by Henry Green
‘Then I saw a great car coming down that road we’d evacuated the Dock by. It was obviously one of the Chiefs. It drew up in front of us. As two or three minor officers got out a man said in a frantic voice inside, ‘What are all these men doing here?’ When he got out and came towards us, I saw it must be one of the Chiefs. I think it was the one who is rather a friend of Hilly’s.
‘Well, you know, I made up my mind at once the only thing I could do was to beard him before he could tackle me. So I went up, saluted, and told him I’d been ordered out, which was more or less true, and been told to stand by a hydrant outside with my pump, which was untrue but an example, darling, of what they call the Fire Brigade mind, and finally I told him I had come back for orders. That was true. He asked me where my pump was. I told him three hundred yards up the street. “Right,” he said. “You see that ship over there?” “Yessir,” I said, noticing for the first time a great ocean-going merchantman ablaze, writhing with flames from end to end. “Well then take your pump,” and he waved his hand, “and put it out,” he shouted. Three men with one pump.
‘Shiner walked alongside me on the way back.
‘“What did he say, cock?” he asked.
‘“He said to put that bloody liner out,” I told him.
‘“Suffering Jesus,” was all Shiner said.
‘But luckily it did not come to that. For just after we’d driven through the Gates a sub appeared who took us off to the left, towards the old gasometer. We had to stop the fire getting round the end of a wall into another, untouched, timber yard. We stayed there, oh, until far into the morning. There was nothing else. Only the pigeons flying about burning. Some were on the ground, walking in circles into the flames, fascinated. And of course Shiner was killed later on.’
‘Darling, you mustn’t let it get you down.’
‘It doesn’t worry me,’ Richard answered stoutly.
He did not think it did.
She then said a very foolish thing, because it was true.
‘I wonder what’s the meaning of it all?’ she asked.
He felt a flash of anger. It spread.
‘I know this,’ he announced in what, to him, was direct answer, ‘you’ve always been most unfair to Pye.’
She was astounded.
‘Pye?’ she asked.
‘Yes, to Pye,’ he said. He stopped, turned away from her. ‘That’s the tragedy.’
‘Tell me, my darling.’
He could not look at her. He knew, if he did, that it would break down, that he would not be able to go on, that Pye would be nothing; because the love he held her in, which was the last tie that bound him to life, would blow all thought of Pye to the winds like a cobweb off a tree; yet he could not help himself.
‘Well,’ he began, whipping himself up, speaking in a new high, cracked voice, ‘a man can be responsible, somehow, for his wife, can’t he, but never for his sister, never. He’d lived alone with her for years. She was obviously half crazy. Then she took Christopher away. That was hard luck on everyone, but when I was posted to his station it was much worse for him than it was for me. Then what finally ruined him was the authority he got. He didn’t do anything to get it. It came with the war, because he was an experienced fireman. He wasn’t in the least ready to have men under him. Hardly any of them were. The wonder is that he was as good as he turned out to be. But it was sex finished him off, and sex arising out of his authority. You see there were a couple of enthusiastic amateurs he got in with through being in charge. He just couldn’t take it. Well, he used to invite this Prudence woman out, and it’s the old story, what she liked was more than he could afford. That is to say a gin and lime in the local wasn’t enough. She had to have it in a night club, which came twice or three times as expensive.
‘One thing led to another. In the end he got too confident. He was caught out once or twice, absent without leave you know. I’m not sure what he thought about his sister. He told me once he would rather she stayed in the asylum. But what he could not forgive was that she had been put inside.’
Roe was shaking.
Dy stamped. ‘Richard, darling, you surely wouldn’t have her running around?’ Her voice was shrill. She chanced a look at him, but all she could see was the back of his head.
She was beginning to lose her temper, as he could tell. When he spoke again it was more in his usual tone of voice.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but why should he pay for her? The asylum people were threatening a writ at the end. Oh, I know he was earning bigger money than he had ever got, but even then it wasn’t up to his new standards. And he went and brought back a boy late, and kept him the night in his room.’
