She doesn’t reply.
‘And that’s meant to make me feel better, is it? Helen, we were so happy. We were made for each other. The age difference – it was like it wasn’t there. You were as young as I was and now – well now, I’m as old as you. Older in some ways. We can’t throw this away. How many people do you know that are in happy marriages? Ours would have been extraordinary. It would have been everything that marriage should be.’
She looks at him and he can see that her eyes are wet, glistening.
‘Oh Lewis,’ she said, ‘can’t you see – I have to do this. Don’t make it more difficult for me than it already is.’
‘You could walk out of here now, tonight – into a life of fun and laughter and happiness and tenderness. Don’t you want that?’
‘It’s not what I want. It’s —’
‘It’s what then?’ he says angrily.
‘It’s what’s right.’
‘This is what’s right. To come with me now.’
‘That’s not right, Lewis. You know it isn’t.’
‘I know it is, Helen. It is. Look – I’ve seen things. I’ve seen how brief life can be. I’ve seen lives wasted. Lives that were full of promise. Snuffed out. We have that promise now. Let’s not lose it. Let’s seize it with both hands. Oh please, Helen. Please.’
They have come to a bench that sits in the grounds of the church. Helen stops and takes a handkerchief from her handbag. She had begun to cry. He goes to comfort her. She turns away at first, turning a hostile shoulder towards him. But when his hands touch her arms and then encircle her, she relents and turns back. He holds her in his arms and she sobs. He can smell her scent. The perfume is new, different but the smell of her hair is just as he remembers it. The whole feeling is just as he remembers it. His body remembers how it was when he held her. It all seems so familiar – the press of her breasts against him, the feel of her body beneath his hands.
She is sobbing now and he holds her and strokes her hair. He touches her hair with his lips. It is a long time before she separates from him. When she does, the handkerchief is still in her hand. She blows her nose and smiles through the tears. It is the first time she has smiled since she arrived. He thinks he has never seen her looking more beautiful. They stand close to one another in front of the bench. She blows her nose again and wipes her reddened eyes.
She looks at him. She is weakening. He knows it. She is going to relent.
‘If I did this,’ she begins slowly, ‘I should never be happy. Oh, I know you think we would just go back to the way we were. But we wouldn’t. I should be thinking about Robert all the time, wondering how he is. I should be permanently guilty. There would be no happiness in that for me.’
Lewis goes to interrupt but she holds up the hand that contains the balled-up handkerchief.
‘No. Please. Life wasn’t meant to be a bed of roses, Lewis —’
‘Our life was.’
‘Lewis darling, please try to understand. It’s me. It’s just the way I am. I know it sounds wrong. Maybe it is wrong. But it’s me.’
‘People can change,’ he says.
‘But that’s just the point, don’t you see – I don’t want to. I want to do this.’
‘More than you want to be loved? Loved like nobody’s ever been loved? I would dedicate my life, you know – dedicate my life to making you happy.’
‘I know you would, my love. But some things are just not meant to be.’
‘I – I could come to live here. Close by, I mean. We could meet … see each other.’
She shakes her head.
‘No,’ she says.
‘And if Robert were to die?’ he asks.
‘No more, Lewis,’ she says. ‘Please, no more.’
‘Did I not love you enough?’ asks Lewis.
She looks up at him.
‘Of course you did. You know you did.’
‘Then why?’ he asks simply.
‘Because he needs me.’
‘And me?’ he says. ‘Maybe I need you too. And maybe you need me.’
She just continues to cry. Her eyes are swollen, her face red.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ he says.
His voice is loaded with bitterness and anger.
‘That night … in Fowey … when he came and you went out with him. And then you came back and you got into my bed and we made love. Why did you do that? If you felt this way, if you knew it was always going to end up like this, why did you do that? Why did you offer something like that only so that you could take it away again?’
‘I know, I shouldn’t have,’ she says.
‘Then why?’
