it more and more difficult to last out the long underground shift, even with the help of what he took with him in his hip flask. Increasingly he found reasons for instructing someone else to take the men down.

———

Weir had been on leave to England. He arrived at dusk at his parents’ Victorian villa in Leamington Spa and rang the front-door bell. The maid opened it and asked him who he was. His telegram had gone astray; they were not expecting him. His mother was out, but the maid told him she thought his father would be in the garden. It was an October evening, three months after they had attacked on the Ancre.

Weir took off his greatcoat and left it on a chair in the hall. He dropped his kitbag on the floor and made his way through to the back of the house. There was a large flat lawn with laurel bushes and a giant cedar in one corner. He saw the gnats in the damp air ahead of him and felt his boots sink into the short-cropped lawn. The packed grass gave luxurious support to his steps. The air was thick with garden scents at evening. The denseness of the silence
pressed his ears. Then he heard a door bang in the house, he heard a thrush; then a motor lorry backfiring in the quiet suburban street.

On the left of the lawn was a large greenhouse. Weir could make out a trickle of smoke coming from the door. As he approached it he caught the familiar smell of his father’s pipe tobacco. He stood in the doorway and looked inside. His father was kneeling beneath a shelf on which small boxes of seeds were neatly laid out. He appeared to be talking to someone.

“What are you doing?” said Weir.

“Feeding the toad,” said his father, without looking up. “Quiet now.”

From an old tobacco tin on the ground beside him, he took a small dead insect, pinched it between finger and thumb, and pushed his hand slowly forward under the shelf. Weir could see the polished seat of his trousers and the back of his bald head, but little else.

“That’s it, that’s my beauty. He’s a champion, this one. You should see the size of him. We’ve not had an insect in here for weeks. Come and have a look at him.”

Weir went over the uncemented paving that his father had laid down the middle of the greenhouse and knelt on the gravel next to him.

“You see there? In the corner?”

Weir heard a fat croak from the direction his father indicated. “Yes,” he said. “A fine specimen.”

His father backed out from under the seed boxes and stood up. “You’d better come on in then. Your mother’s at choir practice. Why didn’t you let us know you were coming?”

“I sent a telegram. It must have got lost. I didn’t know until the day itself.”

“Well, never mind. We’ve had your letters. Maybe you’ll want a wash after your journey.”

Weir looked across at his father’s portly figure as they walked over the lawn. He wore a cardigan over his shirt, still with its stiff collar from the day at the office, and a dark, striped tie. Weir wondered if he was going to say any word of greeting. By the time they reached the French windows to the sitting room it was clear that the moment had passed.

His father said, “I’ll get the maid to make up a bed if you’re stopping.”

“If that’s all right,” said Weir. “Just for a night or two.”

“Of course it’s all right.”

Weir took his kitbag upstairs and went to the bathroom. The water roared in the pipes, stalled, gurgled with an airlock that shook the room, then thundered from the wide mouth of the tap. He dropped his clothes on the floor and sank into the bath. He expected that he would soon feel at home. He went to his old room and dressed carefully in flannel trousers and checked shirt: he was waiting for the moment when the familiar wash of normality would come over him and he would be restored to his old self; when the experiences of the last two years would recede into some clear perspective. He noticed that the clothes were too big on him. The trousers rested on his hipbones. He found some braces in a drawer and hitched them up. Nothing happened. The polished mahogany of the chest looked alien; it was hard to imagine that he had seen it before. He went to the window and looked down on the familiar view, where the garden ended by the cedar tree and the corner of the next-door house with its rear terrace and long drainpipe blocked the skyline. He remembered afternoons of childhood boredom when he had looked out at this view, but the familiar recollection did not bring back any sense of belonging.

When he went downstairs he found his mother had returned.

She kissed him on the cheek. “You look a bit thin, Michael,” she said. “What have they been feeding you on over in France?”

“Garlic,” he said.

“Well no wonder!” She laughed. “We got your letters. Very nice they were, too. Very reassuring. When was the last one we had?”

“About a fortnight ago. You’d moved, you said.” Weir’s father was standing by the fireplace, loading another pipe.

“That’s right,” said Weir. “We moved up from Beaucourt. We’re moving again soon, up toward Ypres. Near somewhere called Messines, where we were at the start. I’m not really supposed to tell you too much.”

“I wish we’d known you were coming,” said his mother. “We had our tea early so I could go to choir practice. There’s a bit of cold ham and tongue if you’re hungry.”

“That would be nice.”

“All right. I’ll get the maid to set it out in the dining room.”

“You’re too late for my tomatoes, I’m afraid,” said his father. “We had a champion crop this year.”

“I’ll ask the girl if she can find a bit of lettuce.”

Weir ate the meal alone in the dining room. The maid set a place with a glass of water and a clean napkin. There was a slice of bread and butter on the side plate. He swallowed quietly, the sound of his own chewing magnified by the lack of conversation.

Afterward he played cards with his parents in the sitting room until ten o’clock, when his mother said it was time for her to go to bed.

“It’s nice to see you all in one piece, Michael,” she said, as she gathered her cardigan around her and went to the door. “Don’t you two sit up talking all night.”

