White Feathers (29 page)

James shrugged. ‘That sort of thing does rather stick, Mam.’

Joseph, watching James, asked carefully, ‘How do you feel about leaving the army?’

James, looking down at the largely untouched food on his plate, replied, ‘Does it matter? I’m out now, or as near as, and that’s it.’

Lucy began, ‘Yes, but you could still …’

‘
No
, Lucy,’ James barked suddenly, banging his hand on the table so hard that his wine spilled and everyone jumped. ‘I can’t! I can’t
still
do anything! Don’t you understand? I wanted to lead men in battle, that’s all I’ve
ever
wanted to do, and I fucked up and Tarrant’s dead and so’s Jenkin and all the rest of them and it’s finished, all of it!’

Lucy’s hands flew to her mouth in shock at the violence in her husband’s voice, and her eyes filled with tears.

‘James!’ Tamar, too, was appalled.

‘Well, I’m sick to bloody
death
of it! All they went on about in the hospital was how it wasn’t my fault, that accidents happen and he was probably already dead when he fell back in the trench. But I
know
, all right! I know
exactly
what I did. I shot him in the head and I killed him! And do you know why?’ James shoved his chair back and glared wildly around the table. ‘Because he was
me
, that’s why! He was a frightened, gutless little bastard and he was
me
!’ He lurched to his feet and marched out of the room.

Tamar rose to go after James, but Joseph said, ‘No, Mam, leave him for a while. I think he’d probably rather be by himself for now.’ He looked over at Lucy, feeling desperately sorry for her. ‘He’ll come round, don’t worry. Shell shock can take a long time to recover from. This is pretty normal, I think. He just needs time.’ He looked over at Keely for confirmation.

She nodded in agreement. ‘He’ll come right. Some of the men I nursed, some of the really badly affected ones, were still showing symptoms a year after being withdrawn from combat.’ Then she realised what she’d just said — James had already been in hospital and then a convalescent home for almost a year. ‘But it can come right just like that,’ she added, clicking her fingers. ‘All he needs is rest and quiet.’ But even to her own ears she didn’t sound very convincing.

After dinner Joseph went in search of James and found him in the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark, drinking brandy from the bottle and smoking. Joseph sat down next to him, but said nothing. The night air was warm, for September, and carried a hint of the delicious scents that spring would bring.

After a while James said tonelessly, ‘I can’t help it. It sounds pathetic, I know, but I can’t seem to manage my temper any more.’ He took a final drag on his cigarette, dropped it and ground the butt into the short grass under the heel of his boot. ‘It just sort of roars up from somewhere in my guts and I can’t control it and I always end up saying or doing something I regret. And I feel so wobbly and weak afterwards.’ He turned to look at Joseph, and his brother saw in the light of the half moon that he had been crying. ‘But I mean it, what I say. I mean it.’

Joseph nodded. There was no point to arguing — if James felt the need to persecute himself for his actions, then he would, until he found the strength to begin to live again. And that, Joseph knew, might be never. But he didn’t —
couldn’t
— judge his brother: Joseph himself, and any number of the men he had fought beside, would probably have done the same thing.

James took a swig from his bottle, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘They all know what really happened, you know. Well, the ones that matter, any way — Bob Smythe and Villiers and the others. And the boss knew, Chapley. He came and talked to me
briefly after the trial before I was transferred to the hospital and he asked me outright. I wasn’t talking much then, I don’t think, but I do remember saying to him I definitely did it.’

‘What was his reaction?’

‘Can’t remember, really. He shrugged, I think, and I
think
he might have said if that really were the case, I should keep my mouth shut about it. But I’m not sure. I might have imagined that bit. I was imagining a lot back then. God knows how much of it all was real. Chapley might not have been there at all.’ James laughed, but it was without humour.

‘And the people at the hospital? Hornchurch, wasn’t it? How were they?’

‘Oh, the doctors all wanted to believe I hadn’t done it, because if I really had, what would that say about the Empire’s glorious and noble officer class, eh? That we were a bunch of savages happy to casually murder anyone who didn’t measure up? That if someone pissed us off we just shot them to get them out of the way? I don’t think they wanted to treat confessed killers, so they chose to believe I was imagining things instead.’