‘I suppose I was trying to convince myself. To act the way I would act if I were free. I was trying to draw a line under my relationship with him. I thought that if I was unfaithful to him then that would be the end of it. If nothing else it would give him a reason to divorce me. I was trying to end my relationship with him.’
Lewis absorbs this.
‘For you it may have been the end of something. For me – I thought it was the beginning.’
‘I shouldn’t have,’ she says limply. ‘It was wrong. All of it was wrong. I was stupid.’
‘No,’ says Lewis. ‘You were in love. You’re still in love.’
Helen sits down slowly on the seat. It is like she has crumpled. Lewis finds himself standing over her.
‘You know what will happen, don’t you?’
She continues crying. Lewis ploughs on.
‘It will be just like what you said happened to my mother. Your unhappiness will make you sick.’
‘Oh stop Lewis, don’t wish that on me.’
He sits down beside her. He reaches out and puts his hand to her cheek, turning her face towards him.
‘I’m not wishing it on you, you know that. But it’s what will happen. You know it better than I do. And I don’t want you to die. To die unhappy. When you could have so much else.’
‘Stop, Lewis. Please stop.’
He can see that he is hurting her and he doesn’t want to.
‘There was a time,’ he says. ‘When I knew nothing about you but I longed to know so much.’
He smiles. It is a weak, tiny smile – the most that he can manage.
‘Do you know that I still feel that way? I wanted to spend the rest of my life finding out all about you.’
She seems to suddenly decide on something. She blows her nose, dabs at each of her eyes in turn and then returns the handkerchief to her bag. She stands up and extends a hand.
‘Goodbye Lewis. I hope you find all the happiness in the world. You deserve it.’
He refuses to take her hand. Instead he stands up too. She looks at him steadily for another moment and then she turns and begins to walk away slowly. He calls her name once. Twice. But she doesn’t turn round. He thinks he should go after her, and actually makes a move to do so, but then he stops. She reaches a corner and he wills her to look back. To change her mind. But she doesn’t. Instead she disappears round the corner and out of sight. He knows with a terrible finality that he will never see her again.
Little images of their time together race through his mind. The first time he saw her in the church. And then on the beach. The evening he repaired her puncture. The first time he came to tea and listening to the music afterwards. The first time they made love. He sees her face in sunlight, smiling, laughing, happy, her blonde hair flecked with strands of gold. His skin remembers the sensation of her skin. His fingertips touch her face, stroke her nose, trace her lips, outline her eyebrows. His palms touch her cheeks and stroke her hair.
Lewis realises that ever since his mother died, he has been alone. Apart from that few months he spent with Helen in that long ago summer, it has always been this way. Foolishly he thought that when he was away in France she was with him; that he was travelling with her, that they were on a journey together. But he realises now that it is a fallacy. They were never together. He was always by himself.
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He finds himself wondering whether this is the way of the world – that everyone goes alone. But he knows it isn’t so. People travel in pairs and in merry groups and in great caravan trains. But somehow, for some reason, he has been fated – cursed – to travel alone. Because he knows now that is the way it will always be for him from now on. This is how he will make the rest of his journey.
Swallows are swooping over the roof of the church. Further away he hears the sound of children playing in the summer evening. He can smell onions frying as somewhere normal life goes on. Despite the warmth of the evening, he feels cold. Cold as though he were dead.
Part 3
54
December 1919.
‘Come on,’ lads,’ a voice said firmly. ‘Time to get up.’
Lewis tunnelled out of a deep sleep and eventually broke the surface to see the canvas over his head. The tent was freezing. Outside he could hear Sergeant Wilkes’s voice becoming more insistent along with groans and curses as the men stirred themselves. Lewis had been awake most of the night and then had fallen into a dead sleep, what seemed like only a few minutes ago. He got out of bed into the arctic air and pulled on his uniform. Then he stepped outside into the frigid day. It was just after dawn and a heavy frost had fallen. The grey and seaweed-green world had been dusted with white. He wasn’t sure which were worse – the summer days when they had to stop at noon because of the smell or the freezing cold ones where digging was so backbreaking.
