Peacetime

by Robert Edric

  Sensing that this was his only way of defusing the situation, Mercer said that he, and he alone, told his own workers what to do.

  ‘That’s what we said,’ the man said. He, too, seemed relieved that the confrontation had passed its peak.

  ‘Tell them to sit down,’ Mercer whispered to Mathias, who translated and relayed this. He was the first to lower himself back to the ground, and the others followed his lead, until only Roland remained standing. Mathias shouted at him and, having made his point, Roland turned and walked away.

  Mercer left Mathias and went to the men on the road. Turning to the Germans, he shouted, ‘You can stay there; don’t come any further on to the site.’

  Some began to protest at the remark, but again Mathias spoke to them and explained what Mercer was doing.

  Leading his crew away from the tower, Mercer regretted that he had been unable to arrange to meet Mathias later in the day.

  Coming out beyond the houses, he saw Lynch, his wife and Mary still standing and watching the airfield. They had been joined by several other local men and women. The children of the place were gathered in a separate group a short distance away.

  Mary saw him and he waved to her. She kept her arms by her sides, but quickly flicked open her hand in response. Neither Lynch nor her mother saw him as he passed behind them with the others.

  Out on the airfield, the first of the bombs were dragged on trolleys across what remained of the runway. A round of applause rose amid the rubble and the dunes. The children stopped their playing to watch. What they all secretly wanted, these distant watchers, it occurred to Mercer, was for one of the bombs to fall and to explode, and he knew how, for the rest of the day, their unspoken disappointment would be tempered by their endless speculation on the subject.

  He followed the men to the lorries, some of which had already been moved, and the rest of which stood with their engines running in readiness, throwing up sand and dust behind them, the drivers wearing goggles and some with handkerchiefs tied across their mouths. The first man he saw with his face covered in this manner reminded Mercer of his brother, and he tapped the pocket holding his wallet, in which there was a photograph of the man with his own weather-beaten face similarly covered. He was unrecognizable in the picture, but it had been the last one taken of him before he was killed, and for that reason alone Mercer had chosen to carry it with him everywhere he went.

  29

  Mathias came to him at the end of the afternoon.

  As Mercer had been warned, the removal of the bombs had lasted all day, and no work had been done on the site. He had ignored the advice of the Disposal men and had sent his own workers back to town early. The passage of the lorries along the sea road had caused no delays at the airfield, and it remained his opinion that the bombs were unarmed and harmless and that work away from the perimeter might have proceeded as usual.

  ‘Won’t you be missed?’ he asked Mathias as the two of them sat together in the tower.

  ‘Not today. Not with all this going on. They still count us occasionally, but less and less often. We come and go. And today they can have little idea where any of us are. After your departure, they called for volunteers to return to the airfield.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘The men taking away the bombs called for others to sit beside them in their restraining cradles on the backs of their lorries. Only as far as the town. They still considered the road too uneven and needed someone to ensure the bombs stayed in place. They assured us they were all without fuses and perfectly safe.’

  ‘Still …’

  ‘Precisely. So you can imagine how much more appropriate, how much more fitting it must have seemed to some of them to have one of us holding onto the things. I’m being unfair, of course. Their own men sat alongside us. We were just there to help, extra ballast.’

  ‘So no one was blown up?’

  ‘Happily, no. Some of us made several journeys. Once in the town the roads were considered sufficiently improved for the bombs to be rocked and jolted to their final destination unattended.’

  ‘So your men are scattered between here and there.’

  ‘My men? Oh, yes. Some of us here, some of us there, some of us in between. I made sure that I was able to return.’

  It was four days since Mercer’s visit to see Jacob and hear the story of Anna’s friend. He asked Mathias if he had seen him more recently.

  ‘Yesterday,’ Mathias said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he remains unwell while protesting ever louder otherwise.’

  ‘Does he know about your failed application to stay?’

  ‘Of course. And, like you, he possesses an unwarranted and unfounded faith in the appeal process.’

  ‘He told me about his sister, Anna,’ Mercer said, still uncertain of how many of those same tales Jacob had already told Mathias.

  ‘I imagined he had.’

  ‘He blames himself for her death.’

  ‘He blames himself for not having ensured her survival. I imagine he believes there is a great difference.’

  It seemed to Mercer that Mathias spoke of the girl as though he had long since known and understood everything that had happened to her, and of the ties that still bound her to her brother.

  At Mercer’s suggestion, they left the tower and walked on the beach. Though August was drawing to a close, it had been a warmer day than usual, and the tower was airless. On the beach, at least, a slight breeze blew in off the water, and both men faced into it as they walked.

  ‘Perhaps if you had someone to sponsor you in your application to remain, then whoever decides these things might look again at your application,’ Mercer said. The idea had occurred to him earlier, but despite his initial enthusiasm for the proposal, he quickly realized that he himself was unlikely to be considered as such a sponsor, and that Mathias’s employer would be a far better proposition.

  ‘My employer, for instance?’ Mathias said, as though reading these thoughts. He shook his head. ‘He has been asked too many times. He has written on behalf of others, but to no avail.’

