by Pat Barker
Beyond the shelter of the houses, you felt the full force of the wind. It was still blowing almost directly off the sea. Ahead of them was a row of cottages, some obviously abandoned, their doors and windows blocked by shingle. Others had smoke coming from their chimneys, though there was no barrier to save them from the rising tide.
‘How do they manage?’ Paul said.
‘Open the front door, let it run through.’
‘I can’t imagine anybody living like that.’
The place was called Slaughden, Neville said. It had once been a bustling fishing village, but over the generations storms had swept away most of the houses and the shingle had piled up, choking those that were left. It had become the little town’s ghost twin.
‘That’s the awful thing, really. The sea doesn’t just take away, it gives back, but what it gives is tons and tons of shingle. And that’s almost equally destructive.’
Paul turned and looked back across the marshes. Through some trick of the wind, the shining wet roofs of the houses seemed to appear and disappear like a shoal of rocks at high tide. From this distance, the town might have been out at sea.
A few hundred yards further on, Neville said, ‘Well, that’s me done. Enough fresh air for one day. You coming?’
‘No, I think I’ll go a bit further on.’
After Neville had gone, Paul turned inland, hoping for some shelter from the wind. The path had recently been flooded; he slipped and slithered along until he found a sheltered spot where he could sit down and rest. All around him, the reeds whispered to each other, a papery rustle, not unlike the sound the palms of your hands make when you rub them together. Even when the wind died down, the murmuring still went on, the reeds swaying in unison, making secrets.
This place, the way water and land merged, reminded him of that other inundated landscape: the countryside around Ypres. Only there, the mud was full of death – bodies, gas, strings of bubbles popping on the surface, God knows what going on underneath. Only rats and eels flourished there. Here, the mud teemed with life. Knots and dunlins picked their way along the water’s edge; he was aware of other birds too, secretive, hidden away among the reeds. Once he thought he heard the boom of a bittern. He got his sketch pad out and made a few tentative drawings, but he couldn’t grasp the place, not yet, it was too new to him.
Last night’s fantasy of lemon trees and sunshine seemed a long way off today. He was a quintessentially English painter, but then, he thought, rebelling, some of the best writing about place has been done in exile. Wasn’t it at least possible the same might be true of painting? After all, he was painting Ypres from London …
Lunch was at the Cross Keys where a log fire blazed in the grate. The locals asked cautious questions, establishing that yes, he had been to France and yes, his limp was a war wound. After that, he could easily have got drunk on the number of drinks he was offered, but managed to refuse most of them without giving offence.
The man sitting opposite had black eyebrows so bushy it looked as if two caterpillars had crawled on to his face. Paul got talking to him; he turned out to be the local doctor. His boy had been in France, he said. He’d always hoped Ian would take over the practice, but now this … Nothing, he said, as they parted at the door, would ever be the same again. He raised his hat, almost cheerfully, and walked off down the street.
During the time Paul had spent in the pub the weather had taken a turn for the worse. The town seemed to be hunkering down. You could see the tension in the faces of the fishermen: darting eyes, caught in nets of wrinkles, scanned the horizon or measured the progress of the tide, which had turned and was running in fast.
Neville was in the living room when he got back.
‘Spring tide,’ he said, in that knowledgeable way of his. ‘They’re supposed to be delivering more sandbags. I’ll believe that when I see it.’
‘There’s something going on. I noticed there’s quite a little gathering round the huts.’
‘Trawler in trouble. Did you get any drawing done?’
‘Not a lot. Fantastic place though. Oh, and I bumped into Dr Mason, in the pub along there. He sends his regards.’
‘Yes, he’s a good man. Shame about Ian, I used to play with him when we were boys.’ Neville seemed very tense; he jumped when somebody knocked on the door. ‘That’ll be the sandbags.’
Paul heard a rumble of voices from the front door, and then Neville came back into the room.
