The Blasphemer: A Novel (40 page)

His father’s grave proves difficult to find and his mother has to go back with them to the entrance to consult the book in which all the names of the dead are listed. It shows where they are on a map. When they do find the one they are looking for, they are surprised to see fresh flowers have been laid on it. They look around. A number of the other graves have flowers, too.The flowers must be for those with medals. Philip looks up at his mother. She has tears running down her powdered cheeks. Her lips are moving, shaping the words on the headstone.

Capt W Kennedy,VC, MC

48/Royal Marines

Killed in action 27 June 1944

He died that others might live

Philip had once overheard his mother talking on the phone to someone about the wording. The army wanted to include his father’s age but there was some confusion about what that was. According to their records, he was twenty-five. But he had always maintained to her that he was a year older. As they hadn’t been able to trace his birth certificate, the age was left off the headstone.

His mother tugs a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabs her eyes. Philip steps forward and looks up at her again, this time for permission to touch the stone. She nods. It is cold. Portland stone. He takes out his pocket watch, the one that his father left him in his will, opens it and shows it to the gravestone. He can hear his mother sniff behind him. His sister steps forward and she touches the stone as well, tentatively, as if worried it might give off an electrical charge. She holds out a drawing she has done of a soldier and places it on the grave.

Philip steps back and feels for his mother’s hand. His sister does the same and the three stand contemplating the gravestone in silence, heads bowed. A gardener working two rows away distracts Philip. He watches him straighten his back and massage its base with both hands before bending once more to untie his knee supports – which look like cut-up sections of an old car tyre. He places them in his wheelbarrow, on top of the clods of turf he has sliced from the edges of lawn. On these he places his shears and spade and a strange-looking cutting tool which is semicircular in shape. He takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves, exposing white hairs. It is getting hot. The gardener takes off his cap too, wipes his bald head, and puts it back on. With his knees bent, he grips the arms of the wheelbarrow, lifts with a sigh and pushes. The creaking of the wheel seems to provide a sympathetic echo to his steps. He is coming towards them. Philip follows his progress out of the corner of his eye. When he senses the gardener is standing behind them, he turns round.

‘This is my daddy,’ Philip says.

The gardener looks at the headstone: ‘You must be proud of him.’

‘He won his VC postu, postum—’

‘Posthumously,’ his mother finishes.

‘How did he win it?’

‘He attacked a German machine-gun nest,’ Philip says. ‘He was very brave.’

‘Can you take a photograph of me next to Daddy?’ Hillary says, tugging at her mother’s sleeve.

Her mother reaches in her handbag for the Brownie 127 camera she paid one pound, four shillings and sixpence for on the ferry. Philip and Hillary take up their positions either side of the headstone.

‘Would you like me to take one of you all together?’ the gardener asks.

Their mother considers this for a moment before winding the camera on and handing it over: ‘Would you mind?’ She takes up her place behind the headstone and adjusts her hat. All three wear expressions of appropriate solemnity.

Click
. Pause.
Clack
.

Philip opened his eyes.The sound memory had roused him from his reverie. He took a sip from the tea. It was cold. Leaning on his walking stick in order to rise out of his armchair, he walked stiffly across to the section of his library containing memoirs from the Second World War. His fingers closed around the spine of a book written by Brigadier Frank Waterhouse, a former commando who died in 1998. It fell open on a passage he knew by heart. Daniel must know it by heart, too – as a child he had often requested it as a bedtime story. Philip hoped that he might have left enough time since his last reading of it to have forgotten some of the phrases and thereby enjoy them afresh. It was written in the dry, self-deprecating style favoured by retired soldiers of that generation – none of the boastfulness of contemporary memoirs. Extraordinary deeds rendered ordinary – and more powerful for being understated.

