The first shells come whistling in. They explode in yellow flame and black smoke and showers of dirt and stones on the German side of the wire. Lewis reaches the sandbag wall at the British trench. As he does so, he realises that the British artillery barrage has started up again. Somebody has been clever enough to grasp the situation and telephone the artillery to resume. Lewis blesses him whoever he was. That should give the rest of the men a chance to get in.
Lewis throws himself onto the sandbag wall and, on all fours, tumbles over it and down into the trench. He lands on the fire step where strong arms suddenly catch him. A voice that sounds gentle, even though it is shouting above the noise of the artillery, says, ‘We’ve got you, sir.’
44
It was nearly five by the time Lewis had calmed down enough to sleep. By then, the wounded man that had been carried back, had died. Two other men, caught out in the open by the German barrage, were also killed and three more seriously wounded. All of Lewis’ men got back safely. Lewis had his hand dressed but was told it would be impossible to stitch and that it should just heal by itself and come back to normal. The raid was judged to be a success by whoever decided these things.
Lewis fell into a deep sleep and it was just after eight when he emerged from the dugout. Later that day he received a letter from Helen. It was like so many others that she had sent. She talked about her work at the hospital, dwelling on the lighter moments, obviously hiding the darker ones. She did the same things Lewis did when he said things to her like ‘We have a little job to do tonight, but don’t worry, it is nothing serious.’ He loved her for that. Some day, he was sure, when they were together again, they would talk about what the War had really been like for both of them. But this had been a way to get through it, to lighten the load, to keep the dark forces at bay.
She said she was longing to see him and hoped that the War might soon be over. It was closed with ‘Much love’. ‘All my love’ was the other phrase she used. She had never said, ‘I love you’, as he did. She had sent so many letters to him, writing every couple of days, that he had a huge collection. Most of them he had sent back to her in batches for safe keeping; but he always kept the most recent ones in a waterproof bag in his pack. He added this one to it after writing a reply.
The rest of the day was quiet. During the afternoon Lewis remembered Byrne and the quote from The Wind In The Willows about ‘matchless valour, consummate strategy and a proper handling of sticks.’ Lewis found himself smiling – he should tell Byrne when he saw him next.
But it was a different runner, a man Lewis didn’t know, who brought a message that evening. Lewis asked the man if he was likely to see Byrne later. The man hesitated and then replied, ‘Sorry, sir, Byrne was killed this morning. Shrapnel, sir.’
Aimlessly, Lewis returned to the dugout. He wished he had some whiskey; he felt like getting well and truly drunk. To take his mind off Byrne, he took out the photograph of Helen. ‘Thank you, for keeping me safe, my darling,’ he said. ‘I love you.’ He wrote and asked her what she had done for her birthday.
But it was a question that would never be answered.
Lewis wrote several more letters in the days that followed but none of them received a reply. Finally, towards the end of October, he received them all back, held together with a rubber band. On each of them somebody had written, in blue indelible pencil, ‘Not known at this address’.
His first reaction was the she had been killed or died. It couldn’t have been shelling – Etaples was far, far away from the front line, but had it been bombed? Or had she had an accident or caught something – hospitals weren’t exactly the healthiest places in the world. He was her next of kin, so there followed more agonising days that killed whatever joy or relief he might have felt at the Armistice while he waited to receive a War Office telegram. But none came.
She was alive. But where was she? And why had she stopped answering his letters? Was there something he had said or done? He tried to remember his last letter to her. Had there been anything untoward in that? But no, it had just been the usual love letter that he had been writing to her since November 1916.
The following year, in June 1919, Lewis was offered demobilisation from the Army. Since he could think of nothing better to do, he signed on for another two years. He was given a month’s leave and arrived back in England on the twenty ninth of June. He spent a day with Dad in London on the thirtieth – Lewis hadn’t seen his father since just before he had been posted to France in Easter 1917. Dad looked older, greyer, a bit more well-fed. He would be retiring from the Navy and, a bit like Lewis, was unsure what he would do. They had lunch and both seemed to be of the opinion that ‘taking some time off’, ‘a bit of a rest’ was the best thing for both of them now. Lewis was able to put Helen out of his mind for a few hours but by the time he went to bed, he could think of nothing else.
The next morning, as he had planned, he went to Paddington.
Part 2
45
The omens were good. It was exactly the same date as the day he had begun his journey three years ago. The weather was remarkably similar as well, promising a day of blue sky and heat and no clouds. He had dressed in civilian clothes and taken the Tube to Paddington. He felt he had already picked up her trail.
The station looked different, of course. Three years ago, with the Somme offensive only a few hours away, and the action off Jutland less than a month old, the predominant colours in the station concourse had been khaki and navy blue and white. Today, even though it was a Monday, the place had a holiday feel about it as families caught trains to places on the coast – all the Mouths, Sidmouth, Bournemouth, Teignmouth, – and places further west. The women wore brightly coloured pastels, the men grey, black and white. It was as though one of those new coloured films had somehow become spliced in a strange way with an ordinary black and white one.
