‘Are you alright, Ma?’ Fraser asked, appearing behind her and placing his hand between her shoulder blades.
‘Yes, yes,’ she insisted, giving him a half-baked smile.
‘So…’ Joe said. ‘Malcolm would have arrived here in an ambulance very similar to the old Sunbeam out there,’ he said, gesturing back to the vehicle in which they had just travelled.
Harriet nodded, abhorring the very clear imagery forming in her mind, linking together what Timothy Mogridge, the Duchess of Westminster, Arthur whatever-his-name-was and Joe had told her about Malcolm’s final hours. They were painful and real in her mind now, as though she had witnessed them for herself. But, in some dreadfully primordial, almost sadistic way she needed that pain and first-hand knowledge. She paused, then turned to Joe with a brighter transformed look, and asked, ‘And what were the rest of the rooms used for?’
‘The next was the latrines. Even one year on after the war ended, I still wouldn’t suggest going in there,’ he relayed with a chuckle, to which Harriet agreed. Then he continued, pointing to the next door. ‘That one was the dressing room, then the kitchen, then the evacuation room, where soldiers waited, before either going back to their regiment, or being sent back to England for recuperation or further treatment and operations.’
‘A room which Malcolm never got to see,’ Harriet observed, unable to disguise the bitterness in her voice.
‘No,’ Joe mumbled.
Harriet’s breathing had at last normalised. She took a step back and looked at the awful structure where her son had succumbed to the effects of the very thing, which he had meticulously studied and trained to understand. It was just like Arthur had told her in his unfiltered way: that P Company was known as The Suicide Company.
‘D’you still wanna see the trenches?’ Joe asked.
‘If it’s not too much bother,’ Harriet replied. ‘Fraser—will you be alright with that?’
‘Provided there are no armed Bosche in them, then fine.’
‘Definitely no live ones,’ Joe answered with a snigger. ‘This way.’
They walked at a thankfully leisurely pace around the Dressing Station and along behind the back of the cemetery. They continued a short distance and then crossed over a bridge to the other side of the canal.
They wandered in silence, the sounds made by their feet meeting the gravel the only noise to be heard. Harriet found the peacefulness to be contradictory in the way in which it managed to be both calming and unsettling at the same time. She somehow couldn’t conceive of there having ever existed there the mania, terror and utter frenzy of war just eleven months ago.
Her eyes lazily rolled over the still water, catching the fleeting movement of some bird in the fledgling trees opposite, or a moorhen swimming hastily past them. The tranquillity soaked into her mind, and she listlessly tried to tease apart a knot of feeling inside her. Had she been correct in her assertion to Fraser that she would know when the time were right to stop her investigations? Apart from speaking with Lina Peeters, there was little else to learn; and yet, notwithstanding this, she felt inexplicably dissatisfied. Maybe she wouldn’t know after all, when she should desist. Or was all of this just some enormous self-delusion, a refusal in some way to accept that Malcolm was really gone?
She touched Fraser’s elbow, and he looked at her. ‘Tell me. Am I really going too far with all of this?’
He thought for a moment and looked out over the canal. ‘No, Ma. I don’t think so. Not anymore.’
She nodded, still not convinced either way.
A few feet farther along, they followed Joe off the path through a gap in the hedgerow, which opened out onto a vast field of knee-high grassland. But for a small thicket of trees in the distance, the landscape was barren.
‘Most of ’em have been ploughed over and filled in, but for some reason this bit ain’t,’ Joe informed them, continuing through the field. He stopped abruptly and pointed to the ground. ‘Right ’ere.’
‘Good gracious! Oh, my goodness,’ Harriet exclaimed, suddenly finding herself teetering on the edge of a long, narrow trench. Pieces of unidentifiable wooden debris jutted from the water-logged floor and, on the other side of the trench, were half a dozen sandbags in varying stages of ruination. ‘Was this a British trench?’
‘Yep. The German trench was just over there,’ he said, pointing to a not-too-distant cluster of saplings.
‘Where? Just…there?’ Harriet did not believe that she could have understood him correctly, as she confirmed that Joe had indeed been indicating the same spot as she was now looking at, not even a football pitch in length away.
