by Jo Baker
“If they get taken into town, the whole place would be implicated.”
They stand in silence.
“We came through a town,” he says, “where there’d been reprisals.” The woman with the frozen eyes. The man with a hole in his cheek, his jaw on show.
“We can’t just leave them lying here,” Miss Beamish says.
“No.”
She becomes brisk. She’s off back through her gate, yelling at the dogs, striding up the path, while he stands there with the dead. Up at the house, the other Suzanne is trying to get the dogs indoors. Voices are raised over their barking: What is it? Oh Good God, what are we going to do? He looks at a foot, the hole where a toenail has scythed right through the wool. The soldier’s gaiters are lying loose on the dust nearby. The killers took the boots.
It’s early yet. The road is quiet. Few people pass this way. They might get away with it.
Anna rejoins him. She has thrown on slacks and a polo-shirt and brings two garden spades, sloped together over a shoulder. She has also brought a bottle.
“My pal suggested this.” The bottle is lifted for inspection. Brandy.
“She is very wise.”
“She is. She really is.”
They consider the men. Slavic, high-boned faces, one softer than the other, younger, with a scattering of freckles like a pancake. The eyes are open and they’re grey, and the corneas are creasing as they dry, and the flies gather to sip away the wet. The Armée de l’Est, serving here, were recruited from conquered countries; they were prisoners of war.
“State of them, poor lads.”
She hands him the bottle. He uncorks it, swigs brandy, hands the bottle back.
“Where’ll we…”
They glance around.
“Over there,” she says with a nod. There, the verge is wider. Wide enough for a grave.
They go past the bodies.
“Russians, do you suppose they are?” he asks.
“Could be. Could be Poles. Took their chances, didn’t they? Either this or a labour camp. You can see why.”
The other is darker and seems a little older than his companion, a little harder-looking. Sunburned.
Anna turns her face away. He follows her on to the wider scruffy margin before the trees. He wants to say something consoling, something useful. There is nothing consoling or useful to say.
Her voice is dry; he hears her swallow. “Here?”
“Here’s as good as anywhere,” he says.
They shunt their spades into the ground. They begin to dig.
—
It takes a long time to dig a grave. As the diggers sink lower into the earth, the inner surface grows blood-red, damp, veinous. Paler rusty topsoil trickles down inside. He turns his sucking stone over in his mouth, tucks it down alongside his back teeth; the nerves sing like wires.
After an hour or so, Anna clambers out, careless of her clothes, and goes back to the house. No one passes; no one comes to investigate the gunshots in the night. He is grateful for the isolation of their little houses, for the self-preservation that is keeping their few neighbours at a distance.
When Anna returns, the other Suzanne comes with her, frowning, worried, carrying two bottles of beer and a biscuit tin. They drink the beer and eat in silence, squatting in the dust. The other Suzanne offers to help with the digging, but there is no room really for another in the grave, so they wave her away; also, the fewer people tainted by association, the better. They swig more brandy, swipe at flies, and get back to their work.
They dig as the sun climbs into the sky and the heat grows, and the flies buzz loud and the smell gets worse. He runs with sweat.
“That’ll do,” she says, breathless. “Won’t it?”
They climb out.
He turns his face aside as he hauls the boy up by the armpits. He is much heavier than he looks. Flies buzz around him, but he no longer has a free hand to swat them away. Anna huffs down to grab the feet, and between them they lug him over to the edge of the pit. They lay him down beside it.
“How do we do this?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Swing him in or roll him?”
Neither seems appropriate. They do not move.
“Right.” She bends to grab the feet again. “Come on.”
He just stands there.
“What?”
“I don’t like it.”
“No. I know. I don’t either.”
He hunkers down. They grab handfuls of grey-green serge, drag on limbs, heave and push. The body thumps over on to its side; a hand dangles in. They shove again; there’s a fall of dirt and the body tumbles and scuffs down the side of the pit. It lands awkwardly at an angle, feet higher than the head. The sides of the grave are too oblique, the base not flat enough for dignity; the boy’s neck twists back and he is profiled on the dirt.