Weir sat facing his father across the fireplace.

“How’s the office?”

“It’s all right. The business doesn’t vary as much as you’d think.”

There was a silence. Weir could think of nothing to say.

“We’ll ask some people over if you like,” said his father. “If you’re stopping till the weekend.”

“All right. Yes.”

“I expect you’d like a bit of company after all … after, you know.”

“France?”

“Exactly. Make a change.”

“It’s been terrible,” said Weir. “I’ve got to tell you, it’s been—”

“We’ve read about it in the paper. We all wish it would hurry up and finish.”

“No, it’s been worse. I mean, you can’t imagine.”

“Worse than what? Worse than it says? More casualties, are there?”

“No, it’s not that. It’s … I don’t know.”

“You want to take it easy. Don’t get yourself upset. Everyone’s doing their bit, you know. We all want it to end, but we just have to get on with things in the meantime.”

“It isn’t that,” said Weir. “It’s … I wonder if I could have a drink?”

“A drink? What of?”

“A … glass of beer, perhaps.”

“We haven’t any in. There might be some sherry in the cupboard, but you wouldn’t want that, would you? Not at this time of night.”

“No. I suppose not.”

Weir’s father stood up. “You get yourself a good night’s sleep. That’s the best thing. I’ll ask the maid to get some beer tomorrow. We’ve got to build you up after all.”

He put out his hand and patted his son on the back of the left bicep. “Good night, then,” he said. “I’ll lock up.”

“Good night,” said Weir.

When he could no longer hear his father’s footsteps upstairs, he went to the corner cupboard and took out the two-thirds-full bottle of sherry. He went out into the garden and sat on a bench, where he lit a cigarette and raised the bottle in his trembling hand.

“I
want you to do the runes. Tell my fortune,” said Weir.

Stephen smiled at him. “You’re a hopeless devil, aren’t you? He wants me to tell him he’s going to survive,” he said to Ellis, who was watching from the bunk.

“Go on,” said Weir. “Don’t pretend you don’t believe in it. It was you who introduced me to it.”

Stephen stood up and walked to the gas curtain that hung over the entrance to the dugout. “Riley,” he shouted. “Get me a rat.”

While they waited, Stephen took a pack of cards from the wooden shelf by the door, some stubs of candle, and some sand. He made the shape of a pentangle on the table, placing several cards face down and linking them with trails of sand. He lit the candles and placed them at five equidistant points. He could feel Ellis’s eyes boring into him from behind.

“This is voodoo I invented to pass the long hours. Weir likes it. It makes him feel that somebody cares about him. It’s better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.”

Ellis said nothing. He could not understand the relationship between the two men. The captain from the tunnel appeared to be always on the point of collapse while his own senior officer, Wraysford, seemed so calm that he was capable of being cruel to Weir, of saying anything without the other man protesting. Weir came shaking to the dugout for whisky and reassurance; he apparently depended on Wraysford’s coldness. Yet on occasions, late at night, Ellis had had the impression that there was another aspect to the men’s surly friendship. He looked down and saw Wraysford’s sunken eyes, black in the candlelight, and they seemed to be fastened on to Weir’s nervous conversation; they were locked on to Weir as though he depended on him for some quality he lacked. It was almost, Ellis once thought, as if he really cared for him.

Riley came in carrying a rat by its tail. “Coker got him, sir. The cheese on the bayonet trick.”

Ellis looked at Riley with distaste. He was a very smart little man, always perfectly turned out. Ellis admired this in him, but found him obsequious and inclined to break the rules.

“Have a drink, Riley,” said Stephen. “Have some of this chocolate.”

Riley hesitated under Ellis’s gaze but accepted.

“Ellis?” said Stephen. “You going to risk a drink tonight? We wouldn’t have to carry you to bed. You could just lie there.”

Ellis shook his head. The shellfire was starting up outside. He could not yet distinguish between the howitzers and the guns, between the different sizes of the enemy artillery. He had studied the effects of shell blast in training, however. He had seen the destructive powers demonstrated on maps and on prepared ranges; he had drawn diagrams of the conical delivery of shrapnel and compacted blast of mortar. What he had not seen until the week before was the explosive effect on soft tissue, on the pink skin of two privates in his platoon who had been gathered up into a single sandbag by one of the others: he had watched the small joints of meat being dropped into the bag. When he heard the sounds of shellfire again he began to worry. The start he felt when the explosion went off was bearable; it was like a wave breaking, noisy but brief. Worse than that was the undertow of fear as the sound retreated. It seemed to suck and draw at him, leaving him a little weaker every time.

“They know what they’re aiming at tonight all right,” said Riley. “They’ve had planes over all week apparently.”

Stephen did not look up from the table. “Turn the lantern off now,” he said. “He likes this bit,” he said to Ellis. “It makes him feel afraid.”

He placed a small wooden figure he had carved in the middle of the pattern on the table. Its rough shape was caught by the flickering light of the candle flame. From his pocket he took a knife with a single, carefully sharpened blade. He sank it into the rat’s chest, between the forefeet, and dragged it down. He held the rat in his other hand and shook out the guts on to the table.