The Edge of the Fall (22 page)

‘I can't help it.'

The waiters fluttered behind them, the lights cracking off the glasses. ‘Listen, Tom, everything is forgiven now the war is over. It's forgotten. Try to forget.' She was grateful, so relieved. It was the war that had been filling his mind, nothing else.

‘I can't.'

‘I know what went on. I heard the men talk. They had to kill Germans hand to hand. You did nothing bad, really you didn't. I'll tell you now, it's forgiven.'

‘You would forgive me?'

‘Everyone would.' She looked at the soft curve of his cheek. He'd tell her now the stories she'd heard a hundred times before – attacking German bodies, strangling them, kicking corpses. ‘I'd forgive you anything.' She shifted her leg on the stone.

‘Anything?'

‘Of course.'
I love you
.

A tear welled up, rolled down his cheek. ‘I didn't know,' he said. ‘They brought him back and I didn't know.' He looked down, then up again.

‘What do you mean? Was it someone who was ill?'

‘I didn't really know what was happening. I couldn't see. How was I to know?' He wasn't talking to her, but gazing ahead, looking at the window. He was like someone talking through his sleep, lost in darkness.

‘I thought he was—' He broke off, buried his head in his hands.

She took his hand again. ‘Why don't you tell me from the beginning? Start there.'

He still wasn't looking at her. He started talking. ‘It was pretty slow. After the Somme, not much happened. We joked they didn't want us to lose any more men, so they just kept us polishing guns. We were sitting about, really. I thought it was the same for the others. But other regiments were out there, fighting, going over. Michael was.'

She nodded.

‘He had a hard time. I found that out later. They sent him and his men to check an enemy trench that they thought was dead, all the men gone in it. But they weren't. They rose up and killed half his men, did you know that?'

‘No.' She tried to wrap her head around it. ‘But not him.'

‘No, not him. But it threw him. He had a – friend, there, that's what they told me, a best friend, Wheeler. And he died. Michael was very affected. He couldn't get over it.'

‘You saw him?'

He shook his head, buried his face in his hands.

‘I know he was shot,' she said. ‘Is that what you're trying to tell me? I already know. The others don't. A man in London told me by mistake.'

Tom stared at her. ‘You know?'

‘I can never tell them.' She put her hand over his. ‘But if you're trying to tell me about it, you don't need to. I understand. I don't think he was a coward. I never have. I saw so many men suffer from what they'd seen.'Men screaming in the back of her ambulance, the pain in their heads stronger than that in their bodies.

‘I can't believe someone told you by mistake.'

‘He didn't realise. He thought we knew. It's just that Michael's officer lied and said he died bravely.' She remembered the night at the Ritz with Jonathan, when another man, drunk, came up to them and started talking about Michael. ‘It's my secret. Mama must never know.' She squeezed his hand. ‘It's so kind of you, Tom, to try and break it to me like this. I'm grateful. I supposed
it was shell shock, that sort of thing. Now you've told me so I understand.'

He was gazing at the flowers, hot-coloured, flaming things. He wasn't looking at her. She tried again. ‘I'm glad you know too. I've someone else to talk with, since I can't tell them at home. I'm not ashamed of him. I'm so proud of him. He fought hard.'

Tom was still gazing at the flowers. He shook his head. ‘It's not all. There's more.'

Then he looked ahead, started talking. The words were pouring out, fast. ‘It was sometime after the Somme, those days when really nothing was happening, we were all just waiting, reading the newspaper reports, in shock, really. They said we had a German spy. They
told
me it was a German spy. They lined us up and said – here comes a German spy, men, do your duty. They meant us to— You know. He was a German spy, so we had to.'

She looked around, quickly, afraid someone might hear. Everyone else looked absorbed in their food. ‘It was a German spy,' she said. ‘You had to.'And yet the words didn't sound as sure as they had before. She heard them and they were wrong as they came from her, confused, pulled out of shape.

‘You know. Like I said. Michael was affected by the death of his men, his friend. He couldn't get over it. It . . . hurt his brain.'

