The Gates of Rutherford (7 page)

It was full of lice.

He felt no surprise, and no loathing. The war had taken loathing away. Lice were a fact. They came from the world into which he had been conscripted. It was not the fault of the lice that a mass of human beings had suddenly presented themselves in filthy conditions. He stared at the creatures, all no bigger than a grain of rice, inside the box—feeling once again their unbearable itch.

In all the time that he had been fighting, he had never had a bath, never had a change of clothes. The lice were constant, as continuous as the noise, the fear, the shuddering of the guns.

He looked down at his hands again, and the light went out of the dream. There was a single line across the center of his sight, and above the line was dark blue, and below the line was black. He heard a whisper, an order, that he must go up into the dark blue, and crouch down, and feel his way towards the machine gun post. It was three o'clock in the morning, and he knew that the man who was whispering to him was lost; lost in his mind, insane. But he was his officer.

He got up and slouched through the mud.

As he went he saw, bizarrely, crushed in the foul-smelling dirt, a reflection from a piece of metal. The darkness was suffocating and cold, as thick as the mud itself, a miasma, and he tried to see what the metal was—whether it was an unexploded shell, or a weapon, or shrapnel. He peered at it, astonished to see lettering on it:
Crosse & Blackwell Plum and Apple Jam.
The utterly prosaic nature of it touched him, made him want to weep.

But its presence showed that he was near the British. They threw their cans away. He'd seen them, through his periscope, throw their hard tack biscuits away, too. Biscuits so hard that no one could eat them. He doubted that the British could be as hungry as they were. He had forgotten the true taste of food, and so the sight of the tin, and the thought that discarded food might be down there among the dirt . . .

He lost concentration, and that was when it began.

The place was Pilckem Ridge.

I
t was eight o'clock in the evening, and already dark, before Charlotte and Michael arrived in Dorset. They had taken the train to Sherborne, and a taxicab to the cottage that had been loaned to them by Michael's aunt. Michael had not wanted to go to a hotel—“to be stared at” as he put it. She didn't know how he realized such things, and had once said so. He had given his little crooked smile. “The room goes very quiet,” he'd told her. “One feels something like a ripple. Of interest. Of pity. That's what I can't bear.”

Tonight, as the train had approached the country station, she had asked about his aunt. “We shall have to visit her, I'm afraid, despite her being as mad as a hatter,” he explained. “She's not far away, in the village.”

“Is the village very remote?” Charlotte had asked him last month, when they had been finalizing their arrangements. She was certainly hoping so.

“It's a nice little place, very friendly,” Michael had answered.

When she had confided this to Louisa, her sister merely laughed.
“I don't see the problem,” she'd exclaimed. “If you don't want visitors, bar the gate or something.”

“It's not Rutherford,” Charlotte had answered. “It's only a cottage. I shouldn't think anyone bars their gates. I expect people come and hang on gates instead, and expect to talk. What will I say to them? I don't want to be the subject of discussion. You know, new bride and all that. It would be so embarrassing.”

“Chattering away should suit you down to the ground,” Louisa had replied. “You're used to talking to all kinds of people by now, aren't you? At the hospital and so on.”

Charlotte had raised an eyebrow. “It may come as a revelation to you,” she said, “but I do not chatter away. Sister would shoot me for it.”

“Rather defeating the object, shooting nurses?” Louisa retorted. They had been having tea at Claridge's—a rare afternoon treat on Charlotte's day off. She couldn't explain, even to Louisa, her misgivings about being permanently at Michael's side. Anyway, she had rather thought it would be tactless to say such things to Louisa, who had been so spectacularly jilted three years ago.

She had eyed Louisa secretly when her sister's head had been turned. Strange . . . Louisa didn't look at all like the spinster sister. She looked rather happy, in fact. Who would have thought it? Sociable, empty-headed Louisa, being happy to be at home in Yorkshire with Father. What changes they had all been through. It was like being on a surrealist merry-go-round.