‘We were all confessed killers,’ said Joseph eventually, after a silence.

‘Yes, but we’re not supposed to talk about that side of it, are we?’

Joseph reached for the brandy and took a long drink himself.

‘Not many do. Not to outsiders any way, people who weren’t there. And do you really think the doctors were that naive? That it might not have occurred to them that what you were saying was true?’

James was silent for a moment. ‘No, I don’t really. There were some really decent chaps there who didn’t give a shit about the morality of it any more and just wanted us to get better and functioning normally again. They were absolutely knackered too, you know, the doctors. And some of them held quite openly pacifist
views. They would have got on really well with Thomas.’ He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Oh, there was the odd arsehole who insisted it was just a matter of pulling yourself together and getting back to the war, but you never saw any of them volunteering for service in the field.’

Joseph grunted, then asked, ‘So, do you think you
are
better?’

‘No,’ James said bluntly. ‘I’m not “neurotic” any more, as they say, but sometimes it still feels as if I’m right back there. I can hear it and see it and, worst of all, I can
smell
it. All that shit and blood and rot. And I’m still having the nightmares.’ He turned to Joseph. ‘Do you have those?’

‘The odd one, yes. And sometimes I dream I’ve still got my leg and I’m running all over the place and then I wake up and realise it was just a dream. That’s hard, sometimes.’

They lapsed into silence again for several minutes, then James said, ‘Poor Lucy. She’ll be wishing she hadn’t waited for me. Now she’s stuck with a mad husband invalided out of the army for conduct unbecoming.’

‘Oh, bollocks,’ Joseph replied immediately, a hint of anger in his voice now. ‘You’re being given an honourable discharge on medical grounds, like thousands of other blokes. And don’t tell me you’re the only officer to take drastic action to keep his men safe, because you aren’t. I know that for a fact.’ James opened his mouth to say something, but Joseph barged on: ‘And don’t be feeling sorry for yourself either, because that really is gutless, and for God’s sake give your wife some credit because she deserves it. She
has
waited for you, and she’s known since we got Thomas’s letter what happened, and she hasn’t wavered once. She’s gone on raising your son and telling everyone what a hero you were at Gallipoli and in France and it’s obvious she loves you and wants to stand by you, so don’t go buggering that up, all right? She’s a strong girl, and a decent one, and you’re lucky to have her.’

James said nothing but took a deep swig of the brandy and lit another cigarette. He wanted to say that Joseph didn’t understand what it had been like, but he knew that was untrue and that made him feel ashamed because he did sometimes feel sorry for himself. At other times he felt irrationally aggressive, but when he wasn’t angry the fear came back in such monstrous waves that it paralysed him.

‘Are you supposed to be having any more treatment?’ Joseph asked, his voice even again.

James took a deep breath. ‘If things go well, no. If they don’t, yes.’

‘What’s “well”?’

‘Well, Christ, I don’t know. I suppose if the nightmares and the anger and all that go away. Otherwise I’m supposed to go into town to the hospital for a “rest” in the returned servicemen’s ward they’ve set up there, but I’m buggered if I’m doing that.’

‘But are you supposed to see anyone else in the meantime?’

‘There’s a trick cyclist at the hospital and apparently I’m booked in to see him every month or so.’ James flicked his cigarette butt into the shrubbery. ‘Oh, and I’m meant to be attending a rehabilitation programme in town as well, seeing as I can’t be a soldier any more.’ He looked Joseph squarely in the eye. ‘I thought I might take up basketry.’

They both burst out laughing. They laughed until they had tears in their eyes, and then James was crying again, great noisy anguished sobs that almost broke Joseph’s heart.

Christmas 1917 at Kenmore wasn’t a happy one. Ian’s absence was still keenly felt, and the mood was sombre, but Tamar insisted the family still celebrate the holiday, even if only for the children’s sake.

Duncan was almost three now, a bright inquisitive little boy who ruled the household. Everyone adored him, although he pushed
even Tamar to the limits of her patience at times with his incessant questioning and fiddling — Mrs Heath’s kitchen equipment, the offal pit, Tamar’s cosmetics, Joseph’s spare wooden leg which Duncan decorated with creosote.