And the papers had been different too. Then there had been so much about the War. Today, if there was any recognition of it being the anniversary of the opening of the Somme battle, he hadn’t seen it. The big story was the airship R.34 flying to America and back. How things had changed.
He remembered the women with the white feathers. ‘Can I suggest, my dear ladies, that you take your feathers, shove them up your pretty little bottoms and fly away home?’
Lewis bought a single to Truro and carried his pack to the platform. It was the pack he had carried with him all through the War. In it, shaving tackle, a couple of changes of clothes, and his 1919 diary. Porters and passengers hurried by, the tea and coffee shops and food stands were busy, the noise of it all echoing off the great glass ceiling of the station. There was the odd sailor or soldier but nothing like there had been during the War years. It was as though somehow, the War had never happened. Could it really only be eight months since it had finished?
The train was already at the platform. He boarded and found an empty compartment. He put his luggage on the rack and sat by the window. The compartment filled up. A young father, an incredibly thin and childlike mother and two children under ten, a chubby boy and a tall, pretty girl; an older couple. The children chattered excitedly. The parents apologised for their high spirits – they were going on holidays. The older couple smiled indulgently. Lewis said something about us all having been children once. The mood in the carriage was light and festive. Lewis’ heart was broken.
People used the expression glibly but now Lewis realised what it meant. Strangely enough, it had been Helen’s husband who had first said it in a way that he understood. It was something that Helen said he had said the night they went into Fowey to talk. ‘It is possible for a heart to be broken.’ Lewis knew this now. It was possible for a heart to be broken. He knew all about it. He could describe – in minute detail – the symptoms.
It began when you were separated from the person whom you had loved. There was the ache of not having them around, of not being able to do and say all of the things that had been possible before. Then, adde
d to that, hope was taken away – the hope that you might ever see the person again.
But some things were also given to you. Gifts. Poisonous gifts. You were given all the memories of how it had been. The sweetness. The laughter. The happiness. And you weren’t just given them. They were sharpened, intensified. Wine tasted sweeter, music sounded more beautiful, the colours of sunset were more vivid, lovemaking was more intense, flesh felt and smelt more perfect. And they weren’t all given to you at once. It was as though some were injected into you at unsuspecting moments, so that you could be engaged in some entirely innocuous pursuit and suddenly a memory would find its way to your brain and to your heart. And the torture would be more intense for its unexpectedness. This was a broken heart. It was worse than a death. A death was final. This just went on and on and on.
Apart from his memories he had so few physical things to remember her by. The photograph that he had gazed at countless times. The final bundle of letters that had come back to him – she had the rest of them. So that they wouldn’t be lost, he had said. So that their children would have a record of their parent’s relationship, had been what he had thought – though he hadn’t said this to her. Instead he had said it was for the book he would write about his wartime experiences – a book that he would never write – could never write – now.
There was the stocking she had sent him, the fragrance of the perfume she had sprayed on it long faded. It was in his pack. He sometimes touched it with his fingertips or held it to his face, trying to inhale the scent of her and call her back. This stocking had held her leg, the top had encircled her thigh. How could all that closeness and intimacy be gone from his life?
His plan was simple. Or stupid. He wasn’t sure which.
He was certain she wasn’t dead. Somebody at Etaples or the War Office would have told him if that was the case. So she was alive, but for some reason she didn’t want to see him or be in touch with him any more. Had she met somebody else? Had she gone back to her husband? That seemed the most likely explanation. She had always stalled about getting a divorce so maybe she had just returned to him. Or maybe he had been wounded as she had feared he would be and she had gone home to nurse him. The irony there would have been in that. She had become a nurse with all of that talk about nursing Lewis if he was wounded. How cruel it would have been if she had ended up nursing her husband.
So assuming she was alive, he would track her down.
The sensible thing to do might have been to go to Etaples and begin the journey there, but the place was already being wound down and eight months was a long time. A lot could have changed in the time since she had sent back – or caused to be sent back – his letters. A trail beginning there would be cold. No, his hunch was that she was gone from France. She was in England, he felt. The two most likely possibilities were that she had gone back to Fowey or home to Shropshire.
And there was another way to view all of this. His whole relationship with Helen had begun when that landlady of his in Fowey – Mrs Middleton - had asked him if he was going to church. Such a small thing but if that hadn’t happened – if Mrs Middleton hadn’t seen him that morning; if she hadn’t been interfering or solicitous of her guests (depending on how you saw it); if he hadn’t felt so guilty that he thought he’d better go to church to keep Mrs Middleton happy – then he wouldn’t have been in the church that day. And if he hadn’t done that he would never have seen Helen.
Yes, he might have met her some other way but, as far as Lewis was concerned, there was an almost mystical inevitability to their story. This wasn’t just normal life. Some force had been at work that day that had made it all happen. Two years ago he would have ridiculed these thoughts, but war had a way of making the most rational of men superstitious or spiritual – whichever you preferred. So he would try to tap into this force again. That was why he was going back to Cornwall. He would go to Fowey where it had all began. He would go on exactly the same day, and retrace his steps. He would pick up her trail and track her down. He didn’t know what had happened, why she had gone. He just knew that she haunted his dreams, that thoughts of her filled his days, that he longed for her, that he couldn’t picture a life without her. He had had eight months of it and it had been unbearable. He would go to Cornwall and somehow, he would be guided to her. He would be guided just as he had been guided safely through the War.
