The Blasphemer: A Novel (45 page)

As they drove, Daniel noticed that the rushing air was dragging the beads of rain on the driver’s side window, making them look like spermatozoa swimming across a Petri dish under a microscope. He was so distracted by this he did not see the orange backhoe loader on an articulated arm that was biting into the ground ahead of him.

Philip tapped him on the shoulder and pointed in its direction. It was trailing mud as it excavated the earth, and next to it was a small bulldozer with caterpillar tracks. Beyond that was a large white tent around which stood a team of half a dozen men and women in luminous jackets, hard hats and wellington boots. One was wearing headphones and sweeping a metal detector back and forth across the ground.

Father and son parked and found two umbrellas in the boot of the car. A short and jowly man was jogging towards them, grinning broadly and pushing his spectacles further up the bridge of his nose.
He was wearing a lumberjack hat with earflaps hanging down loosely and a cagoule over a pink shirt that was flecked with mud. ‘This is Clive,’ Philip whispered. ‘Bit of a chatterbox but don’t let that put you off him. He’s a good man.’

‘Philip, Philip, how are you?’ Clive said breathlessly as he shook hands. His glasses had steamed up. His mottled cheeks were pouched at the bottom. He turned to Daniel. ‘Good to see you again, Professor Kennedy …’

Daniel blinked twice. ‘Actually I’m not a …’ He held out his hand, a look of bemusement playing across his face. ‘Hello … again … I’m trying to think …’

‘Trinity College. I was the porter there until … well, we don’t need to go into that. It was a job to pay the bills. This is my real passion. I do battlefield tours. I’m also an amateur archaeologist.’

‘One of the most professional I’ve come across,’ Philip corrected.

Clive beamed. ‘Very exciting. This morning. Two more bodies. Germans, we think. Thank goodness we got to them first. Local farmers tend not to report Germans. I’ve heard of them spitting on the bones.We have to inform the local police in case the bodies are murder victims. Do you have wellies?’

Daniel and Philip shook their heads.

‘Never mind.You might be OK without them.You will have to wear hard hats though. There’s a couple in the tent over there. Careful how you go. It’s slippy.’ The archaeologist led the way to the tent, where he swapped his own lumberjack hat for a hard hat and handed out one each for Daniel and Philip. All three made their way to a muddy hole in the ground, their footwear sucking in the orange mud. Rain was splashing in the pools at the bottom of the hole.The remains of duckboards and rotting A-frames could be seen in the sodden ground. ‘When we uncover bodies we have to be certain of the identification before we can give them a formal burial,’ Clive shouted above the sluicing of the rain, scarcely pausing for breath. ‘Only then can we take them off the missing list.Things like watches and cigarette cases engraved with initials are not enough on their own because bones often got melded together. You know, if one man was carrying another when a shell hit them.
Couldn’t tell which was which. Identification is usually impossible because dog tags were made from cardboard and leather and so have rotted away. We found this yesterday.’ Clive held up a rusting entrenching tool. ‘We usually find human remains nearby. That’s why this place is known as “the boneyard of Belgium”. And come and have a look over here.’ He pointed to a cross-section of earth ten feet deep where layers of rusting metal could be seen at intervals below the turf and the clay. ‘There was so much lead falling from the skies here, over such a long period of time, it has settled into its very own geological formation. Look! A solid mass of rusty matter. Isn’t that amazing?’

Daniel nodded under his umbrella.

‘This whole area was a maze of tunnels and bunkers. Cows sometimes disappear down the shafts when a shelf of soil gives way. Even tractors disappear sometimes. The ground opens up and swallows them.’

‘The present collapsing into the past,’ Daniel said.

‘Or the past rising up into the present.We’ve got one over here.’ Clive led the way to a fenced-off hole. ‘Look down there.’

Daniel peered over the edge and immediately staggered back. ‘Sorry. Not good with heights.’

Clive was shining a torch down the hole. ‘You can’t see the bottom. Must be fifty feet straight down.The entrance to a tunnel. Unexploded mines go off sometimes, especially when there’s lightning. They throw up soil that hasn’t been in contact with air since the First World War. Look at this.’ He held up a dirty bottle. ‘HP sauce. That has to be British. Would you like to keep it as a souvenir?’

Daniel glanced at his father as if asking for permission.

