If Then (16 page)

At night, she wrote James’ name on the grey walls of her flat with a hunk of chalk. Wasn’t the Process meant to respond to desire? Well, here it was, written out, clear as day.
I want my husband back.

Her food allowance was increased to take account of her swimming, and her allocation included a warning against further self-medication with alcohol. In the transparent box, there were also replacement needles for her sewing machine, and bolts of brightly coloured material for sun hats, which she always made to trade at this time of year. She seethed in the aisles, then dashed her box to the ground, its contents scattered across the linoleum.

Without James, she felt unmoored. She thought of her last visit to her parents’ house in Kings Langley, the house in which she had grown up, in which her father had died and from which her mother was quietly removed during the Seizure. Ruth, the only child, was left to pack away the things. She’d often heard it said about only children – what will become of them when their parents are gone? How will they cope when they are all alone? Her mother collected models of country houses and cottages and displayed them in a glass case. In the attic, boxes for each part of the collection had been preserved along with the tissue paper in which they had been wrapped. Ruth spent the last day in her family home putting her mother’s collection of small houses back into their boxes. When she was done, she returned the boxes to the attic, having neither space nor inclination to take the collection herself. Her mother’s things were a burden. The wardrobes were still full of her father’s clothes, and his uniform hung from the rafters of the attic. And then she left. Her parents’ life had not been tidied away, the surface had not been wiped clean.

Ruth stood at the edge of the swimming pool, preparing herself for the shock of the cold water. Being alone made it difficult to act; she had no one to discuss her plans with or confirm her feelings. The cleaner mopped the smooth bricks of the poolside slowly, from left to right. The night wind had shaken apple blossom from the trees and it drifted delicately upon the water’s surface. There were no other swimmers. Breaking the stillness seemed indecent. The clock passed nine and still she had not braved the water. Without that mile behind her, she would not be able to get through the night. Yet something held her back.

The lido seemed eerie, as if the blueness of the water had increased in intensity. Fog obscured the sun. She shivered and glanced over at the cleaner to see if she had noticed it too. Yes, they shared a puzzled look. The cleaner looked up at the sky, from east to west, and then she smiled.

“The guns have stopped,” she said.

They had. The guns had stopped. It was peace. Who knew how long it would last but while it did, she could act. She had been unwilling to swim because something within her knew that she would need her strength.

Ruth did not even change back into her clothes. She ran up the hill in her bathing suit. The rest of Lewes had awoken to the unaccustomed silence, and outside the food kitchen, an old woman gripped her arm and asked her if she knew what was happening. She ignored her. Back at the flat, she set about packing. There was almost nothing she wanted to take. From the kitchen, she gathered a fire steel, her boning knife, a set of cutlery, a tin mug and canteen. She sorted through her jewellery to find the pieces which meant something: her mother’s locket which opened onto a black and white photograph of her father, in his wedding suit, as he had been long ago.

Ruth slipped half a loaf and some cheese into her rucksack and headed up the high street, past the slumping Tudor houses and the castle keep and up toward Western Road. The rhythm of the bombardment had kept her hunkered down in the town. Without it, she wanted to be free, to get out, to find James.

Christopher had mentioned a field hospital in Saddlescombe village. She would begin her search for James there. It was directly west of Lewes and so her walk would not take her near to the battle lines.

The Nevill estate spread along the foothills of the Downs past a large allotment of polytunnels and raised beds. The estate had become a suburban shantytown, with houses interconnected by outhouses, tents and shacks. Children played in the street, families flowed into one another, the clan life of the Nevill.

A hot day. Where her rucksack lay against her shirt it was slick with sweat. She passed a gang of menfolk on ladders securing a tarpaulin over a collapsed section of roof, and then a couple of mothers from the school who were brewing tea over a Kelly Kettle. She accepted a mug from them. How long did she think the guns would rest? Was this the end of the war or merely a break in the battle? She was tempted to dally longer, to chat, to be among others. Such a simple and obvious happiness, to be part of a community, with enough drama, intrigue and consolations to fill a life. All these people had lost in the Seizure was their debts, and any meaning they derived from the servicing of that debt; they were the lucky ones.

The edge of the estate was marked by ramparts patrolled by the
douanier
’s men. She signed herself out at the gate, pausing to look back across the shanty suburb so that she was sure the Process observed her departure.

