A Spell of Swallows

by Sarah Harrison

  ‘Welcome, Boots,’ he said.

  Just then he saw from the corner of his eye a movement on the far side of the garden—a figure with a billhook, hacking with slow movements at the long grass. He withdrew his arm.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  Vivien glanced over her shoulder. ‘Who—oh, it’s only Ashe. He offered to clear some of that when we got back, so I thought why not? Saxon, watch this.’

  She put the puppy down on the ground and began walking backwards away from him.

  ‘He doesn’t know what to make of it when I do this . . .’

  Saxon watched as the puppy crept, paused, laid its head on its paws, then bounced forward. But the moment’s romantic, sylvan domesticity had become something else—subtly altered by that quiet, industrious dark figure behind him, cutting the grass.

  He retrieved his briefcase, and Vivien scooped the puppy up again. ‘Poor thing, he’s tired. He’s only a baby. That’s enough.’

  She linked her free arm through his. ‘Let’s go in and you can tell me about your day, I’m dying to hear.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ said Saxon, ‘but there isn’t that much to tell.’

  MESOPOTAMIA

  ‘Are we downhearted?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Are we downhearted?’

  ‘No! No!’

  ‘Are we downhearted?’

  ‘No! No! No!’

  ‘What are we after?’

  ‘Bags in Baghdad!’

  And who’s going to get us there? Our Charlie. General Townshend. For some reason he’s got this reputation for getting things right. Talk about blind faith. If these men can believe that, without a shred of evidence and when most of them have never clapped eyes on him, they’ll believe anything. No wonder so many of them turn up on church parade.

  ‘Are we downhearted?’

  Not so sure now. It’s getting hotter by the second. The shouting’s died away. Now it’s just the crunch, crunch, crunch of thousands of boots on the gritty sand. Nobody looks at anyone else. Eyes front. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

  Time out of mind it’s been nothing but battles round here. The longer a place has been civilised, the longer it’s been at war. A nice little paradox. You can feel them, just below the surface, all those battles, all those centuries of strife and carry-on. Our army’s like a column of ants crawling over the scars—what’s our little bit of bother compared to everything that’s gone before? Whole civilisations have been, and had their day, and gone in this part of the world; wiped out by people pretty much like us. Cannon Fodder. Enlisted men. Time-servers and mercenaries who knew who the enemy was, but not why. As a matter of fact, they may have had a better idea than us, because of tribes, and territories. We don’t even have that. We’re not on our patch, and none too clear what our quarrel is with the Turks except that they’re pretty good fighting men.

  Ctesiphon’s a case in point. It doesn’t exist any more. But we’re getting the idea, because we’re two miles away and already we can see the thumping great arch that Jarvis told me used to be the palace gates. It’s as high as a city church and as wide as a football pitch, just standing there on its own in the middle of nowhere. All that’s left, but it’s enough to send shivers up your spine. The arch is rising up out of a mirage, a kind of shimmer . . . Like the cloud of dust raised by all those past armies. The ghosts of all those other men who are dust themselves. Not nice.

  We’re on the old caravan road. Well, I say road, but it’s just a track across the desert wastes. Funny how it winds about for no reason, and we follow it like sheep. If we marched straight we’d be quicker but no, we follow the track. Maybe there were other buildings here once—forts and castles—and that’s why the track winds.

  It’s fucking hot.

  As usual, they’re waiting for us. They’re dug in somewhere to the east of the arch, and behind that as well. So from where they are we’re just a cloud of dust too—a sandstorm moving in their direction. But you can bet they’re ready. The minute we stop being a cloud, and start being ants, then a millipede, then a column of men, they’ll open up on us. We just have to hope the powers that be have a plan.

  It’s hot. If I so much as think of a glass of cold, clear water I’ll go mad. Smelly tepid canteen stuff’s what we’ve got, and not much of it.

  ‘A bold heart is half the battle.’ Latin proverb. I saw it once on a gravestone.

  We’re about to find out what the other half is.