‘Him, too?’
‘I don’t say it was sexual. I’m sure it wasn’t. I don’t think it had anything to do with what his sister did. Old Piper made out he’d got to know the parents afterwards, that they’d told him the boy was so mad to see a raid he often stayed out all night in case there was one at last. Piper said, too, that he informed Trant, the District Officer, whose bathroom he was doing, what the parents had told him. I expect this was the first they heard up at Number Fifteen about the boy. He was a snake that man. So Pye was doubly on the mat. And that was the end.
‘But I’m sure it was unpremeditated, just like this,’ and he leant his full weight on the stick he carried. It went six inches into the ground. Resting both hands on the handle he stood, halted, ridiculous.
‘Don’t,’ she cried out, with a break in her voice, ‘you look as if you were digging.’
He was silent for once. He felt his rage rise.
‘So Pye committed suicide?’ she asked, although Richard had written to tell her weeks before.
‘In the gas oven,’ he said. ‘But he had the sense to turn off the automatic burners in the boiler first. Or we should all have been blown up.’
He waited, watching his anger. Then he heard the verdict.
‘I can’t help it,’ she said, ‘I shall always hate him, and his beastly sister.’ He turned towards her. She had a high colour, was looking at him with a smile. He saw she was radiant.
This was too much for the state he was in. He let go. ‘God damn you,’ he shouted, releasing everything, ‘you get on my bloody nerves, all you bloody women with all your talk.’
It was as though he had gone for her with a hatchet. She went off without a word, rigid.
He felt a fool at once and, in spite of it, that he had got away at last. Then his son came up, gravely looked at him.
He said to Christopher, for the first time:
‘Get out,’ and he added,
‘Well, anyway, leave me alone till after tea, can’t you?’
London, June 1940–Christmas 1942
BACK
A country bus drew up below the church and a young man got out. This he had to do carefully because he had a peg leg.
The roadway was asphalted blue.
It was a summer day in England. Rain clouds were amassed back of a church tower which stood on rising ground. As he looked up he noted well those slits, built for defence, in the blood coloured brick. Then he ran his eye with caution over cypresses and between gravestones. He might have been watching for a trap, who had lost his leg in France for not noticing the gun beneath a rose.
For, climbing around and up these trees of mourning, was rose after rose after rose, while, here and there, the spray overburdened by the mass of flower, a live wreath lay fallen on a wreath of stone, or on a box in marble colder than this day, or onto frosted paper blooms which, under glass, marked each bed of earth wherein the dear departed encouraged life above in the green grass, the cypresses and in those roses gay and bright which, as still as this dark afternoon, stared at whosoever looked, or hung their heads to droop, to grow stained, to die when their turn came.
It was a time of war. The young man in pink tweeds had been repatriated from a prisoners’ camp on the other side. Now, at the first opportunity, he was back.
He had known the village this church st
ood over, but not well. He had learned the walks before he turned soldier, though he had met few of those who lived by. The graveyard he had never entered. But he came now to visit because someone he loved, a woman, who, above all at night, had been in his feelings when he was behind barbed wire, had been put here while he was away, and her name, of all names, was Rose.
The bus, with its watching passengers, departed. In the silence which followed he began to climb the path leading to those graves, when came a sudden upthrusting cackle of geese in panic, the sound of which brought home to him a stack of faggots he had seen blown high by a grenade, each stick separately stabbing the air in a frieze, and which he had watched fall back, as an opened fan closes. So, while the geese quietened, he felt what he had seen until the silence which followed, when he at once forgot.
But there was left him an idea that he had been warned.
Propping himself on his stick, he moved slowly up that path to the wicket gate between two larger cypresses. He felt more than ever that he did not wish to be observed. So he no longer watched the roses. As if to do his best to become unseen, he kept his eyes on the gravel over which he was dragging the peg leg.
