Bright Hair About the Bone (31 page)

CHAPTER 29

F
or a moment she was silent, trying to gauge his mood. Serious or playful? Flirtatious or menacing?

“Well, I've witnessed you blaspheming, drinking, left-hooking a lord, making lewd comments to an innocent young girl—me, of course!—and communing with a pagan goddess, so, yes, I suppose I have to take your declaration seriously. Tell me—how long has this been going on? And did you confide your faithless condition to my father when he interviewed you?”

“No. He never questioned it. So I didn't raise the matter.”

“Then I add deception to my list. Oh, and gluttony!”

“Add what you like. My charge sheet is already full. And full with much more serious sins than any you can come up with.” His voice had lost its lightness and she heard again the tormented Gunning of their early days.

On impulse, she took hold of his hand and spoke quietly. “What happened to you, William?”

He turned away, unable to speak.

Letty ventured her best guess: “Many men lost their faith on the battlefield. You are not alone.”

Into his continued silence: “Throw off the shroud of the war, William! It blankets your senses. It suffocates you,” she said. Esmé would have condemned the edge of impatience in her voice.

He still could not respond.

She tried again, a more direct challenge: “Did you kill a man, William? The epaulette from a German uniform that you carry around with you—I had wondered. Just the kind of dreadful memento a sensitive man might take away from the battlefield to torment himself with evermore.”

At last a glance towards her. “No. I killed no one. The man who wore it is alive and well. He is my dearest, perhaps my only, friend.”

She did not interrupt this halting beginning. Instinctively, she closed her eyes like a child preparing to hear a story.

“I answered a call for help…” He paused and started again. “A call which I ought to have ignored. It was November. Last of the battles of the Somme. It had been raining for a month and we were attempting to advance over clay soil south of the Ancre River. I went out with a stretcher party. Some of our chaps had gone out in a raid over No-Man's-Land to the nearest German positions to grab a prisoner or two…we badly needed to wring some information out of them about the timing of the next assault…We had no idea they were mounting the same sort of operation from their side. What a mess. The two groups clashed horribly in No-Man's-Land. Those who could retreat did, but there were several men, including officers in possession of valuable information, left wounded in the middle. Dangerous to leave them to the opposition. Off we went, two stretcher parties and me in support, an hour or two before dawn to sweep them up. The last clue we'd had about position was the glare of the Very lights the Boche had sent up when it all broke loose. There was a half-moon, but covered by scudding clouds and not much use to us.

“Skirting our way around the water-filled shell holes, I heard a voice calling for help. In German. I started towards it. ‘Leave it off, Padre!' I was told. ‘Not one of our lads.' I went anyway. Letty, do you know what ‘Anzac Soup' is?”

“Yes, I do. A shell hole filled with water, mud, dead horses…probably worse.”

“The voice was coming from such a stinking pit. A German officer, judging by the peaked field cap, was stuck, up to his armpits and sinking. In a flash of moonlight he identified my outline and called to me in English. ‘I say, old man, would you mind awfully extending a hand? Rather a long one, if you can provide.'

“As I peeled off my greatcoat I continued in the same mad conversational tone. ‘Good Lord, man! How'd you manage to get yourself into such a pickle?'

“‘Attempting to extricate a fellow officer from this quagmire, so, if you're minded to mount a rescue operation—have a care!'

“‘A fellow officer? Where is he?'

“‘I'm afraid I'm standing on him. He appears, involuntarily, poor sod, to be now preserving
my
life. For a few more minutes, at least.'

“Holding firmly to the tails of my coat, I threw it out as far as I could over the soup. He made a grab for it and seized it by a flapping epaulette. I pulled, but the epaulette came away in his hand. He waved it at me as he sank another inch and laughed. ‘Bloody awful English tailoring!'

“They were all proud of their own smart
feldgrau loden!
” He smiled. “I hauled the coat back and tried again. This time he grabbed the collar and, bit by bit, I reeled him in. There was just enough moonlight to get a look at each other close-up, and we stared in disbelief. Like me, he was unarmed; like me, he wore a cross around his neck. The belt of his field tunic carried the words
Gott mit Uns.
I was looking at my opposite number. The man was a German priest. He hunted about round the edge of the crater for the greatcoat he'd thrown off to facilitate his rescue attempt and put it about his shoulders. He was cold, wet, shocked, and at a low ebb. His attempts at cheeriness were, I thought, the last throw of the dice for him. We sat down, huddled together in the dry overcoat, in barely adequate shelter in the scrape of a shell hole and, in cupped hands, shared the last of my cigarettes and the emergency rum ration I carried. We talked away the rest of the night. He was—is—a scholar, a theologian and linguist. A Berliner, he'd spent some years in England researching his subject. He was rather dismissive of English religious scholarship. ‘If we ever get out of this, my friend,' he said, ‘I want you to come to Berlin and look me up. I will re-educate you! I will show you wonders!'

“Those moments of sanity and friendship were the only light in that black hell. And it was a human light. It owed nothing to a divine presence. Oh, we could quote chapter and verse of the Scriptures at each other in several languages, we could argue the finer points of theology, we could name our saints in order of merit—but when we looked about us, where was the supposed centre of all this? The Spirit that had moulded our lives? The Being whose name was on our lips and in our minds? Where was God? In that waste-howling wilderness not even Satan was present.