‘Now,’ Clive said, handing over the bottle. ‘Am I right in thinking your great-grandfather fought at Passchendaele?’

Feeling delirious from lack of sleep and not in the mood for such enthusiasm, Daniel said: ‘Went over on the first day.’ He glanced at his father again. It wasn’t a lie.

‘And he was with the Shropshire Fusiliers, wasn’t he? Well, where we are standing now was the front line on the eve of the attack.’ He
pointed to the remains of a concrete bunker a few yards away. ‘The Germans were only that far away on the higher ground.They could hear them talking. They could smell the bacon they cooked for breakfast. I’d have to check, but I’m pretty sure the Shropshire Fusiliers were in this sector. They went over in the third wave. According to our maps we are above a trench they named Clapham Common.’

Daniel made as if to say something but rubbed his arms instead. His jacket was saturated, the fibres gorged with rain.

‘They liked to give the trenches familiar names, to make the men feel at home. They
were
quite homely. By the summer of nineteen seventeen, they had had two years to work on these trench systems. The engineering was very sophisticated.’ The rain had turned to a fine drizzle. Clive held out his hand. ‘Think it’s more or less stopped. Come with me. I want to show you something in the Land Rover. Are you coming, Philip?’

‘Eh?’

‘You coming over to the car?’

‘Actually I need to go back to our car for something.You go.’

‘Can you take this with you, Dad?’ Daniel handed over the HP bottle.

Clive kept up the chatter as he bustled along. ‘I should think he’s sick of hearing me bore on about Passchendaele.We work together on the War Graves Commission, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘Expect he’s told you all about it?’

‘The commission?’

‘Passchendaele.’

‘Not really.You know what he’s like.’

‘He is quite …’ Clive looked over his shoulder. ‘What’s the word?’

‘Taciturn?’

‘Well, empty vessels like me make most noise.’

‘Some find him rude. I think it’s because he’s a bit deaf. Finds it hard to join in. He can go days, even weeks, without talking.’

‘So what would you like to know?’

Daniel looked at his father’s straight back as he was walking away. ‘Did he ask you to give me a history lesson?’

Clive grinned as he unlocked a Land Rover, raised his blotchy hands and described an arc. ‘On the occasions when the rain lifted, foaming black smoke hung over the landscape, blotting out the sun. More than half a million British and German troops were killed during the fighting here – and often the dead would be buried under a deluge of soil, only to be disinterred by the next shell and reburied by the next. In the summer months, those bodies left on the surface would either be eaten by rats or stripped down to the skeleton by maggots, a process which took eight days. And it stank like the cauldron of hell: cordite, mustard, putrefying horseflesh.’

‘What was the first day like?’

Clive pointed with his umbrella to a distant spinney. ‘The British took the Pilckem Ridge over there, one of their objectives. But we had twenty-seven thousand killed, wounded and missing that day. The Germans a similar number. In his diary entry for the first of August, Field Marshal Haig recorded the thirty-first of July as “a fine day’s work”. He described the losses as “small”.’

Daniel puckered his lips as he took this in. He looked at the grassland around him and nodded as he saw it was still dimpled and cratered by shells. He looked back towards Ypres but could not see its spires through the rain. When he turned back to his guide he was fifteen yards away standing on a block of concrete, holding a large scroll and signalling for Daniel to join him.

‘This,’ Clive said, tapping the block with the scroll, ‘is a German pillbox. Ferrous concrete. When your great-grandfather went over the top on the first day here he would have seen whole battalions reduced to husks by the Devil’s Paintbrush. That’s what the Tommies called the Maxim gun. They placed them on the top of these.’ He stamped his foot. ‘This whole salient,’ another sweep of his arms, ‘was a quagmire. Liquid mud. Soldiers who slipped from the duckboards drowned. Marching men were ordered to ignore the cries for help.To stop with a battalion behind you on a slippery duckboard eighteen inches wide was impossible.’

With the spires of Ypres becoming visible through the mist
behind him, Clive unscrolled the black and white panoramic photograph he had collected from his Land Rover. He asked Daniel to take one end. It was fifteen feet long and showed a charred and jagged landscape that was almost featureless apart from barbed wire and a few splintered tree stumps over on the Passchendaele Ridge. ‘This is the view your great-grandfather would have had on the morning of the attack,’ he said. ‘Would you fancy heading out into that?’