The grass grew long on this side of the Downs. It brushed against her knees as she strode upward. The heat released delicious aromas from the earth and her skin. At the top of the ridge, a single bench was positioned for the regard of the town below, and beyond lay the Gallops, a long straight racetrack and burned out ruins of the stables.

The sound of the town fell away, replaced by the wind in her face and the eerie absence of the guns. The path to Saddlescombe was a simple one, heading west over the chalk ridge, past Plumpton and Ditchling, crossing the road at Pyecombe, then turning south west. In all it shouldn’t take much more than an hour and a half. She hadn’t left the town very often in the last few years, and to walk clear of its narrow streets and familiar faces always made her regret that she had not taken the time to walk alone more often.

A rut had been made by wide tyre tracks running up and over the Downs. This was where the enormous effigy that burned on Eviction Night had passed by. The effigy of a head half-buried in the earth, either prophecy or warning. The face had not looked like James’ to her, but then what would he look like after a week in the earth?

The thin path was a white bootlace on the greensward. The breeze carried the ripe smell of wild goats. Sheep, too. Clustered in the verges, the tiny yellow offerings of cowslips and purple bluebells. The riddling branches of a wind-bowed tree pointed each way at once. Hedgerows of ash and oak marked out here from there.

A clump of hawthorn rustled as if disturbed by an animal. Her heart lurched. Wasn’t this how James had found Hector, a stray caught up in the wire? She approached the bushes, and their shivering quickened. Something white stirred in between the branches. It was an animal. A horse. No, not a real horse. She came around to get a good look at it. It was a peltless unformed horse, its back legs stiff and deactivated while the front hooves scraped fruitlessly at the earth with the instinct to outrun the pain. She did not offer reassurance to the thing. That would have been pointless. Its blue lips curled and it gasped. The horse was not wounded, it was lethally premature, a carelessly manufactured piece of suffering. Its long head in the dirt, and eyes, wet and raw, exposed to the sun. Would it be easier to put it out of its misery if it were a real animal? Out of mercy, she stood so that her shadow cooled its face. If she took a heavy rock, and crushed its skull, would that even kill it? If the Process was alive in every cell, would it continue to writhe headlessly into the earth? She was sure that she could kill it. It was feasible. But how could she be sure that it was suffering? The horse was not a real horse. It had been manufactured for a specific purpose. Perhaps the horse was not malformed or unfinished but was complete and its pain was the very reason for its creation? This might be its role, and fulfilling a role was the highest form of happiness. But what if your role was to suffer?

She could not decide what to do. She wanted to do good. She wanted to make amends. The horse seemed to be in so much pain. An act of mercy was needed. She looked around for a rock big enough. The ground was dry. She levered a stone out of the earth – it was twice the size of her hand and smooth at the edge, neither as jagged nor as pointed as she had hoped. The horse had no eyelids and her approach made it more agitated.

She had never killed anything larger than an insect. Nothing in the act appealed to her. Her arms felt too weak to deliver the necessary force. She hovered over the horse with the stone held above its pallid muzzle. No, she would need something bigger if she was to crush it. Her boning knife was in her backpack. But a stab in the eye hardly constituted an act of mercy.

She thought of James out there somewhere, suffering like this. She couldn’t bear it. Her love was made from protection and forgiveness, love from the times that he had been strong and the times that he had been weak. She remembered Eviction Night, the press of the crowd at her back, her belief that the eviction must continue – everyone else knew it had to be done but could not accept raising their hands to do it themselves.

It was evil to cast out a child. She let the evil into her to spare him. The other townspeople said that it had been a test and she had failed it like something out of a myth or the Bible – but since when did the Process set tests? In the night, the people brayed to save themselves and cast out the children but by morning, they had suppressed all memory of this accord – yes, she remembered the crowd willing her to do it, but no one actually asked her, did they, no one actually said the words. That was why you needed someone with you to check the facts and to help you fight. Otherwise the world echoed in your mind until it was insubstantial and meaningless and simply easier to give in.

The horse was a broken machine. She put her hand on its cheek. Its pale skin clung to her fingertips and, for a moment, the unformed horse was replaced by another, a brown mare, lame from shrapnel, lying in a shell-hole, its front hooves sinking into the mud. The impression of another world, more instant, more present than her own, passed by, pricking the surface of her stripe as it did so. Under her hand, it was a pale horse again. She left it alone.