For there was a bicycle bell, ringing closer and closer by the church, clustering spray upon spray of sound which wreathed the air much as those roses grew around the headstones, whence, so he felt, they narrowly regarded him.
Which caused him to stop dead when a boy of about six came, over the hill on a tricycle, past the porch; then, as the machine got up speed, he stood to one side, in spite of the gate still closed between the two of them. He sharply stared but, as he took in the child’s fair head, he saw nothing, nothing was brought back. He did not even feel a pang, as well he might if only he had known.
Charley was irritated when the boy, after getting off to open the gate and climbing onto his machine again, shrilly rang the bell as he dashed past. Then the young man started slow on his way once more. And he forgot the boy who was gone, who spelled nothing to him.
For Rose had died while he was in France, he said over and over under his breath. She was dead, and he did not hear until he was a prisoner. She had died, and this sort of sad garden was where they had put her without him, and, as he looked about while he leaned on the gate, he felt she must surely have come as a stranger when her time came, that if a person’s nature is at all alive after he or she has gone, then she could never have imagined herself here nailed into a box, in total darkness, briar roots pushing down to the red hair of which she had been so proud and fond. He could not even remember her ever saying that she had been in this churchyard, which was now the one place one could pay a call on Rose, whom he could call to mind, though never all over at one time, or at all clearly, crying, dear Rose, laughing, mad Rose, holding her baby, or, oh Rose, best of all in bed, her glorious locks abounding.
Oh well this would never do, he thought, and asked himself where she could be. For there was a large choice. While the church was small, this graveyard gaped deep and wide, densely stacked throughout its rising ground with mounds of turf and mottled, moss grown headstones. And, as he was forever asking himself things he could seldom answer, and which, amassing in his mind, left a great weight of detail undecided, the next question he put was, what he could say if a woman came while he searched, if she were to observe that he was lame who was of an age to have lost a leg, in fact what he should do if seen by a village gossip, who might even recognize him, but who, in any case, would have her sense of scandal whetted, so he felt, by a young man with a wooden leg that did not fit, searching for a tomb.
He thought how Rose would have laughed to see him in his usual state of not knowing, lost as he always was, and had been when the sniper got him in the sights.
Indeed, if he had not come such a distance, from one country at war to another, then home again, he might well at this minute have turned back. But as it was he went in the gate, had his cheek brushed by a rose, and began awkwardly to search for Rose, through roses, in what seemed to him should be the sunniest places on a fine day, the warmest when the sun came out at twelve o’clock for she had been so warm, and amongst the newer memorials in local stone because she had died in time of war, when, or so he imagined, James could never have found marble for her, of whom, at no time before this moment, had he ever thought as cold beneath a slab, food for worms, her great red hair, still growing, a sort of moist bower for worms.
Well the old days were gone for good, he supposed while standing by a cypress, holding a briar off his face. The rose, rocking from it, sprinkled held raindrops on his eyes as, with the other hand, he poked his stick at two dwarf box trees which had obscured what he now saw to be a marble pillow. He had time to read the one word, ‘Sophie,’ cut with no name or date, when his glance was held by a nest the walking stick uncovered, and which had been hidden by thick enamelled leaves that were as dark as the cypress, as his brown eyes under that great ivory pink rose. Changing hands with the stick so the rose softly thumped his forehead, he pushed past to lean, to feel with a hand. But the eggs were addled, blue cold as moonlight.
He wiped his fingers. Paper crackled in a pocket, to remind him of the wire, ‘Report to Officers Rehabilitation Centre Gateacres Ammanford by 20 hours June 12th.’ It was now the thirteenth. He supposed they would not shoot a chap because he had not gone, nor, out of spite, make him pay for the new limb waiting there numb and numbered in a box. ‘E.N.Y.S.’ it was signed. More letters standing he did not know what for.