Lewis had done one final thing. It had occurred to him last week. He had sent a letter to Helen c/o No. 24 General Hospital, Etaples with ‘Please Forward’ loudly emblazoned on the front and back. In it he told her that he loved her, that his life was empty without her and that he just wanted to see her so that they could talk. He didn’t know where she was but he had a suggestion. He was planning to go to Fowey on the first of July. He would arrive there that evening. Next day, the second he would go out to Readymoney and he would be at the spot where her bicycle got the puncture all that time ago. He would be there at the same time, which he suggested must have been about five thirty in the evening. This would allow her more than enough time if she was coming from London that day. Would she come too? Would she meet him there on the second? Please, would she come?
The train slipped out of the station and began to pick up speed. How dreary the suburbs of London were. But soon they were behind as the train hurried along. The War had changed how Lewis saw things in so many ways. In some ways it had ruined the world for him. A hilltop crowned with leafy trees appeared in the distance and hurried towards them. There was a time when Lewis would have just seen its beauty or perhaps wondered what birds lived within its foliage. Now he saw the landscape as an infantryman saw it. No cover for the attackers and a steep climb. That hill would have been a bastard to take. They had taken worse.
Lulled by the rhythm of the carriage and with tummies full of sandwiches, the holidaying children had settled down somewhat. The boy had fallen asleep while the girl was reading. There was a map on the wall of the compartment above the seats beneath the luggage rack. Lewis followed the train’s journey – Reading, Taunton, Exeter St David’s, Newton Abbot, Plymouth North Road, Devonport. He thought of the oceans of tears that had been spilled at these stations and hundreds of others like them all over the country during the last four years. He looked at the buildings as the train sped past. Churches, houses, halls, shops – they would still be standing long after their occupants had gone. Had it all been for a collection of buildings? Was that what the War had been about? Was that what England was?
Then came the Cornwall names, Liskeard, Bodmin Road, Par, St Austell and finally Truro. It was just after four when Lewis stepped onto the station platform into a tawny, golden afternoon. By six he had arrived at the Fowey Hotel.
46
His room overlooked the estuary. This was the hotel where – ten or fifteen years ago – Kenneth Grahame had begun to write The Wind In The Willows. Lewis wondered whether Grahame had ever stayed in this room. That world of The Wind In The Willows and all those childish things seemed to belong to another age now. Yet, The Wind In The Willows had been part of the complex spell that had saved him. That piece where Ratty arms the animals, he had read or written it out so many times before engagements and it had protected him as surely as any creeping bombardment or advancing behind a tank. Perhaps it reminded him of what he was fighting for – England, its countryside and riverbanks, innocence, that other boys wouldn’t have to do what he had done. Maybe. But he wasn’t so sure. These sentiments seemed too noble, too jingoistic almost, to be his. Were these words a link to the world of innocence and childhood and to the woman who had first read it to him?
He came down to dinner early, through the double doors with their frosted glass panels and into the dining room. Only one other table was occupied and the maitre d’hotel gave him a table by the window. A few moments later the kitchen door swung open and with a shock of recognition, Lewis saw the same portly man that had served him and Helen on the night they had come here, celebrating the fact that she had sent the lett
er to her husband. Presently he came to take Lewis’ order.
‘Good evening, sir. Have you chosen?’
Lewis found himself momentarily at a loss for words.
‘Good evening. Yes, I have. I say, I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but I was last here three years ago and I remember you from then. You served us that night, myself and my … my friend.’
‘I’m delighted that you remember, sir. Yes, things don’t change much down here in Cornwall. It’s one of the things I like about the place.’
He took Lewis’ order and shortly returned with the wine. The man had short fat fingers like sausages but he opened the wine expertly and poured it with care. Lewis held the glass under his nose. He had tasted so much terrible wine in France that this was like someone had opened a flask of sunlight and flowers. He tasted it and it ran down his throat like velvet and honey.
‘Good, sir?’ asked the waiter.
‘It’s very good,’ said Lewis, looking up at him. The waiter had a sun-tanned bald head with a tuft of hair around the back and sides, twinkling blue eyes and a ruddy face as though he enjoyed a drop himself. Lewis thought of Mr Pickwick.
‘I don’t know much about wine but I’ve had some pretty bad stuff over the last few years. I think they were getting rid of all the rubbish and saving the good stuff for when we left.’
‘You were in France, sir?’
Lewis nodded. He didn’t really want to talk about this.
‘At the Somme, sir?’
‘No, I was too young for that. I didn’t go in until November 1916. But I was at the Somme in 1918, when they tried that last push.’
Starlight (The Four Lights Quartet Book 1) Page 23
