Tomorrow, Jerusalem

by Tomorrow, Jerusalem (retail) (epub)

  Very pensively she lifted her cigarette, watched the drifting smoke. Beyond the window the world moved with clinking, rhythmic step towards – what? – Isn’t it what life’s all about? Taking a chance?—

  She stood up, stubbed the cigarette out very carefully, reached for her light, khaki jacket, crammed the peaked cap on her head and left the room.

  * * *

  He might, of course, have been on duty. Or at the Mess. Or out with friends. If he were, she had decided, as she had followed the road that led from the village to the once-grand château that was now the Base Hospital, she would take it as a sign. Not my fault, but Thine, o Lord. If I am not to see him, then just make him be somewhere else—

  He was there.

  When she pushed open the door he was in his favourite position in a deep chair by the window, taking advantage of the last of the summer light, his feet on the windowsill, a book propped in front of him. He turned in surprise as the door opened.

  She stood for a moment in the open doorway. ‘Hello, Ben.’

  ‘Sally!’ He scrambled to his feet, unfolding his huge frame, towering almost to the low ceiling.

  She turned, shut the door behind her, stood for a moment, her back against it, watching him.

  ‘Please—’ he said, ‘come in.’ The first surprise had been overcome, voice and face were perfectly and politely controlled.

  She shook her head. ‘You may not want me to.’ She heard herself the odd edge to a voice that was always husky.

  He said nothing.

  She stood for a moment, marshalling words. ‘I could say that I’d come to ask how you were.’ There was a jaunty defiance in the words, and, as always when she was under stress, she heard the almost deliberate harshness of London’s back streets in her voice, ‘or to tell you that I saw Hannah yesterday for two minutes; they’ve evacuated, and they’re moving up to the line tomorrow, did you know? To a place called Bray-sur-Somme. And she’s head-over-heels in love, bless her; isn’t it fun?’ She paused, added brightly, ‘I s’pose I could say I’ve got a splinter in me finger?’ She shrugged like an urchin, added more softly, ‘I could say that the mountain has come to Mohammed, or whatever his name was.’

  The silence was absolute. Beneath the level, austere gaze she felt the colour rise to her cheeks. But she would not look away. She had decided to come, and here she was. She would see it through. Somehow, for good or for ill, this thing had to be finished, ‘I could say that I love you,’ she said.

  The look on his face could not be denied; it was pure pain. He half turned from her. ‘Sally!’

  No more than he did she raise her voice. ‘Don’t tell me!’ she said, in a ridiculously reasonable voice. ‘Don’t tell me about Charlotte and Rachel, and your Dad and Hannah, and everyone else, and what a respected and respectable man you are – don’t tell me! I know! Do you think I don’t? Do you think I’m blind? Or an idiot? Do you think – God help us! – that I don’t know you?’

  Outside a bird had begun to sing, solitary and sweet. The last rays of the dying sun stained the sky to the hue of blood and glinted on the metallic underbellies of the great observation balloons hanging in the distance. The guns boomed monotonously.

  ‘There’s a bloody war on,’ she said, suddenly tired. ‘We might all be dead tomorrow. Doesn’t that change anything?’

  ‘Sally – stop it! Please! I can offer you nothing!’

  ‘You said that before. I’ve been thinking about it. Tell me – what does it actually mean? That you can’t offer me marriage? I know.’ She grinned a little, faintly caustic, ‘Have I asked? That you can’t offer me permanency? I know. That you can’t offer me respectability? Your name? I know. I know! Ben – try the thing that you can offer me. Go on,’ she moved a little towards him, her eyes intent upon his, ‘try it.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Ben?’

  The square, craggy face was set. Still he did not speak.

  She stepped lightly to him, lifted her face to look into his. ‘Coward!’ she said gently, ‘bloody coward!’

  He made the slightest of movements. Stopped. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  She turned a little from him, bitterness in her face. ‘Coward!’ she said again, more quietly but with infinitely more honest feeling.