The prisoners’ camp had flowered with initials, each inmate decorated his bunk with them out there, to let it be known what he taught. Such as ‘I.T.’ which stood for Inner Temple, at which Marples, this very afternoon perhaps, was still teaching Roman Law. The idea had been to make the clock’s hands go round. And now that he’d come, he told himself, all he was after was to turn them back, the fool, only to find roses grown between the minutes and the hours, and so entwined that the hands were stuck.
His felt thoughts began to wander. Of course he was lucky to have a job, his seat kept warm. There were plenty still over on the other side would give the cool moon to stand in his shoes. And they would get on with it if they were here, not spend as he was doing a deal of money on travelling to old places. Then there was the coupon question. What should he do? All he had was this suit he stood up in, which he had bought, and which the tailor had not delivered, but had kept safe till he got back. The rest was looted. Oh, he was lost in this bloody graveyard. Where could she be? Rose that he’d loved, that he’d come so far for? Why did she die? Could anyone understand anything? Perhaps it would have been best if they had killed him, he felt, if instead of a sniper’s rifle in that rosebush they had pooped off something heavier at him. Rose would never have known, because she had died some time about that identical week. God bless her, he thought, his brown eyes dimmed suddenly with tears, and I hope she’s having a jolly good rest.
Then he found it was raining. He must have stood there so lost he had never taken in the first few drops. He started to drag as quick as he could for the path, to shelter in the church porch. But he had to go sideways, brushing against cypresses, getting his neck scratched once or twice, having roses spatter in his ears because he could not lift his leg properly, and did not wish to pull it over the green, turfed graves, to scar them with the long souvenir he had brought back from France.
Misery kept his mind blank until he turned the porch. Then he had a bad shock when he found who was sheltering before him. For of all people, of all imaginable men, and fat as those geese, was James. They stared at each other.
‘Why good Lord,’ James was saying, ‘why, Charley, my good lad,’ he said. Speechless, Charley looked over a shoulder to find whether this widower had been in a position to see where he had been searching for the grave below. ‘Why, Charley, then they’ve sent you back. Good Lord, am I glad to see you, man.’
‘Where’ve you been all this time?’ James began once more, as Charley still found nothing. ‘In Germany?’
he went on, not waiting for answers. ‘Why it must be all of five years. Now how are you?’ and he pump-handled Charley who had said not a word. ‘They often tell us, “Wait till the boys come back.” Well this is it, isn’t it?’ James asked. ‘I mean you’re really home for keeps, for better or worse, richer or poorer, aren’t you? And what’s it like with the enemy? I suppose they put you in hospital, what? How’d they treat the boys, Charley? Pretty rotten I shouldn’t wonder, when all’s said and done. Well you haven’t come back to much I can tell you. My, but I’m glad to see you, man.’
‘It’s my leg,’ Charley explained. He drawled rather when he spoke.
‘Yes, well there you are,’ James said.
‘There it is,’ Charley agreed. One of those pauses followed in which the fat man’s upper lip trembled.
‘Well I’d never have guessed if you hadn’t mentioned it, bless my soul I shouldn’t. Never in the world. But they do marvellous things in that line of country now, or so they tell me. Medical science comes on a lot in a war, you know. I often say it’s the one use there is in such things. Terrible price to pay, of course. But there you are.’
‘You’re right there,’ Charley said.
‘But look, how on earth were you going to have a bite to eat? Bit difficult these days, you know, what with the B.R.N.Q., the V.B.S. and the P.M.V.O. Since the war started, no, I’m wrong, it was after the invasion of Holland and all that. Well now we haven’t even got a village bus. They still send the children in to school, of course the C.E.C. see to that, though the whole job is run very inefficiently in my opinion. But you’ll come down now and take pot luck with me, won’t you? As a matter of fact we’ve begun a pig club in the village. P.B.H.R. it’s known by, everything’s initials these days. Only time the people in these parts have got together within living memory. So there’s a piece of ham left over. Tell you the truth I haven’t started the ham, not yet. Oh and I expect we’ll find a little bit of something to go on with.’