‘They’ve dumped them at the end of the path so I’m afraid we’ll have to carry them. Are you up to it?’
‘Of course,’ Paul said.
Outside, it was growing dark, sea and sky streaming together in a wash of grey. Even the seabirds had taken refuge inland. Every roof was covered in gulls and as they watched more came flying in, great white boomerangs of bone and sinew swooping low above their heads, before landing in a scuffle of flapping wings and jabbing beaks.
They lugged ten sandbags back to the house. Another echo of life in the trenches; the place was full of them. Now that he was getting used to the idea, Paul found the echoes almost soothing; they seemed to integrate aspects of his life that were otherwise chasms apart. Physically, though, it was hard-going. Icy rain plastered their clothes against their bodies; talking was impossible, breathing difficult. They scaled along the walls, staggering when they came to one of the gaps and caught the full blast of the wind. Once Paul’s knee gave way under him and he almost fell.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine!’ Paul said, shouting above the wind. Their rivalry wasn’t confined to painting and girls.
‘That’s it,’ Neville said, at last. ‘I can’t do any more and you look done in.’
‘I’m –’
‘Yes, I know, “fine”.’
In the hallway, Paul wiped water out of his eyes. ‘Do you know, I used to love rain? Now all I can think of are the poor bloody bastards out there.’
Neville threw more coal on to the fire, then propped a shovel and newspaper against the grate to draw the flames. But he was too impatient to do it properly: a singed brown patch appeared in the centre of the page, deepened to orange and began to curl back. Soon, the whole sheet was ablaze. He grabbed the poker and beat the flames down, then trod the remains of the paper into the hearth. Scraps of newsprint were sucked into the chimney; shrieking headlines whirled into the storm-tossed air.
Unable to wait any longer, Paul went to the table and poured them both a large whisky.
‘Give me your coat,’ Neville said. ‘I’ll put it to dry.’
Paul did as he asked, though the really uncomfortable bit was the lower part of his trousers, which chafed against his skin.
Neville came back and threw him a towel. ‘Here, dry yourself off. Thanks for that, I couldn’t’ve managed on my own.’ He sank into the armchair and took the glass Paul handed to him. ‘Your knee’s bad, isn’t it?’
‘Been better.’
‘I’ve got some stuff somewhere …’
‘No, please –’
But Neville was already on his feet. When he returned he was holding a box of powders. ‘Here. You dissolve them in water and they really do work.’
‘I’m not leaving you short, am I?’
Neville pulled what was left of his face. ‘Doesn’t really hurt that much. I mean, obviously it did after the operation, but it’s not so bad now.’
Paul dissolved one of the powders, swirling it round the glass with a pencil he found lying on a side table, and then threw it down in one gulp. ‘Uck.’
‘Takes half an hour. Meanwhile, I recommend whisky.’
‘I’m drinking too much.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake … How much is too much?’
The whisky was already spreading its insidious warmth through every part of Paul’s body. He stretched out his hands to the fire, which, despite Neville’s ministrations, was now crackling away. The shutters banged and thumped. After one particularly loud crash Paul jumped, slopping some of his
whisky on to the back of his hand. He licked it up.
‘There’s plenty more,’ Neville said, drily.
‘How do you get it?’
‘Father. Dunno where he gets it. I don’t ask.’
Neville’s painkillers were already starting to take effect. Paul’s speech was becoming slurred, or sounded so to his own ears; he doubted if Neville would notice. He seemed to have become almost torpid, staring blankly across the hearth. What came next was unexpected.
‘Brooke came here, you know. He sat in that chair.’
‘No, I didn’t know. I didn’t realize –’
‘Oh, we weren’t friends, not really friends, he just came with Elinor.’ A short silence. ‘In a way, you know, I think that might have been the trouble, part of it. He was an officer, I wasn’t, and yet before the war we’d stayed in each other’s houses. He could never quite …’
‘He couldn’t accept it?’