  He moved then, a swift step, his hand hard on her arm. ‘Sally, be careful! Don’t push me too far.’

  She swung on him, tears gleaming suddenly in her eyes. ‘Damn care for a lark, Doctor Patten! That’s what I came for! To see you lose control, just once! To see you do something – just once! – that you want to do! Something your heart – your guts – tell you to do – not your stupid, duty-bound, bone-headed head! To see Doctor Ben God almighty Patten act like a common or garden human being, not like Jesus Christ on a monument!’

  ‘Sally!’ He swung her to face him.

  Tears were running down her face, hateful tears that she could not control; defeating tears. She wanted nothing now so much as simply to get away. ‘Let me go!’ Futilely she tried to wrench herself from his grip.

  ‘Sally – please! – don’t you see? It’s you I’m thinking about! What about you? I couldn’t hurt you – use you as I’d have to use you—’

  ‘Why not?’ She glared at him through reddened, tear-drowned eyes. ‘Why not? Think about it, Ben! If I say it’s all right, then why not?’

  He was watching her now, as shaken as she, in a fury of frustration. Almost he shook her, and furiously again she struggled to release herself and could not. ‘Because—’ he said, and stopped.

  ‘Because your pride won’t let you. Because your – bloody – man’s – pride – won’t let you. Because you think I’m a child, with no will, no needs, no bloody pride of my own! Righteous Ben Patten. Living everyone’s lives for them! Sacrificing himself for others. But you can’t accept sacrifice, can you? You aren’t big enough for that! Well, damn your pride, Ben, and damn your obstinacy. And damn whatever part of you it is that bleats about a woman’s freedom and then treats her like a child! It’s time someone told you that you aren’t always right! You don’t always know what’s best for everyone! I came because I wanted to. Because—’ she struggled for a moment, lifted her head fiercely, ‘because, God help me, I love you! If you can’t accept that it’s both our loss.’ She was all but incoherent, ‘Try thinking about what it cost me to get here! I should have had more bloody sense.’ She turned blindly towards the door.

  He caught her with easy strength, pulled her to him. They stood, clinging in a fraught and desperate silence. She was grimly fighting open tears. He waited a long time for the tension to ease. When he felt her relax a little he opened his arms and she walked away from him, dashing the back of her hand across her wet face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said very quietly. ‘I had no right to say any of those things. No right to come here.’ She raised a tired, tear-stained face, attempted a bleak half-smile. ‘That’ll teach you to take homeless orphans in off the street, Ben Patten. Breeding will out, as they say—’

  ‘Shut up, Sally. For Christ’s sake – shut up.’

  They stood in a long silence. The sun had sunk below the horizon; the sky was a glory of gold and red. Sally sniffed. Ben stood like a statue, his face expressionless as granite. She could all but feel the violence of the battle he was fighting. When he moved at last, slowly towards her, she lifted her chin, concealing the faint stirrings of something very like fear. He hesitated for one moment, waiting for her to move, giving her, she knew, a last chance to draw back.

  She waited.

  He kissed her with a ferocity that spoke of the disintegration of long-held control. His mouth was hard, his strength overpowering. Painfully he crushed her body against his, enveloping her, hurting her. She could feel his anguish and his anger; the overwhelming desire that, against his nature, drove him. He kissed her as if he would imprint himself on her soul, crush the life from her body. The explosion of his excitement was like a shellburst; and she burned with it. Fire against fire, she fought him;
not to be free, but to possess him at last – to be possessed. She felt his hands at the buttons of her tunic, slid her own beneath his shirt, scratching and clinging, tangling her fingers in the matted hair of his chest, rubbing her thumbs across his nipples. Her hair fell tangled across her shoulders, which were bare and marked with his kisses. He took her savagely, standing, half-clothed, panting and streaming with sweat. At his climax he shouted agonizedly, throwing his head back, face clenched in a kind of fury. In the silence that followed she saw the glint of his tears, felt the faint, uncontrollable trembling of his body. Gently she drew his head to her, cradling him, drawing him to the bed. He lay like death, hardly breathing, his face buried in the crook of her arm as, with light and loving fingers she stroked his hair, traced the contour of neck and massive shoulder. Excitement ebbed, but her body still throbbed and glowed with the aftermath.