  The raw patches on my feet are too far gone to hurt now, but they’re going to give me gyp as soon as we stop marching. The sweat’s making my eyes sting.

  Night, and it’s freezing. It’s so cold if you poke your nose out of the tent and look around you’d think it was snow, not sand, all around you. Miles and miles of it, grey in the moonlight with a few little bits of scrub sticking up. Icy dust, stones like iron. A frozen, dry desert. And thousands of us lying on it, like maggots. My feet hurt now, but from the cold, not the blisters. Thawing out’s going to be fun.

  Because it’s flat I can make out the arch against the sky, blacker on black. No sign of the enemy, he’ll be below ground like any creature with sense. Keeping his head down and his feet warm. I look up. Thousands of stars, some of them close, like lamps, others so many and so far away they make a kind of haze.

  I think about Jarvis. Shivering and miserable, or sleeping like a baby? Looking at the stars, like me? Suddenly I’ve got this picture of the army, the tents, like something out of the Bible, spread out on the eve of battle—and just one or two pale faces like sixpences turned up to the sky . . . All those men, all those thoughts and dreams and nightmares and fears. All those fucking blisters! All freezing and alone.

  Next morning there’s a kerfuffle. Not till we’ve got up, mind you, and we’ve struck the tents, and loaded our kit and got the weight back on our poor bloody feet (and I mean bloody, my socks are matted with the stuff).

  Then they tell us there’s been a change of plan; and we wait. It’s hotter than hell, and we’re standing around exactly where we slept. There was a hot drink (tea? who can say) earlier, when it was still cold and dark, and because we’re not moving it’s gone straight through us, so first piss of the day’s happening on the spot. Very nice. Thousands of square miles of desert and the BEF’s created an area that smells like the gents’ urinals at Piccadilly.

  My companion on today’s gallant enterprise is Dick Drago, originally from County Cork but serving with our lot. He talks up a storm, I say very little, so we go together pretty well.

  ‘You know what, Johnnie,’ he says (I’d lose my rag if anyone else called me that, but I take it from him), ‘you know what—any other nation and there’d be a mutiny in the ranks. But you British can stand and wait till the cows come home. It’s your greatest talent, you know that?’ He’s a champion at rhetorical questions, I don’t even bother shaking my head. ‘How many massacres have been avoided because you knew how to wait your turn? You know what this is?’ He waved an arm at the motionless host before and behind. ‘It’s just a bloody great queue.’

  ‘If it is, you’re in it,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Dead right I am, Johnnie! What would I do, run off all on my ownsome into the desert? No, when in Rome. I’m staying put where there’s a chance of some refreshment and good craic’

  He ranted on, more or less amusingly. At least when he complains he has the good grace to make a joke of it. Better still he doesn’t wait for a laugh, I don’t have to contribute anything, my attention can wander and no offence taken.

  It wanders now . . . About a hundred yards away there’s a couple of horses standing with their heads hanging, reins trailing on the ground. Their necks and flanks are already scummy with sweat. The officers are standing in the little bit of shrinking shade on the other side of them. As I watch, one of the horses staggers. Its front hooves go wide apart, its head’s swinging from side to side with the tongue protruding, yellow liquid trickling from the side of its mouth. Its knees are bucklin
g now, and as it goes down I can see that one of the officers is Jarvis. He grabs the animal’s reins as if he wants to stop it falling, but what can he do? It’s three times his size and in the throes of a heart attack, poor bugger. In the end the horse takes Jarvis down too, he stumbles and crashes down on his knees, falling forward awkwardly on to its neck. I can’t help it, I want him to get up and not make an exhibition of himself.

  He straightens up, but stays on his knees. The horse’s legs are sticking straight out, shaking like there’s an electric current going through them. I don’t mind admitting that what happens next surprises me. Jarvis unbuttons his holster, takes out his pistol, puts it against the horse’s head just above the eye and pulls the trigger. There’s a muffled bang and then that funny little silence afterwards—‘dead’ silence, must be where it comes from. Jarvis stands up, looks down at the horse. He’s done what needs doing, now it’s my turn, and I put my pack down and go over.