The two of them straighten up. He’s about to wipe his mouth, but then lets his arm fall, shakes out unclean hands and wipes them one against the other.
“We’ve made a poor show of this,” he says.
“We haven’t much experience,” she says.
“I’ve only buried dogs before.”
“It’s not the same, is it?”
“No.”
They stand, looking down at the body in the pit.
“There’s the other fellow.”
They turn and go back, and lift him too.
By midday, the bodies are swallowed up and gone. All that’s to be seen is a darker patch on the pale earth, and that is drying out in the sun. They should not be left here. They should not rot into this red earth. Theirs should be the black tilth of home, years from now, decades on. Half a century or more, they could have had. They could have seen the next millennium in, if this century had not turned out to be the shambles that it is.
He wipes his face with his handkerchief and it comes away smeared with red. Anna’s grey Aertex shirt is powdered with red dust and patched with sweat; the sweat and dust make a red mask of her face. She sinks down on the edge of the road and just sits there in the dust. Her head hangs. He folds himself down beside her. He hands her the brandy.
“I’m too thirsty for brandy.” She uncorks the bottle, drinks anyway. “That was a bad thing we did there.”
He nods.
“I feel disgusting.”
“I do too.”
Anna raises the bottle. “To the end of all of this whorehouse mess,” she says. “To the end of this heap of fecking bollocks, this pile of whorish shit, because I have had my fill and more of it, so I have.”
The bundling forth of French and Irish swearing makes him smile, despite himself. She takes another slug of brandy. She goes to wipe the bottleneck, then, having nothing clean on her, not even an inch of sleeve, just hands it over as it is.
“To the end,” he says, and lifts the bottle, and the brandy burns and warms, and seems for a while to help.
—
That evening he has barely drifted into sleep before he’s jerked out of it like a fish on a hook. A whistle in the street. He slips out of bed, leaves Suzanne sleeping. Her lashes long, her hair tumbled and damp. He hadn’t known—or if he had, he had not remembered—that she would be there. Does it mean something that she is there?
From the window he can see a large group of maquis waiting in the street.
Someone yells up: “The sons of whores are on the run! Come on down. We’re to give ’em what for.”
He grabs clothes and boots, runs downstairs to join them. They march down the middle of the road in the blue evening; they talk, they laugh, they make themselves conspicuous. What, after all, do they have to hide? The balance of the world is shifting; everything is sliding and shivering and settling into different patterns once again. This is their land, this is their home; their noisy footfalls are reclaiming it. He finds himself watching their feet as they plant them on the grit; he watches the slow circle of the cycling boys’ legs and he cannot partake of their joy, thei
r comfort, their sense of ease. He is looking out for German low boots on a farmhand’s feet.
The group clumps along the cart tracks; they pick up others at crossroads, they call at cottages; the crowd grows. They descend towards the main road along the valley floor, where an arms cache has already been dug. They drag away bushes; they unpack the wares, divvy up ammunition, pace out the gaps between charges and lay them. Bonhomme hands him a cold Sten and he hefts it in his grip and recalls the green wine bottle flinging itself in fragments up into the air.
Somebody is dishing out hand grenades. One is placed in his palm like an apple. He puts it in his pocket. It weighs his jacket down, makes it droop.
From the south comes the thud of shells, and distant gunfire. Aeroplanes grind invisibly across the sky. The Armée de l’Est is expected to retreat this way. It has tanks and trucks and artillery and an urgent need to be elsewhere. The maquisards have a few charges, a few rifles and a hand grenade each. They have their own self-righteous outrage to compel them: la patrie, le terroir, la revanche. He can feel none of this. We are fleas on a dog’s back, he thinks; the most we’ll do is make it stop and scratch.