  ‘Perhaps if I tried,’ Mercer said.

  ‘It is kind of you to offer, and I understand why you might want to do so, but I would rather you did not involve yourself. Besides which, I can do nothing until my preliminary appeal is decided one way or another.’

  ‘And the others? Roland, for instance?’

  ‘Some of them have become desperate men. Roland, idiot that he sometimes pretends to be, has not seen his wife or family for almost four years. His son was killed at Stalingrad. His elderly mother lived with his wife for a short while but the two women argued and his mother left.’

  ‘Does he fear for his marriage?’

  ‘He fears for everything.’

  They walked away from the houses until they were beyond all sight of them.

  ‘Will he – will any of them – do anything stupid, do you think?’

  ‘If you are asking me if any of them will try to return home before their appointed time, or if any of them will run away and hide here, then my honest answer is that I cannot say.’

  ‘But you believe it possible?’

  ‘As I said, desperate men.’

  It was clear to Mercer that he was being diverted from Mathias’s own thoughts on the subject, and it was beyond him to ask any more directly.

  ‘Perhaps immediately after the war’s end,’ Mathias said. ‘Perhaps then, when there was nothing but confusion, and all those men had not returned to their desks and factories, perhaps then it might have been possible to disappear or to invent oneself anew, but not now.’

  ‘Did they give you a reason why some of you were successful in your applications and others not?’

  ‘Nothing very specific. “Suitable”, “Unsuitable”, not much else.’

  ‘Suppose you were to marry an English girl,’ Mercer said, the idea only then occurring to him.

  Mathias laughed. ‘Where is she? And besides …’
r />   ‘Besides, what?’

  ‘Do you honestly believe me capable of doing that to someone? Marrying them for that reason?’

  ‘It would make sense. There need be no true deception involved. You could pay.’

  Mathias stopped walking and pulled out the linings of both his pockets. ‘She would have to come very cheaply,’ he said. ‘Who did you have in mind?’

  ‘No one,’ Mercer admitted.

  ‘Perhaps someone here,’ Mathias said.

  They walked in silence for several minutes.

  ‘Thank you for this morning,’ Mathias said eventually.

  ‘It wouldn’t have come to anything.’

  ‘Perhaps. But whatever happened, it would not have helped matters. In addition to Roland, there are five or six other hotheads who would have happily risen to the bait.’

  ‘I don’t really understand why they continue to regard you with such hostility after all this time. The people in the town don’t feel the same.’

  ‘Upon meeting him,’ Mathias said, ‘one of the first things Jacob told me was that while I was here I should do nothing to attract undue attention to myself.’

  ‘I imagine it’s how he himself must have learned to live.’

  ‘Him and his sister, yes.’

  ‘Has he told you what happened?’

  ‘Not really. Just that the two of them were together and that she died and he survived. What else can there be to know? I don’t imagine he believes there is anything to be gained by endlessly telling the story to whoever might listen. Nothing will change.’

  ‘I don’t imagine there are all that many people who want to hear it.’

  ‘No. Everyone now is looking ahead, not to the past.’

  But some men, Mercer knew – men like Jacob, and like Lynch – were as tethered to that past as they were bound within their own bodies.

  ‘I learned from my failed application that I am still, officially, a serving soldier,’ Mathias said. ‘I daresay I will have as many hoops to leap through over there as I have here.’

  ‘Do you think your own Government is insisting on your return?’

  Mathias shrugged, but it was clear to Mercer that he, too, had considered this.

  They reached a point where the road approached the beach, and where its foundations of rubble, eroded by the sea, lay exposed to them. They sat in the shelter of this, knowing it was where they would part. A large ship crossed the horizon, its smoke trailing unbroken for several miles behind it.

  ‘My cousin served on submarines,’ Mathias said. ‘My mother’s sister’s child. He was killed on his fourth voyage. “Voyage” – it sounds so heroic.’

  ‘I can’t think of anything worse,’ Mercer said.

  ‘He was our first family casualty. His brother died on the Rhine. My father’s sister’s son was blinded. He, too, was a sailor. He sailed once to the Caribbean. No one believed him when he told us where he had been. We joked about him securing our supply of bananas. He was bombed off Brest. That’s where he was blinded.’

  ‘Did he survive the war?’

  ‘He took his own life towards the end. The Russians came two or three days later. He had a sister. She ran away two days after he died. No one has seen her to this day.’

  ‘How awful,’ Mercer said.

  ‘“Awful”, yes. What I’m trying to say, I imagine, is that the war there, in Germany and Poland and Russia, was a different thing entirely from what it was here, or even in France before the Second Front.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Mercer said.

  ‘I believe you can, but that is what it will be – imagining. I daresay people might consider this imagining to be an understanding of sorts, however imperfect, but it isn’t.’

  ‘No,’ Mercer said.

  ‘True loss lives only within us, and is made not the least more bearable by being shared with one or a thousand others, or by being imagined by those others.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But perhaps people still feel the need to make the effort to understand, to imagine.’