There were seven tents pitched on a flat, bare site that had been a Casualty Clearing Station. The thirty two men in the squad occupied four tents, the cook slept in the supply tent, the two sergeants, Wilkes and Crawford, shared one and Lewis had a tent to himself. It contained a cot, a small portable writing table and a folding chair. It had been a cold, clear night last night and he had sat outside looking at the stars until the cold had driven him in. He had forgotten to bring in the chair and now it had a thick layer of frost on the canvas seat. Jenkins had already boiled water, and seeing Lewis, brought him some in an enamel bowl. He shaved and by the time he’d finished, the air was full of the smell of frying bacon.
Lewis’ unit was a so-called ‘Flying Squad’. While other units were working their way methodically across the battlefields of Northern France and Belgium, Lewis’ unit was called to areas not yet swept, if bodies were found during rebuilding or cultivation work. They had gotten the call yesterday. A French farmer, clearing his land of barbed wire, had come across something. After breakfast they boarded the trucks – three Type J lorries with canvas covered rears.
Wilkes drove the lead truck while Lewis, with a map on his lap, gave directions. After about twenty minutes, they pulled off the main road onto a narrower one that had been freshly gravelled. Then, further along, was what had probably been a farmhouse, of which only one wall remained standing. Several tarpaulins, tied together with string, had been attached to the single wall and hung over a frame to form a roof and walls. Sheets of corrugated iron leant against the sides to hold them down against the wind. There must have been a hole in the roof because a thin stream of brown smoke rose vertically upwards in the still air.
‘There they are,’ said Wilkes.
There were two men in flat caps standing on the side of the road. Wilkes changed gears and slowed as the Frenchmen flagged him down.
Lewis and Wilkes shook hands with them. Lewis had picked up a bit of French since coming here in July, so he got the gist of what they were saying. The farm had belonged to their eldest brother, but he had been killed by the sales Boches – they both spat as they said the words – at Verdun. They had now inherited the farm and it was urgent that they clear the field and plough it. They had families to feed and the house had to be rebuilt. They pointed at the place with the tarpaulins. Then they turned and indicated the grassy, shell-hole pitted ground that dropped away from the road. Pools of murky water, scattered across the field, reflected the dirty white sky. There was a muddy stream in a ditch at the bottom where the field levelled off. ‘Ici, ici,’ they said.
The French brothers led the way down the field through the frost-covered grass and vegetation. About half way down they stopped at a cleft, a couple of feet wide, in the ground. It was hardly visible because there was so much grass growing over it. Lewis pushed the grass aside with his stick. In the cleft was a discarded British helmet. But then, as he looked more closely he saw the white of a leg bone protruding from the soil and then what looked like a shoulder and an arm in a rotting tunic.
‘I’d say it was a trench, sir,’ said Sergeant Wilkes. ‘Used as a grave by the look of things and then filled in.’
Lewis nodded. In halting French, and waving his arms a good deal, Lewis explained that they would have to search the whole field, not just this patch. At this the two men groaned and looked up to heaven and threw their arms in the air and blew through pouted lips. ‘Non, non, ce n’est pas possible.’
‘On va essayer de travailler aussi vite que possible,’ said Lewis. We’ll try and get it down as quickly as possible.
It was a line he had become used to using. He asked them where their boundaries were and after a bit more rapid fire French and gesticulation, these were established. Lewis explained that what his men would have to do then would be to clear the area within the boundaries. There were more groaning and loud exhalations. But once it would be done, it would be done, Lewis concluded. Then they could get on with their lives.
‘D’accord?’ he asked them.
‘D’accord’, they agreed, somewhat huffily.
The brothers then offered to help, to speed things up, but Lewis explained that his men had been doing this for a long time and they had a systeme. The brothers should keep gathering in the barbed wire while Lewis’ team went to work. It was agreed. As they headed off, Lewis called a reminder to them that if they found any munitions, not to touch them but to call him straight away.