He lays the rifle down beside him on the bank and it catches a guilty sheen of the half-light. The hand grenade lies cold against his thigh. His own blood throbs next to it. He supposes he will throw the thing, if he is obliged to. He is not certain that he can bring himself to throw it accurately. In the half-dark, there are shiftings and sighs. To the south, the skirmishing continues. Someone snores.
He drops off the edge of wakefulness and into harbour-water sleep, livid with dreams, with swaying treetops in blue sky, with the stomach-swoop of falling. He dreams his mouth is full of earwigs and he is chewing them up and swallowing just to be rid of them, but they are bitter and he spits and spits and spits, and still he cannot be rid of them. He runs a stick along the railings, and up in the Dublin hills they are blasting granite: boom.
He wakes to the faint crackle of gunfire, the crunch of artillery. He gets up stiffly and stalks off for a piss. Someone smokes a cigarette. It is dawn already and it is cold, and if the Armée de l’Est did retreat last night, then they did not retreat this way.
“Here.” He slips his hand into his pocket, draws out the hand grenade and hands it back.
The maquis walk home in the early-morning cool, rifles shouldered. The boys are skittish, jostling; the older men tramp solidly and speculate. The Armée de l’Est must have got entangled with the Yanks, must be fighting harder than you might have thought conscripted POWs would fight. Or they must have taken another route, out towards Avignon or Aix. But this talk is soon stitched through with hopes for this year’s vintage, the promise of a puppy from the best gun dog’s next litter, a game of pétanque. He walks with them, but is not of them; the talk winds round him while he is silent, and his footfalls land on earth that was never to do with him. At his gate, he swings the gun from his shoulder and hands it back to Bonhomme. Who takes it and claps his arm and says, “Thank you, my friend.”
And then the crowd of them are on their way again, on into the little town.
—
In the dim kitchen, he wipes off some of the dirt, empties a pitcher down his throat, shovels in cold stew. Then he climbs upstairs and falls into bed, turns on his side, and sleeps.
Suzanne, having lain awake in his absence, and listened to the voices in the street and then him blundering around below, now slides out from underneath the covers. She treads barefoot round the house, chewing at her cuticles. The place already feels unfamiliar, as if they had never lived here. She picks up her mending, drops it again. She shunts her bare feet into espadrilles and scuffs out into the sun. Absently, she picks grapes from the trailing vines and eats them, warm with sunshine and not yet ripe, the sourness making her shudder. They turn to dust over her tongue and teeth, and yet she cannot wait for ripeness, sweetness. She picks another grape. She grows accustomed to the bitterness. Aigre, she thinks. It is not actually unpleasant. It is not difficult to bear.
And then, across the quiet, she hears the tear of an engine. She lifts her head to listen. It’s coming from out along the road and heading towards them. She straightens her shoulders and goes round to the front of the house.
She can feel the thrum through the ground. Above her, at the upper window, the shutters slam back, making her wince and glance up. He steps out on to the balcony in his vest and dust-stained trousers, his weak eyes searching into the distance. She shifts her gaze to follow his. A vehicle rounds the bend. It takes a moment to realize what she’s seeing. A rugged open-topped car—a jeep—burns up the road towards them. It is packed tight with men; the men are big and solid and they are dressed in fatigues. Soldiers. And, incongruously, Henri Hayden is perched on the back of the car. Spotting them, he waves and leans forward to speak to the driver. The car stops in front of the house, the engine churning. White grins on dirty faces. And all of Henri’s preparation, all those English lessons with Anna Beamish, are forgotten in this moment of unalloyed delight. He yells in French: “They were just going to pass us by!”
There are words exchanged between the soldiers in red, rich American English. The driver shunts the car into gear; Henri leans back as they pull away.
“It’s over! Good God, can you believe it? It’s all over! This fucking whore of a war! We’re liberated!”
And the jeep batters off up the road into town, flinging up a cloud of red dust. Suzanne raises a hand to shade her eyes. Henri disappears into the billows. Then the dust roils and settles, and the road is empty.