Michael hadn't wanted to discuss the subject of their marriage at all—not in the sense of what she should be or do. He accepted that Charlotte wanted to go on working at St. Dunstan's, but had hinted that it would not be appropriate in time. She supposed that “in time” meant when she became pregnant. “You will make a topping little wife and helper,” he had told her. “Everyone will love you. We shall be very happy.”

Happiness. One clutched at it like air, almost as a right. But she wasn't looking for the kind of happiness that she suspected Michael was describing; the domestication, the closed-in feeling of four walls.

“We shall have adventures, shan't we?” she had asked him.

“Plenty,” he had reassured her. “Although, darling, some adventures are overrated.”

He had been on a so-called “adventure” in the first few weeks of the war—“over by Christmas” and all that rot—he had packed his bags with a glad heart, like so many thousands of others. He had told her as much. He had been a regular already, an officer in the Royal Field Artillery. “We all wanted to get out there in 1914,” he said. “Champing at the bit. Positively fretting.” He told the story with a wry smile, as he said most things. Whenever she thought of him, she thought of that twisted expression of humor. Never his blindness, never the star-shaped scar that crossed his temple and one side of his forehead in disjointed white lines.

Sitting now on the train, she leaned forward in her seat.

“What's the weather doing?” he asked.

“Trying to rain,” she told him.

“We shall pass Salisbury soon.”

“Yes.”

“Describe it to me.”

She did so—although this was only ever when he asked. She didn't want to be a running commentary on life, a human conduit. Michael had his own opinions, and firm ones at that. He could be impatient. All of this she understood.

“I remember this area so well,” Michael said, when she paused in her description of countryside, the small towns and villages. “I trained here. . . .”

Salisbury Plain, with all its rolling seas of grass, its chalky uplands, was being bought up by the army. It would soon be home
to military exercises rather than the larks that it was famous for until now. She pressed her face to the window glass. “Do we pass Stonehenge, do you know?”

“Not in the train.”

“Amesbury?” She had read about the prehistoric monuments.

“No.”

“Have you visited them?”

“Why would I?”

“I should like to see them. Might we hire a car one day?”

He laughed shortly. “Am I to trust myself to your driving?”

“I drive very well,” she protested.

“If you say so.”

She sat back in her seat. “Well, I shall drive alone to see Stonehenge if you think I'm so very hopeless.”

“You shan't go anywhere without me,” he murmured. “And that is an order.”

The taxicab took them from Sherborne station through the winding lanes of North Dorset. Up a long hill at first, and then out eastwards. It was hard to see any detail, and rain spattered the windscreen. The driver was a talkative sort, rattling on about the war, telling them about his brother who was in the Middle East—“Lot of blinking fleas!” he said cheerily. “That's what's getting to him. Sitting in a hundred degrees getting bitten by fleas.”

“He's seen no action?” Michael asked.

“Oh, he's seen plenty,” the man replied. “You've heard of Kut, sir?”

“Mesopotamia?”

“The very same, sir.” He gave a great sigh. “We never knew what country that was,” he said. “Whoever heard of they places?” His Dorset accent was almost impenetrable. “Damn Ottomans trying to kill 'em. That's t'all thanks you get.”

“Mesopotamia is the birthplace of civilization,” Charlotte said.

“Is it?” the driver replied. “Well, you've got me there, ma'am. I always thought that was His Majesty. Good old Blighty, you'm understand? What would they Africans be without us?”

“Mesopotamia isn't Africa.”

“Bain't it though?” the driver asked. “Tis all foreign to me. What his missus wants to know is, what are we doing out there?”

The answer was on the tip of Charlotte's tongue. She had kept abreast of the war since the very first day.
We're out there because we saw a chance of extending our Empire
, she wanted to say.
Because we condemn the Kaiser for doing so, and then we do it ourselves. To save Mesopotamia from itself, to carve it up along our lines.
She had seen a picture of the new Arab league flag, and proud infantrymen holding it, and the paragraph under the photograph in the newspaper—
Our brave lads supporting the Arab uprising
.

