by Robert Edric
Watching him, Reid saw again how perfectly suited Benoît had grown to the world he inhabited; how that world and all its inter-connected and tightly fitting parts had become an integral part of the man himself; and how, in turn, Benoît had shaped the world around him by the varying measures and degrees of influence and authority he exercised over it.
‘So, you see,’ the old station master said eventually, breaking the silence between them.
‘I do,’ Reid said.
Benoît rose and opened his door and walked outside.
Reid waited where he sat for a moment, listening to the gentle rattling of the coffee pot where it sat on the iron stove. Powdery ash fell from the stove to the worn floorboards, adding its own sudden smell of scorching to the room’s other odours.
29
LATER THAT DAY, as Reid arrived back in Morlancourt from his work, he saw Alexander Lucas and Caroline Mortimer sitting together beside the trough at the entrance to the churchyard. As he came closer he saw that Caroline was holding Lucas by his shoulders, and that Lucas was hunched forward, his head down, his hands clasped to his chest. Closer still, and Reid heard that Lucas was crying, the noise muffled by his posture and by Caroline’s embrace.
Reid went to them and sat beside Lucas, putting his own arm across the man’s back and trying with his other hand to raise Lucas’s head from his chest. Lucas tensed at the gesture, and for a moment he remained as he was. But then he relaxed and slowly raised his head, lowering his hands from his chest to his knees. He wiped his face with his sleeve.
Caroline gave him her handkerchief, and when he refused to take it, she wiped his face herself.
‘Elizabeth died,’ Lucas said eventually, telling Reid what he had already guessed. Either that, or his daughter.
Lucas dropped the ball of paper he held into Reid’s lap. It was a telegram, and Reid flattened it and read it.
Lucas’s wife had died two days previously. His daughter, though still suffering, was no worse and was now expected to recover. The message was from Lucas’s mother-in-law and said nothing else. No cause of death was mentioned, and no definite diagnosis of what she’d been suffering from. The few stark details seemed devoid of all compassion and understanding, a final cruelty almost. Reading the telegram, Reid was reminded of those he himself had sent during the previous years, all of them containing at least some measure of vague or distant consolation. He folded the paper and put it back into Lucas’s waiting hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Lucas turned to face him, but said nothing. Then he turned to Caroline and thanked her for having sat with him.
‘Telephone someone,’ she said. ‘Find out more. Find out about your daughter. Talk to her doctor.’
‘I don’t even know where she is,’ Lucas said absently.
‘Then let me do it for you. It surely can’t be—’
Lucas rose abruptly at the suggestion. ‘No. I mean …’ He looked around them, at the churchyard and the empty lane.
‘At least telephone either Wheeler or Muir,’ Reid said. ‘Let someone know what’s happened.’
‘Them?’ Lucas said. He took several paces away from the bench, stopped and turned. He seemed about to say something more, but then he turned again and walked quickly away from them.
‘I’ll find you later,’ Reid called after him, feeling Caroline’s hand tighten on his arm to stop him from going after the man.
Lucas raised his hand in reply.
Reid and Caroline then sat without speaking until Lucas was lost to sight.
‘I found him here,’ Caroline said eventually. ‘Almost an hour ago.’
‘He applied to Muir for compassionate leave,’ Reid said.
‘And was refused?’
Reid looked away from her. ‘They behave as though the whole thing were still happening,’ he said. ‘This regulation, that regulation.’ He told her what Lucas had told him following his unsuccessful visit to Muir.
‘His wife might already have been dead by then,’ she said.
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’m sure everything possible is being done for his daughter,’ she said.
‘She’s five,’ Reid said. He lit a cigarette and leaned back on the bench, closing his eyes and feeling suddenly exhausted after his day’s work.
‘Are you preparing for Monday?’ Caroline asked him. She leaned back on the seat and sat close beside him.
He told her what had been delivered earlier.
‘A marquee?’ she said.
‘Just like a garden party. Sorry – I didn’t mean …’
‘I appreciate all you’re being asked to do on my behalf … theirs. I’ve had a succession of messages from Colonel Wheeler and Captain Jessop informing me of some new detail or other. I think I’m supposed to be even more grateful for everything that’s now happening.’
‘It wasn’t what you expected,’ Reid said simply. She too, he guessed, was hiding the disappointment she felt now that her own involvement with the dead women was being turned into such a public spectacle, and now that all these others – all these men who had never known the nurses, who had never known what they had been there to do and what they had endured and then suffered in doing it – now that all these others were being invited – encouraged, even – to share in and comment on that grief and loss and sacrifice, far in advance of the women’s families and fellow nurses being afforded that same opportunity.
‘I’m sure the whole thing will proceed according to plan,’ Caroline said, confirming his guess.
Reid resisted laughing at the phrase. ‘I’m sure it will,’ he said.
‘After all,’ she went on, ‘what are plans and preparations for, if not to ensure success?’
‘Exactly,’ Reid said.
‘Jonathan Guthrie has sent me his order of service,’ she said.
‘Of course he has.’
‘He said he’d be only too happy for me to say something on the nurses’ behalf.’