Suzanne turns to look back up to the balcony. Foreshortened by the angle, he is a darkness standing against the brilliant blue and she cannot make him out. He looks into the distance. He lifts his hands and presses them to his face. Then he turns away, and goes indoors.
She wipes her eyes with a flank of a hand. She sniffs. She shakes her head, and turns, and goes back to her garden.
And that is it.
Part Three
Beginning
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
NEW PLACE, FOXROCK
Summer 1945
Ireland is green. It is lush and livid under the heavy sky. After the parched redness of the south, after the greys of battered Paris, his eyes strain to adjust.
Not just his eyes. His attitude, expectations, posture, stomach, nerves. He is out of kilter here more than he ever was.
Milk, for example.
He has become obsessed with milk. He follows the jug as it progresses from hand to hand, watches the white cord as it twines into the cups, watches the gobs of fat shine on the surface of the tea. The mixture is lifted to bristling lips and sucked; throats spasm, lips roll in on themselves and then unstick and stretch and pucker with speech. The milky tea is supped and sucked upon, as though it were something and nothing, as though its continuance were guaranteed; as if it were not, like everything else, as vulnerable and fleeting as the snow, that can be gone with just a change in the weather.
New Place, for example.
The big old house, Cooldrinagh, is sold, and she is in a modest bungalow just across the street from it. Of course she mentioned this in her letters, but it still comes as a surprise. It’s wrong, this house. It’s all edges, corners and awkward angles. It is delicate unstable ornaments and vases. The ceilings feel too low, the corridors narrow and full of turns. He stumbles around, stooped and cautious, haunted by the openness that had been here, the vacant plot of his childhood where the grass blew and cats fought and mated and he and Frank whooped and tumbled and trod in dogshit. He can hear voices from the old place, and the metronomic tock of a tennis ball. The larches stir themselves in the breeze, and one of them is already turning gold, and maybe there’ll be a child up there, clutching a high branch, swaying with the wind. The old house looms over the new; it has prior claim upon the sunshine. He lurches and ducks through the bungalow, but he is peeled into pieces: he drifts through other places, other times, can’t make himself be fully her
e.
Alfy is dead. And all this goes on.
Tea on the lawn should not be so difficult. It should not be utterly intolerable. The cairn of bread-and-butter, the heap of scones, the cake: they are not horrors in and of themselves. That poor spinster his mother has prised off the shelf for the occasion, God love her, and the friends and neighbours: he’s known some of them for years. But he just cannot get the hang of it again. If indeed he ever could. Not the rituals, not the conversation, not what is expected of him. He has gone tone-deaf to it. His mother tongue has disowned him.
Alfy died in the care of the Red Cross, the day after being freed. Maria’s letter is brief. It chokes him. And he is marooned here, islanded.
He sips his tea black and tries not to notice, but when his mother sets her cup down, it rattles against the saucer in uneasy timpani. When she speaks it is with a tiny shake of the head, as though negating every word even as it’s said. He tries not to notice, but he can’t not notice. There are too many negatives to ignore.
She passes him a tremulous plate. He takes a slice of bread-and-butter, passes the plate on. He cuts his piece into halves, into quarters, into tiny squares and then into triangles again, the famine habit still hanging hard on him. His mouth is bitter with decay. His jaw throbs. His tongue probes at carious, sharp-edged molars, at the incisor that rocks in its socket and bristles with pain.
The conversation swells and grows, and he lifts a fragment of bread-and-butter and slips it between his lips and tastes the fat and salt and sweetness of it.
He blinks, and the red inside his eyelids is the red of Roussillon; and there are tumbled stones, the hair-cracked road, and dusty broken boots shuffling along it.
He opens his eyes at the blank white linen tablecloth. Paris walls are pocked with bullet holes. Marble counters in the shops are gleaming and empty. Milk is a miracle. Bread is made of sawdust. The Péron twins all bones and shadows, and not growing as they should. Suzanne stands shivering in a queue. And he should not have left them all to that. He should not have brought himself here. Where he is entirely surplus to requirements.