Philip read:

In war, men are judged only on their bravery. Nothing else matters. One of the bravest men I had the privilege of serving with was Captain William Kennedy, ‘Silky Kennedy’ as he was known. I liked Silky. Handsome and strong-jawed, he had what the poet Keith Douglas called that ‘famous unconcern’ – and a habit of carelessly rubbing the back of his neck while assessing the battle ahead. He was one of those officers who affected a certain homosexual nonchalance and flamboyance. On entertainment nights he would sometimes wear women’s clothing and dance with fellow officers. His nickname came from his preference for silk underwear, which he always bought from a shop in Jermyn Street. I do not think he was actually homosexual – I discovered after the war that he was married with two young children – I suspect it was more that he was ‘acting up’ as a counterweight to the savage business of killing. Homosexuals were seen as paragons of wit and whimsy, after all, and such qualities were considered life-enhancing in wartime. When I met him, I was a lowly subaltern and he was a captain and already had an MC. He also had a bit of a reputation. There was a saying that you should never stand too close to an MC in battle. It was partly because they would take unnecessary risks in order to win the next medal to complete their collection, partly because there was a superstition that their luck might run out.

Silky Kennedy’s luck did run out on the road to Tilly-sur-Seulles on D-Day plus 21. Our column was being held up by a Waffen-SS unit in a ruined farmhouse on a spur about 400 yards up the valley. They were not being terribly friendly. There were three or four machine guns, we reckoned, plus mortars, and they had our range. A Spit had strafed them but they had kept their heads down and resumed firing as soon as the raid was over. Normally we would have waited for the artillery to arrive and blast them out, but the big guns were being held up behind us, along with a convoy of American and Canadian trucks. There were no other roads in the area and the surrounding fields had been mined. The order came through on the radio from the battalion commander that the obstacle had to be cleared ‘at all costs’.

Two attacks had already been attempted – one going round the
open right flank, the other the left. They had been forced to take cover and the Germans still had them pinned down. The only option left was to wait for nightfall and attack head on, crawling straight up the slope under the brow of the spur. We would have to hope they did not have flares. Either way, it would be a ‘VC job’, army jargon for a suicide mission. Volunteers only. We took it for granted that Kennedy would want to do it, as indeed he did. In fact, he seemed exhilarated by the prospect – his eyes, I remember, were wide and shining. The question was, who would go with him? My fear was not of dying but of giving in to my fear, freezing up when I should be providing covering fire. But there was something about Kennedy’s insouciance that made me put my hand up that day. Half a dozen other men did the same. We put cam-cream on our faces and checked our Thompson sub machine guns, all of us except Lance Corporal Carter who was carrying a Bren. I remember someone suggested a flamethrower but it would have been too bulky – the Germans would have seen us coming a mile away. Each man carried six grenades instead.

It took us about an hour to crawl the first 300 yards, spreading out and inching forward on our elbows. At a signal from Kennedy, Carter took up a position behind some rocks to the left. The rest of us crawled on. When we were about twenty yards from the farmhouse a flare went up – it must have been on a tripwire – and the night sky was ablaze with bullets. I could feel the wind from them on my face. Kennedy was up and charging. I tried to cover him with my Thompson but it jammed. There was an explosion. He had taken out one of the machine-gun nests with a grenade and was running along the wall in a crouching position towards the rubble of the next window. It was getting pretty hairy by this stage. Bullets were chipping bits off the wall. Three of our men had been hit. I took a Thompson off one of the dead men and gave Kennedy covering fire. There was another explosion and another machine gun was out of action. We now realized that there was a second outer building behind the main farmhouse and there was another machine gun firing from it. There were more flares and more grenades exploding, then I saw Kennedy dragging one of our wounded men out of the
line of fire, ignoring the bullets. Then he was up and charging again. He lobbed a grenade through the window, but not before the machine gun had hit him with a burst. The remaining Germans surrendered after that, about a dozen of them, some wounded. Another flare went up and Carter went over to where Kennedy was lying on his back. Because they had been fired at point-blank range, the bullets had gone right through his stomach in a tight circle. According to Carter, Kennedy looked down at the bloody holes in his tunic and said: ‘You have to admire the grouping!’ I didn’t hear him myself, but it would be nice to think that those were his last words. He was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. Collection completed.

Philip clapped the book shut and slipped it back into its space on the shelf. He could no longer put off the visit he needed to make to the National Archives. No more excuses.