  ‘Shame about that, sir.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, looking a bit green about the gills. ‘And now we have a problem.’

  ‘Digging fatigues, sir?’

  ‘Good man, Ashe.’

  At least when you’re moving about you’ve got a reason to be hot. I don’t know why that should make a difference, but it does. Drago comes to help—that’s how much he appreciates a good listener—and a sergeant, Sergeant Singer, built like a brick privy, and we take off the saddle and bridle, and get on with it. The ground’s like concrete, we’re not so much digging as chipping at it. Jesus wept! From frozen solid to baked rock-hard in a few hours. Nothing in between in this place. Madness. The flies are massing already, all over the horse’s head and backside, looks like a crawling, buzzing extra skin. The odd few million that can’t find a place on the horse settle on us; there’s no point in brushing them off, you might as well get used to them. Makes our little competition back in Basra look even more stupid than it was, and that’s saying something. I mean, these fat bastards are laying eggs inside the horse while we work. That’s how to colonise a place: occupy it, then populate it with your own side in less time than it takes to run the flag up. Come to think of it, that’s the only reason I know for letting women in on the show.

  We never finish, because the order comes to resume the march, this time up the Baghdad road. Word is we’re some sort of decoy: we’re supposed to look like the advance guard of some massive push on Baghdad, then we can swing round and deliver a right hook to his position at Ctesiphon. It seems to me that if the Turks are as well dug in as we think they are, all they have to do is sit tight, keep their heads down and see what happens.

  Another horse is brought up for Jarvis. We load up again. A minute later we’re off. Crunch, crunch, crunch. The sky’s white, the sun’s the whitest bit, bang in the middle. What were we thinking, trying to bury that fucking horse? It’ll be bones by tonight.

  At two o’clock they call a halt no more than a couple of hundred yards from the river and we’re told we can fill our water bottles. We’re a long way upstream here so they must reckon the water’s clean.

  I’ve noticed it doesn’t take much to turn men into monkeys. One minute it’s crunch, crunch, the great fighting force moving as one et cetera, the next everyone’s dropped his kit and is charging and barging for the river bank. I won’t do that. The first ones are kneeling down and dousing themselves before I’ve even started moving. And just as well because all of a sudden there’s a crack-whoomp! of shellfire and about half a dozen of the men at the front have pitched forward into the water‘s edge. And again, some more go down, the wounded are thrashing about in the shallows and screaming, others have waded in to pull them out. The puffs of smoke are coming from three-quarters of a mile upriver—our flotilla! No one told them about the change of plan that involved us taking the Baghdad road, so to them we’re just a force where no force ought to be and wallop! Blood in the water and brothers-in-arms grabbing the spare water bottles before running for—well, the only cover is the rest of us.

  Signals are exchanged and the firing stops. Only a dozen dead and twice that wounded, all in a day’s work.

  Dick Drago sums it up: ‘Good to know it’s friendly fire. We’d never have guessed, but.’

  Chapter Seven

  It was June, and summer had arrived in all her glory. Not that the puppy knew this. All he was aware of was the sun warm on his back and the smells tickling his nostrils drawing him this way and that over the lush grass. To the puppy, the vicarage garden had its own sensory map, one that shifted and changed according to the weather, the time of day and who was there.

  Some features were constant: the dank, musty boards at the base of the shed, where woodlice lurked; the threshold of the back door where food, security and a certain sternness awaited him; the green wilderness at the end of the garden where he sometimes disturbed mice, and even rabbits, and once a grass snake slithering alarmingly between his paws and away down its hole; the fierce, pungent smell near the fence, full of threat, that sent him skittering away, ears back, from whatever padded silently on the other side . . .

  Further away and higher up, in a different dimension and one that wasn’t so clear, he was beginning to recognise voices. The one he knew best meant play, comfort, caresses, occasionally being whooshed up to where the voice was closer and he was overpowered with scents and sensations, of smooth skin and fluffy hair, the touch of a mouth, the playing of fingers round his ears and ruff. Happiness, insofar as the puppy knew what that meant. Absence of happiness he had experienced—when he had been dragged away from his mother and siblings—but there was nothing to associate that with, and consequently no memory. This was his home now.