‘He wasn’t comfortable. One thing, he was supposed to censor our letters, but I know for a fact he never read mine. Not the done thing, old chap. He was quite conventional in a lot of ways. Surprisingly so.’
‘Were you with him when he got his MC?’
Paul expected Neville to back off at this point as he’d done on every previous occasion he’d been questioned about Toby, but he didn’t.
‘Oh, God, yes. We were told we were going forward again and there was – I don’t know – a very flat feeling. Everybody was sick, sick as in “fed up”, but also sick as in “sick”. We had a real run of coughs and colds, stomach upsets, nothing serious, but one after the other it starts to drag you down. Oh, and I had toothache.’ He jabbed at his cheek. ‘There. One of the back molars with nice deep roots. It’d been niggling on for quite a bit and I’d been trying to ignore it, sticking cloves in, you know, rubbing it with brandy, God knows what, but then it flared up and I just had to go. Man was an absolute butcher, I ended up with a face like a football, no, literally, right out here. And I don’t think he’d got it all out either. Ridiculous, isn’t it? You know you can have an arm or a leg blown off any time and yet you’re still frightened of the dentist. Or you can get your head blown off, for that matter, but then that would solve the problem.
‘Then, well, you know, it was one of those cock-ups. We were supposed to be taken to the attack positions by guides, they never showed up, we hung about, more guides arrived, didn’t know where we were going. By the time we finally got there it was less than an hour before the attack. The barrage was deafening, nobody could hear the orders, shells dropping everywhere. Massive casualties in the first minute, the stretcher-bearers were just overwhelmed. The men who couldn’t make it back were left out there crying for water, flies everywhere …
‘As soon as it was dark Brooke took a party out and we started bringing in the wounded, took us the best part of three days. That’s how bad it was. And then we brought in the dead. I’ve never been able to see the point of it; of course I can see it’s a good thing to do, in itself, but not if it means risking lives, especially not my life.’ He glanced at Paul. ‘I’m telling you the truth. Brooke was a hero, I was a fat man with toothache. And then we went out looking for identity discs. Well, you can imagine, can’t you, pitch black, poddling about in God knows what … Do you know what he did? He got a torch out and switched the bugger on.’
‘Did they fire?’
‘’Course they bloody fired. The age of chivalry’s dead, Tarrant, or hadn’t you noticed. Brooke got a slight wound on the back of his hand, we had a handful of identity discs. Oh, and Brooke’s MC. Eventually.’
‘Strange, isn’t it? All that effort put into collecting identity discs and yet he ended up “Missing, Believed Killed”.’
‘Well, that’s the way it goes.’
They sat listening to the roar of flames. Footsteps ran past the window; further down the path a man was shouting, though you couldn’t make out the words. It seemed mad that anybody should be out on such a night.
‘Can I get you something to eat?’ Neville said.
‘No, I’m all right.’
He didn’t want to risk the interruption a meal would cause. He sensed some kind of crisis in Neville; the abscess had burst and would go on leaking now till it was drained.
‘Do you know what he did? Immediately afterwards? He sent us to another company to help them out. I couldn’t believe it.’
‘What did the others think?’
‘Oh, they worshipped him.’
‘And you?’
‘Well, I worshipped him too.’
This was said in a tone that Paul couldn’t read. Sarcasm? No, not quite, but not unqualified admiration either. Courage like Brooke’s exacts a heavy price, and not only from the man who possesses it. Neville had been, as he said himself, a fat man with toothache who didn’t want to die. Brooke must have come to seem more of a menace than the German army.
‘Was he ever afraid, do you think?’ Paul asked.
‘Oh, all the time probably. Just never acted on it.’
Paul was reaching for his glass when a loud boom reverberated around the room, followed almost immediately by a second. He started to get up, but Neville raised a hand to keep him in his chair. ‘It’s all right, it’s only the lifeboat.’
