Finally, the last hymn was sung and people began to file out of the church. Now he would see her, when she got up to go. But instead of leaving she just sat back down. He waited in the hope that this would only be for a short period of time. But the time dragged on and the church emptied. Still she sat there. The vicar returned from having greeted his parishioners outside the front door and disappeared into the back of the church. The place was echoingly empty now except for the pair of them. But still she didn’t move. Finally, tiring of the whole business, Lewis got up and walked out into the sunshine.
He went back to Mrs Middleton’s, changed his clothes and put on boots more suited to walking. He went to a shop and bought some bread, cheese and a bottle of lemonade. Having placed these in his pack, which also contained a large scale map of the area and a compass, he headed off to explore. It would be his first ‘route march’.
By the end of the day, he reckoned that he had covered about ten miles. He hadn’t particularly pushed himself – he would do that on later walks. Rather he had been happy to explore and find out what was where and get a sense of the place. He had stood on three beaches – Readymoney, Pridmouth and Polkerris. Readymoney – the beach Mum had told him about all those years ago. He had climbed to the top of the Gribben Head. A local man he met there told him that the red and white striped marker was nearly a hundred feet high and had been erected in the last century to guide mariners into Fowey. Beside the Gribben, overlooking the sea and bathed in sunshine, Lewis ate his sandwiches and drank his lemonade. Afterwards, he took off his shirt and lay on the grass and dozed and only the build up of heat on his skin woke him. Then, rousing himself, he struck inland and later turned eastwards to arrive back in Fowey around six.
The woman in the church came back into his head over dinner. He wondered where she was tonight. What was her name and what had she been thinking about in the church? Some great happiness? Or sadness? He wondered what was she like and tried to imagine her personality based on what he had seen of her.
She wasn’t shy – that was certain. He could tell from the way she had entered the church that she was confident, her own woman. She dressed how she liked. She dressed so that she looked good – and she knew that people noticed. He wondered about where she lived. Was her house very tidy? He imagined that it was – that she would have been very clean and neat. He thought she was probably very relaxed, happy, easy going. She laughed and smiled a lot and probably had a beautiful smile. She would have had no time for those stupid women in Paddington yesterday. What would she have done if confronted by them? Probably dismissed them with some withering remark.
‘So what did our young soldier do today?’
Lewis suddenly realised that George was speaking to him. Before he could think of anything to say, George answered his own question.
‘Met a young lady, by the look of things.’
Everybody at the table laughed and, to his own surprise, Lewis wasn’t embarrassed or didn’t blush. Instead he smiled and said, ‘Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it?’
‘Oooh,’ exclaimed George’s wife to more laughter.
‘That’s right, lad,’ said George. ‘Don’t you be telling any of these people your business.’
Then he added with a big wink, ‘You can tell me later in the bar.’
As Lewis was going up the stairs later he found the woman in the church coming back into his head yet again. He pictured her in bed now or getting ready for it. What did she wear in bed? Did she wear the same long white nighties that Mum wore when he was a child? Did she brush her hair out as Mum did as she got ready for bed? Did the woman in the church have a job, he wondered. Or was she rich and maybe just came down here for the summer? Maybe they had that in common – just here for the summer. He had decided she probably did live alone. Or maybe it was that he hoped she did. He didn’t want to think of there being a man in her life. Of course, he thought, he would probably never find out the answers to any of these questions. But that didn’t stop him thinking about her right up to the time he fell asleep.
Some time during the night he woke from a dream. He was laughing. Not just laughing silently but laughing out loud – a noise that sounded almost sacrilegious in the silence of the guest house and the dark harbour outside. The women from Paddington were in the dream. They had surrounded him and were trying to give him white feathers. But it wasn’t a nightmare, and he wasn’t frightened or embarrassed. Instead, as several hands were extended, pushing feathers towards him, he said, ‘Ladies, could I suggest you take your white feathers, insert them in your generous bottoms and fly away home.’
After his laughter had died down – and it took a while, because every time he thought about it he laughed again – he lay for a long time looking up at the ceiling. Dreams came from the heart of you, the real part of you, the essence of you. Mum always said that. And this was who he was – this was his essence. He wasn’t shy and blushing all the time. He was funny, confident, not taking life too seriously. ‘Ladies, could I suggest you take the white feathers …’ was what she – the woman in the church – would have said if she had been faced with the same predicament. He needed to remember this. He would remember this. Now if only he could hold onto it.
5
Lewis drew his pistol and looked up at the parapet but all he could see was the low sandbag wall. Above it the mist and oncoming darkness were mixing to form an opaque soup. The tinkling went silent but then it started again. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, not now, please not now. Along the fire bay, a few paces away, a sentry, standing on the fire step with his rifle out through a loophole in the sandbags, tensed. Lewis was sweating now despite the cold. The lice, pleased with the rise in body temperature, began to fan out. He felt them down the arms of his tunic.
‘What can you see, Wilson?’ he asked the sentry, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.
‘Nothing, sir.’