‘He should have been in hospital. That's where he belonged.' If he'd come to Stoneythorpe, they'd have made him better, ensured he recovered.

‘We just weren't
doing
anything. We were cleaning guns. So one day, the General told us – he said he needed us to do something. We had to walk out to a hut some way back from the front. We had to get our guns.'

He put his hands over his face, talked through his fingers.

‘They said, “He's a spy.” They made us stand so far away that none of us would know. We didn't know. None of the men back at the line would even be able to hear the shot. We stood there, guns waiting. We made a half circle.' The tears were pouring down his face. He didn't stop them.

There was a cold metal sliding around her heart, dark and hard.

‘Then they unmasked him. I said, “You can't! Stop!” But the Captain said to me “What do you think you're doing? Hold your gun up. The other men will take fright.” He said, “The man will hear you and he'll know it is you. Do you want to be in his place?”'

‘Whose place?' she tried to say. But the words whispered out and lay in the air.

‘I tried,' he said, his voice raised, hiccuping, tears on his face. ‘I said, “No! Please!” But they wouldn't let me, said I had to. And I thought, I'm a better shot than half these men. I can shoot straight, fast, so he doesn't suffer. He didn't see me. He didn't know it was me.'

‘In whose place?' she tried again. ‘Who didn't know?' But the words wouldn't come.

He sat up, clasped her hands. ‘Celia, you have to understand. I didn't want to. I
had
to. If I'd have stopped it then, raised a fuss, he would only have heard and it would have been done the next day. It would have been worse for him.' He clutched her again. ‘I had to. I begged them and begged them, but I had to.'

She wanted it to stop. She wanted to stand up and turn the stars around, so she was in a different place, a different time, so she'd never come here, found Tom, lain down next to him in the grass.

‘Please,' he was saying. ‘You have to understand. You do. You said in wartime people have to do things that are terrible. Like killing. They made me do it.' His hands were on his face now, the tears wetting them, he was coughing and hiccuping, his voice cracking.

‘Do what?' she said. The pain was stretching over her, down into her chest. The metal around her heart was spreading over her, covering her eyes, suffocating her mouth.

‘He didn't suffer, Celia. He did die quickly. I promise you. He didn't suffer.' He grasped her hands. ‘Please. You forgive me, don't you? I had to.'

The shock was making her slow. She couldn't hear him.

‘Who?' she asked again. ‘Who died quickly?' This time the words came out, clear. They rose over the flowers, hung between them. ‘Who didn't suffer?'

He buried his face in her hands, his tears soaking her fingers. ‘Michael,' he said.

Her heart stopped. Looking back later, that was what she would always say to herself.
My heart stopped
. Simply, it stopped beating. For two seconds, nearly three, the blood didn't course around her body, her heart didn't beat in and out; nothing worked. She sat there, feeling her heart fail.

‘You shot Michael,' she said slowly.

‘Yes.' He was weeping, not looking up.

‘They told you he was a German spy and you shot him.'

‘I had no choice.'

She felt her heart start again. It started up with more strength than it had ever had before. It was speaking to her, clear in her head.
Do it!
it said. She shook off his hands.
Do it!
She could reach out for the flower vase, pull it out, use every remnant of pain and horror and bring it down on his head. It might kill him. It might. Her hand flickered, touched the glass. She looked at him, saw the fear in his eyes.

In one movement, she pulled herself upright.
I won't do it
, she said, speaking to her heart.
I won't
.

‘I will never see you again,' she said, standing up. ‘Never
.' I could have killed you then
. He knew it too. ‘I can't.'

‘I'm sorry.'

She pulled out the chair, threw it back. She turned, hurried out of the restaurant, past the waiters and the people staring, and out into the air. Then she began really running, her skirt tangling in her legs. The material was tumbling, falling around her, like her thoughts. Michael dead, shot to the ground, Tom holding the gun, aiming at him. It was unthinkable. And yet she had to think it, let it fire through her mind, dragging every thought down with it into darkness.

