The Adjacent (12 page)

I was staring at him in excitement and recognition.

‘That was
The War That Will End War
,’ I said.

Bert grunted his agreement.

‘I read that!’ I went on. ‘I have a copy of the book at home. It made cracking good sense to me.’

‘I’m no longer so sure about it, now I’ve seen some of what’s really going on –’

‘But you couldn’t have written that book. It was by H.G. Wells!’

Captain Wells nodded again. I stood up in astonishment, then sat
down again suddenly, because the carriage was rocking. I gripped the edge of my seat.

‘Then you are…’ I said.

‘Please – go on calling me Bert,’ said the great man. ‘Safer that way all round, I think. Do you suppose we’ll be stopping soon? I could make short work of a nice cup of tea.’

ALL DAY THE TRAIN SLOWLY CROSSED NORTHERN FRANCE. WE
glimpsed the farmland, flat scenery, peasants working by hand, distant church spires. The only trees we saw were tall poplars. Bert and I had much to talk about, but we took it in turns to rise to the window to see what was out there. It was never much.

The train stopped twice during the day and these halts were greeted with quiet relief by us, and by loud cheers sounding from the body of the train. Hot food was on offer both times and Bert and I mucked in with the troops, rather enjoying the good-natured scrum to try to get the first cup of tea, the biggest bowl of soup, the meatiest serving. In spite of the unrelieved crowding on the train everyone managed to remain in a good mood. There was pushing and shoving to get to the latrines, or to try for a second helping, but it was always comradely in a way I found heartening.

The lance-corporal was waiting for us both times as we clambered down, endlessly civil to us and always keen to provide some little extra, should we want it. Hot water appeared miraculously at the first stop, with shaving cream, soap and clean towels. Bert and I felt spoiled by having the spacious compartment to ourselves, with all our basic needs adequately met. Knowing what the cramped conditions were like elsewhere I was reluctant to ask for anything more.

Meanwhile, I was overawed by my illustrious travelling companion and greatly enjoyed the conversation that took us through most of the journey.

Our second halt, towards the end of the afternoon, was at a small country station, anonymous, unremarkable. As we stepped down from the carriage, the lance-corporal greeting us as usual, we were both aware of a thundering rumble, dimly but continuously heard in the distance.

Bert, looking serious, said, ‘Not far to go now.’

My heart sank. ‘We’ll be there tonight, I suppose,’ I said.

‘There’s one small mercy. At least it is not raining now and seems not to have been for some time. The mud won’t be any worse than it already was. You’ll soon learn everything there is to know about mud. So will these boys, alas.’

They were already swarming across the wooden platform towards a mess tent. Steam arose around it and on the cool air we could sense the comforting smell of fried bacon. We wandered over, took our places at the end of the shorter of the two queues, and waited our turn.

The distant thunder of artillery continued, but now we were further away from the train I could hear the sound of birds. In a field next to the mess tent two farming men were speaking slowly in French.

Taking our baguettes with great greasy slices of bacon bulging out of the middle we walked back to the train and resumed our private compartment.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to think of my companion as ‘Bert’, now I knew his true identity. I tackled him about this as my confidence grew – he told me he had been flummoxed when we exchanged names. He said everyone in his family, and close friends, knew him as Bertie, but that didn’t feel appropriate as we were so close to the front. I said I’d be happy to address him as ‘HG’, which was how he was known to the public. He said he would answer to that, and seemed amused.

No matter what we called each other, to be spending the day in the exclusive company of one of the great visionary thinkers of our time was a privilege beyond estimation. HG himself was a modest man, always seeming to self-deprecate, but at the same time he was sure of his opinions. Every now and again he would start ranting in an entertaining way against what he saw as the forces of dullness, or those who were in power, or those who under-rated the questing spirit of ordinary people. His periwinkle-blue eyes would glitter with dedication, or amusement, or rancour, and he waved his hands expressively, making him impossible to ignore. He was brimming with ideas and opinions and had ingenious answers or suggestions for almost any problem I suggested.