The bully beef tins tinkled again. Oh sweet Christ.
There was a pair of loopholes, side by side. Lewis stood on the fire step and looked out through the second one. With the fog and darkness it was like looking into a bag. Oh Jesus, they were coming and without any bombardment. A surprise raid. There would be grenades first and then hand-to-hand, knives, bayonets. Oh Christ, oh Christ. How could Wilson be so calm? He had been in France much longer than Lewis – since 1915. There was some small arms fire further down the trench line. Sweet Jesus, they were in the trench.
‘Think it’s just the breeze, sir,’ said Wilson, calmly.
‘What breeze?’
Lewis hadn’t meant to snap but it had come out like that. He felt Wilson turn sideways to look at him.
‘Breeze’s come up, sir. Can’t you feel it?’
And now Lewis did. A foul-smelling breath of air wafted in through the loophole.
‘Just the bloody breeze,’ he heard Wilson chuckle to himself. ‘Bloody breeze.’
Wilson relaxed his finger on the trigger and then his whole body relaxed as he settled back to gazing through the loophole.
‘Should clear the mist anyway,’ he said, contentedly.
Lewis got down from the fire step. He had been windy and Wilson had seen it.
Lewis had never been this frightened before. It was all these rumours of the end of the War. The thing was that men would die between now and whatever day the War finally did end. He had seen one go only this morning – Winter – half his face sliced off by a white-hot shell fragment that then lodged, still smoking, in what remained of his head. And men would continue to die after that – through accidents, unexploded bombs, booby traps – the Germans had been spreading them about liberally as they retreated. Lewis didn’t want to die now.
Could it be conceivably possible that they were living through its last few weeks? Most men, including Lewis, believed that the only end that would come would be their end. They felt that sooner or later everything would go black from a bullet or they would be vaporised by a shell and that would be how the War would end.
It was virtually impossible to believe that this huge machine that had been running for more than four years would itself, stop. Impossible to believe it actually could be stopped.
The cold was becoming too much. He stamped his feet to try to get some warmth or circulation back into them. He would finish the cigarette and go and write to Helen.
Even though he couldn’t be with her for her birthday he had wanted to celebrate it. Apart from sending her some gifts he had bought in Amiens, he had just wanted a quiet day that he could spend thinking about her. And today had been relatively quiet – that’s if you could call the on-off artillery duel between the British and the retreating Germans quiet. It was quiet, he supposed, in the sense that only one shell had landed in his sector – the one that had killed Winter.
He had wanted a little bit of beauty – a sign that it still existed in the world and something that might remind him of her. He had hoped there might be a sunset – pink seen through diaphanous blue maybe or enraged reds and oranges like a forge of the gods or the passion of lovers. But there had been no sky today and now the trench was becoming dark and vile and sewer smelling. He still hoped that some hot food would come up from the rear and he would have that with a few inches of whiskey that remained in a bottle Dad had sent.
The dugout Lewis occupied had been built by Germans and was like the Ritz in comparison to its British counterparts. The Germans built theirs as though they were staying, the British as if they were passing through. It was a delusion which had lasted three and a half years, and which the red tabs at GHQ had finally only abandoned when the Germans began to retreat in the spring. The dugout had a tongued and grooved ceiling, floor boards, wood panelling and had once boasted electric light, though this no longer worked since the Germans had blown up the generator. A bunk that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a ship was in an alcove on one wall. The place was dry, warm in comparison to the arctic conditions outside and – so far – had proved free of rats’ nests. Some food and drink and time to reflect on the fact that he might now survive the War and have a life after it – that was the sort of birthday he wanted. And there might even be some letters – from Dad or Helen – brought up with the food.
He threw the cigarette butt onto the duckboard where it fizzled out in small pool of water in the mud. He was just reaching for the gas curtain that hung across the entrance to the dugout when a soldier appeared around the corner of the trench, came towards him and saluted. In the dusk it took Lewis a moment to recognise that it was Byrne again.
‘Got a message for you, sir. Got it from one of the C.O.’s runners on the way back. C.O. wants to see you, sir. In his command post at six pip emma.’
Lewis felt his hand start to shake again. He straightened up and he clamped it to his side. He was suddenly sweaty again – and he was angry – very, very angry.
‘He didn’t happen to say why, did he?’
It came out almost as a snarl.
‘No, sir.’
‘But you know anyway, Byrne, don’t you?’
‘Yessir.’
‘And?’
‘Trench raid, sir. Tonight.’
Now, the anger ignited.
‘A trench raid? For Christ’s sake, the Huns are running back to Berlin as fast as their legs will carry them. What possible reason could there possibly be for a bloody trench raid?’
‘Dunno, sir. Orders from above, sir?’
Lewis extinguished his anger. There was no point in it. Not in front of the men. They just thought you were windy. Instead he reached once again for humour. The restorative properties were powerful – they restored both him and the men around him. There was a time when he had given of it freely. But now that well was almost dry. Now, whenever he drew from it, he wondered whether any would remain, whether these few drops might not be the last. And he found himself resenting the fact that other people benefited from this elixir.