She didn't doubt that the lads were brave. She saw evidence every day of courage and fortitude. What she doubted was that her own country was performing some sort of selfless act. She had said as much to her mother and John Gould, and Octavia had raised an eyebrow. “Don't say such things to your Father,” she had commented. “He will have you down as a Bolshevik.”

So Charlotte, in fact, had said nothing to anyone. Not even to Michael. And she said nothing now. Perhaps it was true that she was just a reckless little revolutionary. The idea pleased her immensely.

The taxicab dropped them at the end of a narrow track. The countryside all around them was inky black, and rain dripped from the trees overhead.

“Someone should have left us supper. There should be a light, a lamp,” Michael said. “The place doesn't run to electricity. Not in this neck of the woods.”

“I can see a lighted window, and a porch,” Charlotte told him.

She held his arm, guiding him only slightly. After all, he was
much more used to the dark than she was. As they drew closer, she could make out that the “cottage” was in fact a rather large house with a deep thatched roof. In one of the casement windows, an oil lamp had been put on the sill. From his coat pocket, Michael took out a key. “This is for the front door,” he said. “It was sent with all sorts of instructions to have patience with the lock.”

Eventually, they got it open. The hallway was unexpectedly cavernous, with a stair rising on the left-hand side. Taking the lamp from the porch, Charlotte walked forward. “I think the parlor is straight ahead,” Michael said. “I haven't been here since I was a boy.”

He was right. And on the table, a cold supper had been left for them, the sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, and a plum cake resting under a large muslin dome. On the handle of the cover, someone had tied twigs of apple blossom. “Oh, how sweet,” Charlotte said.

“A woman will come in every day,” Michael told her. “I don't expect you to char. You do enough of that at the hospital.” He was taking off his coat. “Look in the suitcase,” he said. “My holdall there. There might be something to drink.”

Although she was dying for hot tea rather than alcohol, Charlotte took out the bottle of champagne. “Lovely,” she murmured.

“Get some glasses from the kitchen. You'll have to potter about to find it,” he told her. “I have no idea where it might be.”

Just for a second, she hesitated. In the hospital, she was used to being given orders. In fact, it amused her tremendously to become “Nurse” as soon as she set foot in St. Dunstan's. It was relief, somewhat, and a pleasure at times—when she was not exhausted—to be truly useful at last. But it suddenly occurred to her now that this was the very first time that a friend or a member of her family had given her an order—“Get some glasses” —in such a peremptory tone. As one would do with a servant. No smile, no kind inflection. No please
or thank you. Michael's head was turned away from her; his hand beat on the arm of the chair, and his leg jittered with impatience.

“I'm just going,” she said.

“I could do with a bloody drink more than anything.”

Again, in the doorway, she stopped. Bloody, was it? Interesting.

The kitchen was a long, dank-smelling affair at the back of the house. She found candles and another lamp on the draining board of a little scullery beyond it. The floor was flagstone, and beyond the scullery was another tiny room, with shelves set around at waist height. Here, she saw the reason for the pervading aroma of damp. There was a stone plug in the floor, and water about six inches deep. There must be a stream underneath the house, she thought. Was there such a one in Rutherford? She didn't know. She had never inspected the kitchens at all.

“It's quite a revelation,” she said to Michael when she got back with two mismatched glasses. “What is the room for with the water in it?”

“Milk churns,” Michael said. “There's a farm a bit farther down. It's an overspill for them.”

“Gosh,” she murmured. “The things one learns.”

She gave him the glasses. He had already opened the champagne in her absence and, she noticed, taken some already from the bottle. She poured, and clinked her glass with his. “What shall we drink to?” she asked.

“That's an easy one,” he said. “To you.”

•   •   •

T
hey made their way upstairs in another half hour, leaving the remnants of their supper on the table. At the top of the stairs, there was a wide landing with doors on three sides, and a beamed
ceiling. The shadows cast by the oil lamp flickered over hunting prints and a stuffed fox head—wreathed with cobwebs, Charlotte noticed.