Ruth continued on the path west. At Newtimber Hill, the sea glittered in the sun and the outer estates of Brighton – Moulsecoomb, Hollingbury and Withdean – appeared, at this distance, intact; the occasional blackened stump within a row of terraces, fires burning here and there, a tent city in the park.

She felt guilty about the evictions. She had given up Agnes to ward off some other terrible eventuality. But she had been wrong. There, she admitted it. She had been wrong, and she would find some way to make it right. They believed they had made wise and pragmatic bargains with fate. But what they had done out of fear and love was coming to fruition. It lay over the ridge, only half a dozen miles away, a new and inscrutable horror that was using war as a laboratory.

THEN

12

J
ames sleeps standing up
, held in place by the press of men all around, three hundred or so soldiers in pith helmets packed in deep and tight on the black barge, men all the way to the port and starboard, and brimming over fore and aft like herrings in a barrel. Sergeant Hector wakes him with a push and a pull upon his kit bag – stop dreaming, old man – and then moves on through the tightly-packed mass.

It had been a disappointingly literal dream, still half in place as he nods into wakefulness: he was riding a dark horsedrawn carriage to the front, swaying and rattling over rutted lanes and in between high dark hedgerows. The front was neither in Belgium nor the Dardanelles but at home, in the South Downs; sections had been excised from the familiar curves of the Downs and twists of smoke emerged from the burrows of men. Barbed wire was strung across the flood plains. The soft green downland was overturned by explosions, the earth churned up, and all manner of bones disinterred.

He wakes to the outline of a distant shore, tawny cliffs and a high forbidding ridge. No, this is not England. This is war and men, so many men, their heat and stink and silence. Men, most decidedly not soldiers, despite months of drill. The drill that bored. Stumbling over the Downs, shedding his clothes, dropping his pack, cold and naked; and then Hector handing him a uniform in a transparent box. The long boredom was at an end. War, finally. And no matter how vividly he imagined war, no matter how much he tries to anticipate dying, he is prepared for neither. The men are silent under orders. There is nothing to say anyway. Nothing worth saying.

Sergeant Hector administers a shove to some men, reassuring others with a hand upon the shoulder, then he steps up to the bow. Portable derricks either side of a landing platform rise like the horns of a black beetle. The lieutenant colonel is sat up front, field glasses in hand, spray from the prow spattering his puttees. He passes the field glasses to Sergeant Hector and he gazes at the line of cliffs and the dark high ridge beyond, no visible sign of fighting, not from this distance. Heavy oil engines give a good seven knots. Sea shadows speed under the hull. The dark mass of the men is undisturbed by lit cigarette or nervous whistles. The sergeant, having confirmed their destination, readies them for landing.

The sky, dawn-grey and thoughtless, receives its first markings: a jerky scrawl of howitzer trails and fuzzy patches of shrapnel. A German Taube, the mark of the iron cross on the underside of each wing, turns overhead, its silver nose cone blinding in first light. The plane worries away at the barges landing at the shore. Bombs explode in columns of sand and columns of water. A shell, fired in riposte, flies wide of the plane, and the Taube turns slowly inland. The undulant swells of the dream grow choppy as time finds its feet. A destroyer rocks with the recoil of its guns and a Turkish artillery position high on the ridge explodes; wheels, cannon and the flailing shreds of uniform spin up. A retaliatory shell strikes the water so that it broils and blows out spray. Sergeant Hector grips James by the shoulder, and will not stop gripping his shoulder; when the eyes and ears cannot be trusted, the hands search for proof.

The bay looms closer. War gathers all comers in its curved horns. Flashes of rifle fire crackle along the dark ridge, first one side, then the other: a line of rookies to scare the birds out of the trees. And they are so very scared. The lieutenant colonel, a brown-moustachioed old regular, keeps his own counsel. The enlisted men look to the soldiers, the ones with experience of battle, but they are few and far between in Kitchener’s New Army. James reties the string holding up his trousers. With men all around him, he has precious little idea of where he is or where he is going. It is Saturday, he thinks. Such a strange way to spend a Saturday.

A small boat erupts upward and apart: a mine! They should turn. Turn around. Every man asks a silent question of the other. Are we about to die? Can you hold your nerve? Possibly. A solid column of water, black-fringed, rises to their aft. The air quivers with the concussive blast. The men shift their feet, wanting to run but with nowhere to run. For the first time, James feels the urge to scream.