The worst, most frightening incident was when Andrew left the car in the driveway while he went inside to get something, and Duncan got into the driver’s seat, let the handbrake off and sat there crowing with delight as the car rolled steadily towards the solid stone gateposts at the end of the drive. Lachie had to run madly across the lawn after him, almost giving himself a heart attack, leap into the passenger seat and wrench the brake on. When asked what on earth he thought he was doing, Duncan said he was motoring into Napier to buy some lollies.

Joseph said there was a name for children like Duncan —
haututu
, which meant troublesome or a nuisance — but he was actually very fond of him, and the child spent hours alongside his uncle hammering together pieces of wood while Joseph laboured on the house he was building for Erin when she came home.

Liam, on the other hand, blond and slight against Duncan’s ruddy chunkiness, was quiet and incredibly sweet. There was no doubt now in anyone’s mind that he was truly Ian’s son, although there had not been a single word from his mother since the day he was left at Kenmore.

James was fond of Liam, and seemed to reserve for him what little affection he could summon up. Perhaps, thought Tamar, it was because Liam so resembled Ian. James certainly wasn’t very affectionate towards his own son, but then Duncan was still very stand-offish with James and there was an uneasy truce between them. Duncan seemed to resent James’s demands on his mother’s time, few though they were, and did his best to disrupt any moments they had together. Matters hadn’t been helped by the fact that Lucy had allowed Duncan to sleep in her bed throughout the
entire period that James had been away, and the little boy was very put out at being shifted to another bedroom, even if he did have Liam for company. His strategy to counter this rude and abrupt modification to his sleeping arrangements consisted of a steady yelling and a rather forced but nevertheless intensely irritating sobbing that began at 7.30 when both boys were put to bed, and went on for at least two hours.

The performance initially caused a spate of very terse and unpleasant exchanges between Duncan’s parents — Lucy believed the boy should be allowed back into the marital bed to settle him down while James insisted that would happen over his dead body — until James informed Duncan that if he didn’t shut up he’d get a good hard belt across the backside and would be sleeping outside with the dogs. This did nothing to improve relations between father and son, but when James finally decided to go into town for a period in hospital, it was noted by all that Duncan did not move back into his mother’s bed.

James had resisted the idea of an enforced rest for some months, but by January it was clear his health was not improving. He was still unpredictable and short-tempered, could not sleep and sometimes seemed apathetic to the point of almost complete inertia. He would sit in the garden for hours with a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of spirits, not getting visibly drunk but certainly drinking enough to become uncommunicative and extremely withdrawn.

Tamar occasionally attempted to talk to him but when she did he would often be reduced to tears, and she couldn’t stand seeing this. She, and Andrew, encouraged him to get out and about on the station with Joseph in the hope that physical work would help him, but he refused. He was still underweight and off his food, and Tamar worried that he would soon become seriously physically ill.

At the beginning of November she had suggested to him that he take advantage of the opportunity for a break at Napier Hospital,
but he had walked away. However, when Lucy had broached the subject with him the following day, Tamar had been able to hear them yelling at each other upstairs from where she was in the kitchen. She wished fervently that James would not take his temper out on Lucy, because she of all people deserved it least. She feared her son was turning into a bully, willing only to lash out at women and children, perhaps even the sort of man he was insisting he had already become — gutless and weak.

But, just after Christmas, after a particularly heated row that the whole family couldn’t help hearing, Lucy came down to breakfast with a grazed and purple bruise on her cheek. Tamar was appalled and, struggling to control her own temper, deliberately refolded her napkin and laid it carefully on the table.

‘Have you hurt yourself, Lucy?’ she asked evenly. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Joseph watching intently.

Lucy’s hand wandered up to her face in an unconscious effort to hide the bruise. ‘I, yes, I walked into the door last night, on the way to the toilet.’ As nervous liars often tend to do, she compounded the untruth by adding superfluous additional information. ‘I didn’t want to put the light on in case I woke James. And when I got out of bed I wasn’t watching where …’