“Satan! I think if we'd caught sight of Milton's Fallen Angel striding about this Gustave Doré landscape—

“A dungeon horrible, on all sides round

As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames

No light, but rather darkness visible

Served only to discover sights of woe

Regions of sorrow, doleful shades…

“—we'd have greeted him as a fellow soul in torment. We'd have spoken his language. But neither God nor Lucifer was there. And they hadn't fled the field—they'd never been there. The awful thought came to me that we were on our own and always had been. It was in that moment my faith began to crack and crumple. With the first streak of dawn we decided to make a run for it—in opposite directions. Before we parted, he took out his knife and cut off the epaulette from his overcoat and handed it to me. I hadn't noticed that he was still clutching mine in his left hand.”

“But you finished the war still a priest? The military cross was awarded to the Reverend Gunning, wasn't it?”

“I went through the motions. Like those wretched caterpillars that are paralysed and eaten away by parasites from the inside, nothing can be guessed from the outer shell. No one was aware of the inner void. You have been closer to me than anyone, Letty, over this last bit, and I don't think
you
noticed. In any case—no one was looking with much attention. I'm afraid we Anglicans were mostly despised by the troops—too many of us happy to dig in, in safe positions well behind the lines. We were not respected. You've probably heard the awful gaffe made by a chaplain addressing men bound for the front? ‘Well, God go with you, chaps! I shall be back here at base if you need me.' True? I don't know, but it truly expressed the soldiers' verdict on the C of E priesthood. Now—the Catholic padres—they were a different kettle of fish. Many of them were—or had been—monks. Benedictine monks. Tough men! They seemed always to track the grief. They were up at the front line, they were back in the dressing stations, riding horses, driving ambulances…esteemed, listened to, sought after…they were there on the spot when they were needed. And they appeared to have more to offer than a slap on the back, a hearty bellow, and a squashed Woodbine.”

“But what tipped you over the edge, William?”

“The final realisation came very easily, after months of mental turmoil. Oh, it wasn't one of the more dramatic scenes—the ones that have become fossilised into cliché: holding a man's stomach closed over his spilling entrails, looking into the still-living eye of a youngster whose limbs have been shot off, singing Sunday School hymns all night long with a quivering kid who was about to be shot by a firing squad of his own mates at dawn…No—I was just talking quietly to a dying soldier on the field. One of dozens that day. We both knew there was no point in trying to get him back to the trench. I suggested that in his last moments we called on God for grace. ‘Oh, that won't be necessary, Padre,' he said calmly. ‘There's no kindness to be had in that quarter. But you're here. I'm with a fellow man at the end. That's all the comfort I need.' He took my hand and held it until he died. Days later I put my left foot on something ghastly. Invalided out, and shortly after that the whole bloody business groaned to a halt.”

“A double loss. You must have been bereft when you left the hospital?”

“The physical damage was easy enough to repair. By the end of the war, the surgeons had grown very skilled and resourceful. The spiritual loss? Well, that was like throwing off a burden. Though I had thought it soldered to my soul, I found the strength to jettison the dead grey weight of it. I felt renewed, energetic again, intoxicated. I set off into Europe to test out my new foot and my new freedom.” His voice took on a distance and a chill. “You would not understand or condone my subsequent way of life.”

She was saddened by his revelation, but Letty had no intention of allowing him to drag her down into his self-pity. “Pretty rackety existence, eh? Rattling around Europe free from divine supervision, I expect you got up to all sorts of mischief. I can imagine.”

He gave her a pale smile. “I do hope you can't.”

         

As he spoke, his face, lined with bitterness and self-loathing, conveyed all the suffering of all young men thrust, unwilling, into that obscenity. And still, years after the war, he was walking around, an open wound, incapable of healing. And what was a woman to do but offer whatever balm came to hand? It was her mother's long-forgotten childish endearments, murmured in soft French, that came to her lips as she bent and gathered him into her arms, cheek against his, rocking him gently.

One moment, he was reaching for her, clinging to her, his head drooping heavily onto her shoulder, the next, with a suddenness that alarmed her, he had raised his head and pushed her away, eyes sweeping the thickets on the perimeter of the glade.

“Ssh! There's something…somebody…moving about over there. Do you hear it?”

“No, William. No, I don't.”

He remained tense, on the alert.

“It's all right, William,” she said, finally. “You can stand down and stop scanning the horizon in that stagey way. Calm yourself! My impulse towards you was no more than a misplaced maternal gesture intended to comfort and soothe. Nothing more challenging than that.”

He replied, not taking his eyes off the distant trees. “Dash it! And for a moment I thought you were about to make the Ultimate Sacrifice.”

Regretting her sympathetic overture and not much liking Gunning's swift return to self-parody, she replied crisply: “Time to go home, I think. Here, put this back where you found it, will you?” She handed him the photograph. “Too embarrassing for Edmond if he found out that his touching gesture had been discovered.”

“And, if it comes to being discovered, it may seem a bit melodramatic, but I don't think we should be seen driving back together. I'll drop you on the corner by the Haras where I picked you up.”

They were a mile short of the town when, negotiating a bend, Gunning exclaimed and pulled the car over onto the verge of the road to avoid an oncoming cyclist. Pedalling demurely towards them, basket full of vegetables from the garden, came Marie-Louise. She wobbled to a halt and put a foot down, looking from one to the other in surprise. Taking in their dishevelled appearance, her surprise turned to chilly disapproval. “Hello, there. Enjoying the evening air, I see?”

“Wonderful! I've been visiting the count's horse. He's gone off to Lyon—with his groom—leaving Dido in the low pasture. She's jolly nearly fully healed, you know, and I said I'd keep an eye on her, take her on a gentle circuit or two of the field each evening to keep her in shape. They keep a field bridle handily on the wall by the gate…” She hesitated as Gunning's foot crunched down on her toe and finished hurriedly, “But it's an awful bother getting out there and the Reverend kindly offered to drive me over.”