‘Phew!’ Paul said, wiping his brow, trying to make a joke of it, though in fact he was badly shaken. He’d only just managed not to cry out.
‘Do you want to go out and watch? A lot of people do.’
Paul hesitated, trying to predict the impact on the atmosphere between them, but that had been broken already. ‘Yes, why not.’
‘We’d better go round the back. I doubt if we’d get the front door open.’
They went across the tiny yard and out into the lane beyond. At first the houses shielded them from the gale, but then they turned the corner and Paul realized the side street had become a funnel for wind and blown spume. The salt stung his eyes and left a foul taste on his tongue. But you couldn’t keep your lips closed: you needed nose and mouth to breathe.
Heads down, they battled the few yards to the front. They came out on to the beach to find lights and a crowd of people assembled, some wearing the dark coats of ordinary townspeople, others the gleaming yellow sou’westers of a lifeboat crew.
‘How the hell did they get here so fast?’ Paul shouted.
Neville pointed to the pub further along. ‘Never left. They’ve been expecting this all day.’
The tide was at its peak, foaming over the last bank of shingle, slavering down side alleys, oozing through sandbags into halls and passageways. It had begun to snow, the flakes not hesitant as they’d been the night before, but whirled furiously up by the gale, mingling with spray and spume. Paul shielded his face with his arm, for this was a sea that picked up pebbles the size of pigeon eggs and hurled them against locked and bolted shutters as if they were pea gravel.
The arc lights were switched on – probably the only visible lights on the whole east coast at that moment – creating an island of light that shaded away into blackness at the edges. Some of the men were already in the boat, shouting down to other men below. Paul caught the atmosphere of mingled fear and relief. The maroon booming like that had had the same effect as whistles blowing to signal the start of an attack. You put your hands on the ladder, started to climb, bile gushing into your mouth, bowels loosening, and yet, mixed in with all the terror was relief because it had started, at last. He glanced sideways at Neville, who was holding his scarf close to his face, for the air was salt enough to sting, and in his eyes, too, there was the same mixture of fear and exultation.
The crew were all in the boat now; some of them were middle-aged, or even older. The young men, their sons, had gone and so the old took up the burden again. One of them leaned over and shouted something to the men on the ground, but his words were snatched away on the wind. The lifeboat was like something half imagined or dimly remembered, its attendant figures scurrying round it like drones round a termite queen.
Just as Paul turned to speak to Neville, a stronger gust blew, making him stagger to one side, and when he looked round again the lifeboat was sliding down the slipway into the sea. As it hit the water great curling plumes of foam rose up on either side. It dipped once, twice, yawing and floundering in the trough of a wave, struggling to free itself, before it reached the open sea. Once there, it slipped quickly into the darkness.
It was a shock to stand there, staring at the place where it had been, feeling how empty the beach was without it, but then the lights were extinguished. Blackness followed, absolute, thick dark. Only gradually did Paul become aware of knots of people dispersing, going off in small groups, some of them, particularly the older women, alone.
Paul and Neville also turned and made for home. Paul felt numbed, mentally and physically, but excited as well, transported out of himself. Neville, too, looked and sounded different. Once inside the living room, he stripped off his coat, unwound the scarf and reached for his unfinished drink.
‘That was a nasty moment, you know. I thought for a minute they were going to capsize. It’s when the wind veers east, it catches them from the side.’
‘How long do you think they’ll be out?’
‘All night, probably. Go on, get yourself a drink.’
Paul felt better than he’d felt for months. The soporific effect of the pain-relieving powder had worn off, but despite that mad scramble across the shingle, the pain in his knee hadn’t returned. He felt a fleeting, irrational hope that it might have gone for good. He pulled his chair closer to the fire. There was an outdoor feel to the room now: a hiss of snowflakes hitting the hot coal, wind thumping doors and windows, lifting rugs, the smell of the cold, wet air they’d brought in on their skins.