‘Very well, thank you for the message, Byrne. You can inform Colonel Ogilvy that I shall be delighted to attend his little soiree at six o’clock.’
The faintest of smiles appeared on Byrne’s face. It had worked – as it almost always did. Lewis scraped around for a few other drops.
‘Will cocktails be served?’ he asked.
‘Doubt it, sir.’
‘No, indeed,’ said Lewis, thoughtfully. ‘So I suppose then Byrne, it’s going to be another night requiring matchless valour, consummate strategy and a proper handling of sticks.’
‘Sir?’
‘Nothing Byrne. Nothing.’
‘It’s a quote, sir. About the “proper handling of sticks,” I mean. It’s a quote, isn’t it?’
‘It is Byrne. And if I happen to get back alive from tonight’s little effort, I shall tell you what it’s from.’
‘I’d appreciate that, sir. Will that be all?’
Lewis nodded.
‘You should probably leave now, sir. Takes nearly an hour to get here.’
‘It can’t take that long.’
‘Mud’s very heavy further back, sir.’
‘And you’re going there now?’
‘Yessir.’
‘Very well then. I’ll just get my things.’
Lewis pulled the gas curtain aside and went into the dugout. In reality, there was nothing he had to get – everything he needed he had on him. But, just inside, in the dark, he whispered, ‘Please Helen, protect and watch over me, so that I will leave this place in one piece.’
When he had first made up this prayer, he had said ‘alive’ but now he said ‘in one piece’. He had seen men who in theory were ‘alive’ being taken away on stretchers. He didn’t want it to be that kind of alive.
He went out to re-join Byrne.
6
It was summer and they had gone for a picnic in the country – Lewis, Mum and Dad. They had been on the train and now they were swishing along a path under a canopy of trees. Pigeons cooed somewhere in the distance. Other birds twittered and called and whistled, high up in the trees or the sky. Occasionally, the bird calls sounded as though they were coming from very low down. Lewis wondered if the birds were actually on the ground and he pictured a little woodland glade with lots of birds hopping around in that jerky movement of theirs. Everything smelt green and earthy. It was cool under the trees but outside in the sun and on the train, it had been baking.
‘Wouldn’t be surprised if it was in the nineties today,’ said Dad.
The path was bordered by ferns that were chest high on Lewis and he ran his hand through them as they went along. They rustled dryly by. He led the way, with Mum behind and Dad at the back carrying the picnic basket.
‘Are you sure you know where we’re going?’ Mum asked.
‘Of course. I used to come here when I was a boy. But not many people knew about it even then. It should be nice and quiet. I’d be surprised if there was anyone here at all here except us.’
The path between the ferns became a rutted lane of hardened, cracked mud, with grass growing up the centre and overhanging branches through which the sun shone. Lewis ran ahead through the dappled patches of light.
‘Be careful, Lewis darling,’ Mum called. ‘Mind you don’t trip.’
‘I will,’ he called back.
The track ended but there was a path off to the left through some more ferns. They followed this and came out at a wide stream which they crossed on a bridge made of railway sleepers. The sides of the bridge consisted of rusty iron railings driven into the wood. A ruined building of grey stone clothed in ivy stood on the far side amongst the trees. It had once been a mill, Dad explained and they walked around to the other side to see the mill race. Nettles and bushes and a sapling choked what remained of the wheel, a skeleton of damp decaying wood.
Close by, shaded somewhat by the canopy of trees, there was a grassy bank dotted with daisies.
‘What do you reckon, me hearties – good spot for a picnic?’
‘It’s a handy cove, Dad.’
‘It is, lad. I
t’s a handy cove, indeed.’
Dad sprawled at full length on the grass. He lay on his back and closed his eyes. Mum lifted up the lid of the wicker picnic basket. It had compartments for different things, and straps for holding plates and bottles. Lewis had helped Mum pack it this morning, carefully stowing things in their places.
‘I’d forgotten you had that basket, Susan,’ said Dad.
‘I bought it the first summer after I finished school. I had made some money from my dressmaking and thought it would be a good thing to have. I thought I’d be having lots of picnics with friends. To the beach. Into the country. That sort of thing.’
‘And instead you met me,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I did.’
Mum shook out the table cloth and spread it. Then she took out all the mysterious packets one by one and arranged their contents in due order. When everything was ready, she said, ‘Now, pitch in, everybody.’
Lewis helped himself while Mum asked Dad what he wanted in his sandwich. There was a bottle of white wine and Dad opened it. Mum took a little; Dad emptied his first glass and refilled it.
Afterwards Dad played with Lewis, rolling him down the bank and then tumbling after him to knock him down just as he was getting to his feet. Lewis screamed with delight and Dad shook with laughter. Mum was lying on her elbow watching them when suddenly Dad ran up the bank, lifted her up in his arms and carried her to the edge of it.
Starlight (The Four Lights Quartet Book 1) Page 4