  There were other voices. In the kitchen, at something of a distance, a background voice that occasionally became louder but no closer, and which meant no harm. In other rooms, on different surfaces, some soft, some slippery, with stranger and less appetising smells, there was a deeper voice and occasionally a tentative hand, patting and feeling him. This was a touch that elicited no particular response; it was cautiously enquiring and that was how the puppy responded, lowering himself on to his stomach and sniffing the black, shiny shoes for clues.

  There was one voice which he did not hear often, but which brought with it a sensation of warmth and companionship, and an associated longing for others of his kind. This voice was the slowest and the gentlest, the lap the broadest and most accommodating. The reaction it produced in the puppy was like that of being with his mother. He quickly relaxed, and often slept on this lap, comforted by the faint, familiar smell that was like an extension of himself.

  Occasionally the puppy encountered another person, one who rarely spoke, or touched him and had, strangely, almost no smell. And yet the puppy was besotted. When this person arrived, or was nearby, he became at once the centre of the puppy’s universe. The puppy, by nature a pack animal, needed order and the authority of a leader to feel secure. And every sense and instinct told him that here was that leader. Of all the people he’d encountered in his new home, this was the one whom the puppy would follow through thick and thin with blind trust and devotion.

  John Ashe worked at the vicarage most evenings now, and very often on a Sunday, too. The days were long and the weather fine, and there was plenty for him to do. He was still doing his job at the station, so his time was full, but that didn’t bother him. He had no social life, he preferred to be occupied, and he was saving his money. Mr Trodd’s eye was on him, but Ashe was careful not to let his duties at the station slip. There would be no cause for complaint.

  Ashe looked after the car, keeping a high gloss on the outside and a knowledgeable eye on the engine. Mrs Mariner no longer needed driving lessons, but the lessons had served their purpose, in more ways than one. All those casual questions, humming with excitement; all those glances that she thought she’d kept hidden; all the little touches, intentional and not so intentional . . . The tension was building, he had only to maintain a distance to keep it taut. Then
she could be reeled in.

  He was careful always to maintain a veneer of absolute neutrality: there must be no clue, not the smallest hint, of his interest in her. On the contrary, he was scrupulous in referring any queries first to her husband, the one who paid him. He never went into the house unless invited, nor cast a look their way if they came into the garden when he was there—at least not until he was addressed by one of them, when he was a model of restrained civility. It was his experience that once the correct conditions were in place, you rarely lost anything by holding back. Other people, subject to those conditions, would reward your patience by doing the work for you.

  Mariner had lent him the book of poems, which he’d read in a single evening. He’d been surprised at how good they were, and how personal; it had been another eye-opener. But perhaps he shouldn’t have been so surprised after what he’d seen in the kitchen that night. The vicar of Eadenford was a satyr beneath the skin.

  He’d returned the book wrapped in brown paper and with an accompanying note, to which he’d given careful thought.

  Dear Mr Mariner

  Thank you for lending me this book. I greatly enjoyed

  reading your poems, some of which reminded me of Ovid,

  who I read during the war.

  I hope the new collection does well, and look forward to reading it.

  Yours ever

  John Ashe

  There had been no answer as yet.

  This evening he was engaged in removing the old, rotten outside sill from one of the vicarage’s downstairs windows. His workbench and tools were at his side, as he worked.

  The window, at the side of the house, nearest the back, belonged to the room used by Mrs Mariner for various purposes: storage, doing her correspondence, practising dance steps to the gramophone (yes, he’d seen her), or simply listening to music or reading, generally with a cigarette in her hand. Ashe had never seen Mariner in there—it was her domain, just as the study at the front was his. The puppy’s cardboard box had been in her room to begin with, but now it had a proper dog basket down in the kitchen, near the stove.