The Winter Ghosts (11 page)

‘Later, they sent his things home through Cox’s. Damp and worn and rigid with mud, the smell of the charnel house and barbed wire and gas. His cap was missing. The garter badge and Roussillon plume he was so proud of were gone. But there was a waistcoat, stiff with blood, and his braces.’ I swallowed hard. ‘It was only when I overheard Florence talking to the ironmonger’s boy at the back gate that I realised George’s body had been so devastated there was nothing left to identify. Almost the entire Thirteenth Battalion, the Southdowners, was wiped out. They knew he was dead all right, mown down with his men. It’s just they couldn’t distinguish one body from the next.’

‘And so you became ill?’

I shook my head. ‘Not then, later. The breakdown, collapse,
petit mal
, neurasthenia, nerves, whatever you want to call it. It didn’t come out straight away. Not until I reached the age George had been when he died. My twenty-first birthday, in fact.’

‘You did not speak of your grief?’

I shrugged. ‘Who would have listened? Within a mile of our house, twenty, thirty families were in the same boat. The Battle of the Boar’s Head is known as “The Day Sussex Died”. Hundreds of local men, boys like George, went to war and never came back. There’s a plaque on the wall of the memorial hall in my home village listing some thirty men, of all ranks, who fell that day. The same thing in all the villages around us. And there was always another battle coming up behind, worse and bloodier and less inexplicable. I suppose I thought I had no right to make a fuss. That I was old enough to cope. Certainly, my parents thought so.’

‘They were not aware how much you suffered?’

‘I’m not sure it would have made any difference. You see, it was George they loved. It wasn’t that they were deliberately unkind, only that mourning George drained the life from them. That I might be missing him too did not cross their minds. And, for my part, in my muddled, old-fashioned way, I saw they had a better claim to grief than did I, so I said nothing.’

‘Your parents are gone?’

I nodded. ‘Mother passed away last winter. Father earlier this year.’

‘And do you miss them?’

I was on the point of muttering the usual platitudes, but I stopped. What was the purpose in lying? Good manners, tradition, fear of painting a poor picture of myself? The truth was I felt relief, not loss. Now they both were dead there was no longer any need to pretend. They had been unable to love me. But that was their fault, not mine.

‘Sometimes,’ I said eventually. ‘Every now and then, something will happen and I will think of them. I have a few happy recollections. But for the most part, it is easier without them.’

I looked again at Fabrissa. She did not seem disapproving or shocked. Her skin was almost transparent now in the flickering candlelight, as though the effort of listening was draining the colour from her.

‘I like to think that I would have been able to accept his death if only I had believed it was true. Grieve, yes, but move on. If only I had accepted he was dead. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. Not for years. The idea he would never again come whistling through the door, or sit in the leather armchair in the music room blowing smoke rings at the ceiling while I banged away at some Beethoven sonata on the piano, was too absurd.

‘It was this, I think, the not knowing, that preyed on my mind. Not knowing what had happened to him, how he had died, when he had died. I became obsessed with piecing together those last minutes of George’s life. I read every report in the newspapers I’d missed when I’d been ill. Studied everything about the battle at Richebourg l’Avoué that I could lay my hands on - the terrain, the weather reports, the ratio of their men to ours. I sought out those few men of the Southdowners who’d survived the engagement and wrote to ask if they had seen him.’ I shrugged again. ‘Made everyone’s life a misery.’

‘The dead leave their shadows, an echo of the space within which once they lived. They haunt us, never fading or growing older as we do. The loss we grieve is not just their futures but our own.’

She was speaking so quietly now that I strained to hear her over the noise of the room.

‘But that was not what made you ill,’ she continued. ‘Not the fact of his death, but what followed.’

I took another gulp of wine and felt the room stagger. I’d had more than enough to drink, but knew I needed to blunt my memory if I was to finish the story.

‘Whatever I did made no difference,’ I said in a level voice. ‘I tried to make up for the fact that George was dead. Be twice the son. But it was George they wanted back, not an imitation of him. They wanted the son who played rugby and cricket and went to war, not a sickly, indoors boy, a boy who cared more for music and books than riding or hunting or skating on the river in winter when the Lavant froze over.’

I was twisting a loose thread of cotton from the tunic round and round my index finger, so tight it was cutting off the blood supply. The soft skin at the tip turned white, then purple. The sensation was comforting.

‘Ironically, in the light of my parents’ antipathy to my penchant for reading, it was a book that did for me in the end. George’s final gift to me, sent from the Front in December nineteen fifteen, wrapped in brown paper and string.’

I paused. ‘Most of all, it was the burden of guilt. In six years, I never did crawl out from under its shadow. In the end, I no longer had the will to fight it. It just seemed easier to give in.’

‘Why should you feel guilt?’

I sighed. ‘Everything. I don’t know. It made no sense, but it’s how I felt. Guilty for being the wrong son, that I’d been too young to fight, that I was alive when George was not.’ I swallowed hard. ‘Most of all, guilt that I was learning to live without him. It seemed an act of betrayal.’

‘A betrayal of whom?’

‘George.’ I waved a hazy hand, feeling the wine singing in my veins. ‘Of us. Not rational, I know.’

‘To survive when others do not takes a particular sort of courage,’ she said softly.