  ‘Christ on the cross,’ he said at last, his voice muffled, ‘What have I done?’

  ‘What we both wanted to do. What – if we’re honest – we’ve both wanted to do for a very long time.’

  He turned from her, throwing himself naked upon his back, his arm shielding his eyes, his mouth harsh with self-condemnation.

  She leaned upon one elbow, watching him, running a fingertip across the dark mass of his chest, tracing his chin, resting lightly upon that uncompromising mouth. ‘Ben.’

  He did not move.

  ‘Ben! Look at me.’

  Very slowly he lifted his arm. There were salt smudges upon his cheeks. Very slowly and very deliberately she leaned above him and kissed him, tenderly, deeply and with every ounce of courage and love she could muster. For a moment his mouth stayed hard and ungiving beneath hers. Then his lips parted and he moved his head a little, his hand creeping up, holding her; but gently, gently and with no sign of the brutality he had just shown.

  For an odd moment the guns had fallen silent.

  She lifted her head. Smiled at him. He opened his mouth. She laid a finger on his lips. ‘Don’t you dare!’

  He raised questioning brows.

  ‘Apologize. Don’t you dare apologize. I’ll bloody kill you.’

  The corners of his mouth twitched to a smile.

  She snuggled beside him, her head on his shoulder, her arm across his chest. She felt, quite suddenly, the tension drain from him. He closed his eyes. She waited a long time, until the uneven thumping of his heart had settled to a quiet rhythm, and the arm that held her had relaxed a little. Then she turned her mouth to his ear, breathing the words, tongue and lips teasing. ‘Next time’, she said softly, ‘could we take it a little slower? I do like to have time to take me boots off—’ and was rewarded by the glint of laughter in his face as he turned to kiss her.

  * * *

  In those last days of June the bombardment laid across the eighteen miles of front that were the Somme valley escalated to a non-stop violence of noise and destruction that crashed the eardrums and shredded the nerves. On the last night of the month at a small village called Busles-Artois the band of the Leeds Pals gave a concert. Corporal Eddie Browne chose not to go; instead he sat in evening sunlight, his back against the rough boarding of a trench that was familiar enough to be called home meticulously honing and sharpening his bayonet, lifting it and turning it in the sunset light, smiling at the perilous glint of it.

  ‘Not at the concert, Corporal?’

  He looked up, squinting into the sun, at the young officer. ‘No, sir.’

  The youngster, fresh from England, in the line just three days, rubbed a hand absently upon his trouser leg. ‘So – over the bags tomorrow, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Seems so, sir.’

  The boy regarded the older man with his battle-stained uniform and tranquil, gipsy face with some envy. He indicated the sharpened bayonet with a small, nervous jerk of his head and an uncertain smile. ‘Ready, then, Corporal?’

  ‘Ready, sir.’

  Eddie watched the slim figure back along the trench, something close to sympathy in his eyes. Poor little sprig; it was a good bet he’d wet his trousers before he went too far tomorrow. He picked up the bayonet again, and as he surveyed it a sudden, fleeting memory of husky, infectious laughter, a sharp-featured face flicked incongruously into his head. He frowned a little. Strange, how difficult he sometimes found it to keep the van Damme girl out of his mind. Eddie Browne rarely had that trouble with a woman. ‘Two of a kind, Sal,’ he remembered he’d said to her last time they’d met, ‘we’re two of a kind.’ Bloody fool thing to say if he’d ever heard one. Scowling a little he went back to his sharpening.