The lighter barge is unstoppable now, the beach inevitable: the sands ahead are two miles wide, set back in a curved bay resembling the horns of the stag beetle. The war closes around him.

Along the shore, the landing is underway, a busy intersection of men and horse. Battalions jog haphazardly on soft sands through lumbering mule corps bringing up the ammunition. The beach is as crowded as market day on Petticoat Lane. He is a small part of the Expeditionary Force. He is nothing special and could be flicked aside like a crumb from the giant’s table. The dry scrub on a hill burns fiercely. He did not expect to be a hero. He has prepared for death. Or at least, he has written the word “death” at the back of his diary, alongside Ruth’s name and their address, and a request that it be returned to her in case he does not.

The hull rides up onto a sand bank. Ropes whirr through the derricks and the landing platform drops onto the sand. The field ambulance begins disembarking in fours, with stretchers, rations, and medical boxes. The Taube returns overhead. And the noise of it. The noise is terrifying. Shells from naval guns explode on the ridge in petals of fire. Hell’s flowers. He should be running but he is not. When and where will he run? There is no cover anywhere. No cover and a hundred yards to the east, a mine heaves up and disperses a platoon across the sand. Particles of blood, particles of silica. It is his turn to run. But he cannot. Hector shouts at him but all he can do is look helplessly down at his feet. He must run!

Hector takes his hand and drags him out onto the beach. They run together, hand-locked, through the
pock-pock-pock
of rifle fire. Four shells burst amidst the lighters, further away, but still the men around them hit the ground, and Hector shouts at them: get up! get up, you rag-tag army! His voice is the only certainty in the confusion. James lets go of his hand, and feels unsteady and exposed. Four explosions from further along the beach. The shells come in fours, alternating between the men on land and the men coming out of the boats. Regular and controlled. Mechanically minded.

The order comes to fall in. Southward the pebbly white beach turns rocky, and then is cut where the river mouth opens into the sea. Lighters run aground some way from the shore, and the men, with all their kit, splash across a hundred yards of rippled sand ridges.

Vicious glare from the sun’s quick rise. He blinks and blinks, already sweating, already thirsty. The lieutenant colonel brings the men of the field ambulance to heel with a whack of his cane against his polished boot, and then he instructs the stretcher bearers in the features of this raw and severe land.

North is dominated by the ridge of Karakol Dagh and its birdless cliff that rises inland, gaining height until it becomes the Kiretch Tepe. To the east is the greater Tekke Tepe ridge, four miles inland and rising to about nine hundred feet; before that there is a coverless plain and a lake, shimmering in the August heat. No, it’s not a lake. The lieutenant colonel confers with his sergeant. The firing line advances slowly across the lake and unless the men are walking on water… No, it is a dried lake bed of white sand mixed with sticky crystalline salt surrounded by marshland. A thousand yards of open ground and the men weighed down with rations and ammunition, two hundred rounds around the neck – might as well be a noose – greatcoats rolled in their packs, blankets and waterproof sheeting – like a bloody camping trip – with pick, shovel and kettle too, and rifle, and the instrument of fear, the bayonet, all of this on their backs. The soldiers hump under a pitiless sun. Rifle fire crackles
pock-pock-pock
. Forward regardless. The imperative of the iron circle. On! On!

Stretcher bearers will move in open formation. Their searching zone will be the Kiretch Tepe in support of the Manchesters. He takes one end of a folded stretcher. This he understands. This he can do.

Bullets send up spurts of sand. He goes with his squad over tufty hillocks of grass and thyme and then the ascent up dried water courses raking the lower ridge. Up! Up! On! On! To the right, deep gullies down which a man could tumble and be hidden in the shadows under thorny bushes. Silence abides. Nobody talks. Nobody can talk. No man knows his own mind. Fear prises the body and soul apart as neatly as a scallop knife – pop! He is no longer in control of himself. Someone or something else commands him: the war itself. He runs in expectation of death – any second, any second now – and then his soul will hang around like so much chaff until a stiff breeze disperses it and he will return to the source.

Up the ridge they go, through thorny waist-high scrub, their boots sliding over the loose sediment and a thirsty rock-studded earth. Perspiration streams off him, positively pouring. Five weeks on the boat has left him far from shipshape. James slips and puts his hands on this foreign ground to steady himself, accidentally letting go of his end of the folded wooden stretcher. He must not let go of the stretcher.