‘Yes,’ I sighed, relieved she understood. ‘And here’s the thing. It seems idiotic now, but in the days and weeks after the telegram arrived, I tried to bargain. I’d say to myself - to a God I no longer believed in - that if George is not dead, then I will not read this book or I will not play this
étude
, or do this thing or that. Stupid wagers I can’t even remember now.’ I pulled the thread of cotton tighter, jerking savagely at it until it snapped. The pressure gone, I felt the blood rush back to my finger. ‘Missing in action. Missing presumed dead. We had no body to bury. No funeral. No head-stone to mark his passing.’

Fabrissa nodded. ‘It did not feel as if it were over.’

I shook my head. ‘I only understood this when they edicated St George’s Chapel in Chichester Cathedral as a memorial to those men of the Royal Sussex Regiment who had lost their lives. It was the eleventh of November nineteen twenty-one, the anniversary of the Armistice. That’s when it hit home, his complete and utter absence. That nagging, unanswered question about where precisely he had fallen. How, precisely, he had died. His name was on a list for all to see, but what did that mean? There was a memorial, too, a pale stone cross in Eastgate Square, and another list in the new memorial hall erected on our village green. But George was not there, either.’

‘But he understood. And so you withdrew into another place, to be with him.’

A wave of gratitude washed over me that this beautiful stranger, this girl, should grasp things so clearly, when those who should have known me best had not.

‘I held out for six years. But it came in the end, my breakdown, collapse, whatever one calls it. December nineteen twenty-two. I was taken to a private hospital, a sanatorium for men with nerve problems, neurasthenia and other consequences of having survived the trenches. The medical staff was kind and efficient.’ I glanced at Fabrissa. ‘But I did not want to get better if it meant losing what little I had left of my brother.’

There. I had said it. I exhaled. My shoulders sagged, worn out by the act of confession. All the emotions, all the regrets and questions I’d allowed to decay inside me for so long, lay scattered about, like discarded gifts. Then, the faintest of smiles came to my lips. I did feel less burdened. Wrung out, certainly, but for the first time since that September day in 1916, my tattered heart was at peace.

Silence fell between us. And in that silence, all the words said and not said seemed to sing. And within it, the whole world was contained, accounted for.

‘But now, it is time to let him go. It is time to walk out of the shadows. You know this.’

My eyes snapped open. There was something in the echo and tone of her voice that sent a different kind of memory scuttling across the surface of my mind. A connection between Fabrissa’s clear voice speaking to me in the Ostal and the whispering on the road to Vicdessos.

‘Freddie.’ It was as if she breathed rather than spoke the word. ‘You know this. You would not be here else.’

That voice. Her voice. How could it be? Could the mountain air have played such a trick, distorting and changing my perspective?

‘It was you,’ I said at last in disbelief, yet knowing I was right. ‘It was you I heard.’

She turned her face away.

‘Fabrissa?’ I said urgently. ‘Was it you in the mountains, earlier, before the snow started? Was it? Did you see me? Fabrissa, please.’

Still she did not answer. I would have pressed her further, except I was suddenly aware the atmosphere in the Ostal had changed. The air was charged with anticipation, with tension.

I tore my eyes away from Fabrissa for a moment. While we’d been talking, everything else had receded. Now, like the lights coming up in the auditorium at the end of a concert, the world came back into focus. The white tablecloths, no longer pristine but covered instead with empty dishes, splashes of spilt wine and crumbs of bread, chicken bones and mutton grease.

The noise level had dropped. Like the low growl of an Easter tide sucking back from the seashore, the rumble of voices was constant, but muted. Everyone seemed to be speaking in hushed voices. Hooded and watchful eyes, no laughter now. For the first time since sitting down at the table, I felt uncomfortable.

I turned back to Fabrissa, but she had withdrawn into herself. And when I said her name she started violently, as if she had forgotten I was there.

‘Fabrissa,’ I repeated gently. ‘What is it? What’s happening?’

She looked at me, then, with an expression of such regret, such longing, that my breath caught in my chest. I forgot myself, instinct making me reach out to her and put my arm around her narrow shoulders. Beneath the heavy cotton of her robe, she was so thin, so fragile. Skin and bone, hardly there at all. But as I held her, I felt my heart sing, expand and soar free. Then she moved, as if my touch pained her, and although she did not ask me to, I withdrew my hand.

Then I felt something. A piece of rough material, different in texture from the rest of her gown. Gently, I lifted her hair and saw there was a crude yellow fabric cross, about the size of a man’s hand, stitched to the back of her blue dress.

‘What is this?’ I asked.

Fabrissa shook her head, as if it were too complicated to explain. Now I noticed what I had previously missed; namely, that several of the other guests had the same yellow crosses pinned to their tunics or to the backs of their robes.

‘Fabrissa, what do they signify?’

She did not answer, but I could see she was uneasy. The air felt heavy now, weighted. Everyone was waiting for something to happen, I could feel it. A shiver ran down my spine. I reached for my cup, forgetting it was empty.

‘Damn it.’

It was probably a good thing. Everything was a little blurry round the edges. I was half-cut already.

Then I heard, quite distinctly, the stomp of horses’ hooves outside in the street, and the rattle of harness. I frowned. Who would be out at this time of night and in such temperatures?