Daniel shook his head. ‘Can’t say I would.’

Back at the car, they found Philip asleep in the passenger seat, his mouth open. His skin looked grey. He was holding the HP bottle in his hand.

Daniel tapped on the window. ‘You OK, Dad?’

‘Mm? Oh … Had a bad night.’

Daniel found himself driving slowly along the road to Nieppe. It seemed the respectful thing to do.

An elderly woman with hair like cauliflower was leaning out of a window halfway up a grey block of flats in the centre of Nieppe. Unsupported by teeth, her mouth had folded in on itself. She was staring at the big car with the English number plates that had parked below her – and, as she watched with clouded eyes, a lithe and delicate-faced man got out of the driver’s side and walked over to a board showing a map of the town. The man studied the board for a moment, tapped it twice, looked up and smiled at the old woman. When she did not return the smile, he looked down the street he had come from and, with his hands on his hips, nodded to himself. A warm breeze was picking up, blowing grit down the street in flurries.

Though blighted by satellite dishes, Nieppe was more wholesome than other towns that marked the line of what had once been the Western Front. It had a country market feel to it, with dusty hens scratching around and several loose-skinned cats resting their
bones on garden walls. There were fuchsia-filled baskets swaying from porches and streets lined with poplars. Most of the houses were of red brick and some of them – the main difference between this and the other towns through which they had passed – appeared to be original, having survived the Great War. The canal looked clean – clean enough for fish to live in, judging by the anglers on its banks. The Château de Nieppe looked sooty and neglected, but its slender turret was solidly intact. Daniel walked back to the car and opened the passenger door. ‘We’re on the Rue d’Armentières, Dad,’ he said. ‘The main road through the town.The road we want is behind that church over there.’ He wagged a finger towards a steeple. ‘May as well leave the car here and walk.You feeling up to that?’

With Daniel acting as traffic policeman, Philip tapped his way across the main road, but his progress was slow and a woman holding the hem of her skirt down against the gathering wind easily overtook him. When he reached the other side, Philip waved his stick in gratitude at a waiting car. They cut through a narrow alley and across a cobbled square that brought them out on to the Rue des Chardonnerets. According to the files Philip had seen in the National Archives, the house at which Andrew Kennedy had been arrested was Number 11. It was a modestly sized, gable-ended dwelling with a slate roof and boarded-up windows. Graffiti about Le Pen had been sprayed on the boards. Father and son looked at one another and shrugged despondently before walking back the way they had come.They continued past the car, around a fountain that spouted no water, and up towards the town hall: an old stuccofronted building from the Napoleonic era. It had a Tricolour draped down one side of its stone frontage and an EU flag down the other. Engraved across its façade were the words
MAIRIE DE NIEPPE
and below this:
LIBERTÉ. EGALITÉ. FRATERNITÉ.
Daniel spoke in pidgin French to the receptionist and was directed to the land registry department. There he approached a young clerk who was reading a text on her phone and handed her a piece of paper with ‘11 Rue des Chardonnerets, Nieppe’ written on it. He explained he was after any information on the building, anything
at all. The clerk returned ten minutes later with a thin file.

‘That house has been empty for the past four years, monsieur. The Lemarre family last owned it. They bought it in nineteen seventy-three. Before that it had been in the same family for forty years.’

‘Do you know the name of that family?’

She handed over the file. It was warm from her hands. ‘Their name was Boudain.They had bought it in nineteen thirty-three. It’s in there.’

‘Does it say who lived there before that?’ Daniel asked as he flicked through the pages.

The clerk sighed testily as she took the documents back. ‘Camier.’ She snapped the file shut and drummed her fingers on it.

‘You wouldn’t happen to know where they moved to, would you?’

‘No.’ She resumed her texting, stopped and raked her hair to one side. ‘I think there is a Camier family living on the Rue d’Armentières, opposite the Hyundai garage. One of them did some decorating for my father.’

The wind determined the slow pace, with Philip, his stick tapping the pavement, bowed like a spinnaker before it. But when they found the garage, they slowed down even more, as if they were both prolonging the journey, to postpone any disappointment they might have at their destination. They looked at one another before knocking on the door. After half a minute it opened on a chain.