‘That’s generous of him. And will you?’ Reid opened his eyes.
‘Of course I will. I heard from Mary Ellsworth yesterday. She’s gone to stay at a rest home in the Cotswolds.’
‘A rest home?’
‘That’s what she said.’
‘Do you think she’ll come back here when she finally feels up to it?’
‘I daresay the passing of time might help matters,’ she said.
‘Time being the great healer, and all that?’
‘I meant she might finally be able to better understand her own reasons for wanting somewhere to mourn and to remember.’
Reid had supervised the burial of Mary Ellsworth’s fiancé less than an hour after his body had arrived in Morlancourt. At the time, he had been relieved that the woman had not insisted on leaving the station and accompanying the coffin to its final resting place. The dignity of the small ceremony arranged by Drake in the goods depot had far outweighed the perfunctory burial at the cemetery itself.
‘I can let you have the details of his grave,’ he said. ‘If you intend writing back to her.’
‘I’m not sure,’ she said, surprising him.
‘It’s all talk of memorials and monuments at the Commission these days,’ he said. ‘The popular politicians are promising the families back at home that no one will go unremembered.’
‘Even if they remain unfound and unburied?’
‘Half of all the actual burials consist of unidentified men. It’s still more common than people think.’
‘Or than the Commission lets on?’ She took the cigarette from Reid’s mouth to light one of her own, blowing on its glowing tip and scattering sparks into the air around them.
Behind them, the church bell pealed its cracked note for a minute and then stopped.
‘The end of the day,’ Caroline said.
A man came out of the church and walked past the gravestones to the far wall, climbing over it and dropping into the field beyond.
‘I see they’ve decided
on a name at last,’ Caroline said. The dying note of the bell sounded for almost as long as its ringing.
‘A name? For what?’ He thought at first that she was talking about the cemetery.
‘For the war. The Naming Committee. The No-men-clature Committee.’
‘And?’
‘“The Great War”.’
‘More window dressing,’ Reid said. ‘They do like everything to be neat and tidy and festooned with flags and bunting, these people. Festooned with flags and then with a gilding of grandiosity – something noble and fitting – thrown in for good measure.’
‘I daresay most people will think it a good thing,’ Caroline said.
‘I daresay they will.’
‘And would you honestly deny them that small consolation?’ she said.
Reid considered his answer. ‘No, I suppose not,’ he said.
‘Because, after all—’
‘Because, after all, I’m just as much a part of all that tidying-up, of that gilding, as any of them?’
‘I was going to say it seems to me that what most people want now – the families of the dead, I mean – is simply a way of getting on with their lives, and that all this pomp and ceremony and tidying-up – yes, your tidying-up included – is a means of helping that to happen.’
‘I suppose so,’ Reid said again, not wanting to argue with her.
‘Of bringing – I don’t know – some certainty and purpose to so many unsettled lives. And, yes, you are a part of all that.’
‘Two sides of the same coin,’ he said.
She smiled at him and held his arm again. ‘If you say so.’
‘Wheeler likes to talk of a “common bond”, of the cemeteries and memorials connecting those who were here with those who stayed at home and did their bit there.’
‘It’s what all the newspapers are saying – it’s what people want to hear. Perhaps you should give the man more credit.’
‘Never,’ Reid said, causing them both to laugh.
They were interrupted by the reappearance of the man who had come out of the church and then climbed over the church wall. He came back through the graveyard and stopped in front of them. It was the bell-ringer, who came to the church at least six times every day to carry out his duty there. The man took off his cap and commented on the weather. He told them there was talk of coming rain, of a thunderstorm, even.
‘Tonight?’ Reid asked him, aware of what a change in the weather would mean for the work still to be done at the cemetery.
The bell-ringer shrugged. ‘Sunday,’ he said. Two days away.
It seemed unlikely to Reid that the timing of something so dramatic, of so sudden a break in the prolonged heat, could be predicted with any real certainty.
The man looked up into the pale, clear sky above them.
When he had gone, Caroline asked Reid if the rain would affect his preparations.
‘Unlikely,’ he said. ‘Besides …’
‘It will happen whatever the weather?’ She turned to watch the bell-ringer talking to others further along the village street.
‘Or it will have been and gone by Monday.’
After that, neither of them spoke for several minutes, and then Caroline said, ‘Will you go and find Alexander?’
‘Of course.’
‘What do you think he’ll do?’
Reid shrugged, unwilling to speculate.
‘Surely, Muir can’t refuse him now?’
Still Reid refused to be drawn.
She rose beside him. ‘If there’s anything whatsoever I can do …’
‘Of course.’ He felt suddenly unsure of what else he might say to her.
She walked away from him – not, as Reid had anticipated, towards the few scattered buildings of the place, but away from the village and its church and into the open countryside beyond. He resisted the urge to call after her, or to catch her up and walk beside her, to make it clearer to her, perhaps, that he was as powerless as any of them to alter to even the slightest degree the course of events ahead.