‘That’s right, yeah,’ he confirmed, then pointed down at the trench in front of them and added, ‘It’s very likely your Malcolm would have been right ’ere…’
The words, the notion, the confirmation, all cut into Harriet’s heart, as she pictured him down there, preparing to release some noxious, illusorily titled substance across No-Man’s-Land in the hope of killing other young men just like him but dressed in a different uniform. Of all of the complex threads unspooling in her mind at that moment, it was once again the futility of it all that most ravaged her. It must have hit Fraser, too, for he sharply turned and hurried back towards the gap in the hedgerow.
‘Right,’ Harriet said quietly. ‘I think it’s time that we moved on, don’t you? Thank you ever so much, Joe…for everything.’
‘You’re welcome, Mrs McDougall.’
Back on the canal path, Harriet spotted Fraser on the bridge, elbows resting on the rail with his chin propped in his splayed palms.
‘So, you’re off to Wipers, then?’ Joe asked, as they walked.
‘That’s right,’ Harriet confirmed. ‘I’m looking for a young lady, Lina Peeters who was friendly with Malcolm. I’m not overly confident of finding her, though, in such a large city. Eighteen thousand pre-war residents, apparently.’
Joe glanced sideways at her, his expression ambiguous. ‘The opposite might be true, actually. The place is a wreck and there ain’t much left of it, to be honest.’
‘Right…’
‘I don’t know any official numbers, but pretty sure there ain’t eighteen thousand living there.’
‘Oh,’ Harriet responded, unsure of the implications of what he had told her.
They had reached Fraser on the bridge, but it appeared to startle him, when Harriet touched his arm and said, ‘Ready?’
‘Yes,’ he said, with a hint of shortness at having been drawn back to reality.
The three of them walked the short distance back to the cemetery entrance, where Joe shook Fraser’s hand. ‘Good luck in Wipers,’ he said, turning to Harriet, taking her hand in his and giving it a rigorous jiggle.
‘I cannot express enough my deep gratitude to you, Joe,’ she said, pressing a small cigar-shaped bundle of two-Franc notes into his hand. ‘It really is much appreciated.’
‘You don’t need to do that: it’s my pleasure,’ Joe countered, trying to pass the money back.
Harriet shook her head and said, ‘I insist, absolutely.’ As she did so, she noticed over Joe’s shoulder that a small flower stall had appeared at the entrance to the cemetery.
With a show of reluctance, Joe pocketed the money and thanked her: ‘Goodbye.’
‘Fraser,’ Harriet began, ‘go with Joe and fetch the cases, would you? I’ll be back with you in just a tick.’
She headed with a purposeful gait to the flower stall, a simple wooden table with a small selection of flowers protruding from half-a-dozen metal buckets. Working behind the stall was a girl, who could not have been more than fifteen years old, with unkempt brown hair and ill-fitting clothes, which had clearly seen much better days.
‘Hallo,’ Harriet greeted.
‘Goeiemorgen,’ the girl replied in Flemish with a wide smile. ‘Kan ik je helpen?’
Harriet scoured the bunches of flowers, quickly selecting some white roses. ‘These are very beautiful, er, dank uwel,’ she said, pass
ing over a one-franc note.
The girl nodded: ‘Dank uwel.’
‘Two minutes,’ Harriet called over to Fraser, who was standing beside the Sunbeam, waiting with their suitcases. She strode decisively back into the cemetery, heading directly for Malcolm’s grave.
She bent down, propping the flowers against the cross, and stared at the grave, taking long breaths. Finally, she was able to speak to him: ‘This might be the last time that I can come here and see you, my dear Malcolm… But you know, though, don’t you, that you will always be alive inside of me, in my heart. I’ll remember the short time that you were with me, my beautiful son, for ever more, and I’ll cherish every sweet moment of it until I breathe my last. Dearest, darling Malcolm, I do love you so...’
Harriet sobbed into her handkerchief. She cried for all of the wonderful things that Malcolm had ever been. And she cried, more so, for all of the wonderful things that he could now never become.