When Nancy opened the door and saw Daniel standing on the step, she could tell he had a speech prepared. He couldn’t meet her eye. His breathing was uneven. He looked smartly dressed, by his standards. Pressed blue shirt and chinos. Clean-shaven. The smell of Listerine and aftershave.

He said nothing.

Nancy was barefoot and wearing a loose-fitting grey sweatshirt with matching bottoms. In her hand were her trainers and a balledup pair of sports ankle socks. After showering and cleaning her teeth she had rubbed Ambre Solaire on her skin. That hint of holiday. She wondered if he would notice.

The moment when they should have kissed each other’s cheeks in formal greeting had passed. Daniel put his bag down and took a step towards her. She had her back to the wall. He took another step and kissed her on the mouth, tentatively at first, parting her lips with his tongue. It took Nancy by surprise. The softness of his lips,
the warmth and mintiness of his breath, stirred something long buried in her, an ache, an unfolding. After a few seconds she pushed him away, closed the front door with her foot and held up her arms. He tugged her sweatshirt off. Slid his fingers behind the material of her sports bra. Kissed her throat.

She pushed him back again, pulled off his shirt and grazed his chest with her teeth. It was as if they were engaged in a duel, parrying and testing one another – as if, too, she was trying to lose herself, play a role, become unrecognizable. She tugged off her tracksuit bottoms and briefs and looped her arms around his neck. He was a stranger now, and this she found intoxicating. Sex with a stranger. He raised his head to hers and they snaked and rolled their necks as if in a mating ritual, as if waiting for the moment to attack. Her shoulders were against the wall and the stranger’s hands were supporting her weight, holding her legs up and resting them on his hips. She used her hand to guide him, then, for the first time in five months, felt him inside her. As ripples passed up her body she was jolted momentarily to her senses, then was lost again, locking her heels behind his back, trying to press as much of her body against his as possible. She clenched him, impaled herself, read with her fingertips the relief of vertebrae down his back. Had he been working out? His muscle tone was different. She tightened her grip, shivered the length of her body and closed her eyes. In her belly she felt an expansive, vertiginous sensation. It moved to her lower back, the base of her spine, through her pelvic saddle – a thousand tiny electrical shocks. Her consciousness of being in her body had disappeared. She was moving bonelessly, scoring him with her nails. ‘Fuck me,’ she said, her voice thick, rising from her gut, an incantation from the back of her throat. ‘Fuck me.’ The words felt strange and wet on her tongue, as if she was possessed, as if she was a stranger, too, as if a stranger had taken over her body, her mouth, her mind. ‘Fuck me, you bastard.’ Time went slack. She became aware of the stranger breathing hotly in her ear.

‘What are we doing here, Nance?’ he was saying. ‘This feels more like a fight than a fuck. Is this what you want? Is it? You want a fight?’

Her hips bucked in answer – an uncontrolled, shuddering fury of movement. She felt as yielding as liquid: heavy, heat-filled, viscous liquid. She was drowning in herself, her own suffocating sexuality, gasping for breath, for meaning. What was happening? What was the stranger doing? She looked down over the breasts bulging up out of the cups of her sports bra, down over the span of her belly, down to where he was appearing and disappearing.

‘I love you,’ he said.

He said he loved me. The stranger said he loved me.

He kissed her again and she saw her eyes reflected in his. They were deranged. The eyes of a stranger. A smile was appearing at the corners of his mouth. His brow was glistening with sweat. Strands of hair were clinging to it.

She felt her hand on his face, fingers splayed, flattening his nose, pushing him away. Then both her hands were slapping and gouging his skin before balling into fists and pummelling his chest. His hands now slipped down over hers, knitting their fingers together. Momentarily muddled by the sensation, not knowing where she ended and he began, she said: ‘You broke my heart.’

Both were breathing raggedly, as if coming up for air. She rolled her hips. He answered her movements with pelvic rotations. There were more deep kisses, more rising and falling, then came the final throes and the stranger’s head flopped into the crook of her shoulder, as though he were dead.