  ‘Why? Because they consider it to be part of the so-called “healing process” we hear so much about. It is indulgence, nothing more.’

  ‘So are we all so completely alone with the losses we bear?’ Mercer was not accustomed to such weighty conversation, and he anticipated Mathias might laugh at what he had said.

  But Mathias did not laugh, nor even smile; instead, he turned to Mercer and said, ‘Of course we are. Every single one of us. Even you.’

  Me? Mercer thought, unprepared for the remark, and unwilling now to prolong this painful dissection by saying it aloud.

  Mathias, too, realized that too much had been said, and that they had deceived only themselves in diverting from their course.

  The sun fell lower in the sky behind them, and when they finally rose from where they sat, it cast their elongated shadows across the sand.

  ‘I saw the girl’s father,’ Mathias said as they prepared to part.

  ‘He was watching the airfield.’

  ‘He, too, came to see us after you’d gone. His wife and the girl came with him. There were others. He told the woman and girl to take a good look at us.’

  ‘Neither of them shares his views,’ Mercer said.

  ‘And neither of them said anything to contradict or silence him. They both did as he said. He picked up a stone and threw it at Roland. He missed, but only because that was his intention. There were still a dozen of us. He expected the woman and the girl to do the same. He shouted at them. One of the other men told him to forget it. I told everyone to remain sitting on the ground. He reminded me a lot in his appearance of the dirty, exhausted American soldier who took me and all those others prisoner. I thought all day that he was going to grow weary of looking after us and shoot us all. We’d heard stories.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Today? He let himself be persuaded by the man talking him out of it. He turned on his wife instead, said she’d betrayed him and that he should have known better than to depend on her. I think all the others were just as uncomfortable with what he’d done. I thought Roland might rise and throw a stone back at him.’

  ‘Did you warn him against it?’

  ‘I said nothing. Perhaps I wanted him to do it; I know some of the others did.’

  ‘Did he – Lynch – know who you were?’

  ‘Me, personally? I doubt it. Besides, who am I?’

  ‘Mary will have told him about you.’

  ‘The stone was definitely aimed closer to Roland,’ Mathias said.

  They parted after that, and Mercer walked slowly back along the beach, leaving it before he reached the houses to avoid the few people still gathered there.

  It was almost dark by the time he arrived at the tower, and he sat for an hour at his desk without lighting his lamps.

  30

  He saw nothing of either Lynch or Mary for the next three days.

  He did, however, encounter Elizabeth Lynch, once, alone on the beach, but upon his approach she had been reluctant to talk to him. She looked hurriedly around her as he greeted her, as though she believed they were being watched.

  ‘Is he out there somewhere?’ he said.

  She seemed genuinely surprised by the remark.

  ‘Lynch.’

  ‘Him and her are in town,’ she said.

  ‘I heard from Mathias what happened,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s Mathias?’

  ‘Mathias Weisz. One of the Germans. He told me about Lynch throwing the stone.’

  ‘Oh, that. He didn’t mean anything by it.’

  ‘Just his way?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘He never threw it to hit anyone.’

  ‘Then why throw it in the first place?’

  ‘Bit of fun.’

  ‘Throwing a stone at a man who he knew was in no position to retaliate or even defend himself.’

  ‘Nothing to stop them from doing either,’ she said, and once again it dismayed Mercer to realize
how immediate and instinctual her defence of her husband was. He regretted that he had made no real effort to contact her after the meal she had prepared for him. Since her husband’s return, she had withdrawn almost completely from the society of the place, venturing out only in his company, or with her children. He remembered her sudden appearance as he had approached her home with Daniels, the way she had waited and then withdrawn upon recognizing him. He knew better than to mention Daniels’s name to her now.

  ‘Neither you nor Mary threw stones,’ he said eventually.

  ‘We might have done.’

  ‘Mathias said that you were reluctant, that Lynch was angry at something.’

  ‘What would he know? A German. Was he the man who nearly got hit?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then.’ She turned to leave him, and he saw only then the bruise on her cheek. She raised a hand to the mark, knowing he had seen it.

  Neither of them spoke.

  ‘Mathias was grateful,’ he said after a minute of this awkward silence. ‘He thinks your reluctance to throw anything prevented the others from joining in.’

  ‘Then he’s wrong. And you can tell him that from me. Mary might not have done anything, but I would.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean “Why?” They’re still Germans, aren’t they? If it wasn’t for them and the war, Lynch wouldn’t have been called up and gone away and got himself into all that bother. And he wouldn’t have turned out like this.’ It was clearly what Lynch himself had told her. Perhaps when he had struck and bruised her. A line of reasoning in which none of them could ever believe, but which remained unchallenged in its simplicity.

  She sensed that she had said too much and fell silent again.

  Of the three of them, Mercer realized – father, mother and child – she had deluded herself the most about the man’s return and about their future together. He wondered if it would not have been fairer of Trinity House to tell everyone living there of their eventual plans for the place. At least then some cold reality, some rigour, might have informed these hopeless expectations.