Through the haze of her tears, something moved. She dabbed her eyes and, when she saw what had landed on the top of Malcolm’s cross, snorted in a strange half-laugh-half-cry.
A male Ghost Swift moth was gently flexing open his silvery wings.
Harriet laughed a strong cavernous laugh, but which, when she felt her acceptance of his absence returning, morphed into weeping once again.
‘Goodbye,’ she breathed.
Chapter Eleven
12th September 1919, Ypres, Belgium
Harriet’s mouth was agape. ‘Good grief,’ she muttered, drawing out the words. ‘Have you ever… Did you ever…’
‘Oh…my God…’ Fraser said, stepping from the taxi-cab.
Before she could link its departure to the inevitable ramifications of what she was seeing around her, the taxi-cab had pulled away, leaving them standing in a cloud of fumy, hot dust.
‘Wait!’ Fraser called after the car, realising at the same time as she that, even though the driver had followed their instruction to drop them in the centre of Ypres city, he had ostensibly abandoned them in some accursed biblical abyss, certainly not the quaint, gentile place depicted on the postcards that Malcolm had sent home.
Harriet turned around slowly, unable to comprehend the scene surrounding her. The devastation was unimaginable, like nothing, which she had ever seen before. In every direction, for as far as the eye could see, were ruins—not a single complete building anywhere in sight—just the odd wall here and there, rising soberly from among great piles of wreckage.
Harriet raised her hands to her cheeks, disbelieving her sight. And the silence of the place! It was dead, devoid of any kind of life. Where were the city’s people gone? Surely her mind was playing a trick on her? This could not possibly be Ypres. Had they mispronounced Ypres…or Ieper? She stared at Fraser, wanting some reassurance, but she knew from his face that he was seeing the same underworld as was she.
It was all a dream, she told herself, gazing dumbfounded at the four- or five-storey tower, smashed and barely standing, which was in front of them. Beside the tower was a single wall of gothic arches, once presumably windows, but now with nothing at all behind or around it.
Slightly panicked by her inability to grasp what was happening, she opened her raffia bag and withdrew the collection of Malcolm’s postcards, quickly thumbing through them until she reached the one of the magnificent Cloth Hall, photographed in 1914. Holding the card up at arm’s length, she made minor adjustments to the height and distance until she could see with her own eyes that the carcass of the building in front of her had indeed once been the Cloth Hall, built in the eleventh century: they were standing in the centre of the city of Ypres and she was not—as really she had feared that she knew all along—dreaming.
Harriet sighed, her resolve weakened by the shock of such unexpected desolation and destruction. Joe had been right; how much harder it would be to find one person among none, than one among a city of eighteen thousand.
‘At least there’s a nice selection of hotels,’ Fraser quipped.
‘Thank you—very helpful,’ she scorned, her determination waning further still with the acquiescence to the loss of a decent meal and a hot bath, something for which they were both now desperate.
Fraser shrugged. ‘Now what?’
She would not be beaten. ‘Now, Fraser… We think,’ she said, taking Fraser’s two hands in hers and looking him in the eyes. ‘You’ve lived in England for four or so years. The British government wants you out; so, you go home. But you find fire and brimstone have rained down and completely destroyed it. What do you do?’
‘Go back to England?’ Fraser suggested.
‘A possibility, yes,’ Harriet agreed. ‘But not likely if you’re not wanted and you have no money for the fare. Besides which, wouldn’t you go back to somewhere you were familiar with? Back to Miss Yavuz in Woolwich?’
‘Are you asking me, or telling me?’
‘Thinking out loud,’ Harriet answered. ‘Where else might you go?’
‘Family…or friends?’
‘Right, yes,’ she said, nodding. ‘And if their houses were destroyed, too?’
‘Go further afield?’ he offered.
‘Yes!’
‘But that could mean anywhere in any part of Belgium. Or the world, for that matter,’ he replied.