‘I think I should go,' she said to Hilde, that evening. ‘I should go home. Sorry.'

Hilde shrugged. ‘Papa's been saying we should all go.' Celia bowed her head.

They all packed together. At the station, Heinrich gave Celia the tickets to Hamburg. ‘I'll escort you,' he said. She wished a stiff goodbye to Lotte, thanked her awkwardly. Hilde hugged her, crying. She kissed Johann but he was staring at the sky. Heinrich sat beside her, not speaking on the train. She looked out of the window.

‘Goodbye, Celia,' he said, at the Ladies' Room at the station.

‘Thank you, Uncle.' They could be any uncle and niece wishing each other goodbye. Not a man waving off the girl who had torn their family apart.

She climbed on to the train. As it was moving, she stepped out into the corridor and threw the blue gown she'd worn with Tom out into a field. A man was sauntering by the door, smoking. He raised his eyebrows at her. She looked away, imagined her favourite pale blue gown tumbled into the mud, trampled on by cows and sheep.

FOURTEEN

France
,
August 1921

Celia

‘Here you will see the position of the second trench.' Captain Evans limped over to the screw of brambles. ‘This was where C Position fell. That changed the whole course of the battle.'

Celia stared at her Baedeker guide to the Somme, trying to match the squiggles on the page with the sparse land in front of her. The trench was shallower than she'd expected, shored up with coloured bags and sacks at the side. She couldn't imagine Michael sitting in a place like this, crouching, waiting for the order. The duckboards at the bottom were splintered, spattered with weeds. Here and there, dandelions grew through the gaps. She wanted to grab them, take them for herself, flowers grown on the soil where men fell.

It wasn't too hard to find a tour in the Somme. Celia had thought that one would have to book months in advance – at least that's what the Thomas Cook advertisements said. But, she found, there were dozens of them, booths in the railway station and three in her hotel alone. When she went out for a walk into the town on her first night, two officers approached her and asked if she was looking for a tour. She booked one through her hotel, not too cheap, not too expensive, a guidebook included in the price. The woman told her that Captain Evans would take them out the next day. That night, she lay in her bed, still afraid. She'd ruined everything. She buried her head in the pillow, hating her actions, all of them.

‘It looks like nothing much to me,' the woman behind her, Mrs
Wadden, was saying. ‘When do you think we're going to stop for tea?' Other people were shuffling their feet. Celia felt for Captain Evans. He was no good as a guide, not really. His voice didn't carry, he was too easily swayed from the itinerary, gave in to Mrs Wadden and Mr Elms, when resisting them would have won him more respect. Even after just an hour, Mrs Wadden had asked to move, tried to join another group at one of the hotels, a tour led by a dashingly handsome officer who Celia supposed must be getting big tips – there had to be some reason for him working here; he was the type who could surely find a job at home. But Captain Evans still kept trying with them, smiling tentatively when he made his speeches about the layout of the Somme, looking at them for approval. Lame, missing an eye, plain-faced, he wouldn't find much work at home.

Just tell us what to do
, Celia wanted to whisper to him.
Don't ask if we'd mind. Tell
. But every time she was about to say it, she thought of Michael, shy, unsure of himself, probably not able to tell anyone what to do either. She'd seen Captain Evans look at her, eagerly, hunting for a friend. The others were older and in groups – Mrs Wadden with her sister, Mr Elms with his wife and sister-in-law, the six others in couples. She was the odd one out, the lone woman. Or at least, she was the odd one out in this group. The other tours were full of lone women, same age as Celia or a little older, weeping in the hotel restaurants, clutching the hands of others while walking around the trenches. Fiancé hunters, Mrs Wadden called them. ‘I expect you're one too,' she'd said to Celia, on the first night, during a painful group meal organised by Captain Evans. ‘They're the only ones who can afford to come out.' That was the general idea, Celia came to understand: the mothers were too old, wives too busy with children, only the girls who'd been engaged could do it, come out to see where their men had fallen. Mrs Wadden's eyes said it all:
indulgent
.