Lewis and Wilkes went back up to the road where the men stood around smoking. A white disc of sun was trying to break through the cloud cover. The two sergeants lined the men up on the edge of the road. They were in one long line with a man every six yards or so, facing down the field. Lewis took up a position at the end of the line, furthest away from the ruined house, Wilkes was in the centre and Crawford at the near end. Most officers didn’t take part in doing the actual work, but Lewis liked to do it. It took his mind off other things. Each of them carried a steel rod and a handful of dirty wooden stakes. Every second or third man had a hammer for driving the stakes into the ground. The steel rods were like the one that Lewis had seen that day last summer when he had gotten the lift from Amiens to Albert. Lewis’ rod actually was a machine gun cleaning rod. Some men had these too; others used whatever they had been able to pick up in the course of their work.
Sergeant Wilkes gave the order and they began to advance down the field very slowly. Wilkes and Crawford shouted at the men not to bunch. The command brought back chilling memories to Lewis. It was the same one he had shouted each time they had gone over the top.
He looked for all the telltale signs they had been taught. The easy ones were rifles or posts bearing helmets or equipment, usually placed at the heads of graves. There were no rifles or posts here. Remains or equipment upon the surface or protruding from the ground. Rat-holes, sometimes showing small bones or pieces of equipment brought to the surface by rats. Discoloration of grass, earth or water. The grass was often a lush, vivid, bluey-green colour and pools of water turned a greenish black or grey. And finally there was the rod method – ‘poke and sniff’ as the men called it.
During their training, the officers had been told to impress on the men that the work was of vital importance given the number of men still missing. Officers were to encourage the men to work carefully so that they might be able to not just find, but also identify missing men. In reality, Lewis had found that the men hardly needed any encouragement. They seemed to have an almost religious desire to do the work as well as they c
ould. During a day’s work there were often moments when there was a whoop of delight because somebody had found something to identify a body. A pay book or a letter or a notebook or some identifying object that would now make its way back to a devastated family and perhaps ease their pain a little.
The line of men worked their way slowly down the field. Each time they found something, they drove a stake into the rock-hard ground. By mid-morning the field had been swept. Twelve spots had been staked, though the number of bodies could be several times more than that. Now the work began. Lewis estimated that, at most, they would be able to recover twenty bodies today. Accordingly, a dozen men under Sergeant Crawford were dispatched in one of the lorries to the nearest cemetery which, according to Lewis’ map, was half a mile away. There were so many that it was rarely a long journey. At the cemetery, these men would dig a trench sufficient to take twenty bodies. The remaining men were divided up into parties of four with shovels, rubber gloves, canvas, rope, Cresol disinfectant and stretchers. Then each party took a staked spot and began to dig.
The work was slow. The battlefields were covered with a thick, luxuriant layer of rank grass and nettles, in places almost waist high. Often, when this was cleared away, further bodies or traces of bodies were discovered. In addition there were chunks of elephant or corrugated iron, barbed wire, stakes, discarded kit and all the other material the Army had used to fight the War. Finally, of course, there were the unexploded munitions. Thankfully it was happening less often now, but a shovel pushed with too much force into the ground could still strike metal, and that unexpected ring of steel upon steel could be the second last sound that the owner of the shovel ever heard.
Lewis wondered if they would get a second pass through this field. There were rumours of the Graves Exhumation Units being disbanded. The War was becoming more and more of a distant memory. The French were anxious to get on with their lives. Yes, the British had lost hundreds of thousands of men – some said it was more than a million. But the French had lost even more. And the War had been fought on their soil. Life had to go on. People had to eat and make love again. Houses had to be built or rebuilt; crops sown and harvested. How much longer would the living have to wait before the dead would make way for them? Hadn’t there been death and dwelling on death for long enough? Time to move on. He suspected that they would only get one shot at this field and after that, anything that remained would be lost forever.
Starlight (The Four Lights Quartet Book 1) Page 27