Then he would suddenly stop, apologize to me for dominating the conversation and ask me some disarming questions about myself.

He was one of the few people I have ever met with whom I was happy to discuss the principles and techniques of magic. The old habit of protecting secrets still had me in its grip, but I saw no harm
in teaching him some simple methods. I showed him how to palm a playing card, or how to force one on someone, or how to make a cigarette double itself or disappear. All this evoked an almost childish delight in HG. For a few minutes we played around with some of my props, to the evident interest of
le chef de train
, who sat silently in his corner with his flags, fingering his moustache and watching us with grave eyes.

But magic was my bread and butter and was no novelty to me. I found HG’s conversation more engaging and challenging.

He asked me, for instance, if I knew what ‘telpherage’ was. I said no, and asked for more details. Instead of telling me he asked me another question: had I ever worked in a department store? No, I said again.

This immediately provoked an apparently irrelevant and emotional reminiscence of his life as a young man, when his mother had indented him to a drapery store in Southsea. A series of horrifying or amusing anecdotes followed: the cruelly long hours, the dreadful food, tedium beyond endurance, the company of dullards. I was soon reminded of a novel of his I had read a few years earlier:
Kipps.

‘That’s the one!’ he cried, his voice chirping with excitement. ‘All of it was true!’

More stories about crooked cashiers, inept apprentices and eccentric customers flowed out. Most of them were amusing to hear. The French farmland passed by at a snail’s pace, unseen by us, as the afternoon began to fail, the evening closed in and we lurched towards the war.
Le chef
lighted some lamps in the van.

Eventually, HG returned to the subject of telpherage.

‘It’s a system they use in some of the big shops,’ he said. ‘When you come to pay for your roll of cotton or your lengths of yarn, the assistant puts your money and his chitty in a little metal container, hooks it up to an overhead ropeway, pulls a handle, and the thing rushes across the ceiling of the shop to the cashier’s desk. A few moments later it comes whizzing back with your change and a receipt, and that’s the end of the business.’

I said that of course I had seen this happen dozens of times.

‘The little metal container is correctly called a telpher,’ HG said. ‘And the ropeway is called telpherage.’

I waited for more but he looked away vacantly, perhaps remembering some incident from his days in a Southsea drapery establishment. Eventually I prompted him to continue.

‘Well, it’s all about mud, you see.’ He was concentrating again,
and I realized that his constant harping on about mud meant it must be a favourite subject. ‘You’ve no idea how much mud there is in those front-line trenches until you experience it yourself. And it’s everywhere else, come to that. Worst in the trenches, but just everywhere! Some of it is above your knees, filthy, runny muck, stinking and sloshing everywhere you go. Until I visited the Ypres Salient I had no conception of how bad it was. And the worst of it is, mud can be a killer. Our troops have to carry most of their own ammunition as well as their packs, the rifle, a lot of other stuff. They wear this device called a Christmas Tree. That’s a belt which is supposed to allow them to carry everything, but it’s always full up, can’t get any more on it, so they carry other equipment in their arms. It was the ammunition that bothered me. It’s fiendishly heavy. It means that most of the soldiers who report for active duty are already half worn out before they start. Some of them have to walk more than a mile, carrying pounds and pounds of extra weight, and for most of the way they have to wade through mud. If you fall face-down in the mud while hauling that lot, the chances are you won’t be able to struggle up in time. While I was in Ypres I was told that on average three British soldiers a week were dying in that sort of accident. Drowning in mud! It’s disgusting. We can’t have that.’

HG had saved part of his bacon baguette from earlier, but now he broke off the end and chewed on it thoughtfully.

‘So, what happened next was when I was back in London. I was having dinner with Winston Churchill. He asked me –’

‘Did you say Churchill? The politician? First Lord of the Admiralty?’

‘Now you’re in the Navy he’s your commanding officer. That’s right – the First Lord. He’s not actually a close friend of mine. Far from it, I would say. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. He’s a politician and it behoves one to sup with a long spoon when you dine with politicians. Out for themselves, the whole lot of them. But they can be useful to someone like me, especially a keenly ambitious man like Mr Churchill. He’s still a Young Turk who doesn’t mind bending a few rules from time to time. He doesn’t think much of me – he was in fact one of the first people to call me a meddler. He put me in one of his newspaper articles, you know, back when I published a book about –’

‘You were telling me about the telpherage,’ I said.