The enormity of the task loomed large once again, a shapeless, nebulous undertaking that bordered on sheer lunacy. What would they do: check every village, town and city in the country until they found Lina Peeters? Harriet couldn’t think like this, or else she would be on the first train back to Calais. ‘First things first,’ she said. ‘A hotel that serves hot meals and hot baths. There must be one.’ She looked around her again and randomly pointed down a road: ‘This way.’
The strange other-worldliness of the place continued unabated, as they walked. But for the odd crater here and there, the cobbled streets remained bizarrely intact, running alongside great open spaces, where buildings had been razed to the ground and subsequently cleared.
After several minutes of walking, Fraser asked, ‘Are you sure about this, Ma? There’s not one building or one person to be seen in any direction.’
Of course she wasn’t sure; she hadn’t a clue, but at some point they simply had to encounter someone. ‘Yes, just keep walking,’ she encouraged.
‘If you say so,’ he mumbled.
‘What’s that?’ Harriet asked, whirling around to locate the cause of a low, distant murmuring.
Fraser had braced himself for a telling off but realised that she was referring to another sound. They both stopped and looked back towards the ruins of the Cloth Hall.
‘A motor car!’ Harriet shrieked, sounding very much as though it were the first time that she had ever clapped eyes on one. ‘A motor car!’ She manoeuvred herself into the centre of the road and stood star-like with her legs apart and arms stretched wide.
‘What are you doing, Ma?’ Fraser asked incredulously.
‘What I’m not doing is letting this jolly fellow pass without helping us.’
The small black car drove steadily towards them. When it drew to within thirty feet, the driver began to beep his horn and wave his hands for her to get out of the road.
Harriet stood smiling but unwavering, not moving a fraction of an inch.
The car drew to a complete stop and a little man with a thin black moustache poked his head out from the car. ‘Mais, qu’est-ce que vous faites? Vous êtes folle!’ he yapped.
Harriet smiled. ‘Bonjour. Do excuse me, I’m English. I’m looking for accommodation.’ She enunciated the words slowly and with an odd widening of her mouth around the vowels, as though they were a burden to articulate.
‘Un…hôtel,’ Fraser added, with an attempt at a French accent.
The man sniffed and held up his index finger: ‘One. One hotel seulement.’
‘Marvellous!’ Harriet exclaimed. ‘Et, c’est où, exactement, Monsieur?’
The little man pointed in the direction in which they
had already been walking, and Harriet nodded smugly to Fraser.
‘Can you give us a lift there?’ she asked, pointing to the car and mimicking holding a steering wheel. ‘Drive—conduire us…nous?’
He nodded resentfully, made a vague gesture to the car and leant over to push open the passenger door.
‘Oh, thank the good Lord,’ Harriet said, flopping down noisily in the back seat. She felt as though she had been on her feet for months on end.
Fraser muttered his thanks in French, as he closed the passenger door.
The man pushed the car into gear and it lurched forwards.
‘What is your name? Er… Comment vous-appelez tu…vous?’ Harriet called from the back.
‘Monsieur Chaput,’ he replied, briefly turning around to answer.
‘I’m Mrs McDougall,’ she said. ‘And this is my son, Fraser.’
Monsieur Chaput either didn’t understand or didn’t care, driving impassively onwards.
‘Buildings!’ Harriet gasped, poking Fraser in the arm. ‘Look!’ The buildings, which they were passing, had all suffered some kind of damage—some were missing their roof, others were missing windows and doors—but remarkably they were still standing. The knowledge that they were leaving the obliterated city gave rise to a new buoyancy inside Harriet, and she began to look hungrily through the windscreen at what they were approaching.
In the distance she saw people, cars, and new wooden buildings: whole rows of complete houses, shops and businesses! She couldn’t help but sigh with relief at the wonderous sight just yards ahead of them: a two-storey wooden structure with SPLENDID HOTEL painted in large black letters on the roof.
Monsieur Chaput stopped the car directly outside the hotel and jerked his thumb sideways at the building. ‘Adieu.’
‘Au revoir,’ Harriet replied, cheerfully. She paused, one leg out of the car. ‘Oh, before we go, you don’t know a lady called Lina, do you? Lina Peeters?’
‘Non,’ he answered, not giving the matter much, if any consideration.
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