  At the northern end of the line, on a hillside overlooking Gommecourt, Peter Patten sat upon a fallen tree, elbows on knees, looking out over the bleak landscape that was No Man’s Land, beyond the trenches where his men prepared themselves for the push tomorrow. In his hand he held a well-worn piece of paper; a letter that had been folded and refolded, worn at the edges and stained with mud. As he read it again he heard her voice, light and pretty, saw the wide, innocent, childlike eyes. Charlotte, surely, was the ideal of the womanhood for whom they were fighting, the very image of the way of life they had to protect, and for which they were ready to die.

  And she was his brother’s wife.

  He folded the letter, started to tuck it back into his pocket, then stopped. Who knew what might happen tomorrow? Who knew, if worse came to worst, what mischief a small slip of paper found in the wrong pocket could wreak? Reluctantly he tore the letter up, and dropped the pieces, watching as they drifted in the still air to the dry dusty ground.

  Giles Redfern, pencil in hand, sketched the skeletal outline of the basilica of Notre Dame de Brébières, with its perilously leaning virgin, which had become a symbol of the shattered towns and villages of France. Tucked into the corner of his leather folder was a small photograph, at which, every now and again, he glanced smiling.

  Hannah, caught in serene and happy pose, smiled back.

  Giles sketched and dared to think of the future.

  Ralph Patten, some six miles to the south-east, stretched his legs in the dust before him, leaned in unthinking discomfort against the wheel of the field ambulance and thought of the coming morning.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I

  At seven thirty on the morning of the first day of July 1916 – a glorious summer’s day, unusual for that year, of sunshine and birdsong – the long-awaited Push, the Big Show, the battle that was, so it was said, to mark the beginning of the end for Jerry, to open the way to Berlin and the heartland of Germany, began. Not a man nor boy of the British Expeditionary Force along the Somme front that day but knew the importance of the action; proud they were to be there, and optimistic. It wouldn’t be easy – no one believed that any more – but they’d have Fritz running like a rabbit, see if they wouldn’t – and then, in next to no time, it would be back home to Blighty—

  When the whistles blew on that glorious morning battalion after battalion scrambled over the parapets and into No Man’s Land confident – for hadn’t they been told so? – that the enemy lines had already been demoralized if not entirely shattered by the British bombardment.

  Not so.

  Warned by the premature explosion of mines, dug deeply and securely into their concrete bunkers, the enemy was waiting; and as the British battalions, the boys of Kitchener’s Army, struggled forward, rank upon rank, into a barbarous storm of bullets and high explosive, so they died, falling in their thousands and in their tens of thousands, climbing over the heaped bodies of their comrades to be mown down in their turn. It was a slaughter the scale of which had never been known by a British force before, the staggering extent of which was so great as to take weeks if not months to be understood or accepted even by those who were most closely involved with it. The day was a shambles, a horror of death and destruction barely comprehensible even to those who took part in it; it was the day when flesh, blood and bone were pitted against the advanced and merciless tools of modern warfare and lost
. Some infantry battalions lost up to ninety per cent of their strength; dead and dying men littered the smoky, sunlit battlefields, a sacrifice ill-planned and, some said, for nothing.

  Number Three Casualty Clearing Station, close by the village of Bray-sur-Somme, was swamped almost as soon as the battle started. Convoy after convoy rolled in from the Front with its pathetic load of crippled humanity. Limbless and eyeless they were carried, half dead already from shock and injury, into the great canvas wards. In Resuscitation they were warmed and coaxed back to a chance of life on the operating table, or they died, giving up the fight on a whisper of breath, too shocked and exhausted to battle further. In Preparation they lay in patient queues, awaiting a table and the precious time of an overworked surgeon, often unaware of how badly injured they were, the lucky ones lulled by shock and morphia into peaceful near-euphoria. An endless stream of shattered, blood-soaked, helpless bodies flowed back from the battlefields to the clearing stations, their only chance of life lying in the steady, overstrained hands of the doctors and nurses who awaited them. Work in the operating theatres went on non-stop as shells howled above the canvas roof and landed in the compound outside. There was no rest to be had and, as that first night fell, no sleep. The battle here was every bit as desperate as that being waged just a few short miles away, the high courage and dedication as great as any shown in the heat of combat.