‘Quite so. Winston Churchill happens to be the cousin of a young woman sculptor, a good and intimate friend of mine. You wouldn’t expect me to name her, I know. Well, I was having supper with her
one evening and Mr Churchill turned up unexpectedly and joined us at the table. The subject came up of the troops having to carry ammunition to the front. Churchill knew all about that and shared some of my concerns. He told me he had spent some time in the trenches himself and knew at first hand the problem of the mud.

‘Sitting there with him I had an inspiration. I suddenly thought of telpherage – if you could put in a big telpherage system, with ropes strong enough to carry boxes of ammunition, perhaps even two or three soldiers as well, power it with the engine of a truck, everything would be a lot quicker, save a lot of blood and sweat and floundering in the mud, and the whole thing would put our lads in less danger. I was awake all night thinking about how to make it work. A few days later I put in my plans to the Admiralty, Churchill took a personal interest, a few strings were pulled with the Chiefs of Staff, and here I am. On my way to put my experience as a draper’s assistant to good use.’

He went into more details of how it would work, how it could be made portable, who would operate it, and so on, and although I listened carefully I must admit my own mind was racing on all sorts of adjacent subjects. For instance, it occurred to me that the very fact HG and I were travelling together suggested that I was on a similar mission to his. But unlike him I had not the least idea what mine would be, nor why I had been summoned.

I was dazzled by HG’s company. Intelligence and commitment radiated from him, making everything seem possible. He was at this time probably the single most famous writer in the country, perhaps even in the world. I, on the other hand, although enjoying a certain amount of celebrity in a small theatrical circle, was less a man of creative inspiration and more a careful follower of procedures. That was the difference between us.

What I do on the stage is contrived to look like a series of miracles, but in reality the preparation of a magical illusion is a prosaic matter. Few people realize the amount of rehearsal conjurors have to put in, nor what goes on in the background. A trick often requires technical assistants, who will help design and build the apparatus. The movements a magician makes on stage are the result of long and patient rehearsal, while still having to look natural and spontaneous to the audience. It is an acquired practical skill, in other words. Only while in performance, in the glare of the limelight, can magic look like inspiration. Even at best it is never more than an illusion. Things are never what they seem.

I felt humbled by the great man’s infectious energy. His imagination was like a torch burning brightly in that shabby old railway carriage. The war was about to be won! Germany would be defeated and Britain would be triumphant! Thousands of lives saved! Prosperity for everyone. A democracy for all men. Science would lead progress and progress would change society.

THE TRAIN PULLED INTO THE TOWN OF BÉTHUNE JUST AS
daylight was a last gleam in the western sky. Lights were showing in the streets but not many of them and they were shaded so as not to shine too brightly. As we rattled slowly through the edge of town both HG and I pressed our eyes to the tiny windows to see what we could. At first there did not appear to be too much damage to the buildings, but as the train slowed to walking pace and we approached the station in the centre of the town it was clear that artillery shells had landed in many places.

It was being borne in on me that the life I had been leading in London was based on a false understanding of this war. News of it came in regularly, perhaps every day, but it was usually portrayed as a distant affair conducted in a foreign country, not something that might threaten the daily lives of ordinary Britons. But the foreign country was France, a short sea crossing away, and battles lost in France would almost certainly lead to invasion and occupation of our country by a hostile foreign power.

Everyone remarked on the increasing absence of our young menfolk, everyone had a son or a brother or a lover in the army, or at least knew of a close friend who did, yet the connection of that with an imminent threat never seemed to be made. Shortages in the shops were annoying but they did not indicate a crisis. There were rumours that Zeppelins, gas-borne monsters of the skies, were about to let go a thousand bombs on our homes, but they had not appeared. Music hall comedians made fun of them, while the threat remained just a threat.