They have gained a hundred feet, sufficient height to look back across the beach and the landing, with its legions of men and horse, its half-pitched tents and dumped stores.

“Don’t be distracted by the view,” says the lieutenant colonel. He directs the stretcher squads to crawl up and down the dried watercourses of the ridge, listening for the cries of the wounded. When they find an injured man, he is to be carried back to the beach. The horse and cart ambulance are useless in this terrain. The slopes are so steep that the stretchers will have to be slid down like toboggans.

The squad drops, belly-down, into a shallow trench, no more than two feet in depth, joining four Munsters lying on their backs.

“Any wounded?” Hector asks.

“Any water?” comes the reply.

There is no time to talk. Hector risks a glance out of the trench and then he is up and running, and so is James, bent double, feet pushing against the downward slide of a sand-floored gully, lungs burning in the effort to keep up with his mountain goat of a sergeant. He dare not let go of the stretcher because without it he will look like a soldier and then he will be of significance to the snipers.

Hector has heard the call for bearers; he holds his index finger up, listening, locating. There! Still doubled-over, they scuttle through holly bush then slide into another shallow trench dug out of the yellow-orange earth, and discover an entire squad in repose. Only one soldier deigns to speak to them, a ratty private, with blood crusted at his ears and nose; he has the loud voice of a deaf man and his left calf has been stripped from the shin bone. As Hector dresses the wound, James asks after the wellbeing of the other soldiers only to discover that they are immaculately dead, with not a mark on them.

On the long carry back down the ridge, Hector speculates as to what killed the rest of the squad. A concussive blow from a shell, he decides, which blasted the life from them. Literally snuffed it right out. The private must have survived because, well, Hector didn’t know how, and since the private on the stretcher is adrift in morphine, suspended in it, protected and imprisoned like a foetus in a jar, it’s no use asking him. Down the slope they slide, loose scree underfoot, the stretcher pitching and yawing with the unsteady footing. James finds himself looking at the private’s wound more than he would like: cloth, skin and flesh are fused into one piece like an ornate chair leg. The bone is out. Out of place. The blood running down from his ears has dried in perfect round seeds. The private weighs not much more than a bag of dead leaves, unlike the stretcher itself, which is thirty pounds of wood and cloth, a weight which he feels in his back with every jolting step.

They return to the beach. The carts are useless on the ridge and they only sink into this soft sand. The squads head southward, two men to each stretcher, thirty of them, a human conveyor belt. The casualty clearing station contains bell tents and a marquee with a red cross visible to the Turk spotters, and these are pitched at the river’s cut.

Gently, James lowers his end of the stretcher, the sling around his chest slackening. The injured man breathes quickly through bared teeth.

“Water,” gasps the injured man, his lips chapped and sore from the long carry under the sun. The flies find him. He flinches and spits them out. The flies are remorseless. The flies return with additional divisions.

James walks along the line. All of the injured men want water. Some want their mothers. In preparation for serving with the ambulance, he had volunteered at the hospital in Brighton. On his first night he saw a cut nose, a deep gash across the bridge, and it upset him greatly. It did not prepare him for this, for the missing pieces, for the scraps. The unmanned moans of pain. Quite inhuman. Or too human. The wounds are an obscene revelation of what being human entails.

Rain clouds approach across the sea. Hector shows the men how to weight a peg so that it holds in the sand. Then he directs the erecting of a tarp. He’s a real boy scout. Big fat raindrops form tiny craters in the sand. A rivulet runs down the tarp, James crouches openmouthed under it, refills his canteen, then his mouth, then washes off the sand and clay in his scalp. The khaki drill of his uniform is soaked until it steams.

A doctor, a thin man with high widow’s peaks in his close-cropped hair, joins him at the rivulet and nods at James’ canteen. His manner is brisk and his hands are bloody. James holds the canteen to the doctor’s lips for a swig of rain water. He drinks it all. Orderlies arrive with baskets of bandages and sterilized sacks. They mill in expectation of orders; crouching, the doctor and James wait for the thin stream of rainwater to refill the canteen.

“We landed at the wrong beach and had to trek across the sands with all this.” The doctor waves a thin bloody hand at the station. “How we’re doing out there?”

“The Manchesters have broken through on the northern ridge. We’re bringing their injured down.”