Instead, he watched her closely as she followed the line of a grubbed-out hedge, and then as she turned and was lost to him amid the wild grass and weeds which rose first to her waist and then to her shoulders, then swallowed her up completely, as though she were a swimmer walking into a calm sea, who wanted to be covered by the water before bursting shouting and gasping at its surface and reaching up into the air above.
30
REID FOUND LUCAS later that evening. He’d gone first to Lucas’s room and had found it empty and in disarray. His clothes and equipment lay scattered over the floor and narrow bed, as though everything had been recently and hurriedly unpacked and searched.
Eventually, he found Lucas sitting alone in the open cobbled yard at the rear of one of the bars, overlooking the distant canal.
Only as Reid approached close behind him did Alexander Lucas finally turn and acknowledge him.
‘I can leave you if you’d prefer,’ Reid said.
‘No, please.’ A half-empty bottle stood in the shade of Lucas’s chair.
Reid pulled a chair to the table and took an empty glass from another.
‘It’s not my first bottle,’ Lucas said.
The line of distant water shone in the setting sun, looking like molten metal in its foundry bed.
‘Nine months ago we dug up forty temporary graves at a place called Ayette,’ Lucas said as Reid poured himself a drink. ‘Irish. Connaughts, Munster and Leinster regiments. Every man had a bottle with his name and all his details tucked into his tunic. On the second day, one of my men pulled out the bottle to take down the details and it blew up in his face. Booby-trapped. We used to find it a lot in the early days, mostly in those marked temporary graves. Someone would dig the hole and bury the men and then the Germans would overrun the place and put the grenades in. I used to give a little speech at least once a week about looking out for the things.’ Lucas sat with his eyes closed as he said all this. ‘I used to tell them – the slightest doubt, anything you can’t see, anything out of the ordinary, then leave it alone.’
‘What happened? At Ayette.’
‘The man was killed outright. Two others were badly injured. One of them was blinded and lost his jaw.’ He shook his head at the memory. ‘As replacements, they sent me a full squad of boys from the British Empire Service League. I sent them straight back.’
‘Because they—’
‘Because they were boys. And because they didn’t have the first idea about what they were doing, what they were likely to come across.’ He opened his eyes and smiled. ‘I once retrieved some of the Third Warwickshires for the cemetery at Serre, and they sent me a party of conscientious objectors to do the digging. Two of the men were professors of archaeology from Cambridge. I tried to send them back, too, but that definitely wasn’t on. They were a good crowd. Some of them applied to work with me on a regular basis, but you can imagine how that went down with the powers-that-be.’
Reid nodded. Six months earlier he had worked with a similar group of men in one of the Commission’s nurseries at Arras, propagating and multiplying the plants required for the cemeteries. He told Lucas this, but Lucas remained lost in his own thoughts and said nothing in reply.
A waiter appeared in the open doorway at the rear of the bar and called to them. Without turning, Lucas raised a hand to the boy and a few minutes later another bottle was brought out to them.
‘I’ve no money,’ Lucas said. ‘I told him when I arrived that I was waiting for you.’
Reid paid the boy and waved away his change.
‘I don’t know what I’m expected to do,’ Lucas said when they were alone again. ‘I don’t know what’s expected of me.’
It was impossible for Reid to answer him.
Beyond the canal a line of men walked across a field carrying forks and hoes. They sang and shouted to each other as they walked, lacing the evening air with their distant voices.
‘I once saw some br
igadier or other tell the choir of a Welsh regiment to stop singing, one Sunday morning in the trenches up the road here at Morval,’ Lucas said.
‘Because they were attracting attention to themselves?’
Lucas shook his head. ‘Because he said they sounded too sad, too morose. He said they were having a bad effect on the morale of the others.’
‘And did they? Stop, I mean.’
‘What do you think? The choir master just went on conducting them and they went on singing for the best part of another hour. One of them asked me afterwards what kind of bad effect the brigadier thought the German machine guns, artillery and mines were having on them. They said the same man had told them to lower their parapets by six inches because they were over the regulation height.’
Reid wondered why Lucas was repeating all these small, common tales, and guessed it was to keep himself at a distance from the news he had just received and everything he now had to consider. Keeping himself at that distance and also keeping Reid at that same vital distance from him. Whatever his reasons for this, and for the reminiscing itself, Reid knew it would be unwise to confront him any more directly about what he might do next.
‘The Leinstermen – rifle brigade, I think – had been heavily sprayed with creosote to keep flies off the corpses.’
‘Successfully?’
‘Not really.’ Lucas took something from his pocket and gave it to Reid.
At first Reid thought it was the telegram Lucas had received earlier, but unfolding the piece of paper he saw that it was a map. Looking more closely, he saw that it was a simple map of the French coast and then of England and Wales as far north as the Midlands. He remembered what Lucas had already told him about the maps being used to help reassure new arrivals of their eventual return home.
‘It was on one of the bodies at La Chapelette. There were one or two others. Men on Active Service were eventually ordered not to carry them,’ Lucas said. ‘Ridiculous. Look at it – two inches from Boulogne to Paris, half an inch across the Channel. How much information was that ever going to give away?’
Reid studied the map and held a fingertip over his own home. ‘It doesn’t reach as far as Nottingham,’ he said.
